CHRISTIAN WOLFF – Composer, Professor Emeritus at Harvard University and Dartmouth College

Christian Wolff (born 1934, Nice, France) is a composer, teacher, and sometime performer. Since 1941 he has lived in the U.S. He studied piano with Grete Sultan and composition briefly with John Cage, in whose company, along with Morton Feldman, then David Tudor and Earle Brown, his work found inspiration and encouragement, as it did in association with Frederic Rzewski and Corrnelius Cardew. He has had a long association with Merce Cunningham and his dance company. As improvisor he has played with the English group AMM, Takehisa Kosugi, Christian Marclay, Keith Rowe, Steve Lacey, Larry Polansky, and Kui Dong. He taught classics at Harvard 1962-69 and, from 1971 to 1999 classics, comparative literature, and music at Dartmouth College. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Akademie der Kuenste in Berlin and has honorary degrees from the California Institute of the Arts and the University of Huddersfield (UK).

Christian Wolff

From the archive of Christian Wolff