Julia Wolfe’s Anthracite Fields

The Boston Premiere of Julia Wolfe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning oratorio Anthracite Fields is a powerful tribute to the coal miners of Pennsylvania and the communities built on their labor. Scored for New York’s electric Bang on a Can All-Stars and chorus, the work weaves together miners’ names, oral histories, speeches, children’s rhymes, and coal advertisements into deeply moving musical portraits of a vanished way of life — and the human cost behind it.

Equal parts documentary, elegy, and celebration, Anthracite Fields is a strikingly original addition to the American musical canon, blending dynamic amplified chamber music with the raw power of the human voice.

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The Creation of Anthracite Fields