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\u201cWhat\u2019s the music doing now, and does it need me?\u201d Schulkowsky asks. \u201cDoes it need me to be quiet, or does it need me to participate? It\u2019s that open invitation all the time, so it\u2019s hugely political, I would say, listening today.\u201d<\/p>\n
Beyond his work as a composer, and informing it too, Wolff remained active as a performer, playing in a wide variety of settings over the decades, from a longtime association with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company to a surprising album with Sonic Youth. Unlike Cage, he embraced improvisation, performing as an adjunct member of the English ensemble AMM. Even now, he continues to embrace spontaneous collaborations \u2014 and will do so during his birthday concert.<\/p>\n
Designated a \u201cmini-marathon,\u201d the concert is being organized by String Noise, the violin duo of Conrad Harris and Pauline Kim Harris. (They are producing it with Issue Project Room, the Brooklyn experimental-arts venue, in partnership with the Judson Memorial.) The Harrises have assembled a program spanning the composer\u2019s entire repertoire, from the early \u201cDuo for Violins\u201d to the newly composed \u201cWhat If.\u201d Wolff will improvise with the composers David Behrman and John King, colleagues from Merce Cunningham\u2019s company; and with Ikue Mori, the MacArthur grant-winning electronic composer.<\/p>\n
His influence, though difficult to define precisely, has continued to grow. \u201cThere\u2019s something in the best way unfinished about Christian\u2019s work,\u201d the composer and improviser Michael Pisaro-Liu said in a video interview. Mr. Pisaro-Liu, 62, has had a long, close association with Wolff\u2019s music as a member of the Wandelweiser Group, a composers\u2019 collective profoundly inspired by the New York School, and has played and recorded with Wolff.<\/p>\n
\u201cMuch as I love Feldman\u2019s music, if you imitate it, it\u2019s always going to be second-rate Feldman, because it\u2019s a highly idiosyncratic and personal language,\u201d Pisaro-Liu said. \u201cObviously, Cage was immensely influential. But if you\u2019re a composer and you share a lot of Christian\u2019s interests in the agency of the performer, in the social aspect of that, there\u2019s a gold mine of techniques and ideas in the music that you could take up without imitating Christian.\u201d<\/p>\n
What makes Wolff\u2019s ingenious achievements even more remarkable is that for most of his life, composition was a sideline to his principal career as a professor, a course he pursued in order to reliably support his growing family. He studied classics and literature at the University of Florence and Harvard University, and then taught classics at Harvard from 1962 to 1970. Arriving at Dartmouth in 1971, he began to teach music for the first time, alongside classics and comparative literature.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n