Golijov, Osvaldo

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Osvaldo Golijov

Composer

Cross-cultural fusion has been a defining feature of contemporary music in many genres, but until recently it was comparatively rare in the classical field. That situation changed with the emergence of Argentine-born, American-based composer Osvaldo Golijov in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Golijov merged a dizzying variety of traditions in his work: Argentine tango, Eastern European Jewish klezmer music, Afro-Caribbean and Brazilian percussion, contemporary classical vocal techniques and orchestral writing, modern laptop electronics, traditional Jewish and Christian religious chants, and many more. Audiences responded with enthusiasm to Golijov's accessible, colorful compositions, and critic John Von Rhein of the Chicago Tribune called him "the poster child for all that's exciting and accessible in today's new classical music."

Golijov (pronounced GO-lee-hov) uses these various traditions not with the aim of creating exotic effects but in order to express specific ideas as part of a humanistic, international vision. His language is musically diverse partly because of the diversity of his own background. As he told Caleb Bach of Americas, "I am simply an extension of what I heard at home: the classics, the Russians [Russian classical composers], tango, Jewish music." Born on December 5, 1960, in La Plata, Argentina, Golijov was the child of immigrant Jewish parents, a Russian atheist father and a Romanian Orthodox Jewish mother who played the piano and took her son to the opera. He grew up speaking Yiddish, Russian, and Romanian in addition to Spanish.

Influenced by Tango, Synagogue

Both parents liked tango, which left a strong imprint on the music of the adult Golijov. Another fundamental influence came from Jewish religious observances. "My music comes from the theatre of the synagogue, where one man mumbles, another screams," he told the Economist by way of explaining the "semi-chaotic" quality of his music, with multiple events and perspectives following closely upon one another. Golijov wanted to be a composer from the start, and when he was ten his mother enrolled him in an extension class at Argentina's national conservatory.

Golijov left Argentina in 1983 to escape the repressive practices of the country's right-wing military government of the time. He moved to Israel, where he studied with composer Mark Kopytman at the Rubin Academy in Jerusalem and immersed himself in Arab musical traditions. In 1986 Golijov moved to the United States and enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the University of Pennsylvania, studying under composer George Crumb. After earning his degree Golijov took further courses with Oliver Knussen at the Tanglewood Institute.

In 1991 Golijov became a professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, near Boston; he has lived in the Boston area since that time and has also taught at the Boston Conservatory. Golijov and his wife, Silvia, have three children. His compositional career started slowly: his string quartet "Yid-dishbbuk," written when he was 31, was the first work with which he was fully satisfied.

Arranged Mexican Music for Kronos Quartet

The work, written as a tribute to children killed at the Nazi concentration camp at Terezin, Poland, contained scream-like effects for the string players that were difficult to capture in traditional musical notation, so Golijov met with the St. Lawrence String Quartet, the ensemble that was to premiere the work. "When we met Ozzie, he listened and heard our frustration," violinist Barry Shiffman recalled to Paul Griffiths of the New York Times. "He began to describe what he was after. When we asked him to sing it, well, everything changed. He was not 'singing.' It was more like crying, screaming, praying, all mixed up together. We got it."

The group became one of two string quartets that championed Golijov's work; in 2001 it recorded Golijov's The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind (1994) for string quartet and clarinet. That work won the Friedheim Award from Washington, D.C.'s Kennedy Center in 1995. The other supporter was the San Francisco-based Kronos Quartet, which, like Golijov, was interested in incorporating folk and popular traditions into classical music. Golijov served as arranger on the Kronos Quartet's Nuevo album, which was based on a range of materials drawn from Mexican popular music.

For the Record …

Born on December 5, 1960, in La Plata, Argentina; married; wife's name, Silvia; three children. Education: Began studying composition in Argentina at age ten; attended Rubin Academy, Jerusalem, Israel; University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D., 1986; further study at Tanglewood Institute, Lenox, MA.

College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA, professor of music, 1991–; also taught at Boston Conservatory; obtained major commissions for new music, early 1990s; composed La Pasión segun San Marco (St. Mark Passion) for European Music Festival, 2000; composed opera Ainadamar, 2003; song cycle Ayre recorded by soprano Dawn Upshaw for Deutsche Grammophon label, 2005; retrospective concerts of works, The Passion of Osvaldo Golijov, 2006.

Awards: MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, 2003.

Addresses: Agent—International Creative Management, 40 W. 57th St., New York, NY 10019. Website—Osvaldo Golijov Official Website: http://www.osvaldogolijov.com.

More and more top classical ensembles requested new music from Golijov in the middle and late 1990s, and he made his first mark in Europe with a commission in 1996 from the Birmingham, England, Contemporary Music Group for Last Round, a tribute to Piazzolla. Soon after that came Golijov's real breakthrough. He was one of four composers commissioned by German conductor Helmuth Rilling to compose Passion settings (drawn from the four books of the New Testament and describing the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus) in honor of the 250th anniversary of the death of German composer Johann Sebastian Bach in the year 2000.

Created Latin American Passion Setting

At first the Jewish Golijov suggested that Rilling find a Christian composer instead. Then, after having agreed to compose the Pasión segun San Marco (Passion According to St. Mark), he turned to other projects as a distraction (indeed, several major Golijov projects have been finished at the last minute). Finally a unique vision of the work began to take shape in Golijov's mind. It would be a theatrical piece, with singers and dancers, set in contemporary times in a Brazilian street scene, and it would be filled with Latin rhythms. These included four major musical styles: a chanting vocalist accompanied by Afro-Cuban drumming; the flamenco idiom; Brazilian percussion styles; and a style resembling Gregorian chant.

Golijov was nervous as he rehearsed the Venezuelan choir that was to participate in the premiere performance, for he was the only Jew most of its members had ever met. But the premiere in 2000 in Stuttgart, Germany, was a triumph, as an audience of usually reserved Germans applauded for 20 minutes. Successful performances in Venezuela and Boston soon followed.

Picking up additional publicity when a recording of the Pasión segun San Marco garnered Grammy and Latin Grammy nominations in 2002, and when he won a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" the following year, Golijov found himself very much in demand in the early 2000s. Two of his most significant projects of this period were the opera Ainadamar, which dealt with the 1936 assassination of Spanish playwright Federico García Lorca, and Ayre, a song cycle recorded by prominent soprano Dawn Upshaw. Ayre was a daring mixture of Spanish, Jewish, Arabic, and other ethnic and religious musical traditions, pointing toward the coexistence of Jewish and Muslim cultures in medieval Spain. The work also used electronic sounds created by Golijov on a laptop computer, a technique heretofore more often associated with popular music than with the classical mode.

The serious themes of these works were typical, but at the same time, the vernacular (folk and popular) musical traditions used in these works made them accessible to concert audiences. Golijov believed that it was crucial to forge bonds with audiences, and he rejected the dissonant and atonal musical language of much contemporary classical composition. Some critics charged that his music was kitschy. "But then Mozart was silly at times," Golijov remarked to London's Daily Telegraph. "I want everything that pertains to the human condition in my music—and that includes kitsch and silliness. Modernism has been overly intellectual."

As of early 2006, Golijov's plate was crowded with new projects. He planned to write the score for a film, Youth Without Youth, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. New works for the Kronos and St. Lawrence quartets were on the way, as was a piece for star cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. And he had been named co-composer-in-residence of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Speaking to Von Rhein, Golijov expressed a desire to bring various music-making ensembles from different parts of Chicago together. "Hopefully I can be a resource in bringing different parts of the city to the orchestra, and the orchestra to different parts of the city," he said. He had already made a major difference in the world of classical music, opening it up to new influences in a series of dramatic masterstrokes.

Selected discography

The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, Nonesuch, 1997.
La Pasión segun San Marcos, Hänssler, 2001.
Nuevo (Kronos Quartet), Nonesuch, 2002.
Yiddishbbuk, EMI, 2002.
Ayre, Deutsche Grammophon, 2005.
Ainadamar, Deutsche Grammphon, 2006.