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 ‘Fire in my mouth’ focuses on 1911 factory tragedy and the plight of working women in the early 20th century
Composer Julia Wolfe, second from right, spoke with members of the public as part of a special event, co-presented with the New York Philharmonic, at the Tenement Museum earlier this month. Photo: Agaton Strom for The Wall Street Journal By Elizabeth Yuan Jan…
continue readingAs part of the New York Commissions to honor the New York Philharmonic’s 175th season (2016-17) with New York-themed works by New York-based composers who have strong ties to the Philharmonic, Julia Wolfe presents a new evening-length piece for orchestra and women’s choir about women in the American work force. The Philharmonic plans to present this piece in 2018-19.
Wolfe has previously explored American labor history with Steel Hammer, her reimagining of the John Henry legend, and Anthracite Fields, an oratorio about Pennsylvania coal miners…
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 readingJanuary 24–26, the New York Philharmonic premiered Julia Wolfe’s Fire in my mouth, commissioned by the orchestra, 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.
Wolfe’s music focuses on the garment industry in New York City at the turn of the century — specifically the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which killed 146 garment workers, most of them young, female immigrants…
continue readingBy David Ng
When you win a Pulitzer Prize for music, you hear about it just like everyone else — in the news perhaps, or from other people who read about it before you do.
You don’t know anything, said composer Julia Wolfe, who won the coveted award last year for her choral piece Anthracite Fields, an unconventional exploration into the history of coal mining in rural Pennsylvania.
Wolfe recalled that she was at home in her Tribeca loft, working with colleagues from the Bang on a Can ensemble, when a call came in from Washington, DC…
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 readingJulia Wolfe descended hundreds of feet underground, into a dank, dark cavern with gleaming black walls: a Pennsylvania coal mine.
“You can’t believe people spent all day there,” Wolfe recalled Tuesday. “It was spooky, a little bit, but so fascinating, a strange kind of beauty.”
Wolfe’s visit helped inspire “Anthracite Fields,” a choral tribute to the state’s mining heritage – and, now, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in music. The judges described her work as a “powerful oratorio for chorus and sextet evoking Pennsylvania coal-mining life around the turn of the 20th Century.”
“I’m a little stunned,” Wolfe, a music professor at New York University, said a day after her win…
continue readingRead the New York Times Preview
Miller Theater at Columbia University presents a portrait concert of the music of Julia Wolfe on February 3.
New York’s Signal Ensemble, conducted by Brad Lubman, gives the NY premieres of Wolfe’s two string orchestra works, Fuel and Cruel Sister.
New CD: Cruel Sister“Though Ms. Wolfe never directly quotes this mournful song, she painstakingly depicts the story…
continue readingCal Performances at Home premieres Steel Hammer, a new film featuring the acclaimed oratorio by Julia Wolfe. Film will be available on demand through August 4.
Described by The Boston Globe as “[an] epic explosion and reconstruction of the folk ballad,” Julia Wolfe’s Steel Hammer is a meditation on over 200 versions of the John Henry legend, with voices and the Bang on a Can All-Stars, along with mountain dulcimer, wooden bones, banjo, harmonicas, clogging, and body percussion…
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