Julia Wolfe's Anthracite Fields – Album available now!
Julia Wolfe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning oratorio for chorus and instruments, Anthracite Fields, is now available (with a limited quantity personally autographed by Julia Wolfe) at the Bang on a Can online store and also on iTunes. The music is also streaming exclusively on Apple Music.
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. NPR Music’s Tom Huizenga describes the piece as “…almost a public history project and a music project at the same time,” which hints at the work’s universal appeal.
The recording features the Bang on a Can All-Stars and The Choir of Trinity Wall Street, under the direction of Julian Wachner.
Here she is on NPRs All Things Considered, discussing the album.