Born on December 18, 1958, in Philadelphia; resides in New York City
Liberty Bell
Composed: 2025
Estimated length: 12 minutes
First performance: 2025 in Houston, Texas
These performances are the Nashville Symphony premiere.
Julia Wolfe has repeatedly drawn on American history to create music with an immediate connection to the present. A co-founder and co-director of the influential collective Bang on a Can, she has built a body of work that crosses stylistic boundaries while exploring the stories embedded in American life. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning Anthracite Fields, for example, grew from the history of Pennsylvania coal country and the experiences of the miners who worked there.
Liberty Bell was co-commissioned by the Nashville Symphony as part of a consortium that also included the Houston, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Louisville symphonies, Carnegie Hall, and the Grant Park Music Festival. The work also begins with Pennsylvania history—and with Wolfe’s own childhood memory. Growing up north of Philadelphia, she recalls that “the image of the silent cracked Liberty Bell” remained firmly impressed on her mind. In her program note, Wolfe traces the bell’s long history. She notes that it arrived in Pennsylvania in the 1750s as the State House Bell and acquired the name Liberty Bell in the 1830s through abolitionists in New York and Boston. She recounts how it was taken to Allentown to keep the British from melting it down for bullets. The bell cracked at its first testing and was repaired; in 1843 the crack widened, leaving it unable to ring fully. Yet through 1915, Wolfe notes, it traveled seven times across the United States, carrying with it the inscription from Leviticus: “Proclaim LIBERTY Throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof.”
Wolfe then poses the question at the heart of the piece: “How can a piece of music embody and communicate the elusive reach for the most basic tenet of the founding of the country?”
WHAT TO LISTEN FOR
Wolfe’s answer is emphatically noisy. More than 100 musicians are “raucous and loud,” while battles among independent rhythmic lines create what the composer calls a “jagged composite whole.” Metal chimes and pitched bell plates are struck so that they resonate and ring out.
The turbulence is central to Wolfe’s conception. Obtaining liberty, she writes, is “not a quiet tidy process” but a “messy, boisterous, ongoing, interlocking struggle.” Music becomes her own contribution to that clamor: “I shout out perseverance, grab tight to optimism, and search for a way forward.” And she returns finally to the bell’s inscription, taking “unto all the inhabitants thereof” literally as a proclamation for “all who reach for the promise of liberty.”
Scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons (2nd doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, 3 percussionists, harp, piano and strings
− Thomas May is the Nashville Symphony's program annotator.
Featured on Two Giants: Guerrero & Bronfman — November 19 to 21, 2026
Nashville Symphony
Giancarlo Guerrero, conductor
Yefim Bronfman, piano
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