Julia Wolfe (born 1958)
Julia Wolfe is one of America’s most prominent living composers. She was born in Philadelphia and learned piano at a teenager but became more involved with music while attending the University of Michigan. She received a master’s degree in music from Yale in 1986 and a Ph.D. in composition from Princeton in 2012. She teaches at New York University.
With Michael Gordon (her husband) and David Lang, Julia Wolfe is a founder of Bang on a Can, the renowned new music ensemble.
Julia Wolfe has composed music for solo instruments, for chamber ensembles, for orchestras, and for voice in combination with various ensembles. Her music tends to have a driving, sometimes raucous, intensity that is influenced by Appalachian traditions, folk music, and rock.
In recent years, Julia Wolfe has been interested in labor history. Her work Steel Hammer (2009) combined numerous versions of the John Henry legend into a stunning theatrical work. This was followed a composition about Pennsylvania coal miners, Anthracite Fields (2014), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. More recently, the emotional power of Fire in my mouth (2018), about the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, blew away those of us lucky to see the performance by the New York Philharmonic. Here’s a too-short excerpt:
Her composition With a blue dress on (2010, rev. 2014) was inspired by a field recording of a woman singing “Pretty little girl with a blue dress on / Stole my heart and away she’s gone.” The five violinists sing as well as play, and the boots they are wearing are essential for the performance.
A very recent emerging-from-pandemic composition is Oxygen for 12 flutes: