Lightning at our feet (2008) 75'
four singer/performers playing violin, cello, piano, electric guitar, and electronics [all instruments and voices amplified]
BAM 2008 Next Wave Festival and Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston
four singer/performers playing violin, cello, piano, electric guitar, and electronics [all instruments and voices amplified]
BAM 2008 Next Wave Festival and Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston
soprano solo, men's chorus, children's chorus, and orchestra 3(picc).3(eh).2+bcl.2+cbn/4.3(C).2+btn.1/timp.4perc/gtr(steel).ebgtr.pno+eorg.hp/strings
New York Philharmonic
Julia Wolfe’s Pulitzer-Prize winning oratorio for chorus and instruments, Anthracite Fields, will be released on Cantaloupe Music on September 25, 2015. Wolfe wrote the piece after doing extensive research about the coal-mining industry in an area very near where she grew up in Pennsylvania. Her text draws on oral histories, interviews with miners and their families, speeches, geographic descriptions, children’s rhymes, and coal advertisements…
continue readingComposer Michael Gordon and filmmaker Bill Morrison share their multimedia piece Lightning at Our Feet, inspired by the poetry of Emily Dickinson.
Although we all eventually face death, it’s a topic most avoid — except perhaps for philosophers, who explain it to our heads, and artists, who present it to our hearts.
Composer David Lang offers something for both head and heart — and goes one step further in his new song cycle, Death Speaks. Here, death is less a lofty concept than a personality.
“It isn’t a state of being or a place or a metaphor, but a person, a character in a drama who can tell us in our own language what to expect in the World to Come,” Lang wrote for the Carnegie Hall debut of the piece last year…
continue readingClick on the WQXR streaming player to hear a live recording of Steel Hammer with the Bang on a Can All-Stars and vocalists Emily Eagen, Katie Geissinger and Molly Quinn recfrom October 14, 2014 at Brookfield Place’s Winter Garden in New York City.
This performance was presented in partnership with Arts Brookfield and WNYC’s New Sounds Live and hosted by John Schaefer…
continue readingWhen a Critic Hosts the Premiere
[link to article]
Zachary Woolfe
February 14, 2020
“Please silence your cellphones.”
There are few phrases I hear more often in my life as a music critic. But it was strange — like a child playing dress-up — to speak the sentence myself, and in the incongruous setting of my own living room on a rainy evening earlier this week…
continue readingCal Performances at Home premieres Steel Hammer, a new film featuring the acclaimed oratorio by Julia Wolfe. Film will be available on demand through August 4.
Described by The Boston Globe as “[an] epic explosion and reconstruction of the folk ballad,” Julia Wolfe’s Steel Hammer is a meditation on over 200 versions of the John Henry legend, with voices and the Bang on a Can All-Stars, along with mountain dulcimer, wooden bones, banjo, harmonicas, clogging, and body percussion…
continue readingWorld Premiere
June 1-3
(click to read NY Times feature on unEarth)
Commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for orchestra, men’s chorus, and children’s chorus, Julia Wolfe’s unEarth is a large-scale work that addresses the climate crisis…
continue reading