Christian Wolff
Wolff was born in Nice in France, moving to the United States in 1941 and become an American citizen in 1946. He studied classics at Harvard University and upon graduating took up a teaching post there which he kept until 1970 when he began to teach classics and music at Dartmouth College. While at Harvard, Wolff associated himself with the composer John Cage and the group around him (Earle Brown, Morton Feldman). His early work includes a lot of silence. Later pieces often give a degree of freedom to the performers, and some works, such as Changing the System (1973), have an explicitly political element.
Wolff was born in Nice in France, moving to the United States in 1941 and become an American citizen in 1946. He studied classics at Harvard University and upon graduating took up a teaching post there which he kept until 1970 when he began to teach classics and music at Dartmouth College. While at Harvard, Wolff associated himself with the composer John Cage and the group around him (Earle Brown, Morton Feldman). His early work includes a lot of silence. Later pieces often give a degree of freedom to the performers, and some works, such as Changing the System (1973), have an explicitly political element.
Incidental Music and Keyboard Miscellany
“Incidental Music and Keyboard Miscellany, though both consisting mostly of quite short musical items, have as a whole different origins and different shapes. Keyboard Miscellany is an ongoing collection, a place to deposit occasional pieces which seem to have no place else to go. The earliest is “Variation on Morton Feldman’s Piano Piece 1952” (1988). The piece came about when I was asked to contribute an analysis of a Feldman piece to a collection of essays on Feldman’s music. To do this I tri…
Looking Around
Christian Wolff, prepared piano, whistles, stones. Michael Pisaro, electric guitar, harmonica, stones. Recorded in 2014. Chistian Wolff (1934), American composer of avant-garde music. Michael Pisaro (1961), guitarist andcomposer, member of Wandelweiser. The album was mastered by Joe Panzner and designed by Yuko Zama
11 Microexercises
Microexercises were started when the Miniaturist Ensemble asked for a piece with no more than 100 notes in it. Having enjoyed making one such piece, I went on to make 21 more (and then a second collection, Grete, with an additional 14). Instrumentation and number of players are mostly open, as are selection of pieces, playing order, clef and transposition readings, and dynamics.I like the notion of quite long pieces, and, more recently, also quite short ones (these have a history too: Beethove…
Exercise 15
"Exercise 15" was made out of and invites transformations or transcriptions. It's for piano or ad hoc instrumental arrangement. Its material is from a 1920s song "Union Maid" (as I found it in Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer's collection "Songs of Work and Protest") by Woodie Guthrie using an earlier popular song tune. The tempo of the music is not specified. Sometimes it's played rather fast, as the original tune probably was, sometimes at a deliberate, 'prosaic' tempo. Here it's in a slow motio…
Angelica Music
The music of Christian Wolff has long occupied the fertile borderland between composition and improvisation, as both are usually understood. More a set of suggestions than a writ of prescriptions, his scores can take the form of graphic symbols floating freely against a white background—as in 1968’s Edges—or of pitches notated and other parameters left unspecified, as in the Exercises. He is on record as having said that a score is only a means to an end, the latter consisting of the performance…
Pianist: Pieces
As a body of repertoire, these works are remarkable for their freshness of musical thought and energy (John Cage considered Wolff to be the most 'musical' of the experimental composers). Christian Wolff uniquely blends experimental concerns with classical tendencies. In these pieces not only are older composers referenced (Ives, Schumann) but Wolff's love of clarity of line and transparency of texture betrays an empathy with Webern, Haydn and Bach. This aesthetic is, however, combined with a ten…
8 duos
Born in 1934, Christian Wolff is the last surviving member of the group of composers that also included Morton Feldman and Earle Brown, which gathered around John Cage in New York in the 1950s. Wolff's own music has remained faithful to that Cageian experimental tradition ever since, and the eight works for pairs of instrumentalists here show how, in the right hands, the varying degrees of freedom his works allow their interpreters can produce astonishingly beautiful results. The common denomina…
Christian Wolff / Keith Rowe
In September 2011, Erstwhile producer Jon Abbey was invited to curate two weeks of shows at John Zorn's legendary Manhattan venue The Stone, which he used as an opportunity to invite many of his favorite musicians from Japan, Europe and the US to perform. A second three night festival at Issue Project Room was later appended onto the end, making the AMPLIFY 2011: stones festival a 35 set, 17 night extravaganza in all. Four of those thirty-five sets will now be available in the ErstLive se…
Kompositionen 1950 - 1972
A portrait of Christian Wolff, documenting the composer's early activity through recordings made close to the time of their composition from artists including Cornelius Cardew, Frederic Rzewski, David Tudor
Event
How's this for a threesome; in the red corner we have Christian Marclay with a box of records and his trusty turntables, in the blue corner it's twinkle-toes Yasunao Tone and his prepared CD's and players, whilst in the, erm, green corner stands Christian Wolff and his one man band of bass, percussive stuff, radio-cassette recorder and melodica. FIGHT! Recorded live way-back-when in 1998 as improvised accompaniment to a Merce Cunningham Dance Company performance, 'Event' is a single 50 minute pi…
Ten Exercises
This marvelous recording of these elusive works features composer-supervised performances by a hand-picked group of renowned new-music exponents. "Your first encounter with the music of Christian Wolff leaves you with the impression you've just heard (or played, or read) something totally strange, unlike anything else you know. And yet, upon reflection, you realize it is at the same time something completely ordinary and normal, as familiar in its way as any number of repetitive actions …
Percussionist songs
Matchless Recordings presents a live concert by Christian Wolff and Robin Schulkowsky recorded at Poggiolo fram, Pozzuolo, Umbria, Italy on April 22-24 2003.
The album includes fifteen tracks performed by Christian Wolff - composition, melodica, Robin Schulkowsky - percussion.
"Rooms talk to me. I send out a sound, the space answers. The first message I picked up from the old barn in Umbria was 'yes'.Christian Wolff and I had been thinking, speaking about, even planning a CD with his solo percus…
Early Piano Music (1951-1961)
Early Christian Wolf piano music (written 1951-61), performed by: John Tilbury & Christian Wolff (pianos), Eddie Prevost (percussion). Studio recordings from 2001/2. "During the period when these works were composed (1951-61), Christian Wolff was closely associated with John Cage. Morton Feldmon, Earle Brown and David Tudor (they are sometimes referred to together as the New York School'). Feldman later remarked that he was profoundly indebted to Christian Wolff ('I think of him as my artistic c…