Julia Wolfe

Cruel Sister

Cantaloupe Music, 2011

Dark vs. Light

It was Julia Wolfe’s own idea to use the rasterised image of a woman’s floating legs on this cover. I had used the image two years before, on a concert programme for Water – a work that Julia Wolfe, Michael Gordon and David Lang had premiered at the Royal Opera House in Copenhagen. The three composers are co-founders of the artist collective Bang on a Can and legends of the New York new music scene.

Julia had remembered the graphic from Water and contacted me from New York. She wanted to use it on the cover of her upcoming release Cruel Sister – a 35-minute long piece for string orchestra. The work is based on the narrative of an old English ballad about two sisters – one as bright as the sun, the other cold and dark. The dark sister kills her light sister by pushing her into the sea. I had to agree with Julia that the image suited the work very well.

The picture had originally come from my father-in-law’s pilot’s manual from the 1950s. It was a tiny crop from a much bigger picture of a woman demonstrating the use of a life jacket that I had scanned and kept for many years. I continued to be fascinated by the way the body was distorted by the water and the coarse printed line-screen – the harsh graphic pattern contrasting so nicely with the soft beauty of the legs.

I used another part of the same image – a girl floating next to the woman – for the inside of the CD wallet. By reversing the tones, I could play on the dark sister vs. light sister theme while staying in the same bespeckled, black and white universe.