Sometimes you just get lucky.

I was honored to interview the one and only Christian Wolff for Nate Wooley’s Sound American music journal. In all my experience with Christian, some of which I wrote about here, I’ve found him to be very interested in details, so this is what I chose to ask him about: the details of his compositional process. I was curious to know about his paper, his pencils, his table, his piano…and the family life that surrounds it. Being a new father myself, I was fascinated, and encouraged, to hear about how he writes at home at his kitchen table with the din of grand-children around him.

Here’s one of my favorite quotes:

I write with pencil first, usually in a smallish music notebook (that’s easy to carry around, I also recently found very small notebooks – about 3 by 4 inches, with 8 staves, one happily called (a misprint I think) “the red musician’s notebook”, fits in some of my shirt pockets).

His witty humor comes across too. Anyway, before I say too much, here’s the interview. Enjoy!