Christian Wolff

American composer Christian Wolff was born in Nice in 1934 as the son of publisher Kurt Wolff, who had emigrated from Nazi Germany. Christian Wolff studied classics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He received his first piano lessons from Grete Sultan, who introduced him to John Cage in 1950. Together with Earle Brown, Morton Feldman and David Tudor from Cage’s circle, Wolff founded the Project of Music for Magnetic Tape, an experimental forum that united sound, dance and the visual arts. Wolff worked with improvisatory interaction concepts, later incorporating political contents into his music. In 1972, he attended the Darmstadt international summer courses, and in 1974 he was a DAAD fellow in Berlin. He has been a member of Berlin’s Academy of the Arts since 1999.