Julia Wolfe

Philadelphia composer Julia Wolfe, born in 1958, went to the Yale School of Music before moving to New York City and co-founding the legendary Bang on a Can experimental music organisation with fellow graduates David Lang and Michael Gordon in the ‘80s. Wolfe quickly developed works for strings that honed her talent for vivid storytelling—mimicking a slow-motion scream in the 2003 string quartet concerto “My Beautiful Scream” for Kronos Quartet and the Radio France Orchestra or writing the 2004 string orchestra piece Cruel Sister, inspired by an English ballad of romantic rivalry. She mixes it up with projects like the 1999 comic-book opera The Carbon Copy Building, while the saucy 1994 funk piece “Lick” uses pop influences. But it was her interest in American labor history that propelled her to harness the grandeur of classical concert halls in honour of the working class with her 2015 piece Julia Wolfe: Anthracite Fields, commemorating the Pennsylvania Anthracite coal region workers and 2019’s Julia Wolfe: Fire in my mouth recalling the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York City.