Roulette Presents CHRISTIAN WOLFF AT 80, 3/5

Composer/pianist Christian Wolff - who turned 80 last year - will make a new Roulette appearance, joining force with an ensemble composed of some of today's best musicians on the improvisational and/or jazz scene: Joey Baron (drums), Vincent Chancey (French horn), Thomas Morgan (bass), Robyn Schulkowsky (percussion), and Nate Wooley (trumpet). The evening will feature an all-Wolff program, including:

• Song (for 6) (18 min), originally composed for and performed at Merce Cunningham Dance Company's sold-out farewell performances (Armory, 2011). Starting in 1953, Wolff collaborated closely with Merce Cunningham and a number of his compositions were used for choreography. The Roulette performance of Song [For 6 Players] will mark the first time the work is played in its entirety, using all the material available for it.
• Premiere of a new work titled Brooklyn (for 6 players or more) (15-20 min).
• Percussionist 5, a duo composed in the 1990s and performed by long-time collaborators Robyn Schulkowsky and Joey Baron.
• Selections from Exercises (1973-2012) for open instrumentation. "Arguably his finest works to date" (All Music),Exercises are short pieces designed to allow musicians to participate in the score on the same level as a composer.

To order tickets, visit roulette.org or call 917-267-0363.

Christian Wolff was born in 1934 in Nice, France, but has lived mostly in the U.S. since 1941. He studied piano with Grete Sultan and, briefly, composition with John Cage. Though mostly self-taught as a composer, association with John Cage, Morton Feldman, David Tudor, Earle Brown, Frederic Rzewski and Cornelius Cardew have been important for him. A particular feature of his music has been to allow performers various degrees of freedom and interaction at the actual time of performance. His music is published by C.F. Peters, New York, and a good portion of it has been recorded. A number of pieces have been used by Merce Cunningham and the Cunningham Dance Company, starting in 1953.

Wolff has also been active as a performer and as an improviser - with, among others, Takehisa Kosugi, Steve Lacey, Keith Rowe, William Winant, Kui Dong, Larry Polansky and the group AMM. His writings on music, up to 1998, are collected in the book Cues: Writings and Conversations, published by MusikTexte, Cologne. He has received awards and grants from the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters, DAAD Berlin, the Asian Cultural Council, the Fromm Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts (the John Cage award for music) and the Mellon Foundation. He is a member of the Akademie der Kuenste in Berlin and has received an honorary Doctor of Arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts. Academically trained at Harvard as a classicist, Wolff has taught classics at Harvard and from 1971 to 1999 was professor of Classics and Music at Dartmouth College.

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