One of America’s most important composers, Julia Wolfe has often mined the past as inspiration for her contemporary music. Oral tradition, memory and oral history are central to two of her best-known works: Steel Hammer (2009), which has as its source more than 200 variations of the quintessential American folk ballad, the legendary “John Henry.” And the text for Anthracite Fields (2014), her choral oratorio about life and death in Pennsylvania coal country, was, in Wolfe’s words, “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 Union.” Julia Wolfe discusses her multiple roles as composer, researcher and interviewer, and how her compositions, rooted in the past and focusing on workers, labor, and industrialization, have gained new relevance and audiences, in coal country, throughout the U.S. and beyond.
New York City, NY; NYC