Saturday, February 20, 8:00 pm Littlefield Concert Hall
Julia Wolfe (Jean Macduff Vaux Composer-in-Residence)
The multi-talented Julia Wolfe, whose background includes theater, dance, and vocal training, approaches music composition with a sensibility that combines the best of all these art forms. Regarded as one of the key voices of her generation, Wolfe's music is muscular and kinetic and experienced through the body. She creates journeys that are like unfolding dramatic landscapes—a music meant to be entered into by the listener, a music of "rare, strange beauty," according to composer Evan Ziporyn. With influences as varied as Beethoven, Motown, and Led Zeppelin, Wolfe's compositions often contain bold, direct attacks, the body energy of pop music; the unreigned expressiveness of rock and roll; and, above all, a sheer delight in sound.
Wolfe's work is distinguished by this intense focus on sound—the power of sound, the ways in which sound is related to memory and experience, the possibilities for new harmonies between familiar chords, and microtonal tunings or sounds found in nature and the urban world. With a care and attention to detail that is both masterly and highly respectful, Wolfe's music celebrates the extraordinary qualities contained within something as specific as a gesture or an inflection.
Intuitive, organic, insistent, Wolfe's music has thrilled audiences around the world in featured performances at the Sydney 2000 Olympic Arts Festival; the Next Wave Festival at BAM; Tanglewood; the San Francisco Symphony; the South Bank's Meltdown Festival (United Kingdom); Settembre Musica (Italy); Festival International Cervantino (Mexico); Confrontaties Festival (The Netherlands); the Holland, Huddersfield and Israel Music Festivals; in the choreography of Doug Varone, Eliot Feld and the Dusseldorf Ballet; in Michael Blackwood's recent documentary, New York Composers; and in concert and theater productions at the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Public Theater, the Kitchen, the Arena Stage Theater, La MaMa, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Writing music for the stage as early as 1980 in productions by the Wild Swan Theater, a company she cofounded, Wolfe participates these days in adventurous new forms of presentation with large-scale compositions and multimedia works. Recent collaborations include the provocative theater piece House Arrest with playwright and performing artist Anna Deavere Smith; the incandescent and pulsing The Carbon Copy Building with comic book artist Ben Katchor; and Lost Objects, a staged oratorio with Michael Gordon, David Lang, and writer Deborah Artman, which premiered at the Dresden Music Festival in 2001. Also in development is a new music theater work with Anna Deavere Smith.
Other recent commissions include new works for the Kronos Quartet and the Radio France Orchestra, the Next Wave Festival at BAM, the Munich Chamber Orchestra, Lionheart, the Library of Congress, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Netherlands Public Radio, the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Rockefeller Multi-Arts Production Fund, the American Composers Orchestra, Meet The Composer, the Rotterdam Arts Council, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust.
Born in Philadelphia in 1958, Wolfe holds a bachelor’s degree from the Residential College at the University of Michigan and a master of music degree from the Yale School of Music. She recently joined the composition faculty at NYU's Steinhardt School. Her latest release (on the Cantelope label) Dark Full Ride, features works for nine bagpipes, four drum sets, six pianos, and eight double basses.
