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Jean-Claude Wolff

Jean-Claude Wolff was born on October 27, 1946, in Neuilly-on the Seine. In 1964, he decided to devote himself to the musical composition, and entered the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique de Paris (CNSMP) in 1966, to continue his studies in music history, analysis, harmony and counterpoint. He studied composition with, among others, Franco Donatoni, Jean-Pierre Guezec, Andre Jolivet, Maurice Ohana, Henri Dutilleux, Michel Philippot and Ivo Malec. He is strongly influenced by the films of Ingmar Bergman and romantic German writers, such as Hoffmann, Novalis, Chamisso, Hölderlin, Rilke, T. Mann and Hesse, who inspired in him topics which would haunt his thought and works: night, melancholy, roaming, confrontation with death. In 1974, he got the first prize of composition at the C.N.S.M.P. In 1979, his "Symphony n° 2 for violin and orchestra", a significant work in which he tried "the synthesis of a developed melodic writing and an evolution of orchestral material in moving clusters", influenced by Xenakis and Ligeti" won the first Prize at the Musical Youths International Competition (Belgrade). It was recorded for the first disc in the Vienna Modern Masters series "Music From Six Continents" (VMM 3001) in 1991. Wolff has since composed a vast quantity of music, including several symphonies and operas.