One would not expect an award-winning musician to spend his days in Reed Hall talking about Greek history and theatre. But then again, Professor Christian Wolff is not an ordinary musician.
Wolff, who recently won the $50,000 John Cage Award for Music for his work in composing, splits his time between lecturing in the Dartmouth College Classics department and teaching and composing music.
Wolff is only the third recipient of the John Cage Award, which is given bi-annually by the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, Inc., in honor of the experimental composer who died in 1992.
Mary Judge, executive director of the Foundation, said the six members of the Foundation's board of directors select the winner of the award based on nominations from composers and professionals working in the field of music.
Wolff was chosen in November 1996, Judge said, and he received the award in December.
He is both a Classics Professor and the Strauss Professor of Music, although he originally applied for only a position in the classics department at the College in 1969.
Wolff was already an esteemed experimental composer who had studied with Cage by the time he graduated from high school.
But he went to Harvard University to study literature instead of a music conservatory because he said the music he was working with was "so far out."
He wanted to study English literature, but because there were so many people already studying English, Wolff said, he began studying the classics.
Wolff said he first became interested in teaching because it offered him enough time to pursue his interests in music on the side, which he did.
Now he is on the verge of retiring from teaching to devote more time to composing both musical works and a book on classical Greek literature.
The New York School
Music Department Chair Jon Appleton calls Wolff, "probably the best educated musician in our department."
Wolff's musical training started at an early age.
"I listened to a lot of classical music as a kid -- classical music and jazz," Wolff said. "And then I got to hear some early 20th century music ... and I really liked that."
Wolff wrote some compositions in the style that is often called "experimental," and showed them to his piano teacher, who told him to show them to another composer.
"She suggested this guy called John Cage," Wolff said, adding that Cage was and still is "probably the outstanding avant-garde composer of the twentieth century. So I went to see him and he said 'great, let's work together.'"
Wolff described the formation of what became known as the New York School:
"A couple of other composers showed up about the same time. Cage organized performances," Wolff said. "I was just into it and I was encouraged and the work was performed and I've been doing it ever since."
But despite his stature in the music world, Wolff applied for a job in the classics department at Dartmouth.
Wolff said when he was interviewing for the position in the classics department, Appleton told him that if he ended up at the College, he should work in the music department as well.
Appleton was a fan of Wolff's work from his days with Cage and other composers known as the New York School.
Experimental, Quirky, Unexpected
"I was actually chairman of the music department in 1969 and we were looking for a composer on our staff," Appleton said. "And Christian, of course, even at that time, was an extremely well-known composer."
"He had studied classics as a graduate student and his Ph.D. was in [comparative literature]. And Dartmouth was one of those unusual institutions that was able to make an offer to him to come here and teach all three subjects," Appleton said.
By that time, Appleton had already set up one of the first electronic music studios at an Ivy League school, Wolff said.
Dartmouth's interest in electronic music has remained strong since then. "It's very lively," Wolff said. "We have four or five composers on the music faculty; at least three of them do electro-acoustic work."
"The general label that's put on it is 'experimental,'" Wolff said. "Quirky, I guess, is a good word for it. I try to make the music so that it takes you by surprise. I still don't hear a whole lot of music out there that's like it."
Appleton describes Wolff's music as "outrageously original, often unrelated to any known traditions."
Kristina Hagstrom '98 took a class with Wolff and is currently conducting an independent study project with him.
"The pieces are really well-thought-out," Hagstrom said of Wolff's compositions. "You really have to have patience to listen to these things."
Music Professor and Pianist-In-Residence Sally Pinkas released an entire album of Wolff compositions. She described Wolff's music as "unexpected."
"There's something very wonderfully free about it," Pinkas said. "The notes are notated regularly, but there's an extreme amount of freedom. He gives you certain parameters that are fixed but a great amount of it is up to the performer, which is very alluring."
'Any physical object ...'
Wolff's compositions do not always use instruments in conventional ways.
"I'm very interested in making music which is accessible to people who don't necessarily make music professionally or don't even have a lot of training," Wolff said.
Pinkas said the Wolff pieces she played called for her to knock on the piano at times. "Some of the preludes I played had me whistling, in addition to playing, or humming."
In addition to using musical instruments unconventionally, Wolff's music uses unconventional items as musical instruments.
"He is capable of making any physical object in the universe into a musical instrument," Appleton said.
For example, Wolff composed "a piece called 'Stones,' which is made just with stones. There's just instructions in prose."
"You have to go out and find yourselves some stones," he said. "That's not too, hard especially in this part of the country."
Wolff's tastes in music vary as unexpectedly as his compositions do. He explained, "Aesthetic differences are not that important. There simply isn't one kind of music anymore."
He says there is no reason not to mix music as varied as Beethoven, Van Morrison and John Cage.
The Future
As for the $50,000 award, Wolff said, "that just came totally out of the blue. I didn't even know it existed. It's like winning the lottery without even having played."
Wolff said he plans to put the prize to good use. "I've got two kids on the way to college," Wolff said. "Need I say more?"
Wolff said the money will also help cover the costs of composing, such as having music transcribe. "It's a very nice sort of cushion."
The cushion could not have come at a better time, as Wolff prepares for retirement.
"I'll be 65 when I get out," Wolff said. "Right now I've been teaching for 35 years. I thought I should give myself more time" for other projects.
