Osvaldo Golijov


Osvaldo Noé Golijov is an Argentine composer of classical music and music professor, known for his vocal and orchestral work.

Life and career

Golijov was born in and grew up in La Plata, Argentina, in a Jewish family that immigrated to Argentina from Romania. His mother was a piano teacher, and his father was a physician. He studied piano in La Plata and studied composition with Gerardo Gandini.
In 1983, Golijov moved to Israel, where he studied with Mark Kopytman at the Jerusalem Rubin Academy. Three years later, he studied with George Crumb at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree. In 1991, Golijov joined the faculty of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he was named Loyola Professor of Music in 2007. During the 2012–13 concert season, he occupied the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer's Chair at Carnegie Hall.
As of 2016, Golijov lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Golijov has married and divorced twice. He had three children with his first wife, Silvia. He subsequently married and later divorced architect and designer Neri Oxman.

Golijov's music

Golijov grew up listening to chamber music, Jewish liturgical and klezmer music, and the nuevo tango of Ástor Piazzolla. His Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind was inspired by the writings and teachings of Rabbi Yitzhak Saggi Nehor.
In 1996, his work Oceana was premiered at the Oregon Bach Festival. He composed La Pasión según San Marcos for the Passion 2000 project in commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the death of Johann Sebastian Bach. In 2010, he composed Sidereus for a consortium of 35 American orchestras, to commemorate Galileo.
Golijov had a long working relationship with soprano Dawn Upshaw, who he called his muse. She premiered some of his works, often written specifically for her. These included Three Songs for Soprano and Orchestra and his popular opera, Ainadamar, which premiered at Tanglewood in 2003.
Starting in 2000, Golijov composed movie soundtracks for documentaries and other films, including The Man Who Cried, Youth Without Youth, Tetro and Twixt. He also composed and arranged chamber music, including for the Kronos Quartet and the St. Lawrence String Quartet.

Deadline and plagiarism controversies

Golijov came under scrutiny in 2011 for a series of commissions that were either delayed or cancelled. A violin concerto written for the Los Angeles Philharmonic was not completed in time, Golijov missed a second deadline the following year in Berlin, and a third composition missed its January 2013 premiere at Disney Hall.
This followed a similar cancellation in 2010, when a scheduled song cycle had to be removed from the program when it was not completed in time. The March 2011 premiere of a new string quartet for the St. Lawrence Quartet was also postponed, though the work, Qohelet, was completed later that year and premiered by the quartet in October 2011.
Around 2006, the Metropolitan Opera commissioned Golijov to compose an opera, to be performed in the 2018–19 season. In 2016, the Met cancelled the commission because of the composer's lack of progress.
Tom Manoff, a composer and critic, and Brian McWhorter, a trumpeter, alleged that Golijov's Sidereus was largely copied from Michael Ward-Bergeman's composition Barbeich. Alex Ross of The New Yorker reviewed both scores and wrote, "To put it bluntly, 'Sidereus' is 'Barbeich' with additional material attached". Ross added that Ward-Bergeman was aware of Golijov's borrowings. A consortium of 35 orchestras had paid Golijov $75,000, supplemented by a $50,000 grant from the League of American Orchestras, to write a 20-minute work. The work that Golijov produced was only 9 minutes. Golijov had used that same musical material in his 2009 composition Radio.
Golijov responded to these questions by explaining that he composed the original musical material jointly with Ward-Bergeman for a film score which in the end did not include the material, and that he used it by agreement with Ward-Bergeman, who did not comment publicly on the matter. Golijov cited Monteverdi, Schubert and Mahler as other composers who used existing musical material to create new music.

Works

Some of Golijov's notable works include the following:
Awards
Appointments
Film soundtracks
Voice, chamber music and orchestral