Anthracite Fields performed by Bang on a Can All-Stars and Trinity Wall Street @ Carnegie Hall

The music compels without overstatement,” wrote the Los Angeles Times of Julia Wolfe’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Anthracite Fields. “This is a major, profound work.” Inspired by miners living in the Pennsylvania coal region, Wolfe uses oral histories, interviews with miners and their families, speeches, children’s rhymes, and other sources to create a powerful cantata that speaks of the American worker’s experience. With music that is at times elegiac, hard-driving, and tender, Wolfe creates a soundscape that is deeply moving.