Sigma Alpha Iota

PAN PIPES Winter 2019 9 COMPOSERS IN THE NEWS By William Robin, For Musical America In March, in a Q&A session following a stunning performance of Julia Wolfe's Anthracite Fields at the Kennedy Center, an elderly woman stood up to announce her close connection to the material of the Pulitzer Prize-winning work, an oratorio that meditates on the history of coal mining. e granddaughter of a miner, the woman asked Wolfe if she had visited the Pennsylvania Anthracite Heritage Museum (the composer had) and sent greetings from a new mutual friend in the northeastern part of that state, whom Wolfe had interviewed in the course of researching the piece. Such an interaction might seem foreign to the red-carpet pomp of the Kennedy Center, but it felt like an entirely appropriate response to the music of Wolfe, a composer who has consistently sought to create friendly encounters with unfamiliar music. With her organization Bang on a Can — co-founded with composers David Lang and Michael Gordon — she has fought to make the world of contemporary music accessible to those beyond its specialist confines. What started off as a do-it-yourself marathon concert in the Lower East Side in 1987 has since expanded into a multi-million dollar outfit that oversees a new-music ensemble, a marching band, a record label, and a commissioning fund, and unfailingly advocates for the new. A fascination with the working class e grand Anthracite Fields, written in 2014 for the choral Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia and Bang on a Can's All-Stars ensemble, belongs to Wolfe's fascination with the lives and legacy of the American working class. ough this focus coincides with a moment in which the image of the coal worker is being mythologized to advance an environmentally destructive political agenda, Wolfe does not share the nostalgia of the current presidential administration. "It feels to me like kind of a romanticization of coal miners — and that doesn't feel good," she told the New York Times last year about the Trump administration's regulatory roll-backs. Anthracite Fields instead infuses the history of Pennsylvania's mining enterprise with the very real violence that undergirded it. e work opens with a hauntingly repetitive series of names intoned atop a grim drone, punctured by fiercely dissonant instrumental interjections. Dozens of names are chanted, all beginning with "John"; culled from the Pennsylvania Mining Accident index, the chilling list Julia Wolfe: Musical America Composer of the Year 2019 Musical America Composer of the Year Julia Wolfe. Peter Serling photo

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