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JULIA WOLFE
Liberty Bell (2025)

Philadelphians know the Liberty Bell as an icon of their city and top tourist attraction. But famously, nobody has heard it properly ring since it cracked irreparably on Washington’s birthday in February 1846. The bell’s fracture seems to evoke the imperfection and fragility of liberty itself. It also necessitated its move from the tower of the Pennsylvania State House (today Independence Hall) down to street level for display. Its acoustic resonance was replaced with a symbolic and patriotic resonance; something people used to hear turned into something people come to see.


The inscription, cast on the bell in 1752 by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London, reads: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all inhabitants thereof” (Leviticus 25:10). Following the bell’s Revolutionary history—it was perhaps rung after a public reading of the Declaration of Independence—19th-century abolitionists took it as a symbol against slavery and gave it its enduring name. Following the Civil War, it became a more flexible symbol of American values and unity, touring the country by train. In the urban North, it could symbolize the assimilation of new waves of European immigrants. In Biloxi, Mississippi, the former Confederate President Jefferson Davis viewed and venerated the bell, without a hint of recognition or irony.


Today, as we approach the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, music can cut through generic sentiments and let us more sharply and loudly consider the promise and reality of American freedom. And so the composer Julia Wolfe wrote Liberty Bell, a Philadelphia Orchestra co-commission, to give voice back to the famous bell.


Wolfe’s clangorous style emerged from the milieu of the Bang on a Can organization, which she founded in 1987 with two other composers: her husband, Michael Gordon, and David Lang. Coming out of graduate school at Yale, they stood together against the highbrow contemporary music world of the time, embracing rock and popular influences and seeking a wider audience. She is especially known for her series of large-scale oratorios—or “docu-torios”—addressing American social movements and labor history. Her Pulitzer Prize–winning Anthracite Fields (Mendelssohn Chorus of Philadelphia with Bang on a Can All-Stars, 2014) chronicles the Pennsylvania coal region, Fire in my mouth (New York Philharmonic, 2019) tells the story of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and Her Story (Nashville Symphony and Boston Symphony, among other co-commissioners, 2022) is about the suffrage movement and continuing struggle for women’s rights. Wolfe is the recipient of a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship, and currently directs the composition program at the NYU Steinhardt School, where she is a professor of music.


Wolfe began with her personal experience and then dove into the bell’s history. “I grew up in a small town north of Philadelphia. The image of the silent cracked Liberty Bell is emblazoned in my memory,” she writes. “The journey of the bell is storied. In its youth it was carried off to Allentown to prevent it from being melted down by the British for bullets. The bell cracked at its first testing and was repaired. [Then] it cracked further, and was never able to fully ring again.”


In her own program note, Wolfe continues:


My Liberty Bell is not silent. The over 100 musicians on stage are raucous and loud. Battles between independent rhythmic lines form a jagged composite whole. Metal chimes and pitched bell plates are struck to resonate and ring out. Obtaining liberty is not a quiet tidy process. It is a messy, boisterous, ongoing, interlocking struggle. How can a piece of music embody and communicate the elusive reach for the most basic tenet of the founding of the country? The idea of liberty is everywhere—imprinted on coins, decorating postage stamps, declared in poetry and song, sprinkled through speeches. Music is my way of adding to the clamor. I shout out perseverance, grab tight to optimism, and search for a way forward. Taking the bell’s inscription literally, “unto all the inhabitants thereof,” the proclamation speaks to all who reach for the promise of liberty.


—Benjamin Pesetsky

JULIA WOLFE
Liberty Bell (2025)

Philadelphians know the Liberty Bell as an icon of their city and top tourist attraction. But famously, nobody has heard it properly ring since it cracked irreparably on Washington’s birthday in February 1846. The bell’s fracture seems to evoke the imperfection and fragility of liberty itself. It also necessitated its move from the tower of the Pennsylvania State House (today Independence Hall) down to street level for display. Its acoustic resonance was replaced with a symbolic and patriotic resonance; something people used to hear turned into something people come to see.


The inscription, cast on the bell in 1752 by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London, reads: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all inhabitants thereof” (Leviticus 25:10). Following the bell’s Revolutionary history—it was perhaps rung after a public reading of the Declaration of Independence—19th-century abolitionists took it as a symbol against slavery and gave it its enduring name. Following the Civil War, it became a more flexible symbol of American values and unity, touring the country by train. In the urban North, it could symbolize the assimilation of new waves of European immigrants. In Biloxi, Mississippi, the former Confederate President Jefferson Davis viewed and venerated the bell, without a hint of recognition or irony.


Today, as we approach the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, music can cut through generic sentiments and let us more sharply and loudly consider the promise and reality of American freedom. And so the composer Julia Wolfe wrote Liberty Bell, a Philadelphia Orchestra co-commission, to give voice back to the famous bell.


Wolfe’s clangorous style emerged from the milieu of the Bang on a Can organization, which she founded in 1987 with two other composers: her husband, Michael Gordon, and David Lang. Coming out of graduate school at Yale, they stood together against the highbrow contemporary music world of the time, embracing rock and popular influences and seeking a wider audience. She is especially known for her series of large-scale oratorios—or “docu-torios”—addressing American social movements and labor history. Her Pulitzer Prize–winning Anthracite Fields (Mendelssohn Chorus of Philadelphia with Bang on a Can All-Stars, 2014) chronicles the Pennsylvania coal region, Fire in my mouth (New York Philharmonic, 2019) tells the story of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and Her Story (Nashville Symphony and Boston Symphony, among other co-commissioners, 2022) is about the suffrage movement and continuing struggle for women’s rights. Wolfe is the recipient of a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship, and currently directs the composition program at the NYU Steinhardt School, where she is a professor of music.


Wolfe began with her personal experience and then dove into the bell’s history. “I grew up in a small town north of Philadelphia. The image of the silent cracked Liberty Bell is emblazoned in my memory,” she writes. “The journey of the bell is storied. In its youth it was carried off to Allentown to prevent it from being melted down by the British for bullets. The bell cracked at its first testing and was repaired. [Then] it cracked further, and was never able to fully ring again.”


In her own program note, Wolfe continues:


My Liberty Bell is not silent. The over 100 musicians on stage are raucous and loud. Battles between independent rhythmic lines form a jagged composite whole. Metal chimes and pitched bell plates are struck to resonate and ring out. Obtaining liberty is not a quiet tidy process. It is a messy, boisterous, ongoing, interlocking struggle. How can a piece of music embody and communicate the elusive reach for the most basic tenet of the founding of the country? The idea of liberty is everywhere—imprinted on coins, decorating postage stamps, declared in poetry and song, sprinkled through speeches. Music is my way of adding to the clamor. I shout out perseverance, grab tight to optimism, and search for a way forward. Taking the bell’s inscription literally, “unto all the inhabitants thereof,” the proclamation speaks to all who reach for the promise of liberty.


—Benjamin Pesetsky