Julia Wolfe's Anthracite Fields at Disney Hall

 

 

I’ve been thinking about Julia Wolfe’s Anthracite Fields all week. I arrived at the Master Chorale concert last Sunday expecting to be moved. I was even half-expecting to be shaken up. But I left with mixed feelings.

 

The second (The Breaker Boys) and fourth (Flowers) sections were phenomenally compelling. Breaker Boys grabbed your attention and made you listen. It was rude, angry and a musical and dramatic triumph. I suspect that when Wolfe discovered the songs and poems by and about the children who worked in the coal mines, she was so outraged that pathos wasn’t possible—she responded with an outburst of the bitterest irony, and raucous punk exasperation. The Master Chorale--especially the women--rose to the challenge and were astonishing.

 

Flowers was a lyric interlude—and more than a welcome rest. It implied more than it said/sang. It was also the one moment when Jeff Sugg’s video accompaniment actually added to the music—as the the dim black and white botanical illustrations suddenly burst into color. I suspect that hearing stories of happier memories—memories of the beautiful gardens the mining families cultivated—pushed Wolfe and Sugg into genuine invention.

 

For most of the piece, Wolfe and Sugg presented moods and  images without clarification and context, presumably triggering reactions along the lines of “Child labor = Bad” and “Dirty dangerous manual labor = Bad but Noble” and “Hard lives = Dignity” …. It is trading in slogans, which is the opposite of art. Except for the two exceptional movements, the chorus was not especially well used (except for some eerie whistling) and the instrumental music functioned as sound effects.

 

This was also a problem with Bill Morrison’s The Miners’ Hymns (2010)—another movie-plus-live music eulogy for a vanished coal mining culture. (Two big music and movie eulogies for lost worlds of mining in the last five years? What's up with that? Nostalgia? Activism?)

 

Morrison’s archival footage of the work and life of the mining towns in north England in the first three-quarters of the 20^th century avoided context-setting more rigorously than Wolfe’s songs. And linked with the somber music of Jóhann Jóhannsson, it became less an investigation of the miners’s lives, than a meditation on the inexorable passage of time. Wolfe and Sugg were more focused on individuals. At least that seemed to be the ambition. Unfortunately the overall effect was of a view from the outside rather than the inside.