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KINGSTON — Slate pickers lose fingernails from their numb and bleeding hands, all in a day’s work. A woman waits in vain for a loved one who will never come home alive. And in relentless chant, voices intone a litany of men and boys who were killed or injured back when coal was king.
Those are some of the starker images memorialized in “Anthracite Fields,” Julia Wolfe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning oratorio that will be presented at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 14 at Wyoming Seminary’s F.M. Kirby Center for Creative Arts.
But if you talk to the New York City-based composer, who grew up a county or two south of the hard-coal region in Montgomeryville, Pennsylvania, she’ll explain how she took care to include some of the brighter aspects of mining life as well.
“I love doing interviews with people who grew up in the industry,” Wolfe said. “A woman named Barbara Powell, who actually is a docent at the Anthracite Heritage Museum (in Scranton) was one of the first people I interviewed. It was amazing to hear how wonderful her childhood was — not a lavish existence, but she had that whole multi-generational experience of grandparents living with the family or nearby, and eating ethnic foods at holidays.”
“Their houses were small and shack-like, but they had flowers. She told me about so many different kinds of flowers.”
The “Flowers” portion of the oratorio includes in its lyrics the different blossoms Powell mentioned to Wolfe along with “every other flower I could find that grows in that part of Pennsylvania.”
In another part of the oratorio, “Breaker Boys,” Wolfe injected some of the buoyant adolescent rhythms and youthful spirit she believes no amount of hard work could crush.
“They were still kids, playing tricks on the man who was overseeing them,” the composer said. “I like to think that a part of their lives was playful.”
The musicians of Bang on a Can All Stars, who will perform “Anthracite Fields” on Nov. 14 will bring such music-making tools as bicycle wheels (they add “a clickety/pitchy sort of sound” when they spin, Wolfe said) and the wire handle of a kitchen whisk that is likely to be used in place of a guitar pick. The All Stars use more conventional instruments as well.
Vocals will be provided by the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, and in an early section of the oratorio some of the singers will chant a list of names that seems to go on and on forever, like miners trudging into the gloom of a dark pit.
Ace, Art, Ash … Backs, Baer, Bail … Cain, Camp, Carl, …
While each name represents a miner who was killed or hurt, the litany is only a tiny sample.
Wolfe consulted the Pennsylvania Mining Accidents Index and found some 32,000 men and boys who were killed or hurt between 1869 and 1916. It was far too many to include in “Anthracite Fields.”
So she limited her list to men whose first name was John — forget any Witolds or Ginos or Seamuses or Friedrichs.
Then she eliminated all the Johns whose last names had two or more syllables and still had, for example, more than 60 beginning with B and close to 40 beginning with C.
“Those are just the one-syllable names, sadly,” she said, explaining how she arranged for male voices to intone the names in a piece called “Foundation,” while women’s voices would sing about the actual formation of hard coal: “Thick steamy swamps covered the earth. The leaves and branches buried deep. Thick roots and trunks buried deep. Buried deep inside the earth. Layer upon layer upon layer buried deep. Heat. Pressure. Time.”
“We think about who and what are underground,” Wolfe said. “The men no longer with us are underground; the coal is also underground.”
If you come to the concert, you can experience for yourself how Wolfe incorporated elements to suggest the industrial revolution as well as the cavernous environment of the mines.
“I worked hard to get this very deep, resonant sound,” she said.
Her research included interviews, oral histories, geographical descriptions, old childhood rhymes and an old-time advertisement for coal, but audience members shouldn’t expect the music to be the kind of tunes the coal miners themselves might have heard or played 100 years ago.
“It’s not a period piece,” Wolfe explained. “The music aesthetic is not from that time period. I tried to bring it into today.”
The piece will be illuminated by the visual projections of scenic designer Jeff Sugg and, before the concert begins, Wolfe will offer a talk at 6:30 p.m.
Earlier that day she will give a talk at the Anthracite Heritage Museum in Scranton, from 3:15 to 4:45 p.m. That talk is free and open to the public.
For the concert, tickets are $10 and are available at wyomingseminary.org/anthracite or at the door.
