Julia Wolfe
Julia Wolfe (born December 18, 1958)[1] is an American composer and professor of music at New York University. According to The Wall Street Journal, Wolfe's music has "long inhabited a terrain of its own, a place where classical forms are recharged by the repetitive patterns of minimalism and the driving energy of rock".[2] Her work Anthracite Fields, an oratorio for chorus and instruments, was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Music.[3][4][5][6][7] She has also received the Herb Alpert Award (2015) and was named a MacArthur Fellow (2016).
This article is about the American composer. For the British mathematician, see Julia Wolf. For the British composer, see Julia Woolf.
Julia Wolfe
December 18, 1958
American
Composer, Professor of Music
2
Life[edit]
Born in Philadelphia, Wolfe has a twin brother and an older brother. As a teenager, she learned piano but she only began to study music seriously after taking a musicianship class at the University of Michigan, where she received a BA in music and theater as a member of Phi Beta Kappa in 1982. In her early twenties, Wolfe wrote music for an all-female theatre troupe.
On a trip to New York, she became friends with composition students Michael Gordon and David Lang, both of whom had recently attended the Yale School of Music and who encouraged her to apply. She went to Yale in 1984 and studied primarily with Martin Bresnick, and she married Michael Gordon the same year. After receiving her M.M. in 1986, Wolfe, Gordon, and Lang founded the new music collective Bang on a Can in 1987.[8] Bang on a Can is now an organization with a concert series and tours, and a summer festival in the Berkshires for emerging composers and performers.[8] Wolfe, Gordon, and Lang founded Red Poppy Music in 1993 as a printed music publishing company. The three-founded record label Cantaloupe Music in 2001.
Wolfe received a Fulbright Scholarship to travel to Amsterdam in 1992. In 2012, Wolfe received a PhD in composition from Princeton University. She has been a professor of music composition at New York University in the Steinhardt School since 2009, prior to which she was an adjunct professor at the Manhattan School of Music for seven years. In 2015, Wolfe won the Pulitzer Prize for music for her work Anthracite Fields, and in 2016 she was named a MacArthur Fellowship recipient.[8] In 2018, she was a recipient of an honorary degree from Drew University in New Jersey.[9] Wolfe held the 2021–22 Richard and Barbara Debs Composer's Chair at Carnegie Hall.[10]
Wolfe and Gordon are married and have two children. They live in lower Manhattan.[8]