Julia
Wolfe
The multi-talented Julia Wolfe, whose
background includes theater, dance, and vocal training, approaches
music composition with a sensibility that combines the best
of 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 like unfolding dramatic
landscapes, a music meant to be entered into by the listener,
a music of "rare, strange beauty" says 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 masterful 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 is thrilling audiences around the world in featured performances
at the Sydney Olympic Arts Festival, Tanglewood, the Next Wave
Festival at BAM, the San Francisco Symphony's Wet Ink Series,
South Bank's Meltdown Festival (United Kingdom), Settembre Musica
(Italy), Festival International Cervantino (Mexico), Confrontaties
Festival (The Netherlands), and the Holland, Huddersfield and
Israel music festivals; in the choreography of Doug Varone,
Eliot Field and the Dusseldorf Ballet; in Michael Blackwood's
recent documentary New York Composers; and in concert
and theater productions at The Kennedy Center for the Performing
Arts, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, BAM, the New York Public
Theater, the Kitchen, Arena Stage Theater, Merkin Concert Hall,
La MaMa and the Los Angeles County Museum.
Writing music for the stage as early
as 1980 in productions by the Wild Swan Theater, a company she
co-founded, Wolfe these days is participating 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 Deveare Smith; the incandescent and pulsing The
Carbon Copy Building with comic book artist Ben Katchor,
the Ridge Theater Company and composers Michael Gordon and David
Lang; and Lost Objects, the staged oratorio with Gordon,
lang, writer Deborah Artman, and the Barcelona Theater Company,
La Fura Dels Baus, which premiered at the Dresden Music Festival
in 2001.
Other recent commissions include Lionheart,
the Kronos Quartet, 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 1958 in Philadelphia,
PA, Wolfe holds a BA from the Residential College at the University
of Michigan and a Masters of Music from the Yale School for
Music, where she studied with Martin Bresnick. Among her awards
are a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy and
Institute of Arts and Letters, two ASCAP Foundation grants,
a fellowship at Princeton University and a Fullbright fellowship
to the Netherlands. Her opera, The Carbon Copy Building,
received the 2000 Village Voice OBIE Award for Best New American
Work.
Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director
of New York's critically acclaimed Bang On A Can Festival, Wolfe
has been responsible for the presentation of hundreds of new
and unknown works over the past thirteen years. A CD of her
music, Julia Wolfe: Arsenal of Democracy, is available
on Point Records (Universal), and other recordings of her work
can be heard on Sony Classical Argo/Decca and CRI.
The New Yorkers —
2003 Next Wave Festival
Bang on a Can Marathon — 2001 Next Wave Festival
Bang on a Can Marathon — 2000 Next Wave Festival