SSAA, girls choir, and orchestra 3.3.3.3/4.3.2.1.1/4perc.timp/hp.pf.egtr.ebass/strings
The New York Philharmonic; Cal Performances at the University of California, Berkeley; the Krannert Center at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the University Musical Society at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Julia Wolfe descended hundreds of feet underground, into a dank, dark cavern with gleaming black walls: a Pennsylvania coal mine.
“You can’t believe people spent all day there,” Wolfe recalled Tuesday. “It was spooky, a little bit, but so fascinating, a strange kind of beauty.”
Wolfe’s visit helped inspire “Anthracite Fields,” a choral tribute to the state’s mining heritage – and, now, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in music. The judges described her work as a “powerful oratorio for chorus and sextet evoking Pennsylvania coal-mining life around the turn of the 20th Century.”
“I’m a little stunned,” Wolfe, a music professor at New York University, said a day after her win…
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