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Christian Wolff Follow Artist +

Christian Wolff emerged in the 1950s on the New York

experimental music scene and became a prominent
champion of the aesthetics of musical indeterminism.

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Escucha Christian Wolff

en Apple Music

Active 1950s - 2010s

Born March 8, 1934 in Nice,

France

Genre Avant-Garde, Classical

Styles Modern Composition,

Avant-Garde Music,
Chamber Music,
Experimental

Member Of Bourgogne Quatuor

Manfred

Christian Wolff
Top tracks

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MUESTRA
PRELIMINAR

Tilbury
1 10:20
Christian Wolff, Sabine Liebner

Keyboard Miscellany: Variations on M…

2 10:06
Christian Wolff, Sabine Liebner

Another Possibility (2004)

3 08:35
Christian Wolff, Wendy Eisenberg

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Album Highlights

Burdocks

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SÉ UN RAYO DE LUZ

Biography

SÉ UN RAYO DE LUZ

Christian Wolff Biography by Jeremy

Grimshaw

Alongside John Cage, Morton Feldman, and

Earle Brown, composer Christian Wolff
emerged in the 1950s on the New York
experimental music scene and became a
prominent champion of the aesthetics of
musical indeterminism. His works, which
became increasingly explicit in their political
content as his career progressed, stress
choice, artistic cooperation and
interdependence, and an accommodating
attitude toward the potential relationships
between music, sound, and silence.

Wolff was born in Nice, France, but moved to

the United States during his childhood. He
took a rather indirect route to composition,
studying classics and comparative literature at
Harvard University, where he also taught,
before taking positions in both music and
literature at Mills College and later Dartmouth.
Though active as a pianist and electric
guitarist throughout his career, he was largely
self-taught as a composer, and from the
beginning his works relied more on careful
aesthetic design than compositional "craft" in
the traditional sense. This is not to say,
however, that his compositions lack depth or
complexity; indeed, they point up some of the
most crucial philosophical issues of his time,
and do so in a way that engages and invites
close listening and careful consideration.

Although his works of the 1950s already

conveyed a decidedly "democratic" subtext,
with their reliance on freedom and reaction
("parliamentary participation"), they did so
through traditional notation and sometimes
invoked, however obscurely, traditional forms.
The flexibility of their realizations owed to
Cage's influence, while their sparse surfaces
recalled Webern, and in some cases resonated
with LaMonte Young's early works. Wolff's
compositions from the late '50s and and the
1960s placed increased effort on real-time
cooperation between performers, who worked
somewhat freely within certain set parameters
(set durations with unspecified pitches, for
example), but were required to alter their
performative decisions consequent to each
other's actions.

Wolff explicitly drew analogies between his

compositional methods and political views,
and during the 1970s even set texts related to
his democratic socialist positions. This effort
coincided with similar artistic endeavors
espoused by Cornelius Cardew and Frederic
Rzewski, both of whom Wolff interacted with
during this period. Later works turned inward
to more specifically musical topics, perhaps
due in part to Wolff's somewhat self-effacing
assessment of the composer's role. As he
observed in a 1991 interview: "Most political
music, paradoxically enough, is for the
converted; it's an instrument of cohesion for a
group that already knows what it wants...."

Wolff remained prolific in the early 21st

century, with releases on leading avant-garde
labels such as Mode, Pogus, Wergo, Erstwhile,
and Tzadik, and collaborations with Christian
Marclay and Yasunao Tone, Keith Rowe,
Michael Pisaro, John Tilbury, and numerous
other artists.

Discography

Quiz

Which rapper released a diss

track in response to Megan
Thee Stallion's song "Hiss" in
January 2024?

Cardi B

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