“We live in between anxiety and rationality”
“We live in between anxiety and rationality”
a conversation with composer Julia Wolfe
by Matthew Brown, 2026 summer associate @ The Crossing
The Crossing spent July of 2026 rehearsing and recording How to Survive, a multimedia project conceived, written, and designed by Suzanne Bocanegra with new music by Julia Wolfe, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Shara Nova, and Ayanna Woods. Each of the four movements prescribes memorable steps to survive a different natural disaster: hurricane, earthquake, tornado, and wildfire. Julia Wolfe, born and raised in Philadelphia, came home in June to workshop “Hurricane” ahead of its Month of Moderns premiere. As we prepare for the installation’s opening, I caught up with Julia to learn more about her history with The Crossing, her compositional process, and the joy of rehearsal.
Speaking to how you maintain adventurousness in your work, you once said, “I never think ‘that's what orchestras do.’ I think, ‘what could an orchestra do?’” So with The Crossing, I suppose a good place to start is, “What can a choir do?”
Well, The Crossing can do everything. They've set out from the get-go to be adventurous. They're so focused on commissioning new work. And of course, orchestras commission also, but they have a different mission. Their mission is old and new, and different orchestras have a different balance of that. The Crossing speaks my language.
My background is coming from American folk music, and I'm a child of rock and roll. And just seeing how those things merge with notated music…It's on paper and I'm thinking texturally and thinking architecturally. So maybe it's a little different than writing a song. There's a little bit more of a freedom and a kind of exploration that we get to do.
I think that's what I like most about choral music is that it has that architecture you speak of, but there is also, because of the text, the emotional immediacy that you get in folk and that you get in rock and roll. Perhaps that makes it a particularly interesting genre to you?
Definitely, and it's interesting because when I first got out of school, a lot of us weren’t really writing choral pieces. There were some, but if someone said, “you want to write for chorus?” it might seem a little dusty to you. And it's turned itself on its head. Especially with groups like The Crossing, among other great choirs. They're so game and it's not just in this set way of doing things. There are these very adventurous choirs, and The Crossing is leading the pack in terms of welcoming in new structures and new sounds and new harmonies. So it's kind of emerged as one of the main vehicles for composers now. People are really into it. I can speak for myself, I just love writing for choir.
This wasn't your first collaboration with The Crossing and not even your first climate-related collaboration. The tenors and basses joined the New York Philharmonic in 2023 for unEarth. I'm curious how your reading and research for that project shaped your understanding of the climate crisis?
I've always been very aware of the crisis, and it is a crisis. Not only because I'm deeply interested and deeply concerned, but also because I have a lot of friends who do work connected to the climate. Finally, I thought, “OK, maybe it's time to actually address it!” There are hints of it in other pieces, but with unEarth it was really a deep dive.
And thinking about our relationship to nature, how we as humans relate to nature…The history of that is really fascinating—whether we conquer it, or we revere it, or we protect it, or we realize it's bigger than we are. There are so many ways that over the years we, even as Americans, have related to this idea of nature—as if it’s some other thing outside of us. So that was really interesting to start to think about, particularly in unEarth.
I began with the basic flood story. Of course, flooding today is very indicative of climate change and being difficult to control nature in different ways. And then I was trying to think about how this can be an international conversation. And so the second movement is just the names of trees in languages from all over the world. And I was so fascinated with the forest—that segment was called “Forest”—how it's an incredible community of trees, the root systems, the communication, trees helping other trees. It's remarkable. There's been so much writing about that. And so I thought having the names of trees from every continent would show the universality of this issue.
And in that movement too, there's a beautiful poem. Emily Dickinson was way ahead of her time. It begins, “Who robbed the Woods—The trusting Woods. The unsuspecting Trees.” And she's getting at this idea of development and taking things away.
And then we end with maybe the most direct protest music I've written. There were a lot of words that I just used from the language of climate change. I was writing down some of the positive ones like restoration, reforestation, conservation, regeneration, simplification—there are a lot of “-ations.” And then the darker ones, animal migration, a forced migration of animals going to cooler climates.
You speak of how this issue is something that’s changed a lot: how we look at it, how it's been written about—legislated about throughout the years. And with unEarth, you really get that whole journey from the danger of the unknown to the danger of thinking that we know or thinking that we are now the masters of the woods—that we can take from it. That's a really beautiful perspective to get in an evening.
It was a fun arc to build, and tricky. A lot of these oratories I've written are on historical subjects, very specific crises. And this is so big. First of all, it's now. It'd be great if it was historical—there's history to it—but it's current. So suddenly facing something that's current and problematic was challenging but interesting.
Aside from The Crossing, there was also a kids choir. And that was the Young People’s Chorus of New York City—boys and girls. I thought they had to be in the piece. We have to look them in the face. It's their time now. They're coming into the world as young people, and they're super aware of this. Some of the text even came from them. We posed questions to the kids…The whole piece opens with one of their lines, which is “Like a monster devouring the earth / Tell everyone / They may not listen.” That’s what one of the kids wrote down. I was like, “OK, we're starting there. That's just incredible.”
Someone else said “Hope requires action,” and I love that. The piece ends there, so the kids bookend it.
unEarth is 45 minutes long. Fire in My Mouth is a little longer than that. Hurricane is a lean seven-and-a-half minutes. What does that change in canvas mean for your process?
Sometimes it's really nice just to have this nugget of an idea, and of course the bigger idea is really incredible. That's Suzanne Bocanegra’s conception of How to Survive. And this isn't the first time she's entered into that conversation. She has some early work where she was trying to determine how much food you needed and what kinds of foods you needed to survive a year. And she has an artwork that has these large jars filled with flour and grains. And they’re very beautiful to look at. So she's been developing ideas about survival for quite some time.
In this piece, she's coming at it more from developing these texts and these instructions. I remember when I first talked to Suzanne—we’re long-time friends—she said the idea is that if you hear it sung, maybe you'll remember what to do in these crises. Like how we actually remember the order of the alphabet because of the song, right? The song is your guide. I don't think Suzanne meant it on that very fundamental level, but in some way, how can the song bring us into a survival mode?
At the same time, there's a lot of word painting. When they sing, “If you find yourself in a hurricane, in a hurricane,” it’s almost like the wind. I worked with these swells of sound that would be stirring in a hurricane.
When they sing, "If you stay calm, you can think clearly," that’s some of the calmest music I've ever written. It’s just this very still harmony that's a bit mysterious, but you suddenly are suspended in time so that you slow down.
When you received that final text from Suzanne, what were your first steps?
I had to read it a bunch and kind of live with it…The first thing I do is try to sing it. Sometimes you see a sentence and it just sort of naturally sings itself. And even that word “hurricane” just immediately conjures up this rush of energy and sound. So there's a lot in there to play with.
And I had a sense of delight in using the voices in different ways. There are some very slow-mo glissandos where they're really bending pitches out of tune to get to the next pitch.
And then there's some fun counterpoint that's playful, certainly at “When the hur-ri-cane stops…”. It's kind of playful, but also is it really over? It's almost a little hesitant. At the end of a storm, there's always a certain kind of quiet.
So all these things you don't think about immediately, but as you're starting to take texts apart and think about how you want to sing it, new meanings start to emerge.
When you do that initial reading and you just start to sing it and see what happens, you can discover these little tools that you can then make designs out of. You have all of the ingredients spread out before you…
And they build little by little. When you're in the midst of developing one idea another idea comes into your mind. It's kind of mysterious how music happens really, but text is great because text gives you so much to work off of.
One thing I did a little different in this is it's almost a cappella. But I did put a drum in. I just felt like I needed a pulse. It’s almost like a heartbeat. And it goes at different speeds at different times. Amazingly, somebody in the Crossing is a percussionist…
Dan Schwartz…
Yes! who had a beautiful hand drum and a great sensibility about what that part meant. It's very, very simple. It's really an underpinning heartbeat. And it comes in and out. That was fun to play with the different speeds of the heartbeat for this. And also, you think your heart's probably beating pretty, pretty heavily if it's a hurricane…
Something I admire across your work is the balance between slow changes and quick changes. You can get the most out of an idea through repetition, layering, and subtle variation, and you can also change everything on a dime. In “Hurricane,” a lot of those changes are these two characters. You label the more informative lines “CONCERNED” in the score, and then the more reactive lines “ALARMED.” Can you tell me more about those two characters, the narrators we have?
I still think of them all as the same person, and who is that person? It's me, I guess. There's so many different ways of relating to a crisis. It can be anxiety, “This thing is coming and we have no control over it.” Or it can be, “OK, let’s just discuss this. You're gonna get the flashlights out.” Like this kind of rational—Because the text in a certain sense is very step-by-step rational…In some ways it's a play on an instruction booklet, and in other ways it's very human and emotional. And I think that juxtaposition is interesting to play with, because we live in between those things. We live in between anxiety and rationality
I’ve set some poetry, like there's some poetry in unEarth. But for the most part, the texts that I use are speeches or newspaper articles or aural histories or kind of everyday language. I'm really drawn to that. I don't think I've ever used anything that’s more like a manual like this piece. But it's in this same ilk of what I often work with. So it wasn't like, “Oh, where's the flowering language? I need that.” No, I don't even want the flowery language. It's just very direct human instruction, and that was pretty natural for me.
Your pieces often include experimental sounds that we don’t necessarily have established notation for. I’m thinking of the tree creaking string crunches in unEarth or the strings mimicking sewing machines in Fire in my mouth. In both cases, the score includes detailed text instructions to bridge the gap between notation and sound. We have a moment like this in “Hurricane” for the text “do not try to drive through flowing water.” The score gives each section of the choir two pitches with the instruction “free slow gliss. between the two notes to create a blur.” You workshopped this with the choir in June. Take me inside that collaboration of finding a sound that can’t really be modeled by one person or cited in an existing work.
It’s a fun way of playing with the word “water.” If you have one group going down while the other’s going up, you get this accordion going. If it's slow, it gets very trippy and textural or dreamy or whatever. And so at first we did it a little freer with The Crossing, and they weren't going an exact opposite direction. They were just all glissing as they went, which is also a very beautiful sound. But I noticed that when we tried it with them very consciously coordinated in one goes up when one goes down, you really got more of an accordion sound. So I thought, “OK, for that moment, let's actually make it specific.” And that's what's so great about being in the room, you know, “Let's try this, let's try that…”
And even the first time we read the piece through for the reading [in December, 2025], I realized in certain places I just needed a little more space. It was moving on too quickly. I made the tempo a little slower. I said, "Let’s make sure everyone hears these words. And let's give certain gestures time and space and maybe a rest before you start again.”
Rests are a really important part of music. You think nothing's happening, but often when I'm in a rehearsal, I’ll say it's a pregnant rest. It's not just turn the page and start again. It's a suspension. It's a silence that's full of energy. And so I play with rests in a lot of my pieces, especially when a whole orchestra's playing, and then all of a sudden the sound is cut off. But they are not cut off. They are still present. And then they start again. It's fun and very powerful to work with sound that way, very on-off.
So I could workshop every day if they let me. The Crossing is so good that you say something and then there it is. They immediately realize what you're imagining.