Julia Wolfe’s, Anthracite Fields, her Pulitzer prize-winning oratorio for chorus and amplified ensemble, has received a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.

Click here to listen to an NPR feature on Anthracite Fields.

Wolfe wrote the work 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…

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…

Read LA Times review of
West Coast premiere at Disney Hall
The Los Angeles Master Chorale and
the Bang on a Can All-Stars

April 16, 2016
The Royal Library of Denmark, Copenhagen

click here to stream the music
click here for the full album

“[Anthracite Fields] captures not only the sadness of hard lives lost…but also of the sweetness and passion of a way of daily life now also lost…

On May 30 and 31, the NY PHIL Biennial presents the New York premiere of Julia Wolfe’s newest work, Anthracite Fields, with the Bang on a Can All-Stars and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street (Julian Wachner, conductor). In the new work, Wolfe draws from oral histories, interviews, speeches, geographic descriptions, local rhymes, and coal advertisements to create a unique oratorio that provides an intimate look at an important slice of American life…

After a superb premiere at The Krannert Center in Urbana-Champaign, IL, the staging of Julia Wolfe’s Steel Hammer by director Anne Bogart and her SITI Company with the Bang on a Can All-Stars goes on tour beginning October 23, with a final performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in December!

Steel Hammer
staged by Anne Bogart with SITI Company;
Bang on a Can All-Stars

• UCLA: 10/23-24
• Virginia Tech: 11/17
• OZ Arts, Nashville: 11/21
• Brooklyn Academy of Music: 12/2-12/6

Then On November 14, Julia Wolfe returns to the anthracite coal region in Pennsylvania, which inspired her Pulitzer prize-winning oratorio, Anthracite Fields…

On November 14, Julia Wolfe returns to the anthracite coal region in Pennsylvania, which inspired her Pulitzer prize-winning oratorio, Anthracite Fields. In order to share the piece with the community that gave her such invaluable assistance in her research, Wolfe will participate in tours of the Lackawanna Coal Mine and give a talk at the Anthracite Heritage Museum in Scranton. That evening, the Bang on a Can All-Stars and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, conducted by Julian Wachner, will perform Anthracite Fields at the brand-new Allan P…

By MICHAEL COOPER APRIL 4, 2017

LEWISBURG, Pa. — Onstage, a choir intoned the names of coal miners whose deaths and injuries had landed them on the Pennsylvania Mining Accident index more than a century ago. In the lobby, members of the audience — some of whom came on free shuttle buses that picked them up from nearby coal towns — created an index of their own, writing about their mining ancestors in a small leather notebook held open with a coal paperweight…