Julia Wolfe descended hundreds of feet underground, into a dank, dark cavern with gleaming black walls: a Pennsylvania coal mine.
“You can’t believe people spent all day there,” Wolfe recalled Tuesday. “It was spooky, a little bit, but so fascinating, a strange kind of beauty.”
Wolfe’s visit helped inspire “Anthracite Fields,” a choral tribute to the state’s mining heritage – and, now, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in music. The judges described her work as a “powerful oratorio for chorus and sextet evoking Pennsylvania coal-mining life around the turn of the 20th Century.”
“I’m a little stunned,” Wolfe, a music professor at New York University, said a day after her win. “I’m enjoying it, having a good time.”
Commissioned by the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, a choral group, “Anthracite Fields” recalls the hard work and sacrifice of generations of anthracite coal miners, whose toil yielded fuel for the industrial revolution and heat for cities and towns up and down the Eastern Seaboard.