''Steel Hammer'' is a 2009 composition for three

soprano A soprano () is a type of classical female singing voice and has the highest vocal range of all voice types. The soprano's vocal range (using scientific pitch notation) is from approximately middle C (C4) = 261 Hz to "high A" (A5) = 880&n ...

s and

chamber ensemble Chamber music is a form of classical music that is composed for a small group of instruments—traditionally a group that could fit in a palace chamber or a large room. Most broadly, it includes any art music that is performed by a small numbe ...

by the American composer

Julia Wolfe Julia Wolfe (born December 18, 1958) is an American composer and professor of music at New York University. According to ''The Wall Street Journal'', Wolfe's music has "long inhabited a terrain of its own, a place where classical forms are rech ...

. It was first performed on November 21, 2009, at

Zankel Hall Carnegie Hall ( ) is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City. It is at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east side of Seventh Avenue between West 56th and 57th Streets. Designed by architect William Burnet Tuthill and built b ...

by the contemporary classical music groups

Bang on a Can Bang on a Can is a multi-faceted contemporary classical music organization based in New York City. It was founded in 1987 by three American composers who remain its artistic directors: Julia Wolfe, David Lang, and Michael Gordon. Called "the cou ...

and

Trio Mediæval Trio Mediæval is a vocal trio established in 1997 in Oslo, mainly to sing medieval polyphonic works. Its members are Anna Maria Friman (from Sweden) and Linn Andrea Fuglseth and Torunn Østrem Ossum (from Norway). The trio's debut album, ''Word ...

. The piece is based on the ballad of the

African-American African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an Race and ethnicity in the United States, ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American ...

tall tale A tall tale is a story with unbelievable elements, related as if it were true and factual. Some tall tales are exaggerations of actual events, for example fish stories ("the fish that got away") such as, "That fish was so big, why I tell ya', it n ...

John Henry. The composition was a finalist for the 2010

Pulitzer Prize for Music The Pulitzer Prize for Music is one of seven Pulitzer Prizes awarded annually in Letters, Drama, and Music. It was first given in 1943. Joseph Pulitzer arranged for a music scholarship to be awarded each year, and this was eventually converted i ...

Composition

The text of the piece is drawn from over 200 versions of the John Henry folklore. Wolfe described her sources in the score program notes, writing:

Structure

The piece has a duration of 79 minutes and is composed in nine

movements Movement may refer to: Common uses * Movement (clockwork), the internal mechanism of a timepiece * Motion, commonly referred to as movement Arts, entertainment, and media Literature * "Movement" (short story), a short story by Nancy Fu ...

: #Some Say #The States #Destiny #Mountain #Characteristics #Polly Ann #The Race #Winner #Lord Lord

Instrumentation

The work is scored for an ensemble comprising three sopranos,

clarinet The clarinet is a musical instrument in the woodwind family. The instrument has a nearly cylindrical bore and a flared bell, and uses a single reed to produce sound. Clarinets comprise a family of instruments of differing sizes and pitches ...

, percussion,

guitar The guitar is a fretted musical instrument that typically has six strings. It is usually held flat against the player's body and played by strumming or plucking the strings with the dominant hand, while simultaneously pressing selected stri ...

piano The piano is a stringed keyboard instrument in which the strings are struck by wooden hammers that are coated with a softer material (modern hammers are covered with dense wool felt; some early pianos used leather). It is played using a keyboa ...

cello The cello ( ; plural ''celli'' or ''cellos'') or violoncello ( ; ) is a Bow (music), bowed (sometimes pizzicato, plucked and occasionally col legno, hit) string instrument of the violin family. Its four strings are usually intonation (music), t ...

, and

double bass The double bass (), also known simply as the bass () (or #Terminology, by other names), is the largest and lowest-pitched Bow (music), bowed (or plucked) string instrument in the modern orchestra, symphony orchestra (excluding unorthodox addit ...

Reception

Reviewing the world premiere, of ''

The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...

'' praised the piece as "an astonishingly compelling amalgam" of music and noise. Daniel Stephen Johnson of

WQXR-FM WQXR-FM (105.9 FM) is an American non-commercial classical radio station, licensed to Newark, New Jersey and serving the North Jersey and New York City area. It is owned by the nonprofit organization New York Public Radio, which also operates ...

said, "At its best, the music of Julia Wolfe is totally relentless, like a steam-powered drill boring a great hole right through the hard heart of a mountain." He added, "A bit like ''

The Little Match Girl Passion ''The Little Match Girl Passion'' is a choral work by David Lang, based on the 1845 Hans Christian Andersen story, "The Little Match Girl". It is influenced by Johann Sebastian Bach’s '' St Matthew Passion'' (1727) and won the Pulitzer Prize f ...

'' of fellow Bang on a Can composer David Lang, this is a passion play for a sort of ordinary Christ figure, and their pure, exquisitely shaped sound lends Wolfe's work not a suitable elegiac tone, but the laserlike intensity demanded by her music's most luminous moments."

Allan Kozinn Allan Kozinn (born July 28, 1954) is an American journalist, music critic, and teacher. Kozinn received bachelor's degrees in music and journalism from Syracuse University in 1976. He began freelancing as a critic and music feature writer for ''T ...

of ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' lauded Wolfe's mixture of musical styles and wrote:

References

Compositions by Julia Wolfe 2009 compositions Chamber music compositions Music commissioned by Bang on a Can Music commissioned by Carnegie Hall {{PulitzerPrize Music Finalists 2001–2010