Julia 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…

By 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…

Julia Wolfe named Inaugural Festival Director of
Cincinnati Symphony’s
2024 May Festival
May 17-25

Concerts include the world premiere of Wolfe’s new choral fanfare All that breathes, her recent works with orchestra, Her Story and Pretty, as well as her Pulitzer Prize-winning work for chorus and ensemble, Anthracite Fields; plus Michael Gordon’s Natural History and David Lang’s the national anthems; with special guests the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Lorelei Ensemble, and Steiger Butte Singers joining the Cincinnati Symphony and May Festival Chorus…

At the Barbican Centre in London, on March 20, 2012, the Bang on a Can All-Stars premiere Field Recordings — with new works by Gordon, Lang and Wolfe. The evening-length project that is as much a mystery as a concert – a kind of ghost story. The ghosts aren’t the physical presence of people gone before, but they are the ghosts of sounds, images, ideas, and voices. Each composer has been asked to find and interact with something recorded before, using the power of music made right in front of us to reach out to other things not present…

Read LA Times review of
West Coast premiere at Disney Hall
The Los Angeles Master Chorale and
the Bang on a Can All-Stars

April 16, 2016
The Royal Library of Denmark, Copenhagen

click here to stream the music
click here for the full album

“[Anthracite Fields] captures not only the sadness of hard lives lost…but also of the sweetness and passion of a way of daily life now also lost…

Julia Wolfe Wins 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Music for Anthracite Fields
an oratorio for chorus and instruments

“[Anthracite Fields] captures not only the sadness of hard lives lost…but also of the sweetness and passion of a way of daily life now also lost. The music compels without overstatement. This is a major, profound work.” — Mark Swed, LA Times

Read NPR interview with Wolfe here…