'Oxygen' and Julia Wolfe

In 2020, the National Flute Association commissioned a new piece by acclaimed composer, Pulitzer Prize-winner, and MacArthur Fellow Julia Wolfe. Oxygen is scored for 12 flutes (6 doubling piccolo, 1 doubling alto, and 1 doubling bass) and will receive 12 premiere performances around the world, culminating in a mass performance at the 2022 NFA convention in Chicago.

​

The Seattle premiere is being organized by Cassie Lear, and we are thrilled to be featuring this performance at our Flute Celebration Day 2022. The original premiere coordinator was Paul Taub; fittingly, the other half of Flute Celebration Day 2022 will be a tribute concert to Paul, exploring many of the works he commissioned and championed.

Julia Wolfe’s music is distinguished by an intense physicality and a relentless power that pushes performers to extremes and demands attention from the audience. She draws inspiration from folk, classical, and rock genres, bringing a modern sensibility to each while simultaneously tearing down the walls between them.

​

The 2019 world premiere of Fire in my mouth, a large-scale work for orchestra and women’s chorus, by the New York Philharmonic with The Crossing and the Young People’s Chorus of New York City, received extensive acclaim — one reviewer called the work “a monumental achievement in high musical drama, among the most commandingly imaginative and emotively potent works of any kind that I’ve ever experienced.” (The Nation Magazine) The work is the third in a series of compositions about the American worker: 2009’s Steel Hammer examines the folk-hero John Henry, and the 2015 Pulitzer prize-winning work, Anthracite Fields, a concert-length oratorio for chorus and instruments, draws on oral histories, interviews, speeches, and more to honor the people who persevered and endured in the Pennsylvania Anthracite coal region.

​

In addition to receiving the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Music, Wolfe was a 2016 MacArthur Fellow. She received the 2015 Herb Alpert Award in Music, and was named Musical America’s 2019 Composer of the Year. Julia Wolfe is co-founder/co-artistic director of New York’s legendary music collective Bang on a Can, and she is Artistic Director of NYU Steinhardt Music Composition.

​

Her music is published by Red Poppy Music and G. Ricordi & Co., New York (ASCAP) and is is distributed worldwide by the Universal Music Publishing Group.