Christian Wolff was born in 1934 in Nice, France, to the German literary publishers Helen and Kurt Wolff, who had published works by
Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, and
Walter Benjamin. After relocating to the U.S. in 1941, they helped to found Pantheon Books with other European intellectuals who had fled Europe during the rise of fascism. The Wolffs published a series of notable English translations of European literature, mostly, as well as an edition of the
I Ching that came to greatly impress
John Cage after Wolff had given him a copy.
Wolff became an American citizen in 1946. When he was sixteen his piano teacher Grete Sultan sent him for lessons in composition to the new music composer
John Cage. Wolff soon became a close associate of
Cage and his artistic circle, which included the fellow composers Earle Brown and
Morton Feldman, the pianist David Tudor, and the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham.
Cage relates several anecdotes about Wolff in his one-minute
Indeterminacy pieces.
