Christian Wolff (composer) - Biography

Biography

Wolff was born in Nice in France to German literary publishers Helen and Kurt Wolff, who had published works by Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, and Walter Benjamin. After relocating to the U.S. in 1941, they helped found Pantheon Books along with other European intellectuals who had fled Europe during the rise of fascism. The Wolffs published a series of notable English translations of mostly European literature, as well as an edition of the I Ching that would prove influential upon John Cage after Wolff gave it to him as a present.

After the family moved to the United States in 1941, Wolff became an American citizen in 1946. At the age of sixteen he was sent by his piano teacher Grete Sultan for lessons in composition with new music composer John Cage and quickly became a close associate of Cage and his artistic circle, which included fellow composers Earle Brown and Morton Feldman, pianist David Tudor, and dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham. Cage relates several anecdotes about Wolff in his one-minute Indeterminacy pieces.

Almost completely self-taught as composer, Wolff studied music under Sultan and Cage, and later studied classics at Harvard University (BA, PhD), becoming an expert on Euripides. He taught there until 1970, when he started teaching classics, comparative literature, and music at Dartmouth College. After nine years, he became Strauss Professor of Music there. He stopped teaching at Dartmouth in 1999. In 2004 he received an honorary degree from the California Institute of the Arts. With his wife Holly, Wolff has four children: Hew, a computer programmer living in Oakland, CA; Tamsen, a professor of Drama and English at Princeton University; Nicholas, a graduate student in Archaeology at Boston University; and Tristram, a graduate student in Comparative Literature at University of California Berkeley.