25 March 1911. Fire breaks out on the eighth floor of the clothing factory Triangle Shirtwaist in New York. The workers, most of whom are Jewish and Italian migrant women and girls, cannot escape the flames. The factory doors have been locked to prevent them from taking unauthorised breaks. In the wake of this tragic event, protests and demands for better working conditions come to a head. After Steel Hammer and Anthracite Fields, two previous compositions about workers in America, Wolfe brings the women out of their roles as victims and puts them on the barricades. They are protagonists with influence and a voice – 146 voices, to be precise. 

For years, on her way to her teaching job at New York University, Wolfe would pass by a memorial to the 146 victims of the fire. The history of that place continued to smoulder inside her mind. “I thought a lot about female immigrants in the workplace around the turn of the century. They left their homelands to escape poverty and persecution. Many of them ended up in enormous factories where hundreds of women sat at sewing machines.”  

One of the key figures in the protests against the appalling working conditions was Clara Lemlich, who had come to America from Ukraine. The 23-year-old seamstress was among the organisers of the Uprising of the 20,000 in 1909 – the biggest women’s strike the United States had ever seen. She was beaten up, but the attempt to intimidate her failed. She was back at the protest the next day with broken ribs. Years later, she looked back on her fighting spirit: “Ah, then I had fire in my mouth.” 

Between the cracks in the American Dream 

In four movements, Wolfe reconstructs the journey that the young women took and the American Dream that was ripped and torn to pieces. In the first movement, Immigration, we hear the testimonial of a female migrant on her way across the Atlantic. Sentences are fragmented and repeated to emphasise their meaning. In Factory, the orchestra imitates the rattle and clamour of sewing machines. We find ourselves inside a machine. A Yiddish folk melody and Italian tarantella introduce the two main ethnicities in the factory whilst giving the workers an identity. “I want to walk like an American. I want to look like an American,” they sing in Protest. The women’s choir dreams of a better life. The girls’ choir responds with the bitter reality, chanting a speech by the activist Clara Lemlich. It is only in the final movement, Fire, that the two choirs sing together. A cry for help. An ashen silence. The piece ends with the names of all the victims being projected and read out. They flicker on into eternity.