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Anthracite Fields (2014) 65'

SATB chorus, cl, egtr, perc, pno, vc, db

Anthracite Fields was commissioned through Meet the Composer's Commissioning Music/USA program, which is made possible by generous support from the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Helen F. Whitaker Fund. Additional support was made possible through the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia Alan Harler New Ventures Fund; the Presser Foundation; The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through Philadelphia Music Project.

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Fire in my mouth (2019) 48'

SSAA, girls choir, and orchestra 3.3.3.3/4.3.2.1.1/4perc.timp/hp.pf.egtr.ebass/strings

The New York Philharmonic; Cal Performances at the University of California, Berkeley; the Krannert Center at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the University Musical Society at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

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interviews

Big risks and adventurous friends: How composer Julia Wolfe became a renegade

September 15, 2022
Julia Wolfe, composer
© Peter Serling download original
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Sometimes, all you need is a little push. In the fall of 1976, when Julia Wolfe arrived at the University of Michigan from Pennsylvania, she was just 17 and viewed herself as a “wild teenager” with her sights on social sciences and politics. Activism was a possible path. Music wasn’t on her radar.

But one day, a friend coaxed Wolfe into taking a peculiar music class, taught by a forward-thinking Quaker who didn’t care how much you knew about composing…

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Philadelphia Inquirer

November 15, 2009

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…

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