Anthracite Fields: Music of the Coal Miner
Mar 6, 2016 - 7:30 PM
Americans at Work: Julia Wolfe's Innovative Oratorio
by Thomas MayThe thing I love about music is, it's beyond words. But somehow the words crept back in "big time," remarked Julia Wolfe in an interview on NPR's Studio360 following the announcement that she had won last year's Pulitzer Prize in Music for Anthracite Fields. Wolfe's moving and innovative new oratorio fuses music with words to tell a story deeply rooted in American history - and one inextricably connected to how we live today.
By way of a prelude to Anthracite Fields, our program opens with musical selections that set the stage by pointing to the heritage and tradition of the coal miners who are the protagonists of Wolfe's composition. Artistic Director Grant Gershon has curated a sequence of nine pieces exploring themes of homecoming and the journey toward redemption, toward a Promised Land. "These songs represent the heritage of the miners in a very immediate and soulful way," explains Gershon. "Julia Wolfe's music combines austerity with an incredible flamboyance and energy. I think this set of American music in plainspoken arrangements - as opposed to ones that seem somewhat "prettified" - reflects the ethos of Anthracite Fields more closely."
A pair of traditional spirituals (Keep Your Lamps and Wade in the Water) frames the concert's first part to remind us of the African-American contribution to mining - a contribution often overlooked, Gershon points out, in comparison with the crucial role played by European immigrants.
Six of the songs come from The Sacred Harp - the hugely influential anthology, first issued in Georgia in 1844 and subsequently revised and expanded many times, that helped pass America's shape-note tradition down across generations who would gather for community "sings." Gershon explains that "the simplicity and rawness - of Anthracite Fields - led me to look again at some of the hymns that resonated most with me in this context. I started gravitating toward the ones that talk the most eloquently about our journey to a better place. They talk about death in a very real way but a very joyous way."
The Sacred Harp began as an effort to codify an oral tradition that had sprung into being during the Second Great Awakening of the early decades of the 19th century. The celebrated ethnomusicologist pioneer Alan Lomax made influential field recordings of The Sacred Harp phenomenon in action. For him, this robust, joyfully austere form of music-making represented "a choral style ready-made for a nation of individualists."
Anthracite Fields
Growing up in a small town in Pennsylvania (Montgomeryville), Julia Wolfe recalls that coal country lay relatively nearby, geographically speaking, by following the highway northward, toward Scranton. Yet it was a world vastly different from the one she knew and "seemed like the Wild West." By then the heyday of the anthracite mining operations, once employing nearly 175,000 laborers at its peak, had long since passed, though this chapter has left indelible social and cultural marks on the region.
The boom in mining operations of the anthracite fields - the purer, high-carbon-content form of coal (aka "black diamonds") resulting from Appalachian geology and discovered in the 18th century - coincided with the massive waves of immigration that profoundly shaped America. It also went hand-in-hand with some of the most oppressive labor abuses associated with the Industrial Revolution that transformed the upstart, breakaway young Republic into a powerful nation ready to enter the global stage.
All of these aspects are pertinent to Wolfe's project. Indeed, Anthracite Fields could be said to represent another kind of homecoming: to the composer's long-abiding interest in social history and labor issues. That was her focus during Wolfe's college years at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, when, she adds, "I was writing songs occasionally but never thought I would become a composer. So this is a return to that early interest and to my interest in art as telling history - with an art documentary attention to the facts, as a poetic history."
Wolfe of course did end up becoming a composer, in the American maverick tradition of a pathbreaker for whom setting new precedents is naturally part of the job description. Wolfe began to make her name through an intriguing stylistic mixture of post-Minimalist idioms with various pop-culture influences, including funk and the exuberantly unbridled energy of rock. She also became known for her gift for crafting arresting soundscapes and aural images. These traits imbue her score for Anthracite Fields.
Together with fellow Yale Music School alums David Lang and Michael Gordon (who became her husband), in 1987 she founded Bang on a Can, a juggernaut for contemporary music, which in turn spawned the amplified sextet Bang on a Can All-Stars (in their debut collaboration with the Master Chorale tonight). Wolfe's Pulitzer in 2015 marked the second time that distinction had been nabbed by the Bang on a Can triumvirate: in 2008 David Lang won for the little match girl passion (recorded by LAMC in January for release this summer, and most recently performed by Gershon and the Master Chorale in April, 2014).
Anthracite Fields also continues a line of development in Wolfe's work that involves large-scale thematic pieces with a narrative dimension (whether using words explicitly or not). While much of her earlier composition was focused on investigating novel sonorities through instruments alone, in 2004 she wrote a piece for string orchestra alluding to the old English ballad Cruel Sister, which incorporated an implicit narrative by following "the dramatic arc of the ballad," as Wolfe explains. "I was fascinated and horrified by the overwhelming greed and jealousy of the tale."
A few years later she collaborated with filmmaker Bill Morrison to create Fuel (2007), a multi-media performance piece reflecting on "the mystery and economy of how things run" and on "the controversy and necessity of fuel," for which she drew inspiration from the "sounds of transport and harbors - large ships, creaking docks, whistling sounds, and a relentless energy" emanating from New York and Hamburg.
Along the way Wolfe had also taken part in creating collaborative performance projects with her Bang on a Can colleagues Lang and Gordon: works built around such themes as the polyphony of memory (Lost Objects) or our dependence on water (Thirst and Water). An important turning point came with Steel Hammer (2009), which reconfigures the legend and lore of the folk hero John Henry into what critic Daniel Stephen Johnson termed "a passion play for a sort of ordinary Christ figure."
"Steel Hammer is connected to my interest in American folk music," says the composer, who, as she did for Anthracite Fields, wrote her own libretto - in the former case culling from more than 200 versions of the famous ballad about John Henry and his formidable steel hammer (and taking into account contradictory versions) to explore "the subject of human versus machine in this quintessential American legend." That experience rekindled her interest in narrative and in labor history, paving the way for Anthracite Fields. "It feels like a very natural progression," says Wolfe, adding that it may at the same time represent a new direction.
Also written for the Bang on a Can All-Stars, along with the early music vocal group Trio Mediæval, Steel Hammer's score manifests the influence of folk music likewise heard in the English balladtinted Cruel Sisters. In the former, the folk element derives from the sounds of Appalachia, which Wolfe notes "have long been a part of my musical consciousness."
Last December the director Anne Bogart brought her theatrical staging of Steel Hammer to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, combining texts by four playwrights with what the New York Times described as Wolfe's "galvanizing score - alternately clamorous, haunting, exhilarating and sometimes all three simultaneously." Asked whether she foresees a similar theatrical adaptation of Anthracite Fields, Wolfe responds: "Sometimes less is more. I'd be wary of over-staging what I feel right now is a nice balance as a concert piece for the audience of visual images and the instrumentalists and singers onstage."
The version Wolfe has arrived at integrates her score with the work of projection design artist Jeff Sugg, who gathered photographs and video documentation of the miners to create a slowly moving sequence of images that respond to the music. Together with his lighting, these projections function as a dynamic set without distracting from the visual component of the performers themselves. "For me it's important that the performance energy of the instrumentalists and singers is also visible for the audience to observe," says Wolfe.
Both she and Sugg discovered a wealth of inspiration from numerous field trips. In addition to her wide background reading, Wolfe's research included making descents into the coal mines and visiting patch towns (the small villages, usually owned by the mining companies that grew up around the towns and comprising simple frame houses). She absorbed a host of colorful details from enthusiastic guides, interviewed miners and their descendants, and visited museums like the Anthracite Heritage Museum in Scranton, which commemorates all facets of the coal miners' work and home life. Wolfe completed Anthracite Fields in 2014 on a commission from the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, which gave the world premiere on April 26, 2014 with the Bang on a Can All-Stars. (Alan Harler, The Mendelssohn Club's director until last year, was himself the son of a coal miner in the Midwest.) Last year a recording of the work with the Choir of Trinity Wall Street as the chorus was released on the Cantaloupe label; it was also nominated for this year's Best Contemporary Classical Composition Grammy Award.
Wolfe points out that she wanted to ensure the words could be heard distinctly " - not just the shape of the line - and thus had in mind the clear sensibility she admired from the Trio Mediæval when they collaborated on Steel Hammer. "The quality of this kind of singing takes it out of the opera world, which is one reason I decided to call Anthracite Fields an oratorio." The forces involved are bigger than in her 'art ballad' Steel Hammer: a mixed chorus of flexible size (from 150 heard at the Mendelssohn Club's premiere to the 32 we hear in this performance, and possibly even chamber size, she notes) plus the amplified All-Stars sextet (clarinets, electric guitar, percussion, piano/keyboard, cello and double bass); two of the players also contribute lead voice for the solos on "Breaker Boys" and "Speech" (cellist Ashley Bathgate and guitarist Mark Stewart, respectively).
"It's a vast subject to cover, but powerful themes emerged and called out to be in the piece," the composer remarks. Anthracite Fields is structured as five movements, each homing in on a different aspect of the workers' experience. Although Wolfe's method turns away from straightforward linear narrative, the opening movement ("Foundation") evokes an unforgettable sonic image of setting off into new terrain - or, rather, a descent into a terrifyingly unfamiliar space. She uses the open lowest string on the double bass, the bottom of the bass clarinet ("a rich, reedy tone, which I made kind of like a foghorn sound"), percussion, and delayed reverb on the electric guitar, played with a kitchen whisk to enhance the overtones. Wolfe recalls visiting the point during guided tours of the mines when the lights would be turned off. "I wanted to evoke that echoey experience of being deep underground, of that complete darkness."
Following this Requiem-like solemnity comes a remarkable shift in tone for "Breaker Boys." The Stygian darkness of the opening gives way to music of raucous energy and drive, with a text adapted from local children's street rhymes ("Mickey Pick- Slate"). Breaker Boys were assigned to remove debris from the coal as it came rushing down breaker shoots (without gloves); in the middle Wolfe uses material taken from a documentary interview with a surviving former breaker boy. A guiding sonic image was the sound of kids rolling sticks against a fence. Wolfe also incorporates the image of boyish energy through newly constructed instruments made of bicycle wheels. The adolescent defiance conjured by the rock idiom is likewise part of the picture, resulting overall in a kind of scherzo counterpart to the darkness of the opening.
Despite their punishing working conditions - as cruel as the conditions under which Wagner's Alberich forces the enslaved Nibelung miners to endure through the power of the Ring he has forged - these boys find a way of escape through their mischievous fun.
"Speech" addresses the protracted, overtly political struggle for improved working conditions so essential to this story. Wolfe uses excerpts from a speech by United Mine Workers of America's president John L. Lewis to craft a movement for narrating solo tenor and male chorus, alluding to bluegrass idiom in the accompaniment.
When she started working on Anthracite Fields, Wolfe says, she grew concerned that depicting such grim working conditions would make for an unrelentingly dark piece. But as with "Breaker Boys," "Flowers" sheds light on the coping mechanisms of those eking out a life in the heyday of the coal mining operations. She was inspired by an interview with a daughter and granddaughter of miners who spoke of the sense of community that emerged in the patch towns. Their gardens served as a much-loved source of beauty — Elysian Fields in comparison to the Anthracite Fields of daily labor. Using a folk-like, flowing melody, Wolfe sets a Whitman-like catalogue of flower names.
The final movement ("Appliance") connects these images of a vanished era - the main "action" being conceivably set at the turn of the century, into the early decades of the 20th century - to our own time. Wolfe wrote out another catalogue here, listing the countless daily ways in which Americans use electricity, a significant portion of which continues to be fueled by coal ("Bake a cake." "Drill a hole." "Toast a slice.").
A direct connection with the era of the miners enters near the end with a reference to a character created in 1900 for an advertisement created by Earnest Elmo Calkins. (See Composer's Notes on opposite page.)
At the premiere of Anthracite Fields, Wolfe had a chance to witness first-hand the effect of her desire to pay tribute to the workers who helped build the nation. "It meant so much to me to see some of the people I interviewed come to the performance. I continue to get letters from people who had family involved in the mining industry in the past. This way of connecting as a musician to a community is really moving."
| Title | Composers/Arranger | Guest Artists |
|---|---|---|
| All Is Well | Sacred Harp Anthology | |
| Babel's Streams | Sacred Harp Anthology | |
| Journey Home | Sacred Harp Anthology | |
| Wayfarin' Stranger | arr. Craig Zamer | Kristen Toedtman, Mezzo SopranoScott Graff, Baritone |
| The Promised Land | Sacred Harp Anthology | |
| We'll Soon Be There | Sacred Harp Anthology | |
| Wondrous Love | Sacred Harp Anthology | |
| Wade in the Water | Moses Hogan | Zanaida Robles, Soprano |
| Anthracite Fields | Julia Wolfe | |
| I. Foundation | Julia Wolfe | |
| II. Breaker Boys | Julia Wolfe | |
| III. Speech | Julia Wolfe | |
| IV. Flowers | Julia Wolfe | |
| V. Appliances | Julia Wolfe | |
| Keep Your Lamps | André Thomas |
Archival Recording
| Date | Review | Media | Reviewer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 7, 2016 |
However surprisingly, the old-fashioned oratorio has survived into the 21st century as an American musical medium just as apt for confronting our moral and social issues as it was for Handel in his time.
Since 2000 alone, we've had John Adams' "El Niño" and "The Gospel Accor...
Read More
However surprisingly, the old-fashioned oratorio has survived into the 21st century as an American musical medium just as apt for confronting our moral and social issues as it was for Handel in his time.
Since 2000 alone, we've had John Adams' "El Niño" and "The Gospel According to the Other Mary," along with Osvaldo Golijov's "La Pasión Según San Marcos." These offer not only the multitudinous context to the significance and necessity of immigration, but they also offer the receptive listener something of the scope of the experience.
Now comes Julia Wolfe's "Anthracite Fields," given its West Coast premiere by the Los Angeles Master Chorale on Sunday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall. If you haven't yet heard the news, this is a riveting, up-to-date oratorio concerning early 20th century mine workers that gives powerful expression to the consequences of labor and the American labor movement.
Premiered by a 150-member chorus, the Mendelssohn Club, in Philadelphia in 2014, "Anthracite Fields" was then a highlight of the New York Philharmonic's Biennial. It won a Pulitzer Prize. (Disclosure: I was on the jury.) A recording released last year was a nominee for a Grammy (it was expected to win but didn't — that's the Grammys for you).
A founding member of the Bang on a Can composer collective, Wolfe wrote the instrumental parts for the rocking Bang on a Can All-Stars sextet. She also made a version for smaller chorus, which was used in the New York premiere and on the recording. That was Master Chorale music director Grant Gershon's choice for the Disney premiere because it offers greater clarity to the text.
That text is a startling starting point for startling music about the lives of coal miners in the Appalachian Mountains in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Wolfe begins with a chanted litany of names taken from a massive index of mining accidents, brilliantly signifying the magnitude of calamity by selecting some 350 names beginning with John and having a single-syllable last name.
Wolfe's inspiration is that dirge transforms, with a post-Minimalist beat, into near-ecstatic celebration. The mine workers are not victims but uncelebrated heroes. Breaker boys, exploited children who pick filter debris from coal shoots with bare hands, are celebrated as well. Folk songs and children's songs are modernized. Still innocent, able to hope, kids turn hardship into exalted, captivating play.
A speech to the House Labor subcommittee by labor leader John L. Lewis, sung as a rock ballad by Bang on a Can electric guitarist Mark Stewart (cellist Ashley Bathgate was able vocalist for "Breaker Boys"), restored the high-minded eloquence we now hunger for in Congress. You and I, Lewis reminded us and Stewart sang with moving pathos, benefit from industrial machines "that grind up human flesh and bones" so we might life in comfort.
We who benefit from their services, Lewis proclaimed, "owe protection to those men ... and security to their families if they die." But the families must find beauty on their own, and the Appalachians supply that with flowers, named in number in lyrical, folk-inspired section for chorus.
The ending is a rhythmically bounding inventory of benefits to modern living through coal: Bake a cake, heat your house, test your blood, watch a movie, ride a subway, boil some water, call your girlfriend on the phone. We can't live any other way, as Wolfe's music happily outlines and restates, growing increasingly complex, activities overlapping with repetition. The Johns gave their well-being and their lives for us, and now we are overwhelmed by it all, and conveniences multiply.
The Master Chorale sang with magnificence and gripping feeling. Gershon found a rich range of expression that the performance I heard in New York and the one recorded by Julian Wachner and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street only implied. Historical video projections of miners and artful uses of the texts by Jeff Sugg on a curtain behind the singers were sensitively handled.
Gershon further set the scene by beginning the program with a series of a cappella spirituals and songs from the "The Sacred Harp" of American shape-note 19th century folk music. The spirituals were of special significance because the miner experience is typically told from the point of view of European immigrants, forgetting that African Americans also worked the mines. Happily no one who heard the restrained rapture that Master Chorale soprano Zanaida Robles brought to "Wade in the Water" will forget it.
Finally, the All Stars cooked like only the All Stars can cook, and their sound crew made them sound great at all times. However, amplifying voices in Disney is a job for experts in this acoustically volatile hall. Wolfe's music stirringly gives every John his day, but this time sonic muck mushed the Johns' names together.
I wonder whether the full, unamplified Master Chorale might not have made a greater impression. It would be worth a try, given that the single performance of so meaningful a work is not sufficient. And maybe that would be an excuse for a second recording, given how much meaning Gershon has to bring to what the "Anthracite Fields" means to modern American music and modern America.
Read Less
|
Los Angeles Times | Mark Swed |
| Mar 8, 2016 |
LOS ANGELES - The working class has gained a new champion in the concert hall with the rise of composer Julia Wolfe, who won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for music for her hour-long oratorio Anthracite Fields, based on the history and lives of the Northeast Pennsylvania coal miners.
Based on her...
Read More
LOS ANGELES - The working class has gained a new champion in the concert hall with the rise of composer Julia Wolfe, who won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for music for her hour-long oratorio Anthracite Fields, based on the history and lives of the Northeast Pennsylvania coal miners.
Based on her past work, and the themes of upcoming commissions, it seems that concertgoers and music organizations as prestigious as the New York Philharmonic are ready to hear some of the rich history of working people who built this great country. The NY Philharmonic has asked Wolfe to compose an evening-length commission for orchestra and women's chorus about the women of New York's garment industry that will premiere in the fall of 2018. The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911 will assuredly assume a central role in that story.
Another work that Wolfe is known for is her lengthy piece Steel Hammer, based on the legendary piledriver John Henry.
After its 2014 premiere by the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, on a commission organized by its then musical director Alan Harler, son of a coal miner who suffered from black lung disease, Anthracite Fields moved on to a performance in Nw York City with the Choir of Trinity Wall Street; that production has been released on the Cantaloupe label and was nominated for this year's Best Contemporary Classical Composition Grammy Award.
On Sunday night, March 6, Anthracite Fields received its West Coast premiere at the Walt Disney Concert Hall by 32 singers of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, conducted by Grant Gershon and accompanied by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, a small group of musicians with wide-ranging talents for exploring extended techniques for their instruments - cello, bass, keyboards, percussion, guitar, and clarinets. A couple of them vocalize also. The ensemble, along with the composers they like to perform, have gathered a large following both for their live concerts at home and abroad, and for their recordings. It was gratifying to see many young music lovers at Disney Hall for this truly radical evening.
Wolfe grew up in the town of Montgomeryville, Pa., not far from Scranton. She now teaches composition at New York University.
"I went down into the coal mines," Julia Wolfe says, describing her research and process, "visited patch towns [small communities adjacent to the company mines] and the local museums where the life of the miners has been carefully depicted and commemorated. I interviewed retired miners and children of miners who grew up in the patch. The text is culled from oral histories and interviews, local rhymes, a coal advertisement, geological descriptions, a mining accident index, contemporary daily everyday activities that make use of coal power, and an impassioned political speech by John L. Lewis, the head of the United Mine Workers Union."
That speech, excerpted from remarks before a United States House of Representatives labor subcommittee, is well known to generations of miners, and achieves its musical apotheosis here: "If we must grind up human flesh and bones in the industrial machine that we call modern America, then before God I assert that those who consume the coal and you and I who benefit from that service because we live in comfort, we owe protection to those men and we owe the security to their families if they die. I say it, I voice it, I proclaim it, and I care not who in heaven or hell opposes it. That is what I believe, and the miners believe that."
That speech forms one of five sections of the oratorio, and is performed by the male voices alone (with the band), as a kind of Credo intoned by a beloved community of Gregorian monks. At the end of that section, in the film projection that runs throughout, coal cars are seen running off their tracks into the water - equipment, like human lives, discarded when they're no longer needed.
One could almost say, especially with Jeff Sugg's poetic film accompaniment to the whole composition, that Anthracite Fields is itself a type of musical documentary. We learn, for instance, that anthracite is the most clean-burning type of coal, and is relatively rare in America; most of the coal in the U.S. is the much dirtier bituminous.
The four other sections start off with "Foundation," mostly a recitation of names Wolfe found in that mining accident index, that reveal the varied national origins of the immigrants who came to the greater Scranton area to rebuild their lives - and sometimes to lose them. These names - all those lives - form part of that geological continuum that is highlighted in this movement:
"The briny seas rose and fell, wide shallow seas.
Thick steamy swamps covered the earth.
The leaves and branches buried deep.
Thick roots and trunks buried deep.
Buried deep inside the earth.
Layer upon layer upon layer buried deep.
Heat. Pressure. Time."
In the second movement Wolfe focuses on the "breaker boys," youngsters ages 8 to 18, who picked through the raw coal looking for debris, forced to use their bare hands. The irrepressible energy of children comes through in their street rhymes and bitter games, the rock music signaling a new generation, the tongue-twisting lyrics suggesting the boundless capacities of youth gruesomely thwarted by the abuse of child labor.
Following the John L. Lewis speech comes a section of "Flowers," a graceful ode for the women's voices to the little gardens families tended in their patch towns, reminders of beauty, growth and creativity that folks craved in such grim times. Dozens of different flowers are named, but the text comes back again and again to forget-me-not. Forget me not, indeed. The whole oratorio is an act of recovery, remembrance and gratitude.
In the final section, "Appliances," Wolfe speaks directly to the audience, as if to say, "This history is not over. You live with it every day." "Bake a cake. Drill a hole. Go to the gym. Heat your house. Blend a drink. Blast your guitar..." and much more. All powered by coal - until the day comes (not stated but implied) when we decide to leave fossil fuels in the ground and use renewable energy instead. The final projection is a group of the breaker boys that gradually fades, fades off the screen. Forget me not.
Part of the genius of Anthracite Fields is its completely unrhetorical nature. It's not a lecture, not a sermon. It's a collective portrait of the coal experience as much as the miners themselves, bringing the women, the children, and ourselves as listeners and consumers into this epic story.
A well deserved Pulitzer for this beautifully told tale - and well deserved bows were taken by all at the end. The singers of the Los Angeles Master Chorale are represented by the American Guild of Musical Artists (AGMA), AFL-CIO.
The first half of the concert included hymns and spirituals, many derived from the Sacred Harp Anthology of 1844 that for generations defined the American choral tradition, especially in the South and Appalachia, establishing a historical foundation for Wolfe's big throw in the second half. So many of those hymns looked blissfully ahead to eternal life in the next world, given the way this life could be, as the Wayfarin' Stranger says, "rough and steep."
Read Less
|
People's World | Eric A. Gordon |
| Mar 8, 2016 |
The years just get bigger and bigger for New York's Bang on a Can collective. Never wanting for recognition, both the composers who founded the group and the magnificent All-Stars, the musicians who make up the group's performance ensemble have been grabbing larger headlines in recent months...
Read More
The years just get bigger and bigger for New York's Bang on a Can collective. Never wanting for recognition, both the composers who founded the group and the magnificent All-Stars, the musicians who make up the group's performance ensemble have been grabbing larger headlines in recent months even by their prior standards. David Lang popped up behind Chris Rock on this year's Oscar telecast following his nomination for Best Song from Paolo Sorrentino's film, Youth. (Though he was denied the common courtesy of having his work performed during the telecast.) Meanwhile his fellow colleague Julia Wolfe has been on a tear of her own recently winning last year's Pulitzer Prize for music. It was a big and well deserved win for a "downtown" artist (in the parlance of Kyle Gann) and a rare acknowledgment by the judges of compositions by women (she is only the 6th woman to win in the Pulitzer's history). The prize winning work, Anthracite Fields, received its West Coast premiere Sunday night with the assistance of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, their Artistic Director, Grant Gershon, and the Bang on a Can All-Stars. It was a stunner and probably the best single performance the Walt Disney Concert Hall has hosted this season. And after a weekend full of Gustavo Dudamel's bloated, ponderous Mahler with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Wolfe and her collaborators provided a much needed aesthetic antidote on just about every level.
Anthracite Fields is an hour long oratorio about coal mining in Eastern Pennsylvania, a region very near where Wolfe herself grew up. It functions on some levels as an oral history of laborers working in these mines and can swing between elegy and a call for social and economic justice. But before diving into Wolfe's grand choral work on Sunday, the Chorale presented a number of American folk songs from the Sacred Harp collection. More often associated with a raw sound or edge when performed in a more typical community setting, these folk songs were beautifully performed with a restraint lent by the polish of a professional ensemble. It was a smart introduction for what followed, though, in that while Anthracite Fields concerns the lives of coal miners, Wolfe did not tied the piece musically to elements of traditional folk music of the Appalachian region. Instead Wolfe uses a more contemporary language and sound inspired more by late 20th-century minimalism and rock'n'roll. Anthracite Fields unfolds over five movements starting with Foundations, which opens with low rumbling invoking a journey into the depth of the earth. This is soon replaced by the repeated names of injured coal miners, all starting with John followed by monosyllabic surnames, which provides a back drop to imagery of the formation of coal in the earth and what the miners endured to pull it out of the ground. The focus of the work pulls back over subsequent movements, including passages that set the words of labor leader John Lewis, and later builds on a couplet from early 20th-century advertisements for coal-powered trains. The piece concludes with a masterful movement called Appliances. Here the names of injured miners have been replaced with daily living functions we all participate in from turning on lights to calling a friend. All of these activities consume the power these miners have suffered for through their labor. And the final image above this sonic backdrop is of the imagined New York socialite Phoebe Snow traveling by train in the ads of a locomotive company from over a century ago. She arrives with her white dress pristine and unblemished thanks to traveling under the power of coal. This deft and insightful imagery packs a punch and it highlights Wolfe's ability to deliver a huge amount of material with relatively minimal words.
In just over an hour, the Master Chorale and Bang on a Can All-Stars had taken us out of the ground but we were no longer able to clean the metaphorical coal dust from our own hands. The performance was accompanied with video projections designed by Jeff Sugg consisting mainly of photographs and animation of coal miners and their work environment from the early to mid- 20th century. It worked well without overwhelming the content of the musical performance. The Chorale masterfully wound around the many turns in the score from the soft moaning and whispers that laid the ground work of each movement to the raucous and rhythmic passages when the power of motion of the energy produced in this particularly American history of labor was in full operation.
It was a great night for the Chorale overall and it continued their great work with the Bang on a Can artists. Next up in the collaboration will be the release next year of the Chorale's first recording for Cantaloupe Music featuring David Lang's the national anthems and his own Pulitzer winning the little match girl passion.
Read Less
|
Out West Arts | Brian Holt |
Americans at Work: Julia Wolfe's Innovative Oratorio
by Thomas May The thing I love about music is, it's beyond words. But somehow the words crept back in "big time," remarked Julia Wolfe in an interview on NPR's Studio360 following the announcement that she had won last year's Pulitzer Prize in Music for Anthracite Fields. Wolfe's moving and innovative new oratorio fuses music with words to tell a story deeply rooted in American history - and one inextricably connected to how we live today. By way of a prelude to Anthracite Fields, our program opens with musical selections that set the stage by pointing to the heritage and tradition of the coal miners who are the protagonists of Wolfe's composition. Artistic Director Grant Gershon has curated a sequence of nine pieces exploring themes of homecoming and the journey toward redemption, toward a Promised Land. "These songs represent the heritage of the miners in a very immediate and soulful way," explains Gershon. "Julia Wolfe's music combines austerity with an incredible flamboyance and energy. I think this set of American music in plainspoken arrangements - as opposed to ones that seem somewhat "prettified" - reflects the ethos of Anthracite Fields more closely." A pair of traditional spirituals (Keep Your Lamps and Wade in the Water) frames the concert's first part to remind us of the African-American contribution to mining - a contribution often overlooked, Gershon points out, in comparison with the crucial role played by European immigrants. Six of the songs come from The Sacred Harp - the hugely influential anthology, first issued in Georgia in 1844 and subsequently revised and expanded many times, that helped pass America's shape-note tradition down across generations who would gather for community "sings." Gershon explains that "the simplicity and rawness - of Anthracite Fields - led me to look again at some of the hymns that resonated most with me in this context. I started gravitating toward the ones that talk the most eloquently about our journey to a better place. They talk about death in a very real way but a very joyous way." The Sacred Harp began as an effort to codify an oral tradition that had sprung into being during the Second Great Awakening of the early decades of the 19th century. The celebrated ethnomusicologist pioneer Alan Lomax made influential field recordings of The Sacred Harp phenomenon in action. For him, this robust, joyfully austere form of music-making represented "a choral style ready-made for a nation of individualists." Anthracite Fields Growing up in a small town in Pennsylvania (Montgomeryville), Julia Wolfe recalls that coal country lay relatively nearby, geographically speaking, by following the highway northward, toward Scranton. Yet it was a world vastly different from the one she knew and "seemed like the Wild West." By then the heyday of the anthracite mining operations, once employing nearly 175,000 laborers at its peak, had long since passed, though this chapter has left indelible social and cultural marks on the region. The boom in mining operations of the anthracite fields - the purer, high-carbon-content form of coal (aka "black diamonds") resulting from Appalachian geology and discovered in the 18th century - coincided with the massive waves of immigration that profoundly shaped America. It also went hand-in-hand with some of the most oppressive labor abuses associated with the Industrial Revolution that transformed the upstart, breakaway young Republic into a powerful nation ready to enter the global stage. All of these aspects are pertinent to Wolfe's project. Indeed, Anthracite Fields could be said to represent another kind of homecoming: to the composer's long-abiding interest in social history and labor issues. That was her focus during Wolfe's college years at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, when, she adds, "I was writing songs occasionally but never thought I would become a composer. So this is a return to that early interest and to my interest in art as telling history - with an art documentary attention to the facts, as a poetic history." Wolfe of course did end up becoming a composer, in the American maverick tradition of a pathbreaker for whom setting new precedents is naturally part of the job description. Wolfe began to make her name through an intriguing stylistic mixture of post-Minimalist idioms with various pop-culture influences, including funk and the exuberantly unbridled energy of rock. She also became known for her gift for crafting arresting soundscapes and aural images. These traits imbue her score for Anthracite Fields. Together with fellow Yale Music School alums David Lang and Michael Gordon (who became her husband), in 1987 she founded Bang on a Can, a juggernaut for contemporary music, which in turn spawned the amplified sextet Bang on a Can All-Stars (in their debut collaboration with the Master Chorale tonight). Wolfe's Pulitzer in 2015 marked the second time that distinction had been nabbed by the Bang on a Can triumvirate: in 2008 David Lang won for the little match girl passion (recorded by LAMC in January for release this summer, and most recently performed by Gershon and the Master Chorale in April, 2014). Anthracite Fields also continues a line of development in Wolfe's work that involves large-scale thematic pieces with a narrative dimension (whether using words explicitly or not). While much of her earlier composition was focused on investigating novel sonorities through instruments alone, in 2004 she wrote a piece for string orchestra alluding to the old English ballad Cruel Sister, which incorporated an implicit narrative by following "the dramatic arc of the ballad," as Wolfe explains. "I was fascinated and horrified by the overwhelming greed and jealousy of the tale." A few years later she collaborated with filmmaker Bill Morrison to create Fuel (2007), a multi-media performance piece reflecting on "the mystery and economy of how things run" and on "the controversy and necessity of fuel," for which she drew inspiration from the "sounds of transport and harbors - large ships, creaking docks, whistling sounds, and a relentless energy" emanating from New York and Hamburg. Along the way Wolfe had also taken part in creating collaborative performance projects with her Bang on a Can colleagues Lang and Gordon: works built around such themes as the polyphony of memory (Lost Objects) or our dependence on water (Thirst and Water). An important turning point came with Steel Hammer (2009), which reconfigures the legend and lore of the folk hero John Henry into what critic Daniel Stephen Johnson termed "a passion play for a sort of ordinary Christ figure." "Steel Hammer is connected to my interest in American folk music," says the composer, who, as she did for Anthracite Fields, wrote her own libretto - in the former case culling from more than 200 versions of the famous ballad about John Henry and his formidable steel hammer (and taking into account contradictory versions) to explore "the subject of human versus machine in this quintessential American legend." That experience rekindled her interest in narrative and in labor history, paving the way for Anthracite Fields. "It feels like a very natural progression," says Wolfe, adding that it may at the same time represent a new direction. Also written for the Bang on a Can All-Stars, along with the early music vocal group Trio Mediæval, Steel Hammer's score manifests the influence of folk music likewise heard in the English balladtinted Cruel Sisters. In the former, the folk element derives from the sounds of Appalachia, which Wolfe notes "have long been a part of my musical consciousness." Last December the director Anne Bogart brought her theatrical staging of Steel Hammer to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, combining texts by four playwrights with what the New York Times described as Wolfe's "galvanizing score - alternately clamorous, haunting, exhilarating and sometimes all three simultaneously." Asked whether she foresees a similar theatrical adaptation of Anthracite Fields, Wolfe responds: "Sometimes less is more. I'd be wary of over-staging what I feel right now is a nice balance as a concert piece for the audience of visual images and the instrumentalists and singers onstage." The version Wolfe has arrived at integrates her score with the work of projection design artist Jeff Sugg, who gathered photographs and video documentation of the miners to create a slowly moving sequence of images that respond to the music. Together with his lighting, these projections function as a dynamic set without distracting from the visual component of the performers themselves. "For me it's important that the performance energy of the instrumentalists and singers is also visible for the audience to observe," says Wolfe. Both she and Sugg discovered a wealth of inspiration from numerous field trips. In addition to her wide background reading, Wolfe's research included making descents into the coal mines and visiting patch towns (the small villages, usually owned by the mining companies that grew up around the towns and comprising simple frame houses). She absorbed a host of colorful details from enthusiastic guides, interviewed miners and their descendants, and visited museums like the Anthracite Heritage Museum in Scranton, which commemorates all facets of the coal miners' work and home life. Wolfe completed Anthracite Fields in 2014 on a commission from the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, which gave the world premiere on April 26, 2014 with the Bang on a Can All-Stars. (Alan Harler, The Mendelssohn Club's director until last year, was himself the son of a coal miner in the Midwest.) Last year a recording of the work with the Choir of Trinity Wall Street as the chorus was released on the Cantaloupe label; it was also nominated for this year's Best Contemporary Classical Composition Grammy Award. Wolfe points out that she wanted to ensure the words could be heard distinctly " - not just the shape of the line - and thus had in mind the clear sensibility she admired from the Trio Mediæval when they collaborated on Steel Hammer. "The quality of this kind of singing takes it out of the opera world, which is one reason I decided to call Anthracite Fields an oratorio." The forces involved are bigger than in her 'art ballad' Steel Hammer: a mixed chorus of flexible size (from 150 heard at the Mendelssohn Club's premiere to the 32 we hear in this performance, and possibly even chamber size, she notes) plus the amplified All-Stars sextet (clarinets, electric guitar, percussion, piano/keyboard, cello and double bass); two of the players also contribute lead voice for the solos on "Breaker Boys" and "Speech" (cellist Ashley Bathgate and guitarist Mark Stewart, respectively). "It's a vast subject to cover, but powerful themes emerged and called out to be in the piece," the composer remarks. Anthracite Fields is structured as five movements, each homing in on a different aspect of the workers' experience. Although Wolfe's method turns away from straightforward linear narrative, the opening movement ("Foundation") evokes an unforgettable sonic image of setting off into new terrain - or, rather, a descent into a terrifyingly unfamiliar space. She uses the open lowest string on the double bass, the bottom of the bass clarinet ("a rich, reedy tone, which I made kind of like a foghorn sound"), percussion, and delayed reverb on the electric guitar, played with a kitchen whisk to enhance the overtones. Wolfe recalls visiting the point during guided tours of the mines when the lights would be turned off. "I wanted to evoke that echoey experience of being deep underground, of that complete darkness." Following this Requiem-like solemnity comes a remarkable shift in tone for "Breaker Boys." The Stygian darkness of the opening gives way to music of raucous energy and drive, with a text adapted from local children's street rhymes ("Mickey Pick- Slate"). Breaker Boys were assigned to remove debris from the coal as it came rushing down breaker shoots (without gloves); in the middle Wolfe uses material taken from a documentary interview with a surviving former breaker boy. A guiding sonic image was the sound of kids rolling sticks against a fence. Wolfe also incorporates the image of boyish energy through newly constructed instruments made of bicycle wheels. The adolescent defiance conjured by the rock idiom is likewise part of the picture, resulting overall in a kind of scherzo counterpart to the darkness of the opening. Despite their punishing working conditions - as cruel as the conditions under which Wagner's Alberich forces the enslaved Nibelung miners to endure through the power of the Ring he has forged - these boys find a way of escape through their mischievous fun. "Speech" addresses the protracted, overtly political struggle for improved working conditions so essential to this story. Wolfe uses excerpts from a speech by United Mine Workers of America's president John L. Lewis to craft a movement for narrating solo tenor and male chorus, alluding to bluegrass idiom in the accompaniment. When she started working on Anthracite Fields, Wolfe says, she grew concerned that depicting such grim working conditions would make for an unrelentingly dark piece. But as with "Breaker Boys," "Flowers" sheds light on the coping mechanisms of those eking out a life in the heyday of the coal mining operations. She was inspired by an interview with a daughter and granddaughter of miners who spoke of the sense of community that emerged in the patch towns. Their gardens served as a much-loved source of beauty — Elysian Fields in comparison to the Anthracite Fields of daily labor. Using a folk-like, flowing melody, Wolfe sets a Whitman-like catalogue of flower names. The final movement ("Appliance") connects these images of a vanished era - the main "action" being conceivably set at the turn of the century, into the early decades of the 20th century - to our own time. Wolfe wrote out another catalogue here, listing the countless daily ways in which Americans use electricity, a significant portion of which continues to be fueled by coal ("Bake a cake." "Drill a hole." "Toast a slice."). A direct connection with the era of the miners enters near the end with a reference to a character created in 1900 for an advertisement created by Earnest Elmo Calkins. (See Composer's Notes on opposite page.) At the premiere of Anthracite Fields, Wolfe had a chance to witness first-hand the effect of her desire to pay tribute to the workers who helped build the nation. "It meant so much to me to see some of the people I interviewed come to the performance. I continue to get letters from people who had family involved in the mining industry in the past. This way of connecting as a musician to a community is really moving."| Title | Composers/Arranger | Guest Artists |
|---|---|---|
| All Is Well | Sacred Harp Anthology | |
| Babel's Streams | Sacred Harp Anthology | |
| Journey Home | Sacred Harp Anthology | |
| Wayfarin' Stranger | arr. Craig Zamer | Kristen Toedtman, Mezzo SopranoScott Graff, Baritone |
| The Promised Land | Sacred Harp Anthology | |
| We'll Soon Be There | Sacred Harp Anthology | |
| Wondrous Love | Sacred Harp Anthology | |
| Wade in the Water | Moses Hogan | Zanaida Robles, Soprano |
| Anthracite Fields | Julia Wolfe | |
| I. Foundation | Julia Wolfe | |
| II. Breaker Boys | Julia Wolfe | |
| III. Speech | Julia Wolfe | |
| IV. Flowers | Julia Wolfe | |
| V. Appliances | Julia Wolfe | |
| Keep Your Lamps | André Thomas |
Archival Recording
| Date | Review | Media | Reviewer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 7, 2016 |
However surprisingly, the old-fashioned oratorio has survived into the 21st century as an American musical medium just as apt for confronting our moral and social issues as it was for Handel in his time.
Since 2000 alone, we've had John Adams' "El Niño" and "The Gospel Accor...
Read More
However surprisingly, the old-fashioned oratorio has survived into the 21st century as an American musical medium just as apt for confronting our moral and social issues as it was for Handel in his time.
Since 2000 alone, we've had John Adams' "El Niño" and "The Gospel According to the Other Mary," along with Osvaldo Golijov's "La Pasión Según San Marcos." These offer not only the multitudinous context to the significance and necessity of immigration, but they also offer the receptive listener something of the scope of the experience.
Now comes Julia Wolfe's "Anthracite Fields," given its West Coast premiere by the Los Angeles Master Chorale on Sunday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall. If you haven't yet heard the news, this is a riveting, up-to-date oratorio concerning early 20th century mine workers that gives powerful expression to the consequences of labor and the American labor movement.
Premiered by a 150-member chorus, the Mendelssohn Club, in Philadelphia in 2014, "Anthracite Fields" was then a highlight of the New York Philharmonic's Biennial. It won a Pulitzer Prize. (Disclosure: I was on the jury.) A recording released last year was a nominee for a Grammy (it was expected to win but didn't — that's the Grammys for you).
A founding member of the Bang on a Can composer collective, Wolfe wrote the instrumental parts for the rocking Bang on a Can All-Stars sextet. She also made a version for smaller chorus, which was used in the New York premiere and on the recording. That was Master Chorale music director Grant Gershon's choice for the Disney premiere because it offers greater clarity to the text.
That text is a startling starting point for startling music about the lives of coal miners in the Appalachian Mountains in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Wolfe begins with a chanted litany of names taken from a massive index of mining accidents, brilliantly signifying the magnitude of calamity by selecting some 350 names beginning with John and having a single-syllable last name.
Wolfe's inspiration is that dirge transforms, with a post-Minimalist beat, into near-ecstatic celebration. The mine workers are not victims but uncelebrated heroes. Breaker boys, exploited children who pick filter debris from coal shoots with bare hands, are celebrated as well. Folk songs and children's songs are modernized. Still innocent, able to hope, kids turn hardship into exalted, captivating play.
A speech to the House Labor subcommittee by labor leader John L. Lewis, sung as a rock ballad by Bang on a Can electric guitarist Mark Stewart (cellist Ashley Bathgate was able vocalist for "Breaker Boys"), restored the high-minded eloquence we now hunger for in Congress. You and I, Lewis reminded us and Stewart sang with moving pathos, benefit from industrial machines "that grind up human flesh and bones" so we might life in comfort.
We who benefit from their services, Lewis proclaimed, "owe protection to those men ... and security to their families if they die." But the families must find beauty on their own, and the Appalachians supply that with flowers, named in number in lyrical, folk-inspired section for chorus.
The ending is a rhythmically bounding inventory of benefits to modern living through coal: Bake a cake, heat your house, test your blood, watch a movie, ride a subway, boil some water, call your girlfriend on the phone. We can't live any other way, as Wolfe's music happily outlines and restates, growing increasingly complex, activities overlapping with repetition. The Johns gave their well-being and their lives for us, and now we are overwhelmed by it all, and conveniences multiply.
The Master Chorale sang with magnificence and gripping feeling. Gershon found a rich range of expression that the performance I heard in New York and the one recorded by Julian Wachner and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street only implied. Historical video projections of miners and artful uses of the texts by Jeff Sugg on a curtain behind the singers were sensitively handled.
Gershon further set the scene by beginning the program with a series of a cappella spirituals and songs from the "The Sacred Harp" of American shape-note 19th century folk music. The spirituals were of special significance because the miner experience is typically told from the point of view of European immigrants, forgetting that African Americans also worked the mines. Happily no one who heard the restrained rapture that Master Chorale soprano Zanaida Robles brought to "Wade in the Water" will forget it.
Finally, the All Stars cooked like only the All Stars can cook, and their sound crew made them sound great at all times. However, amplifying voices in Disney is a job for experts in this acoustically volatile hall. Wolfe's music stirringly gives every John his day, but this time sonic muck mushed the Johns' names together.
I wonder whether the full, unamplified Master Chorale might not have made a greater impression. It would be worth a try, given that the single performance of so meaningful a work is not sufficient. And maybe that would be an excuse for a second recording, given how much meaning Gershon has to bring to what the "Anthracite Fields" means to modern American music and modern America.
Read Less
|
Los Angeles Times | Mark Swed |
| Mar 8, 2016 |
LOS ANGELES - The working class has gained a new champion in the concert hall with the rise of composer Julia Wolfe, who won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for music for her hour-long oratorio Anthracite Fields, based on the history and lives of the Northeast Pennsylvania coal miners.
Based on her...
Read More
LOS ANGELES - The working class has gained a new champion in the concert hall with the rise of composer Julia Wolfe, who won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for music for her hour-long oratorio Anthracite Fields, based on the history and lives of the Northeast Pennsylvania coal miners.
Based on her past work, and the themes of upcoming commissions, it seems that concertgoers and music organizations as prestigious as the New York Philharmonic are ready to hear some of the rich history of working people who built this great country. The NY Philharmonic has asked Wolfe to compose an evening-length commission for orchestra and women's chorus about the women of New York's garment industry that will premiere in the fall of 2018. The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911 will assuredly assume a central role in that story.
Another work that Wolfe is known for is her lengthy piece Steel Hammer, based on the legendary piledriver John Henry.
After its 2014 premiere by the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, on a commission organized by its then musical director Alan Harler, son of a coal miner who suffered from black lung disease, Anthracite Fields moved on to a performance in Nw York City with the Choir of Trinity Wall Street; that production has been released on the Cantaloupe label and was nominated for this year's Best Contemporary Classical Composition Grammy Award.
On Sunday night, March 6, Anthracite Fields received its West Coast premiere at the Walt Disney Concert Hall by 32 singers of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, conducted by Grant Gershon and accompanied by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, a small group of musicians with wide-ranging talents for exploring extended techniques for their instruments - cello, bass, keyboards, percussion, guitar, and clarinets. A couple of them vocalize also. The ensemble, along with the composers they like to perform, have gathered a large following both for their live concerts at home and abroad, and for their recordings. It was gratifying to see many young music lovers at Disney Hall for this truly radical evening.
Wolfe grew up in the town of Montgomeryville, Pa., not far from Scranton. She now teaches composition at New York University.
"I went down into the coal mines," Julia Wolfe says, describing her research and process, "visited patch towns [small communities adjacent to the company mines] and the local museums where the life of the miners has been carefully depicted and commemorated. I interviewed retired miners and children of miners who grew up in the patch. The text is culled from oral histories and interviews, local rhymes, a coal advertisement, geological descriptions, a mining accident index, contemporary daily everyday activities that make use of coal power, and an impassioned political speech by John L. Lewis, the head of the United Mine Workers Union."
That speech, excerpted from remarks before a United States House of Representatives labor subcommittee, is well known to generations of miners, and achieves its musical apotheosis here: "If we must grind up human flesh and bones in the industrial machine that we call modern America, then before God I assert that those who consume the coal and you and I who benefit from that service because we live in comfort, we owe protection to those men and we owe the security to their families if they die. I say it, I voice it, I proclaim it, and I care not who in heaven or hell opposes it. That is what I believe, and the miners believe that."
That speech forms one of five sections of the oratorio, and is performed by the male voices alone (with the band), as a kind of Credo intoned by a beloved community of Gregorian monks. At the end of that section, in the film projection that runs throughout, coal cars are seen running off their tracks into the water - equipment, like human lives, discarded when they're no longer needed.
One could almost say, especially with Jeff Sugg's poetic film accompaniment to the whole composition, that Anthracite Fields is itself a type of musical documentary. We learn, for instance, that anthracite is the most clean-burning type of coal, and is relatively rare in America; most of the coal in the U.S. is the much dirtier bituminous.
The four other sections start off with "Foundation," mostly a recitation of names Wolfe found in that mining accident index, that reveal the varied national origins of the immigrants who came to the greater Scranton area to rebuild their lives - and sometimes to lose them. These names - all those lives - form part of that geological continuum that is highlighted in this movement:
"The briny seas rose and fell, wide shallow seas.
Thick steamy swamps covered the earth.
The leaves and branches buried deep.
Thick roots and trunks buried deep.
Buried deep inside the earth.
Layer upon layer upon layer buried deep.
Heat. Pressure. Time."
In the second movement Wolfe focuses on the "breaker boys," youngsters ages 8 to 18, who picked through the raw coal looking for debris, forced to use their bare hands. The irrepressible energy of children comes through in their street rhymes and bitter games, the rock music signaling a new generation, the tongue-twisting lyrics suggesting the boundless capacities of youth gruesomely thwarted by the abuse of child labor.
Following the John L. Lewis speech comes a section of "Flowers," a graceful ode for the women's voices to the little gardens families tended in their patch towns, reminders of beauty, growth and creativity that folks craved in such grim times. Dozens of different flowers are named, but the text comes back again and again to forget-me-not. Forget me not, indeed. The whole oratorio is an act of recovery, remembrance and gratitude.
In the final section, "Appliances," Wolfe speaks directly to the audience, as if to say, "This history is not over. You live with it every day." "Bake a cake. Drill a hole. Go to the gym. Heat your house. Blend a drink. Blast your guitar..." and much more. All powered by coal - until the day comes (not stated but implied) when we decide to leave fossil fuels in the ground and use renewable energy instead. The final projection is a group of the breaker boys that gradually fades, fades off the screen. Forget me not.
Part of the genius of Anthracite Fields is its completely unrhetorical nature. It's not a lecture, not a sermon. It's a collective portrait of the coal experience as much as the miners themselves, bringing the women, the children, and ourselves as listeners and consumers into this epic story.
A well deserved Pulitzer for this beautifully told tale - and well deserved bows were taken by all at the end. The singers of the Los Angeles Master Chorale are represented by the American Guild of Musical Artists (AGMA), AFL-CIO.
The first half of the concert included hymns and spirituals, many derived from the Sacred Harp Anthology of 1844 that for generations defined the American choral tradition, especially in the South and Appalachia, establishing a historical foundation for Wolfe's big throw in the second half. So many of those hymns looked blissfully ahead to eternal life in the next world, given the way this life could be, as the Wayfarin' Stranger says, "rough and steep."
Read Less
|
People's World | Eric A. Gordon |
| Mar 8, 2016 |
The years just get bigger and bigger for New York's Bang on a Can collective. Never wanting for recognition, both the composers who founded the group and the magnificent All-Stars, the musicians who make up the group's performance ensemble have been grabbing larger headlines in recent months...
Read More
The years just get bigger and bigger for New York's Bang on a Can collective. Never wanting for recognition, both the composers who founded the group and the magnificent All-Stars, the musicians who make up the group's performance ensemble have been grabbing larger headlines in recent months even by their prior standards. David Lang popped up behind Chris Rock on this year's Oscar telecast following his nomination for Best Song from Paolo Sorrentino's film, Youth. (Though he was denied the common courtesy of having his work performed during the telecast.) Meanwhile his fellow colleague Julia Wolfe has been on a tear of her own recently winning last year's Pulitzer Prize for music. It was a big and well deserved win for a "downtown" artist (in the parlance of Kyle Gann) and a rare acknowledgment by the judges of compositions by women (she is only the 6th woman to win in the Pulitzer's history). The prize winning work, Anthracite Fields, received its West Coast premiere Sunday night with the assistance of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, their Artistic Director, Grant Gershon, and the Bang on a Can All-Stars. It was a stunner and probably the best single performance the Walt Disney Concert Hall has hosted this season. And after a weekend full of Gustavo Dudamel's bloated, ponderous Mahler with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Wolfe and her collaborators provided a much needed aesthetic antidote on just about every level.
Anthracite Fields is an hour long oratorio about coal mining in Eastern Pennsylvania, a region very near where Wolfe herself grew up. It functions on some levels as an oral history of laborers working in these mines and can swing between elegy and a call for social and economic justice. But before diving into Wolfe's grand choral work on Sunday, the Chorale presented a number of American folk songs from the Sacred Harp collection. More often associated with a raw sound or edge when performed in a more typical community setting, these folk songs were beautifully performed with a restraint lent by the polish of a professional ensemble. It was a smart introduction for what followed, though, in that while Anthracite Fields concerns the lives of coal miners, Wolfe did not tied the piece musically to elements of traditional folk music of the Appalachian region. Instead Wolfe uses a more contemporary language and sound inspired more by late 20th-century minimalism and rock'n'roll. Anthracite Fields unfolds over five movements starting with Foundations, which opens with low rumbling invoking a journey into the depth of the earth. This is soon replaced by the repeated names of injured coal miners, all starting with John followed by monosyllabic surnames, which provides a back drop to imagery of the formation of coal in the earth and what the miners endured to pull it out of the ground. The focus of the work pulls back over subsequent movements, including passages that set the words of labor leader John Lewis, and later builds on a couplet from early 20th-century advertisements for coal-powered trains. The piece concludes with a masterful movement called Appliances. Here the names of injured miners have been replaced with daily living functions we all participate in from turning on lights to calling a friend. All of these activities consume the power these miners have suffered for through their labor. And the final image above this sonic backdrop is of the imagined New York socialite Phoebe Snow traveling by train in the ads of a locomotive company from over a century ago. She arrives with her white dress pristine and unblemished thanks to traveling under the power of coal. This deft and insightful imagery packs a punch and it highlights Wolfe's ability to deliver a huge amount of material with relatively minimal words.
In just over an hour, the Master Chorale and Bang on a Can All-Stars had taken us out of the ground but we were no longer able to clean the metaphorical coal dust from our own hands. The performance was accompanied with video projections designed by Jeff Sugg consisting mainly of photographs and animation of coal miners and their work environment from the early to mid- 20th century. It worked well without overwhelming the content of the musical performance. The Chorale masterfully wound around the many turns in the score from the soft moaning and whispers that laid the ground work of each movement to the raucous and rhythmic passages when the power of motion of the energy produced in this particularly American history of labor was in full operation.
It was a great night for the Chorale overall and it continued their great work with the Bang on a Can artists. Next up in the collaboration will be the release next year of the Chorale's first recording for Cantaloupe Music featuring David Lang's the national anthems and his own Pulitzer winning the little match girl passion.
Read Less
|
Out West Arts | Brian Holt |
