By David Patrick Stearns
NEW YORK — Among downtown New York composers, few stick so relentlessly to the cutting edge as Julia Wolfe.
Now 50, she recently wrote a piece for nine bagpipes that sent her two children running for cover in her SoHo loft. Even her husband, Michael Gordon, who with her cofounded the composer collective Bang on a Can, has been moving toward more mainstream music for opera and film…
continue readingJulia Wolfe’s Pulitzer-Prize winning oratorio for chorus and instruments, Anthracite Fields, will be released on Cantaloupe Music on September 25, 2015. Wolfe wrote the piece after doing extensive research about the coal-mining industry in an area very near where she grew up in Pennsylvania. Her text draws on oral histories, interviews with miners and their families, speeches, geographic descriptions, children’s rhymes, and coal advertisements…
continue readingBy MICHAEL COOPER APRIL 4, 2017
LEWISBURG, Pa. — Onstage, a choir intoned the names of coal miners whose deaths and injuries had landed them on the Pennsylvania Mining Accident index more than a century ago. In the lobby, members of the audience — some of whom came on free shuttle buses that picked them up from nearby coal towns — created an index of their own, writing about their mining ancestors in a small leather notebook held open with a coal paperweight…
continue readingAfter a superb premiere at The Krannert Center in Urbana-Champaign, IL, the staging of Julia Wolfe’s Steel Hammer by director Anne Bogart and her SITI Company with the Bang on a Can All-Stars goes on tour beginning October 23, with a final performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in December!
Steel Hammer
staged by Anne Bogart with SITI Company;
Bang on a Can All-Stars
• UCLA: 10/23-24
• Virginia Tech: 11/17
• OZ Arts, Nashville: 11/21
• Brooklyn Academy of Music: 12/2-12/6
Then On November 14, Julia Wolfe returns to the anthracite coal region in Pennsylvania, which inspired her Pulitzer prize-winning oratorio, Anthracite Fields…
continue readingOn Tuesday April 29, Cantaloupe Music releases Julia Wolfe’s much-anticipated recording of her evening-length art ballad, Steel Hammer.
Inspired by her love for the music and lore of Appalachia, Wolfe based her text for Steel Hammer on over 200 versions of the American legend “John Henry”, which has been recorded by everyone from Johnny Cash to Bruce Springsteen…
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