Self-taught but for composition lessons with John Cage, Christian Wolff was a key member of the post-WWII New York experimental music scene that included Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, and pianist David Tudor, among others. For the majority of Wolff’s adult life, he served as a professor of classics at Harvard and later Dartmouth, with waves of musical productivity supplementing his career as an academic.

Like John Cage, he has explored indeterminacy throughout his career, but with his own aims and emphasis. For Wolff, indeterminacy is driven not by a Cageian elision of self, but by an ethos of social engagement and decision making. As Wolff puts it, he “realized that the kind of sound made in an indeterminate situation includes what could result in no other way; for example, the sound of a player making up his mind, or having to change it.” Like his contemporaries and colleagues Cornelius Cardew, Pauline Oliveros, Gavin Bryars, and others, many of Wolff’s pieces can be also performed both by professional musicians and those without such formal training, acting as a kind of social inclusion not often seen in the concert hall. 

During the 1970s and the social upheavals of the Vietnam War, the “politics of culture” implicit in these approaches became more explicit as Wolff turned towards more obvious political engagement in his music. While inspired by colleagues such as Cardew, Wolff’s political turn did not involve a repudiation of his earlier musical materials. Instead, like Frederic Rzewski, Wolff integrated political texts and histories into his own experimental voice. Moreover, Wolff sees no fundamental division between his more explicitly political music and the rest of his oeuvre.  

“I think we have this notion that there is propaganda music, political music, and then there’s the other kind of music that has these humanistic values and this universal and so forth,” Wolff explains. “But I think that’s wrong. I think all music is propaganda music. Ah, the humanistic so-called universal music, is propaganda for that kind of music and for the society that produces it.” 

Propaganda or not, Wolff’s music entails a delicate balance of clarity and complexity, of exciting mass with pointillistic sparsity. It marries intellectual rigor with thorough-going-going experimentation. As The New York Times notes in its recent profile of Wolff, his music “require[s] performers to make considered, mutually respectful decisions.” His language and choices are always in good faith.  

Above all, they help build one of Wolff’s key aims: “a community that enjoys itself together.”  And so, in honor of Wolff’s 90th birthday in 2024, Wise Music is pleased to present a selection of music from across this important American composer’s long and remarkable career. 

Highlights from the Christian Wolff Catalog

Duo for Violins (1950) 

Duo for Violins is the first piece Wolff composed after beginning composition lessons with John Cage. Wolff intensified the focus of the techniques Cage taught him by narrowing his pitch materials to an adjacent set of D, Eb, and E with no octave transpositions. The result is a tight, dissonant soundworld that rewards careful, focused listening with shimmering beating and a variety of rhythmic articulations. As Pitchfork observes, “Wolff finds meditation and grace within restriction.” 

Suite I (1954) 

Dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham had a profound influence on Wolff’s music—as Wolff puts it, in “the way [Cunningham] structures the pieces, the combination of movements […] the formal character of the dances, the combination of abstraction with very powerful evocative possibilities.” This admiration was mutual, as Cunningham choreographed a number of Wolff’s pieces, including Cunningham’s 1957 solo Changeling, set to Suite I as performed by David Tudor. Changeling was patterned on the formal structure of Suite I, in which ten notes on the solo piano are “prepared” with small objects, but no prepared notes are used in the first section. The second and third sections enact a “timbral metamorphosis,” gradually drawing the prepared pitches into textures of rhythmic complexity and technical virtuosity. 

For 1, 2 or 3 People (1964)  

For 1, 2 or 3 People is one of Wolff’s best-known works and among those he describes as “contingent.” Contingent works require the performers to react in real-time to variables such as their perceptions of what other performers are doing, their position in the piece’s overall form, and the work’s set of overarching rules. As Wolff beautifully puts it, “this music is drawn from the interaction of the people playing it,” creating “a kind of democratic interdependence.” Together with the piece’s open scoring and its accessibility to performers without professional musical training, For 1, 2 or 3 People embodies a philosophy of social inclusion and community—critical values for today’s world. 

Burdocks (1971) 

Wolff identifies Burdocks as a transitional work in which form and freedom coexist, and where diatonic possibilities began to enter his music. Throughout, Wolff aims to layer a multitude of materials (“really to make a kind of messy situation”), while also giving each of the piece’s ten sections its own distinctive character. Scored for one or more groups of five players with no upwards limit, Burdocks was influenced by polyphonic Ba-Benzele music and the idea of the Scratch Orchestra—a collection of players loosely guided in “populist-anarchist spirit” by Cornelius Cardew, Howard Skempton, and Michael Parsons. Through these inspirations and Wolff’s varied notational strategies, Burdocks evokes the endurance and efficacy of the tough, medicinal root after which it is titled. 

Changing the System (1973) 

Wolff calls Changing the System one of his first explicitly political pieces. The title is drawn from the work’s text, which is a portion of a speech by anti-war activist Tom Hayden about “the need for fundamental change of our dysfunctional social system in order to achieve an adequately workable and just society.” The performing forces are divided into two or more quartets of open instrumentation; at least 48 players have performed it together on one occasion. Each performer is also required to use their voice to speak, sing, or chant the text and to select four sound-producing objects to be struck in rhythmic unison with the ensemble in periodic percussive sections. Wolff articulates the role of this technique thus: “I had in mind that the percussion in this piece—in conjunction with the ways the piece as a whole is done—represent a focusing of concerted, persuasive but not coercive energy and—it’s hard to get this exactly into words—a kind of revolutionary noise."

Rhapsody (2009) 

Rhapsody is scored for three small orchestras. Wolff invokes his expertise in classics, which refers to an ancient Greek word meaning “stitched song” that describes the tradition of oral poetic performance from Homer’s time onward. With a patchwork structure of stylistic juxtaposition, the title is a fitting one. As composer Michael Parsons observes, “sections reminiscent of the density and complexity of Ives, of the simplicity and directness of Satie, and of the transparency of Webern, are juxtaposed without any need to mediate or explain how they are connected. The music is continually surprising, exhilarating, and challenging; it resists easy categorization.” 

Mountain Messengers (2020) 

Mountain Messengers is Wolff’s second concerto—a form he calls “tricky,” since he dislikes the idea of “a star performer supported by a larger anonymous group.” Instead, Wolff creates a framework for a “mutually dependent individual and collective” in this work for piano and orchestra. Throughout, bits of Bach, folk songs, and other musics are woven together with open sections that hand significant performative decision-making to the performers and conductor. This openness also generates a sense of the “public communication” alluded to through the title, which is borrowed from a long-running California newspaper that was saved from going defunct in 2020.

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