Christian Wolff
Christian Wolff, born in Nice in 1934 and raised in New York, is an American composer and the youngest member of the New York School around John Cage, Morton Feldman and Earle Brown. From the early 1950s his scores left more and more to the players, with cues taken from what the others do, so that performers become co-composers. Burdocks (1971), for any number of musicians, is the best known example. A classicist by profession, he taught at Harvard and then at Dartmouth for decades. From the 1970s his political commitment entered the music through workers' songs and protest tunes, and his later pieces explore fragile tonal relationships with the same openness.
Christian Wolff, born in Nice in 1934 and raised in New York, is an American composer and the youngest member of the New York School around John Cage, Morton Feldman and Earle Brown. From the early 1950s his scores left more and more to the players, with cues taken from what the others do, so that performers become co-composers. Burdocks (1971), for any number of musicians, is the best known example. A classicist by profession, he taught at Harvard and then at Dartmouth for decades. From the 1970s his political commitment entered the music through workers' songs and protest tunes, and his later pieces explore fragile tonal relationships with the same openness.
