Julia Wolfe

Watch the video clip of Fuel

Julia Wolfe music brings a modern sensibility to each while simultaneously tearing down the walls between them. Her music is distinguished by an intense physicality and a relentless power that pushes performers to extremes and demands attention from the audience. In the words of the Wall Street Journal, Wolfe has “long inhabited a terrain of [her] own, a place where classical forms are recharged by the repetitive patterns of minimalism and the driving energy of rock.” Wolfe has written a major body of work for strings, from quartets to full orchestra. Her quartets, as described by the New Yorker magazine “combine the violent forward drive of rock music with an aura of minimalist serenity [using] the four instruments as a big guitar, whipping psychedelic states of mind into frenzied and ecstatic climaxes.” The influence of pop culture can be heard in many of Wolfe’s works and she has collaborated with theater artist Anna Deveare Smith, architects DillerScofidio+Renfro, filmmaker Bill Morrison, Ridge Theater, director Francois Girard, Jim Findlay, and choreographer Susan Marshall among others. Her music has been heard at BAM, the Sydney Olympic Arts Festival, Settembre Musica (Italy), Theatre de la Ville (Paris), Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall, and has been recorded on Cantaloupe, Teldec, Point/Universal, Sony Classical, and Argo/Decca. In 2009 Wolfe joined the NYU Steinhardt School composition faculty. She is co-founder of New York’s music collective Bang on a Can. For more information visit www.juliawolfemusic.com.

Fuel
Wolfe’s piece Fuel, a collaboration with filmmaker Bill Morrison, was premiered in April 2013 by Ensemble Resonanz in a former warehouse in Hamburg, Germany. Fuel weaves a tapestry of images and music with fierce and propelling energy and incorporates film shot in the US and in Hamburg. Like all ports, Hamburg relies on the standardized shipping container as its medium of commerce. Fuel presents these containers as a metaphor for world commerce, communication, and globalization of world markets.