#WeAreNewMusic Spotlight:
Julia Wolfe

Julia Wolfe (photo by Peter Serling, courtesy G. Schirmer, Music Sales)

Julia Wolfe has been a fixture of the new music community since she founded Bang on a Can with Michael Gordon and David Lang in 1987. Over the course of the past decade, she has emerged as one of today’s leading compositional voices of conscience through her series of oratorios inspired by tragic events in American labor history. The second of these works, Anthracite Fields, was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Music; the work was commissioned with support from New Music USA.

Julia discusses New Music USA’s impact:

“It is crucial to support individual composers in their work, as well as to fund organizations that support individual composers. That’s what artists need! Meet the Composer, which led to New Music USA, began with the mission to pay composers for their work and to make them visible to the public. New Music USA has carried on this mission. This support is cross-generational and across different aesthetics, giving voice to a wide range of composers.

 

Anthracite Fields, commissioned by the Mendelssohn Club with the support of New Music USA, along with the Pew Foundation and other important funders, was certainly one of the deepest dives I have taken in creating a large-scale musical response to American labor history. Having the support to research, and to write both the text and music, allowed for an immersion into a study and creative process that made the piece possible. The funding for this composition made it possible for me to take the time and give intense focus to the work. Anthracite Fields has now been performed all over the world and received the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in music.

 

New Music USA is essential to the new music community. Support for all generations of composers, for new ideas in music, for a multiplicity of voices, is crucial for maintaining a vital musical culture. New Music USA is at the center of that.

 

My hope is that innovative music flourishes. That composers can create work independent of the mainstream marketplace, that organizations that support this can thrive and continue to present exciting groundbreaking new music.”

Explore Julia + Bang on a Can’s Work Funded by New Music USA: