Julia Wolfe
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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 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 micro tonal 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 Next Wave Festival at BAM, the Sydney 2000 Olympic Arts Festival, Tanglewood, the San Francisco Symphony, 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 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, 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 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 Deavere 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, a staged oratorio with Gordon, 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 a new work for 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 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 of Music, where she studied with Martin Bresnick. Among her awards are an Academy Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, an Artist Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, 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. Wolfe received a 2001 OBIE for the music to Jennie Ritchie, a collaboration with playwright Mac Wellman and Ridge Theater.
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 fifteen years. A CD of her music, Julia Wolfe - The String Quartets, was recently released on Cantaloupe Music. Another all Julia Wolfe CD, Arsenal of Democracy, was recorded on Point Records (Universal). Her music has also been recorded for Teldec, Sony Classical, Argo/Decca, and other Cantaloupe recordings.
- Deborah Artman, 2003
