Julia Wolfe’s music is distinguished by an intense physicality and a relentless power that pushes performers to extremes and demands attention from the audience. She draws inspiration from folk, classical, and rock genres, bringing a modern sensibility to each while simultaneously tearing down the walls between them.
The 2019 world premiere of Fire in my mouth—a large-scale work for orchestra and women’s chorus—by the New York Philharmonic with The Crossing and the Young People’s Chorus of New York City received extensive acclaim; one reviewer called the work “a monumental achievement in high musical drama, among the most commandingly imaginative and emotively potent works of any kind that I’ve ever experienced” (The Nation). The work is the third in a series of compositions by Wolfe about the American worker: 2009’s Steel Hammer examines the folk hero John Henry, and the 2015 Pulitzer Prize–winning work Anthracite Fields—a concert-length oratorio for chorus and instruments—draws on oral histories, interviews, speeches, and more to honor the people who persevered and endured in the Pennsylvania Anthracite Coal Region. Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times wrote that 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.”
Recent works include Flower Power, a concerto for the Bang on a Can All-Stars co-commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Danish National Symphony Orchestra; Oxygen for 12 flutes, commissioned by the National Flute Association and premiered by 12 flute choirs (144 flutes); and a new large-scale work, Her Story, for orchestra with the women’s chamber choir the Lorelei Ensemble, which will receive multiple performances in the 2022–2023 season with a consortium of five orchestras, including the Nashville Symphony, Boston Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and National Symphony Orchestra.
Wolfe has written a major body of work for strings, from quartets to full orchestra. Her quartets “combine the violent forward drive of rock music with an aura of minimalist serenity [using] the four instruments as a big guitar, whipping psychedelic states of mind into frenzied and ecstatic climaxes” (The New Yorker). Wolfe’s Cruel Sister for string orchestra, inspired by a traditional English ballad, was commissioned by the Munich Chamber Orchestra and received its US premiere at the Spoleto Festival. Fuel for string orchestra is a collaboration with filmmaker Bill Morrison, and Spinning is a multimedia work written for cellist Maya Beiser with visuals by Laurie Olinder.
Wolfe has collaborated with theater artist Anna Deavere Smith, projection/scenic designer Jeff Sugg, and directors Anne Bogart, François Girard, and Anne Kauffman, among others. Her music has been heard at venues around the world, including Carnegie Hall, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Lincoln Center, Muziekgebouw (Netherlands), Southbank and Barbican centres (UK), Settembre Musica (Italy), and Théâtre de la Ville (France). Her music has been recorded on Decca Gold, Naxos, Cantaloupe Music, Teldec, Sony Classical, and Universal.
In addition to receiving the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Music, Wolfe was a 2016 MacArthur Fellow. She received the 2015 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts and was named Musical America’s 2019 Composer of the Year. She is co-founder and co-artistic director of New York’s legendary music collective Bang on a Can, and artistic director of music composition at NYU Steinhardt.
Wolfe’s music is published by Red Poppy Music and G. Ricordi & Co., New York (ASCAP), and is distributed worldwide by the Universal Music Publishing Group.
I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania—Montgomeryville. When we first moved there, the road was dirt, and the woods surrounding the house offered an endless playground of natural forts and ice-skating trails. At the end of the long country road, you’d reach the highway—Route 309. A right turn (which was the way we almost always turned) led to Philadelphia. A left turn on Route 309 (which we hardly ever took) led to coal country, the anthracite region. I remember hearing the names of the towns, and though my grandmother grew up in Scranton, everything in that direction—north of my small town—seemed like the wild west.
When the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia commissioned me to write a new work for choir and the Bang on a Can All-Stars, I looked to the anthracite region. Anthracite is the diamond of coal—the purest form. At the turn of the century, the anthracite fields of Pennsylvania became the power source for everything from railroads to industry to heating homes. But the life of the miner was difficult and dangerous. I had been immersed in issues of the American worker while composing Steel Hammer, an evening-length work on the legend of John Henry. For Anthracite Fields, I went deeper into American labor history, looking at both local and national issues that arose from coal mining. I went down into the coal mines, visited patch towns and the local museums where the life of the miners has been carefully depicted and commemorated. I interviewed retired miners and children of miners who grew up in the patch. The text is culled from oral histories and interviews, local rhymes, a coal advertisement, geological descriptions, a mining accident index, contemporary daily everyday activities that make use of coal power, and an impassioned political speech by John L. Lewis, the head of the United Mine Workers of America union.
My aim with Anthracite Fields is to honor the people who persevered and endured in the Pennsylvania Anthracite Coal Region during a time when the industry fueled the nation, and to reveal a bit about who we are as American workers.
In the first movement, “Foundation,” the singers chant the names of miners who appeared on a Pennsylvania Mining Accident index, 1869–1916. The list is sadly long. I chose only the Johns with one-syllable last names in alphabetical order. The movement ends with a setting of the very colorful multi-syllabic names. The miners were largely from immigrant families and the diversity of ethnicity is heard in the names. At the center of “Foundation” is text from geological descriptions of coal formation.
“Breaker Boys” follows next. There were many boys working in the Pennsylvania coal mines. The younger ones worked in the breakers, which were large ominous structures. The coal would come running down chutes of the breakers, and the boys had the painful job of removing debris from the rush of coal. They weren’t allowed to wear gloves, and as a result their fingers were cut and bleeding. The central rhyme of this movement, “Mickey Pick-Slate,” is from the anthracite region. Others were adapted from children’s street rhymes. In the center of this movement are the words of Anthony (Shorty) Slick, who worked as a breaker boy. The interview is taken from the documentary film America and Lewis Hine, directed by Nina Rosenblum. Hine worked for the National Child Labor Committee and served as chief photographer of the Works Progress Administration.
“Speech” is the third movement. The text is adapted from an excerpt of a speech by John L. Lewis, who served as president of the United Mine Workers of America. Lewis was an impassioned spokesperson for the miners, and fought hard-won battles for safer working conditions and compensation.
The fourth movement, “Flowers,” was inspired by an interview with Barbara Powell, daughter and granddaughter of miners. She grew up in a Pennsylvania patch town and had many stories to tell about her family life. She never felt poor. She had an amazing sense of community. Barbara talked about how everyone helped each other. In one interview, she said that in order to brighten their lives, “We all had gardens,” and then she began to list the names of flowers.
The last movement, “Appliances,” ties the new to the old. I was struck by John L. Lewis’s line “those of us who benefit from that service because we live in comfort.” Our days are filled with activities that require power. Even today, coal is partly fueling the nation, powering electricity. When we bake a cake or grind coffee beans, we use coal. The closing words of Anthracite Fields are taken from an advertising campaign for the coal-powered railroad. In 1900, Earnest Elmo Calkins created a fictitious character, a New York socialite named “Phoebe Snow,” who rode the rails to Buffalo. It used to be a dirty business to ride a train. But with the diamond of coal, her “gown stayed white from morn till night, on the road to Anthracite”—a stunning contrast to the coal darkened faces underground.
—Julia Wolfe