Michael Gordon is known for his monumental and immersive works. Decasia, a work for 55 re-tuned, spatially positioned instruments (with Bill Morrison’s accompanying cult-classic film), has been featured in the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Minimalist Jukebox festival and at the Southbank Centre. Timber—a tour-de-force for percussion sextet played on amplified microtonal simantras—has been performed on every continent, including performances by Slagwerk Den Haag at the Muziekgebouw and Mantra Percussion at Brooklyn Academy of Music. Natural History, a collaboration with the Steiger Butte Drum of the Klamath Tribe, was premiered on the rim of Crater Lake in Oregon by conductor Teddy Abrams and is the subject of the PBS documentary Symphony for Nature. Gordon’s vocal works include Anonymous Man, an autobiographical choral work written for The Crossing; and the opera What to wear with legendary New York theater director Richard Foreman. Recent recordings include Clouded Yellow, Gordon’s complete string quartets performed by Kronos Quartet.
Inspired by the chaotic scheme of weather patterns, I wondered how these might transfer musically, as if the past several hundred years of musical ideas were swirling around, and I could just grab things I liked and build on them. I imagined history as being not so much like a timeline, but like an elevator where I could stop at whatever floor I wanted, and everything was going on simultaneously. The elevator went up to eight, where I found Vivaldi, who of course wrote a massive string piece based loosely on the same subject. Weather One is influenced by Vivaldi’s motoric string writing and use of canons, where melodies are played in close succession creating a blurry, cloudy effect.
Weather One is the first movement of Weather, an evening-length work for string orchestra and electronics. Weather was commissioned by the Seimans Foundation for the Germany-based string group Ensemble Resonanz.
—Michael Gordon
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.
My love affair with American folk music began in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I studied and worked. There, I began to play mountain dulcimer, sing, try out the bones. The folk scene in Ann Arbor was and still is very rich, and I had the opportunity to immerse myself in the culture. As I veered off into more experimental ideas in music, the folk threads remained—references in pieces like Four Marys (my first string quartet), Cruel Sister, and most recently Steel Hammer (an evening-length art ballad for Trio Mediaeval and the Bang on a Can All-Stars). In With a blue dress on, the folk roots come to the fore with fiddling licks, fragments of song, and bows deep into the string. I was inspired by a plaintive field recording of a woman singing, “Pretty little girl with a blue dress on.” Her tone was rough and her rhythm irregular. The timing and tempos—or implied tempos—in my piece play on this irregularity and fluctuation, placing folk-like fragments into a kind of joyful hyper state.
With a blue dress on was originally written for Monica Germino and commissioned by the Eduard van Beinum Stichting.
—Julia Wolfe
Cruel Sister is a stirring and fantastic Old English ballad. The tale is of two sisters—one bright as the sun, and the other cold and dark. One day, so that she can have the love of a young man who has come courting, the dark sister pushes the bright sister into the sea. Two minstrels find the dead sister washed up on the shore and shape her breastbone into a fine harp strung with her yellow hair. They come to play at the cold, dark sister’s wedding. As the sound of the harp reaches the bride’s ears, the ballad concludes, “and surely now her tears will flow.” While my piece references no words and quotes no music from the original tune, it does follow the dramatic arc of the ballad—the music reflecting an argument that builds, a body floating on the sea, the mad harp.
—Julia Wolfe