Music Credits: Excerpts from Anthracite Fields and Steel Hammer composed by Julia Wolfe, used courtesy of Bang on a Can Sound. Excerpts from Fire in my mouth, composed by Julia Wolfe, used courtesy of the New York Philharmonic. Excerpt from “NY” written and performed by Kosta T, from the cd Soul Sand, used courtesy of the Free Music Archive. <music up> Jo Reed: You just heard an excerpt from Anthracite Fields, which was written by Julia Wolfe. And this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. Composer Julia Wolfe has a musical tool kit that is both wide and deep. It is music that is unexpected, yet impossible to imagine in any other way. And it’s very much her own. Julia Wolfe has written major bodies of work for strings, from quartets to full orchestra, taking inspiration wherever she finds it. Cruel Sister, for example, a piece for string orchestra was inspired by a traditional English ballad, while My Beautiful Scream, was inspired by the idea of a slow motion scream. Julia Wolfe is also one of the founders and an artistic director of the music collective Bang on a Can. It was begun in 1987 as a one-day marathon concert in a New York art gallery. Now Bang on a Can has grown to a multi-faceted performing arts organization. Julia calls it her musical family and she credits it with allowing her to dream and to dare musically. And she has taken those dares. Indeed, she was a recipient of the 2015 Herb Alpert Award in Music and in 2016 she was named a MacArthur Fellow. In past few years, Julia Wolfe has created three major pieces of work about events in American labor history: Steel Hammer, which takes the John Henry legend as its subject; Anthracite Fields, an oratorio that looks at Pennsylvania coal mining and won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize; and finally Fire in my mouth, an oratorio that examines the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. Labor and oratorio seemed to me like such an unlikely marriage. I became really curious to find out what drew Julia Wolfe to these historical projects. Julia Wolfe: It sort of reached a point in my creative work—in my creative life where I felt like I needed to make a bigger statement. I wasn’t sure what that statement was going to be and in some ways I started with sound, really. I really wanted kind of a raw sound that draws from American folk traditions, other folk traditions. And then I went looking for a story, so it was interesting that I started with sound before history. I should say back in my beginnings of college I had no thought of studying music. I played folk guitar, I studied some piano, but I actually thought I would be studying social sciences. I took classes and one class in particular that focused on the American worker—actually on workers in general and on the workplace. So my early interest was very political and sociological and I somehow veered into, almost accidentally veered into a music class and, you know, I got the bug. Jo Reed: But then you married those two passions. You married music to history. How did that happen? Julia Wolfe: Well, the kickoff was a piece called Steel Hammer, and that was written for the Bang on a Can All-Stars and Trio Mediaeval, who are a wonderful Norwegian folk group. And the Bang on a Can All-Stars are my home band. I just kept coming back to the John Henry story, the John Henry ballad, and just fascinated by the story. You know, it’s man fighting against the machine in a very basic way. He’s digging a tunnel. The machine has come, been brought in, to take his place. And just the many, many versions of that ballad and it having so much meaning to so many different groups of people, and the connection to work songs and protests. So that began with this piece Steel Hammer and that eventually was followed up by Anthracite Fields, which was a much more in-depth research piece where I’m actually going into a community. In this case it was the anthracite coal community in Northeastern Pennsylvania, which is close to where I grew up, and just immersing <laughs> myself in that, in that community and understanding what that industry was, who we were as a people and in relation to that industry, and I guess the interest just <laughs> kept growing and growing. The one thing about those two pieces is they’re fairly guy heavy. You know, John Henry’s a big, muscly man. The miners were men, and in both of those pieces there are important threads of women, which was very important to me. But all of a sudden I was like, “Well, wait a minute. These are fascinating subjects and very American, but I really want to take a look at women in the workplace,” and along with other things that drew me to the subject, that took me to the garment workers in New York City at the turn of the century, which is this recent piece, thatwas just performed, Fire in my mouth. Jo Reed: Well, I just want to go back to Steel Hammer and John Henry for one second. There have been so many, so many songs about John Henry, and it just got me wondering, what do you think it is about that story that we as a culture keep coming back to it again and again and again? Julia Wolfe: Well, I love the fact that there are so many versions. <laughs> It’s such a beautiful example of the way stories travel, the way music travels, so-- and that is a certain sense what my piece is about, about these over 200 versions, that there’re all these conflicting facts, as well as commonality and-- but the gist of the story is this individual person who is suddenly confronted by this machine, which is, of course, still a subject <laughs> we deal with today. And so this early example of someone who is so determined to beat the machine, I think is forever fascinating to all of us here, and in the end, he did out-dig the-- John Henry did out-dig the machine in, I think, every version. But he doesn’t exactly win because he dies after he out-digs the machine. We’re all, I guess, <laughs> fascinated by working ourselves to death. But also, there’s so many other just colorful bits of information that come into the piece or into the ballads. There’ll be lines like, “Ain’t nothin’ but a man,” and, you know, it goes by kind of quickly, but if you actually take a look at it and you meditate on some of those words, you think, “Well, what does that even mean, <laughs> ‘ain’t nothin’ but a man’?” you know. And so as you start to dissect the words and play with them and develop patterns and music, then it starts to both gain meaning and sometimes even lose meaning and become just sound. <music up> Jo Reed: Had folk music been part of your musical world before that? Julia Wolfe: Oh, yeah, yeah. I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania and took piano lessons, primarily classical piano lessons, although I’d play all kinds of popular tunes and show tunes on the piano. My grandmother would sing and my mother would sing. And then sometime, I guess, early high school I picked up a folk guitar and started to, you know, try to become Joni Mitchell, sort of <laughs> or something like that. Jo Reed: Oh, as we all did. <laughs> Julia Wolfe: Yes. <laughter> Julia Wolfe: And just started to write songs and listen to her harmonies and I was really drawn to her use of the mountain dulcimer. But, you know, I’d just very casually write songs and play late into the night, and then when I went to college I went to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I went to this very small kind of alternative liberal arts program called the Residential College. Oh, an amazing place. A tiny little program with very interesting faculty and, you know, a very politically-minded, socially conscious place, and it’s, aside from that, it’s a real folk town, and some of the really greatest folk musicians have come from that scene. So one of, like, one of the best harmonica players, Madcat Ruth, is based there. And I picked up the mountain dulcimer, which is a beautiful lap instrument, you know, usually associated with Appalachian music. So I started to make some instruments. I worked for an instrument maker for a while, so I just immersed myself into this world. There’s also a pretty well-known folk house there called The Ark, and I did some performances there. And it’s just a great. <laughs> Jo Reed: That’s right. There is. Yes. Julia Wolfe: Still there. Not the same original location, but still active. So this was a wonderful environment to walk into, and while I was kind of gleaning from the folk world I was also getting interested in experimental classical music, contemporary music. So somehow these worlds came together, <laughs> even though they’re somewhat disparate, or they definitely were at that time. Jo Reed: Well, you’re known for having a very wide and very deep musical tool bag. Julia Wolfe: Yeah. I love all kinds of music and I really do believe that it sort of naturally becomes a part of you, whether you’re conscious of it or not. Whatever you’re listening to, whatever you’re running across, even as you’re walking down the street, you hear something blaring out of a car, which you often hear in New York City. But it’s all part of your world. Jo Reed: I wonder how your musical ideas begin to take shape, and it might be easiest to focus on a particular piece, like Anthracite Fields, which also won a Pulitzer, congratulations. Julia Wolfe: Thank you. Jo Reed: You mentioned you did research, and so you have all this information and you talked to people. Did you go down into a mine? Julia Wolfe: Yeah, I went down into—three mines. Jo Reed: Oh, my God. Julia Wolfe: Actually, anyone can go. One of them was a somewhat closed up mine, which was <laughs> a little bit precarious, but... But at the Anthracite Heritage Museum, which is an amazing, amazing little museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania, just outside, there is this whole setup where they have this kind of trolley car that takes you down very deep into the ground. Usually the guide is a retired miner who’s leading you through the dark and damp <laughs> spaces below the earth, and it’s really incredible experience. I mean, it’s not for everyone. If you’re claustrophobic I would not recommend this. <laughs> But it’s an amazing world, black and shiny and quite dark. Sometimes they’ll just want-- the guide will show you how dark it is by just turning off the tour light and it’s complete darkness. I don’t think I have seen anything quite as dark as the non-lit mine underground. So yes. That was really important to see that and to be there physically, and then I spent a lot of time at that museum. Was amazing, amazing exhibits that really depict everything about the life from the washhouse where they tried to scrub off this black soot that never could really come off, to newspaper articles about, you know, political issues or safety issues, to the tools they used, and that led me to interview a number of people, so a third-generation miner. And so just amazing to connect with people directly. They were just so open and generous really with their time and their stories, and I took lots of notes, and so after interviewing people and reading books and watching documentaries and looking at photographs, suddenly all these themes emerge and you just know they have to be in the piece. You can’t make this piece without somehow touching upon the breaker boys, which were these young boys that worked in the mines, and the political issues. So that was captured in a speech, a speech that was given, or more like a talk, I guess, talk/speech, given by John L. Lewis, who was the head of the United Mine Workers union and was a big advocate for workers’ compensation and safety, and so these texts became really alive to me, and some of the texts I’m just adapting or, you know, kind of gleaning from existing sources and others-- parts I’m writing until it all coalesces into a <laughs> composition. Jo Reed: And does the music follow or how does-- what’s the <laughs> relationship between the text and the music? Do you have a certain melodic line or-- in your mind and then you can see how certain text will go with that? How does that work? How do you translate that? Julia Wolfe: Yeah. Well, it’s a combination of sometimes the music is creating an environment. So, for example, in the first movement of Anthracite Fields--the title of the first movement is “Foundation,” and the text is a list of all of the Johns with one syllable last names in alphabetical order. So all these Johns came from a much, much longer list that was a Pennsylvania index of accidents. I think it was from the late 1890s or maybe little earlier. Anyway-- Jo Reed: All these men were in coal mining accidents? Julia Wolfe: Yes, and so at the turn of the century until maybe about 1916, and they didn’t necessarily die, but there they are, there’s their name listed, and just crazy-long list of names. So I couldn’t possibly set everyone’s name, and I wound up just picking, like I said, the Johns with these one little syllable last names. So it would be like John Aires, John Ash, John Bains, John Bates, John Carr, John Cash. It’ll just kind of go down the alphabet, in a kind of chant-like way. <music up> Julia Wolfe: So the text is a combination of the Johns and then descriptions of how coal is formed. So coal is basically just vegetation over a very long period of time, like leaves and branches with a lot of pressured heat in the ground, and then it, after many, many years, <laughs> that becomes coal, and so, well, what would the music be for that? I’m creating a kind of sonic world that’s very, very low and deep, so the lowest open string of the double bass and the very bottom end of the bass clarinet, and so you get this kind of, “whaaa,” kind of, you know, almost like a deep hum at the beginning, as kind of a setting. And then as you’re saying these names, that I chose to do in a, like I said, in a kind of chantlike ways. So at times I’m setting an environment, and at other times I’m responding to speech itself. So, for example, in the movement called “Speech,” which is the third movement of Anthracite Fields, I had been watching this video of John L. Lewis. He’s an amazing speaker <laughs> and very, very dramatic, intense, a beautiful language, and he begins that speech. He has this wonderful, deep voice and he kind of-- there’s little bends in pitch that he does, <laughs> and so I just kind of took from that and in that case there’s a solo that Mark Stewart sings, because he’s a guitarist but also wonderful singer, and so I’m inspired by speech in the way this man spoke, and that becomes music. So, so many different ways, into expressing everything about this world from the people who spoke for the miners to what we were, what you’d be looking at if you were in a mine. Jo Reed: The second chapter of Anthracite Fields is about the breaker boys, who are the kids who worked in the mines. And the music is very different. They’re kids who were workers, certainly, but they’re still kids and the music reflects that. Julia Wolfe: Yeah, and, you know, I really wanted to capture that aspect that-- of youth and that they are kids. I mean, it’s a very sad situation. The boys are working in the mines. It’s incredibly unhealthy. They don’t really have a choice about this. It’s complicated though, because some of the families want their boys in the mines. That tiny bit of income is making a difference. And so I wanted to capture combination of the pain of this setup as well as the incredible boyishness of this. <laughs> You know, the fun and mischief-ness and all that. So there’s a crazy drumbeat, which I think is, you know, what else is adolescent boy than a drumbeat, <laughs> a really hard banging drumbeat, and fun, I did a sort of fun play on the rhymes. There’s some local rhymes in-- from that region. One in particular is “Mickey picks slate early and late. That was the poor little breaker boy’s fate.” And this was actually from the region, and other rhymes that riff off of either using the word coal or these sort of dark children’s rhymes about death and... But yeah. So, you know, and in that case, musically, I was looking for sounds that would evoke some of these images, and so David Cossin is playing percussion, is playing drumsticks, like, sticks against sticks. So you get this kind of clickety-clackety sound, and he, at one point, he takes all these kinds of sounds that are somehow playful and evocative of the world these boys lived in. <music up> Jo Reed: Now, had you always intended this to be a multimedia piece? Julia Wolfe: Yeah, from the beginning. With Anthracite Fields I went in thinking I wanted it to be this sort of visual, immersive experience as well, and so from the very beginning I pulled in Jeff Sugg, who’s just a wonderful projection designer and so important to the piece, because you really are getting the story not only from the singers. The story’s illuminated, by what you’re looking at. You’re seeing the faces of breaker boys and you’re seeing strange diagrams and maps of the ground and the layers of earth and coal, and so many beautiful things that Jeff gathered, and he actually did the same research that I did, but, again, looking for the visual bits of information, and so we work kind of in parallel and then we kind of get together and talk about what’s going on in each movement and then we go off and <laughs> work again. But it’s music-driven, so Jeff is responding to the arc of the music and the narrative of the music, and then building a visual scape that goes with it. Jo Reed: And he did that again for Fire in my mouth, your most recent work. Julia Wolfe: Yes, that’s right. Jo Reed: Put the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in context for us. Who worked there? What were the conditions? Julia Wolfe: Yeah, so the Triangle Shirtwaist factory was on the Lower East Side of New York City, and it-- we’re talking about, like, right at the turn of the century, early 1900s. There were huge waves of immigration and the two main populations that were working in the garment industry in New York City were either Eastern European or Russian Jews and Southern Italians, and the bulk of the workers were women. So the bulk of these two populations are in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, or in the factory itself, and even before the fire, there was lots of unrest and protest. It was a big factory floor. It was hundreds of rows <laughs> of women and sewing machines. You know, they just had terrible working conditions. There was no collective voice, no unions. And we’re talking about ridiculously long hours. A lot of harassment on the job, long hours, very little pay, no compensation should you be sick or whatever. So in 1909 there was an uprising of 20,000 and everyone just got up and out of their chairs and went to streets. Very, very dramatic, most of them were women. After the uprising of 20,000 a lot of change happened, but not everywhere. The Triangle factory did not improve working conditions, and there was clear negligence on the part of the factory owners and the part of the city and the part of the inspectors. Jo Reed: Tell us about the fire and its significance. Julia Wolfe: In 1911, a fire broke out and the factory was on the 8^th, 9^th and 10^th floors and just it’s like a tinderbox. There was all this muslin hanging. There are all these paper-- thin paper that’s used for patterns, and apparently the rags or the leftover material hadn’t been collected that week yet, and someone dropped a cigarette into a trash can or something like that, and the whole place erupted, and so one of the worst workplace tragedies in in New York City, and just it’s hard to explain how horrific this was. But 146 young-- mostly young women. Mostly young immigrant women died in this fire. They were either burned or they jumped out of the windows. There were survivors as well, but it was a shock. I mean, the whole city really went into shock, and a lot of people were standing in Washington Square Park and watching, kind of witnessing this whole thing going on, and it was a real turning point. You know, the whole city mourned. Huge numbers of people came out for the funeral procession. The photographs are really quite remarkable, quite painful. So it was a big turning point, and I think the combination of the earlier protests and then this, unfortunately, this tragedy, people woke up and a lot of fire code laws were put into place and, you know, many more things relating to work were addressed. Jo Reed: So, of course, my question to you is how do you translate this into music? How did you organize this piece? Julia Wolfe: Well, the one thing that was really important to me was to not just focus on the fire. Fire’s the last movement. So the four movements are “Immigration,” “Factory,” “Protest,” and “Fire.” It was really important to me that I wasn’t just making a piece about victims, and it was about these amazing women who came here. You know, some of them had only been here a few months and some a few years. They’re self-educated, they’re outspoken, they’re coming over here on a boat and landing on these shores. They came for different reasons. I mean, the Eastern European and Russian Jews came because of persecution and also poverty, but the Southern Italians, I think, primarily, because of natural disaster and poverty. So I guess poverty’s a common theme, and they’ve come to these shores. They have sewing skills, and then as they enter into the American fabric and work in these factories, they realize this is not-- this is not the country where the streets are <laughs> paved with gold. And they are incredibly brave and resourceful. They are activists. They just were amazing individuals. People like Clara Lemlich, who got up and spoke early on. Her words are in the piece, actually in several places in the piece. She’s on the street. She’s organizing. She’s going to night classes where she’s educating herself, and then she’s beaten up by thugs. She was followed one day after work and beaten up and they broke six of her ribs, and, like, very shortly afterwards, she’s back on the picket line. <laughs> So she was not going to be stopped. The title of the piece actually comes from an interview that she did many years later. She was asked about her youth and she said, “Ah, then I had fire in my mouth,” and I think she meant she was feisty and outspoken. I don’t even know if she thought about that she said the word “fire,” you know, and its relationship to the fire. Jo Reed: It’s a wonderful title, because it works both ways. Julia Wolfe: Yes and she had this incredible drive to make things right. Jo Reed: And, you know, in the second movement, “Factory,” you use words from Yiddish and Italian folk songs. Julia Wolfe: Yeah, actually literally used the folk songs. So, well, first I set the scene with the factory and that was really fun, and I was hoping the orchestra would be game, and they were. They’re doing these crazy sounds, so the strings, for example, are playing what I refer to as a Geiger counter sound. They’re muting the pitch with their left hand on the neck of the violin, say, or the cello, and then they’re taking the bow with their right hand and putting intense pressure on the strings as they bow and press down and that produces this kind of clicking sound. So it gets kind of like, “ck-ck-ck...” like that-- Jo Reed: Like a sewing machine. Julia Wolfe: Like a sewing machine, exactly. So I did this little search with various instruments, “What sounds the most like a sewing machine?” And when you get that going through all those strings it’s just an unbelievably <laughs> fantastic sound. Maybe the other sound that comes close also is their percussionists are rolling on the rims of the drum, so when you roll on the rim, which is metal, you get this really, like, “tka-tka-tka...” So you get this real, like, kind of, you know, clackety sound again. So all these sounds start to add up. The brass is blowing air through their instruments so they’re not, again, also not making pitch, at least at the beginning. So you hear this kind of, “thwooo, thwooo.” <music up> Julia Wolfe: And who knows what that is. It’s some factory thing. Who knows, it just gave me a regular pulse of that going. And so in the midst of all this cacophony of factory sounds, the choirs come in. First the very mournful, Yiddish tune, “Mit A Nodl, On A Nodl,” which means “With a Needle, Without a Needle,” and it’s about sewing with pride and it kind of floats above the cacophony, and then this very feisty Southern Italian folk song, which I believe is Pugliese, it’s really from, like, a dialect, and they come in, “Dada-da, yai-dada-da...” They come singing this kind of close harmony, and they’re bouncing up and down, <laughs> and so the two are happening simultaneously, the slow, mournful tune, the feisty Italian folk tune, and then all this factory thing going on. <music up> Julia Wolfe: It was really fun to do that, <laughs> and that’s factory, yeah, just getting the two cultures of women represented. Jo Reed: As you did with Anthracite Fields, you use names as text. Julia Wolfe: Right. So the last movement, in “Fire,” which of course, was the hardest to figure out how to do because I really wanted to be respectful of the women that were lost. You know, I didn’t want to be too gory. I didn’t want to overdramatize it, and so how do you even deal with a tragedy like that? It’s so horrific, and in a certain sense, I went just to music. I mean, the moment that really is the roar of the fire, is pretty much just music. There is some singing but just, like, the choir’s floating above them singing, “I see them falling,” and they’re just kind of floating, but it’s mostly an orchestral moment because it’s, I guess in certain sense I just-- I felt it was beyond words. But at the very end, the very, very end of that movement, which is the end of the piece, I thought, “I’ve got to have the names of the women,” in the piece. And at first I thought, “Well, maybe like I did with Anthracite Fields. I’ll extract certain names just to represent the people that were lost,” and I thought, “Well, should I do the younger people or should I do the people with this many syllables <laughs> in their name?” I couldn’t figure out how to kind of pull out names and leave out others, and I kept coming back to names that I recognized. So, for example, there was one person on the list, Fannie Lansner, and I had found out that she was a great-aunt of someone I know and I thought, “Well, I can’t leave Fannie Lansner out. That’s Gabby’s aunt,” and, you know, so, of course, they’re all someone’s aunt or sister or mother. And so in the end I thought, “I’m just gonna figure out a way to include all 146 of these names. But to set 146, if I set them all one at a time, it would be a very long piece <laughs>. And so I wound up doing these layers and you do lose some of the perception of what the name is once they start singing in counter point, but they’re all there. By the end, they’re also there visually. So Jack has them coming in little by little, like a name will appear and just disappear and another will appear and disappear. Then by the end he has the complete list on the screen. Jo Reed: And what a group of artists performed Fire in my mouth. First, the orchestra was the New York Philharmonic. Julia Wolfe: They are really amazing and I hadn’t worked with the New York Philharmonic before. I hadn’t worked with the conductor Jaap van Zweden and it was a fantastic experience. Jo Reed: And then you had 146 singers. You had The Crossing which is a chorus of 30 women and then 110 singers form the Young People’s Chorus of New York City. Those are a lot of voices. Julia Wolfe: Well, I started off actually thinking, “This is a piece for chorus and orchestra. I’ll need 36 women.” I wanted the number 36 and then I was in conversation actually with someone I work with, the person who’s the head of my organization, Bang on a Can, and that’s Kenny Savelson, and Kenny was like, “Ah, wouldn’t it be great if you had 146 singers too--” and I thought, “That is crazy, and amazing. We have to try to do that.” <laughs> Jo Reed: And explain why you wanted young people as part of your chorus. Julia Wolfe: First of all, I thought it’d be great to have young people because the women were young. I mean, they were on average in their early- to mid-twenties, but the youngest was 14, at least, that died in the fire, and so plenty of teenagers. That’s 16, 18, so they’re kind of spanning between 14 up to maybe mid-thirties. Jo Reed: I want you to-- we’re running out of time and there’s so much more I want to talk to you about. This is very, very frustrating. Describe that opening night. Julia Wolfe: Oh, wow. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything like that. I went in knowing it was going to fly. I mean, the sense that everyone was great. I didn’t have any doubt about the orchestra. I didn’t have any doubt about the conductor, and I had no doubt about the choirs, and, of course, live performance there’s always that, “What’s going to happen?” So I went in with this incredible feeling of support for the piece, but nonetheless, it’s a packed house, and <laughs> everyone’s there with me listening and I think I was stunned. I felt so grateful really that I got to have this experience and put this on stage and have the support. You know, just really felt beyond what I had imagined. Jo Reed: Well, Julia, we have to go, but it was such a pleasure to talk to you. Julia Wolfe: Yeah, thank you so much. Jo Reed: Thank you so much for giving me your time. Julia Wolfe: Oh, yeah. Thank you for asking. <music up> Jo Reed: That was composer Julia Wolfe. We were talking about her compositions inspired by events in labor history. Steel Hammer, Anthracite Fields, and Fire in my mouth. My thanks to Bang on a Can for making the music to Steel Hammer and Anthracite Fields available and thanks to the New York Philharmonic for allowing the use of Fire in my mouth. You’ve been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Subscribe to Art Works wherever you get your podcast and leave us a rating on Apple—it helps people to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening. <music up> <end> ########