In an age of trends and fashions, movements and anti-movements, genres and sub-genres, Julia Wolfe's life and work defy early categorization. On the surface, she seems the quintessential composer for the '90s --New York-based, politically aware --and, don't forget, female --and in fact her career has been appropriately meteoric. In the last few years she has sprung into the consciousness of the musical cognoscenti through a few startlingly individual and unforgettable works for orchestra, string quartet, chorus, and chamber ensemble, and she is now rightfully regarded as one of the key musical voices of her generation. Given all this, one would ordinarily expect something befitting the "latest thing." But when one hears her music, the catch-phrases immediately become inadequate, one-dimensional, and simplistic. The music's simply too damn real to be described by an "ism."

Born in Philadelphia in 1958, her resume is bedecked with dazzling degrees and prizes: doctoral work at Princeton, MM from Yale, a Fullbright Fellowship, and a generous assortment of grants from the Koussevitsky Foundation, Meet the Composer/Reader's Digest, ASCAP, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and other august bodies. Her pieces have been performed by an equally prestigious cast of characters: the San Francisco Symphony, the American Composer's Orchestra, the Cassatt Quartet, the Lark Quartet, Orkest de Volharding, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, and the New York Youth Symphony. But while certainly impressive, the list leaves out the most important parts: her work as co-founder of New York's Bang On A Can Festival, where she has been responsible for the presentation of hundreds of new and unknown works over the past seven years; and her studies with composer Martin Bresnick, with whom she shared a fascination and engagement with music of all stripes.

Julia Wolfe's appetite for music is wide-ranging and voracious; her enthusiasm for late Beethoven is rivaled only by her passion for Led Zeppelin, or perhaps her love of traditional American folk music. These influences and many others can be heard subtly but clearly in her work, yet in no way is her music a pastiche of styles. Rather, disparate sounds and structures are put to new, unexpected uses, the point being not one of self-conscious reference, but rather that of finding expression for the unique way she has processed the material. There are no power chords in the breathtakingly virtuosic string quartet Early that summer, but the vibrancy of rock and roll sears through every moment. Similarly, one can sense the spirit of Stravinsky and Andriessson in On Seven-Star-Shoes and The Vermeer Room, and yet these pieces have identities that are distinct and utterly Wolfe-ian.

--Evan Ziporyn