Big risks and adventurous friends: How composer Julia Wolfe became a renegade

Big risks and adventurous friends: How composer Julia Wolfe became a renegade Enlarge this image toggle caption Peter Serling/Courtesy of the artist Peter Serling/Courtesy of the artist Sometimes, all you need is a little push. The Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, another important force in Wolfe's life, once remarked that while she looked quiet and polite, her music, compared with that of her colleagues, was "the sharpest and most aggressive." For example, when I first got the opportunity to write for orchestra, I didn't think, "Oh, this is my orchestral music and that is my Bang on a Can All-Stars music." I think of these pieces as "docu-torios" — a marriage of documentary, history and music, in basically an oratorio format. I think in opera — because you know the piece already or it's in a different language — there's sometimes less emphasis placed on hearing what they're saying.