Julia Wolfe (born December 18, 1958) is an American composer. She was born in Philadelphia, holds degrees from the University of Michigan, Princeton and Yale, and currently works in New York. Wolfe's music is rhythmically vigorous and often clangorously dissonant. As a composer associated with the downtown style of new music she is not averse to drawing on rock and minimalism as primary influences. Her music, however, shows a good deal more rhythmic complexity than is generally found in these genres, hence her music can properly be considered and described as postminimalist.
In 1987, Wolfe co-founded Bang on a Can together with composers David Lang and Michael Gordon, her husband. She was awarded a grant in 2000 from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. In 2010, Wolfe was nominated as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Music.
In 2003, she joined the composition faculty of the Manhattan School of Music. Currently she is Director of Music Composition at New York University in the Steinhardt School.
Read more about Julia Wolfe: Recordings
Famous quotes containing the words julia and/or wolfe:
“... [a] girl one day flared out and told the principal “the only mission opening before a girl in his school was to marry one of those candidates [for the ministry].” He said he didn’t know but it was. And when at last that same girl announced her desire and intention to go to college it was received with about the same incredulity and dismay as if a brass button on one of those candidate’s coats had propounded a new method for squaring the circle or trisecting the arc.”
—Anna Julia Cooper (1859–1964)
“The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art ... is merely romantic fiction.... The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.”
—Tom Wolfe (b. 1931)