Julia Wolfe: Fire in My Mouth

A vivid choral rendering of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in which 146 garment workers died in a New York sweatshop accident.  Eschewing linear narrative, composer Julia Wolfe depicts this pivot point in American labor history primarily through the accumulation of fragmentary and repeated vocal lines. Where her Minimalist forbears used this kind of repetition for conceptual explorations in perception, consciousness, and spirituality, Wolfe instead uses it to build kinetic energy and dramatic tension.  The techniques bring the listener to the scene of the crime, nowhere more searingly than in the third movement, “Protest.”