Many will think of Christian Wolff as the prot�g� of John Cage, the sixteen-year old sponge (to Cage's thirty-eight years) who turned up at the composer's door for lessons at the behest of a mutual friend / Wolff's piano teacher (Var�se was a family acquaintance and suggested mentor, but Wolff wanted more questions than answers). Under the influence of Cage and an assignment to aid in the transcription of a Webern piece, Wolff began to abandon his dense cannons in favor of brief, compressed four and five note gestures; in Cage's circle, Wolff would also meet Morton Feldman and David Tudor. But it was Wolff who, with parents as literary publishers, brought Cage his first shiny copy of the I Ching. This fortunate back-and-forth musical relationship fostered not only Wolff's realization as a composer but the prosiliency of the New York School.

Throughout this double-disc collection, the listener can hear the evolution of Wolff from pupil (For Prepared Piano, 1951) to graduate (For 1, 2, Or 3 People, 1964) to teacher (his Prose Collection of the late 1960s). Though his work would continue to be rooted in amoebic particulates, he learned to organize the disorganized but keep the events...naturally scattered; his music retains the element of surprise and internal independence, and we witness two-decades-worth of Wolff discovering how to point elements in a collected, interesting direction � the way the tide can regulate shells and rocks and sand on a beach into an "arrangement", or how wind guides a selected set of chimes into "patterns".

And Wolff's choice of performers arguably enhanced the musical realizations of his sparse graphical scores (though Wolff's aesthetic welcomes "non-musicians...people with an interest in music", he certainly set a precedent with those he chose to appear on his albums). On Duo for Violinist and Pianist (this recording from 1973), J�nos N�gyesy and Cornelius Cardew take visual cues from one another, flipping between extended silences and sharp elision; longtime collaborators Frederic Rzewski and David Tudor offer their creative intelligence to two different versions each of For Piano I (1952, 1956) and For Pianist (both recorded in 1959); late 1960s "electronic music group" Gentle Fire (Richard Bernas, Stockhausen assistant / understated instrument inventor Hugh Davies, Graham Hearn, Stuart Jones, Michael Robinson) apply myriad amplified strings and thumps, growls, churning atmospherics and otherwise electroacoustics to the 1968 Edges (version 1974); Hamburg sound art collective Nelly Boyd finds inspiration in Wolff's text "Make sounds with stones, draw sounds out of stones, using a number of sizes and kinds..." on Stones (recorded in 1998). The closer, Drinks (1969), is a wild, mute dinner party (carried out by Arbeitsgemeinschaft f�r Neue Musik) that expresses itself with gurgles, clinking cups, pouring drinks and intermittent ringing goblets.

Kompositionen 1950-1972 is a captivating document of a na�ve high school kid with the determination and growing talent to move from nothing, to spending every lunch hour at Cage's piano, to a figure associated with and influence on the most important time in 20th Century and beyond music.