Julia Wolfe

Julia Wolfe (born December 18, 1958) 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”. Her work Anthracite Fields, an oratorio for chorus and instruments, was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Music. She has also received the Herb Alpert Award (2015) and was named a MacArthur Fellow (2016). Life 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 sa