“After receiving the Pulitzer Prize for music last year, a Grammy Award nomination and other praise for her coal-mining-themed choral work ‘Anthracite Fields,’ composer Julia Wolfe can add another accolade to her professional mantel: a MacArthur Fellowship, a five-year grant that comes with an unrestricted $625,000 stipend,” writes David Ng in Wednesday’s (9/21) Los Angeles Times. “Wolfe is working on another labor-themed project: an orchestral and choral work that explores women’s labor issues in factories … She is one of the founders of [the contemporary classical group] Bang on a Can…. Her piece about female garment workers is a New York Philharmonic commission for orchestra and women’s chorus that is set to premiere in fall 2018.” Says Wolfe, “You’re always rushing around and managing your life and work … so maybe that’s what this award will give me—time and space.” Anthracite Fields was commissioned and premiered by the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia in 2014. This season, her 2012 percussion concerto riSE and fLY, commissioned by the BBC, will be performed by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, with percussionist Colin Currie. Previous MacArthur recipients in music include conductor Marin Alsop, soprano Dawn Upshaw, cellist Alisa Weilerstein, and pianist Jeremy Denk.
Posted September 22, 2016
