Julia Wolfe

Julia Wolfe (born December 18, 1958) is an American composer and professor of music at New York University.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Wolfe's music has "long inhabited a terrain of its own, a place where classical forms are recharged by the repetitive patterns of minimalism and the driving energy of rock".

As a teenager, she learned piano but she only began to study music seriously after taking a musicianship class at the University of Michigan, where she received a BA in music and theater as a member of Phi Beta Kappa in 1982.

In her early twenties, Wolfe wrote music for an all-female theatre troupe.

On a trip to New York, she became friends with composition students Michael Gordon and David Lang, both of whom had recently attended the Yale School of Music and who encouraged her to apply.

She went to Yale in 1984 and studied primarily with Martin Bresnick, and she married Michael Gordon the same year.

After receiving her M.M. in 1986, Wolfe, Gordon, and Lang founded the new music collective Bang on a Can in 1987.

Bang on a Can is now an organization with a concert series and tours, and a summer festival in the Berkshires for emerging composers and performers.

Wolfe received a Fulbright Scholarship to travel to Amsterdam in 1992.

Wolfe, Gordon, and Lang founded Red Poppy Music in 1993 as a printed music publishing company.

The three-founded record label Cantaloupe Music in 2001.

Written shortly after September 11, 2001, her string quartet concerto My Beautiful Scream, written for Kronos Quartet and the Orchestre National de France (premiered in the US at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music under the direction of Marin Alsop), was inspired by the idea of a slow motion scream.

The Vermeer Room, Girlfriend, and Window of Vulnerability show Wolfe's ability to create vivid sonic images.

Girlfriend, for mixed chamber ensemble and recorded sound, uses a haunting audio landscape that consists of skidding cars and breaking glass.

The Vermeer Room, inspired by the Vermeer painting "A Girl Asleep"—which when x-rayed reveals a hidden figure—received its orchestral premiere with the San Francisco Symphony.

In Window of Vulnerability, written for the American Composers Orchestra and conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, Wolfe creates a massive sonic universe of dense textures and fragile windows.

The influence of pop culture can be heard in many of Wolfe's works, including Lick and Believing for the Bang on a Can All-Stars.

Lick, based on fragments of funk, has become a manifesto for the new generation of pop-influenced composers.

The raucous My Lips From Speaking for six pianos was inspired by the opening riff of the Aretha Franklin tune "Think".

Wolfe's Dark Full Ride is an obsessive and relentless exploration of the drum set, beginning with an extended hi-hat spotlight, while Lad is a piece for nine bagpipes.

She has been a professor of music composition at New York University in the Steinhardt School since 2009, prior to which she was an adjunct professor at the Manhattan School of Music for seven years.

Wolfe's interest in labor history has informed her recent work, including Steel Hammer, an evening-length art-ballad that was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize.

The text is culled from more than 200 versions of the John Henry legend and based on hearsay, recollection, and tall tales that explore the subject of human versus machine.

In 2012, Wolfe received a PhD in composition from Princeton University.

The piece premiered in 2012 with the BBC Concert Orchestra, conducted by Keith Lockhart, and premiered in the Netherlands with the Codarts Ensemble and the United States with the Albany Symphony Orchestra in the 2014–15 season.

Wolfe drew on oral histories, interviews, geography, local rhymes, and coal advertisements for her Pulitzer Prize-winning piece Anthracite Fields, an oratorio about the coal mining community of her native Pennsylvania which premiered in Philadelphia and was performed at the New York Philharmonic Biennial in the spring of 2014.

Her work Anthracite Fields, an oratorio for chorus and instruments, was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Music.

She has also received the Herb Alpert Award (2015) and was named a MacArthur Fellow (2016).

Born in Philadelphia, Wolfe has a twin brother and an older brother.

In 2015, Wolfe won the Pulitzer Prize for music for her work Anthracite Fields, and in 2016 she was named a MacArthur Fellowship recipient.

In 2015–16, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, with first the Los Angeles Master Chorale and then the Danish Radio Vocal Society, gave Anthracite Fields its West Coast and European premieres, and Cantaloupe Music released the studio recording, featuring the Choir of Trinity Wall Street and the Bang on a Can All-Stars.

Premiered by the Trio Mediaeval and the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Steel Hammer was presented in a fully staged version by director Anne Bogart and her SITI Company at the University of Illinois, UCLA, Virginia Tech, OZ Arts Nashville, and BAM in 2015.

Following her folk interests and the tradition of body percussion in American folk music also led her to compose riSE and fLY, a concerto for body percussionist Colin Currie.

In 2018, she was a recipient of an honorary degree from Drew University in New Jersey.

Wolfe held the 2021–22 Richard and Barbara Debs Composer's Chair at Carnegie Hall.

Wolfe and Gordon are married and have two children.

They live in lower Manhattan.

Wolfe has written a major body of work for strings, from quartets to full orchestra.

Her quartets, as described by The New Yorker magazine "combine the violent forward drive of rock music with an aura of minimalist serenity [using] the four instruments as a big guitar, whipping psychedelic states of mind into frenzied and ecstatic climaxes."

Wolfe's Cruel Sister for string orchestra, inspired by a traditional English ballad of a love rivalry between sisters, was commissioned by the Munich Chamber Orchestra, received its US premiere at the Spoleto Festival USA, and was released (along with her other string orchestra piece, Fuel) on Cantaloupe Music.