Julia Wolfe: 'Anthracite Fields is a poetic reflection on the lives of miners'

The American composer Julia Wolfe (1958) has a thing for the social history of her homeland. Steel Hammer reflects on the unequal struggle of man versus machine, as described in the folk ballad John Henry. Anthracite Fields zooms in on the tough lives of miners in Pennsylvania. She won a Pulitzer Prize with it in 2015. The full-length oratorio will have its Dutch premiere at the Haarlem Choral Biennale on two July. Daniel Reuss conducts Bang on a Can All Stars, Cappella Amsterdam and Utrecht Student Cantorij in Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ.

Even before I have asked her a single question, Wolfe bursts into an enthusiastic speech. Above all, I must remember that Jeff Sugg's visuals are phenomenal. 'He did the same research as me and we found stunning photographs of miners. Especially Lewis Hine's of the so-called breaker boys are impressive. These were children sitting in a kind of barge to cleanse the anthracite of iniquities. - With their bare hands. Actually, Jeff thought the images were too direct, but they were too powerful not to use. Together with maps, advertisements and other things, they formed a deepening layer to my piece.'

Tiny museum

When conductor Alan Harler asked her to write a piece for his Mendelssohn Club, Wolfe immediately decided to do something with her own background. 'The choir is based in Philadelphia and this was my first ever commission from the state of Pennsylvania, where I grew up. That was where the heart of the US mining industry was in the early 20th century, concentrated around Scranton. My grandmother had grown up there. I decided to devote a full-length play to it à la Steel Hammer, again together with Bang on a Can.'

'As a child, I lived two hours' drive from the mining area, in a village in the middle of the forests. Yet I knew next to nothing about it, so I decided to investigate. I talked to former miners, read newspaper articles and reports and visited the Pennsylvania Anthracite Heritage Museum. - A tiny building in the middle of nowhere, accessible only by winding country roads. Three curators told about what mining life was like, showed photographs, geographical diagrams, maps and cross-sections of earth layers. Extremely fascinating. Jeff also found a lot of useful material there.'

Earthen mine shaft

A visit to a coal mine was, of course, not to be missed. 'That is not something for people with claustrophobia,' laughs Wolfe. 'Together with former miners, you descend in a kind of railway carriage, along the track they used themselves at the time. Once down, they take you through various tunnels and passages. For them it was a tough and harsh reality, but as a visitor it is beautiful. The walls gleam, there are small medical aid stations and you can see how deep they penetrated the earth's layers. When they suddenly switch off the lights, you don't know what hit you. It's pitch-black, you literally can't see your hand in front of your face.'

Wandering through the underground spaces, musical ideas came naturally. 'When you are exploring and collecting, you are super aware. Some sounds entered the piece in response to what I saw, others are directly related to those spaces. You hear the roar of drills and the rattle of carts, of gases escaping or an alarm going off. There were many dangerous situations, then the workers had to flee the mine as quickly as possible.'

Auditory memorial

This did not always work out and, over time, there were many casualties. 'I stumbled across the Pennsylvania index of mining accidents. Pages and pages full of names of men who might not have died, but were at least injured.' Wolfe decided to record them in a kind of aural memorial. 'But there were so many! I started with monosyllabic names like John and Frank, but still there were too many. Eventually I limited myself to Johns with a monosyllabic surname. John Ash, John Ayres, John Chain, if you sing that alternately, a strong rhythm naturally develops.'

The names are echoed in the first movement, 'Foundation', against a backdrop of deafening (electronic) roaring and banging. Wolfe: 'It was quite emotional to sound out those names; after all, each of them represents someone's grandfather, father, brother or uncle. This is reflected in the huge response to Anthracite Fields. In every city in America where we played it, people came up to me afterwards. In Los Angeles - by no means a mining area - a woman said: my grandfather is on your list, John Coyne. I got goose bumps, that is indeed a rare spelling.'

Spinning bicycle wheel

In the second part, 'Breaker Boys', Wolfe erects a monument to the boys who were already doing just as hard labour as the adults. 'To work more precisely, they were not allowed to wear gloves, so they often had bleeding fingers. Still, I imagined they had fun sometimes too, they are still boys after all. This volume is full of energy, with rattling wooden percussion, a spinning bicycle wheel, folk tunes and a jolly-dark rhyme about Micky Pick-Slate.'

Although Wolfe emphatically states that she does not want to make a political statement, in the subsequent 'Speech' she quotes a well-known trade unionist. 'I saw videos on YouTube of John L. Lewis ranting against the abuses in the mines. He was an inspired speaker of the type we sorely miss today. - "If we must grind up flesh and bones in this industrial machine we call America...". Incredible, it's almost poetry. When I heard that, I knew: this must be in the play.

Sea of colour

As a counterbalance, Wolfe also smuggled in a female element. 'It all got so heavy and guy heavy. But I also spoke to Barbara Powell, whose father and grandfather were miners. She grew up in a company-built patch town: a collection of tiny workers' cottages. The people led such limited, shabby lives, but despite this, Barbara was the sunniest person I have ever met. She proudly and lovingly shared her memories, including her garden. Spontaneously, she started listing all the flower names. You can picture it: those shabby, gloomy houses, suddenly bathed in a sea of colour in spring. - The play needed that, because although life was hard, it wasn't all doom and gloom.