A Conversation with Osvaldo Golijov
by Habitus · 02/05/08
How about the synagogue where you grew up?
It was officially Orthodox, but it was very chaotic and sui generis. Anarchy is always lurking in Argentina. The synagogue was in the same building as the basketball court and the Jewish community center. I would be playing basketball on a Saturday and they would come ask us to help complete the minyan.
What about music in the synagogue?
There was a children’s chorus, we sang for the high holidays. Before my Bar Mitzvah, my uncle gave me a little electric organ. I would play it in the synagogue, for weddings and Simchat Torah. The director of the chorus would always say, “Oh, this melody comes from Israel,” but I think he was making them all up. [laughter]
Do you think of your music today as being distinctly Jewish?
Yes, yes. Often I will try to downplay that side of it, but people will still come up to me and say, “Oh, that was so Jewish!” [laughter] Sometime I try to filter that because I think it’s important not to do what comes most easily.
In the critical responses to your music, you often hear words like “pollution” or “contamination” because of the way you combine sounds and juxtapose cultures. That’s a familiar charge to a Jew, isn’t it?
Correct. But I take it as a compliment. Thanks to pollution we have tango and jazz. It’s similar to what Mahler and Bernstein had to endure. There is a certain type of critic that gets very uncomfortable with contamination.
Since you mention Mahler: are you doing something fundamentally different than what he, or maybe Bartók, did as a translator of musical traditions?
I think, at the core, it’s the same. Mahler lived in a different world and he had one incredible instrument, which was the symphony orchestra, which he knew better than anybody. He was able to use it to express the entire range of human experience at that time.
In the hundred years that separate us, there was the electric guitar, jazz, rock: the world has been enlarged, and I don’t think that the symphony orchestra is still able to contain the entire universe, which was Mahler’s dream.
So is that your dream as well?
Absolutely.
You’ve also said that cultures are like keys.
Not like keys on the piano, but like tonalities. For instance, in the opera I wrote about García Lorca, there is an intense interlude of gunshots, over which a flamenco cantora sings a lament. It ends with something very lush, very much like Richard Strauss. That modulation—from flamenco and bullets to Strauss—is similar for me to when Mahler goes from a key that has three flats to one that has five sharps.
Do you ever envy pop musicians, who can cross boundaries with abandon?
Of course! I admire and learn from them. It reminds me that many of the questions that are asked in the so-called classical world are just irrelevant. They are questions of fear rather than courage. Artists like Björk or OutKast are simply phenomenal creators.
Can you imagine a version of yourself—as a composer or a man—who never left Argentina? How would your music have been different?
Yes, I meet some people like this when I go back. [laughter] The only problem with staying in Argentina is that nothing you do, as a composer, really matters. Not just that it doesn’t matter in New York, but it doesn’t matter in Buenos Aires, either.
The composer doesn’t have a meaningful voice. In the Soviet Union, Shostakovich was a vital part of the culture. In Latin America, that role is taken up by popular musicians. They were the ones who carried the spirit of resistance. The classical composers were just opening branches of the European avant-garde in Buenos Aires.
But would your preoccupations as a composer have been different had you never, for example, lived in Jerusalem?
Of course, yes! Jerusalem was, first of all, an experience of liberation, of not feeling like a second-class citizen anymore. Argentines come to Israel with a sense of gratitude. It’s not like from America, where it is a mitzvah. No, we come feeling like, “Oh wow! A place where people actually like us!” [laughter]
But also, it was an opportunity to rediscover all the roots of my music, to see that all the cantorial music I had learned—if you go back and back—was connected to Sephardic music, and Yemenite and North African music.
I could use it all. It all belonged to me.
