thirteen ways

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Golijov, quoting William Faulkner

Dawn and Osvaldo, above: “You can’t take a photo! I’m eating chocolate!”

We are in the middle of what Osvaldo Golijov playfully refers to as his “Ayre circus”. With an amazing entourage in tow, including some of this country’s best musical talent and of course the incomparable Dawn Upshaw, we are taking Osvaldo’s powerful work to five cities across the country. (8bb technically isn’t “eighth blackbird” for this tour, but are rather part of an ensemble that has already changed its name once: Orquesta los Pelegrinos in Durham; Orquesta Los Marranos in Richmond.)

The rehearsals and first performance took place in Richmond, and as part of our stay there, Osvaldo, the Kap, J-Flower (also known as keepalive and the Getawaykyd, who already has a short blog entry about the tour) and I took part in a discussion as part of a University of Richmond class, Meaning in Music. Students had been prepped, and were each ready with a scripted question, but these were diverse and interesting enough to inspire Osvaldo to give typically enlightening answers.

Below, r to l: the Kap, the Argentinian, J-Flower:

In response to a question about his work with Dawn, Osvaldo began by describing the voice as a “primal thing,” something that existed before any other sort of musical expression. This primacy exists even today: “When you meet a nice girl, the voice is very important - if you don’t like it then you don’t like the girl.”

I asked him if Dawn was his muse. “Her voice was always thought of as “angelic”, but I found that it was so flexible that she inspired me musically. Yes, Tim, I think she is my muse.”

The discussion turned to the private, ritualistic “space” created onstage during a live performance. I said that this space has the power to transform me into a different person, giving me confidence and command that I lack in everyday life. Osvaldo thought that this concert “space” was “like any ritual; it can be empty or full of meaning, just as a Thanksgiving dinner can be a deeply emotional event, or an empty, boring evening.”

In his quiet and thoughtful way, Osvaldo is an evangelist. He speaks softly but insistently and with gentle ardour, expressing thoughts and beliefs with the same clarity and authority that his communicative, deeply emotional music possesses. I have fallen under this spell.

Responding to a question about compositional “inspiration,” Osvaldo said that he loves “working on big pieces. When I am composing a big piece, I can live in two different lives: there is my everyday life, and the life of my composition. There is my daily rhythm - wake up, make a coffee, go to work - and the rhythm of the piece. I wish everyone could have that experience.”

He talked of being “led by the music” into unexpected territory. When composing the St Mark Passion, Golijov said that he expected the music for a scene of Jesus rebuking his disciples to be dramatic, even violent, but he found that he was led to write music in which “Jesus talked to them like a mother to her children, quietly chiding.” The music accompanying Jesus’ death “was much more luminous than I could have planned.” In summation: “The piece tells you.”

A student asked about his stylistic diversity. Osvaldo:

“Composition is all about the emotion of the moment; it is like an iPod. I don’t think of music as history, but rather I think of the geography of music. For example, Mozart is a city, with cafes, museums, bars; Messiaen is more like Easter Island: you have to take a boat to get there, and it is very stark. The Beatles, I think, are like Mozart. (I think of the Beatles as classical music - their music has lasted.) In contrast, I think of Tango as one composer obsessed with sexual provocation.

He talked about using musical styles as symbols, and pointed to an example in the visual arts world: “The horse in Guernica by Picasso is an obvious symbol, but is grotesquely twisted, with a sword coming out of its mouth. Similarly, I choose a symbol and then play with it, distort it.”

What about his relationship with performers? “I want my performers to take total ownership of a piece. It is the difference between reading a nice play and seeing it live on stage.”

For a composer so closely allied with a number of phenomenal performers, he expressed frustration at many unsatisfactory performances of his work. “We talk about famous dead composers. Many times, when I hear my work, I want to be dead too.”

Below, composition can be a lonely road: