About: Interviews

WNYC, Soundcheck
March 11, 2003

Julia Wolfe is a composer who is as influenced by the songs of Led Zeppelin as she is by the symphonies of Beethoven. As one of the most acclaimed young composers in New York, she has managed to expand on the definition of what a string quartet can be. This weekend the members of the innovative electric and acoustic string quartet, Ethel, will be performing string quartets by both Ms. Wolfe and John Zorn. Today, she is in our studios to talk about her newest music.

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Bomb Magazine
Fall 2001
by David Krasnow

To read the entire interview, please download the pdf.

''I heard my first Julia Wolfe work, performed by the Spit Orchestra, in the early nineties. It took me back to teenage concerts where I hung off the thin edge of the stage in front of the speaker stacks, hearing in my stomach as much as my ears. I was equally thrilled listening to a recent piece played by Wolfe's quartet, Ethel; this time the excitement was in trying to decipher how a fantastic maelstrom was put
together so exquisitely, with the demure materials of harmony, rhythm and strings.

Wolfe has all the credentials a young composer could want: a degree from Yale, a Fulbright, and commissions and awards from The Kronos Quartet, Library of Congress, Cary Trust and Meet the Composer, for starters. But she’s best known as one of the three founders of Bang on a Can, a homegrown festival (with concerts sometimes lasting 12 straight hours) that’s become one of new music’s major
events and spawned an ensemble, Bang on a Can, a commissioning fund and a record label, Cantaloupe. The first American concert exclusively of Wolfe's work will
be presented at New York's Miller Theater next year.
From orchestra to a cappella, Wolfe's attention to sound as a material with physical weight owes as much to the New York School of Morton Feldman as to the Minimalists' rigorous patterning (officially, she is postminimalist). Feldman, however, didn't consider the sound of a car skidding as musical material. Julia's studio, where
we talked, was filled with the staccato rhythm of jackhammers and the slow crescendos of crane engines from outside. I listened, and wondered when they'd
show up in one of her compositions.''
(...)

To read the entire interview, please download the pdf.