2015 Pulitzer Prize Awarded to Multimedia Choral Work

The 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Music was awarded to Julia Wolfe for her work Anthracite Fields. The piece was commissioned and performed by the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia and uses voice, music, movement, and lighting and video projections to tell the stories of the coal miners and families who worked in the mines of northeastern Pennsylvania. In this article from NPR, Wolfe describes the inspiration for the piece, the music's structure, and what she hopes the listener takes away from it.