by Alvin Lucier
CHRISTIAN WOLFF was born on March 8, 1934, in Nice, France. He moved with his family to the United States in 1941, where he studied piano with Grete Sultan and composition with John Cage. The youngest member of the New York School of composers, which included Earle Brown, John Cage, and Morton Feldman, Wolff continues to write numerous works for unlikely combinations of disparate or indeterminate instrumentation, many of which use political texts. He studied classics at Harvard University and later went on to become the Strauss Professor of Music and Classics at Dartmouth College. Wolff’s honors and awards include honorary degrees from the California Institute of the Arts and Huddersfield University in the United Kingdom, as well as a DAAD Berlin fellowship and a lifetime achievement award from the state of Vermont.
LA MONTE YOUNG was born in a log cabin in Bern, Idaho, on October 14, 1935. He attended Los Angeles City College and, in 1958, received a BA from UCLA. From 1958 to 1960 he did graduate work at Berkeley with composer Seymour Shifrin, at which time he composed Trio for Strings, a work whose use of extremely long tones was the precursor to the subsequent development of the minimalist aesthetic and drone music. In the summer of 1959 he traveled to Darmstadt, where he met David Tudor, who introduced him to the music and writings of John Cage. He moved to New York City in 1960 to study electronic music with Richard Maxfield at the New School for Social Research. In 1970 he developed an interest in North Indian classical music and began studying under the Hindustani vocal master Pandit Pran Nath. His five-and-a-half-hour work The Well-Tuned Piano, which Young himself regards as his masterpiece, is the definitive example of the use of just intonation in experimental music. In 2002, Young, along with Marian Zazeela and Jung Hee Choi, founded the Just Alap Raga Ensemble, a Hindustani classical music ensemble based in New York City.
