Osvaldo Golijov grew up in an Eastern European Jewish household in La Plata, Argentina. Born to a piano teacher mother and physician father, he was raised surrounded by classical chamber music, Jewish liturgical and klezmer music, and the new tango of Astor Piazzolla. Since the early 1990s, he has enjoyed collaborations with some of the world’s leading chamber music ensembles, including Kronos Quartet and the St. Lawrence String Quartet, in addition to relationships with artists such as Yo-Yo Ma, Dawn Upshaw, and Robert Spano. In 2000, the premiere of his La Pasión según San Marcos (St. Mark Passion) took the music world by storm. The Boston Globe called it “the first indisputably great composition of the 21st century.” Golijov has also received acclaim for other groundbreaking works such as his opera Ainadamar and the clarinet quintet The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, as well as music he has written for the films of Francis Ford Coppola.
The 2022–2023 season sees a new production of Ainadamar by Olivier Award–winning choreographer and director Deborah Colker, co-produced by Detroit Opera, Opera Ventures, Scottish Opera, Welsh National Opera, and the Metropolitan Opera. In the fall, members of the Silkroad Ensemble toured his 80-minute song cycle Falling Out of Time. He is currently composing a new work for violin and orchestra that will be premiered this season by Johnny Gandelsman and The Knights. Golijov served as the Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall during the 2012–2013 season. He is composer in residence at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he has taught since 1991.
Reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes
I wrote Tenebrae as a consequence of witnessing two contrasting realities in a short period of time in September 2000. I was in Israel at the start of the new wave of violence that is still continuing today, and a week later I took my son to the new planetarium in New York, where we could see the Earth as a beautiful blue dot in space. I wanted to write a piece that could be listened to from different perspectives. That is, if one chooses to listen to it “from afar,” the music would probably offer a “beautiful” surface but, from a metaphorically closer distance, one could hear that, beneath that surface, the music is full of pain. I lifted some of the haunting melismas from Couperin’s Troisième leçon de ténèbres, using them as sources for loops, and wrote new interludes between them, always within a pulsating, vibrating, aerial texture. The compositional challenge was to write music that would sound as an orbiting spaceship that never touches ground. After finishing the composition, I realized that Tenebrae could be heard as the slow, quiet reading of an illuminated medieval manuscript in which the appearances of the voice singing the letters of the Hebrew alphabet (from Yod to Nun, as in Couperin) signal the beginning of new chapters, leading to the ending section, built around a single, repeated word: Jerusalem.
—Osvaldo Golijov
Akshaya Avril Tucker is a composer who draws inspiration from the music and dance traditions of South Asia, having trained as a cellist and Odissi dancer from a young age. Recent commissions and projects include works for WindSync, flutist Marianne Gedigian, Hindustani vocalist Saili Oak, Duo Cortona, Englewinds, Invoke string quartet, Thalea String Quartet, and Density512 chamber orchestra. In 2019, she won an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award.
Tucker holds a master’s degree in composition from the University of Texas at Austin and a bachelor’s degree from Brown University, and she attended the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music in 2017–2018. Her teachers have included Yevgeniy Sharlat, Reena Esmail, Gabriela Lena Frank, Donald Grantham, Russell Pinkston, Shep Shapiro, and Butch Rovan.
Tucker studied classical Indian dance for nearly 20 years with Guru Ranjanaa Devi in Massachusetts. She has performed Odissi dance worldwide with Nataraj Dance Company, and has performed her own choreography at National Sawdust and at Luminarium Dance Company’s National ChoreoFest. As a cellist, she focuses on North Indian music, new music, and early music. In 2014, she studied Hindustani music on cello in Mumbai, and she also studied with Stephen Slawek, a disciple of Ravi Shankar, in Austin.
Here in California, fire is at our doorstep. Although I am a relatively new arrival to the state, it’s still frightening. Fire has already had a devastating impact especially on Northern California communities (and completely wiped out the town of Paradise in 2018). Across California, we have been experiencing extreme drought for years. All these conditions, from drought to fire to mudslides, are predicted to worsen as our planet warms.
My string quartet, Hollow Flame, is like a journal entry of moments recorded over many months in which I try to grapple with what is happening in the climate crisis: the loss of so much, from human lives to old-growth forests, let alone human health and the well-being of our ecosystems. Hollow Flame is an attempt to witness my own numbness, my own inability to even form words when I try to talk about this. The sections of the piece (as listed within the score) are as follows: Chant-like, through a cathedral of trees; Suddenly bright; Frenzied; The Earth; and Echoes of the empty forest.
My research for this project began in 2020 and led me through a number of writings on the climate crisis. My participation in Composing Earth, a program from the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, has been essential throughout this process. Something like a book club or a support group, this program has opened a space for all the difficult feelings the climate crisis opens in us: grief, fear, anxiety, empathy, anger. Researching this topic, alone at first, felt extremely isolating, even impossible. But in a group, however small, we could share our experiences, and know that—no, we aren’t crazy—for feeling maddeningly frustrated by the apathy of millions, by our own numbness. I want to commend Brooklyn Rider for their courage in choosing this topic, which is so difficult to write and speak about; and I am grateful to Bagaduce Music and Carnegie Hall for co-commissioning this piece.
—Akshaya Avril Tucker
Dmitri Shostakovich’s explosive Eighth String Quartet was written in just three days in 1960 while visiting Dresden to write music for the film Five Days, Five Nights about the Allied firebombing of that city in World War II. Dedicated to “the victims of fascism and war,” the extra-musical meaning of the work has long been debated. Is it an autobiographical statement about the composer’s struggles against the Stalinist regime, a reference to the Holocaust, or a rebuke to totalitarianism? While we will never ultimately know, this beloved work has nevertheless secured a place as one of the most important and searingly powerful works of the 20th century.
The basic building block of the five-movement composition is based on the spelling of the composer’s name D-S-C-H (D, E-flat, C, B), heard in the fugal opening of the first movement. The second movement reveals an iconic Jewish theme also heard in the composer’s famous Second Piano Trio. The composer describes his feelings on the qualitative elements of Jewish music in Testimony: “Jewish folk music has made a most powerful impression on me ... it can appear to be happy while it is tragic. It’s almost always laughter through tears. This quality ... is close to my ideas of what music should be. There should always be two layers in music. Jews were tormented so long that they learned to hide their despair. They express despair in dance music.” Following the third movement’s macabre waltz, the fourth movement unfolds in a series of quotations. Opening with a series of ominous knockings, an inverted D-S-C-H statement is juxtaposed, revealing a fragment of the “Dies irae” from the Catholic Requiem Mass. Following this, the lower three instruments play a Russian funeral anthem (“... tormented by the weight of bondage, you glorify death with honor ...”), followed by the two violins sounding the Russian revolutionary song “Languishing in prison.” Later in the movement, a soaringly transcendent cello melody from Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk serves as an emotional crest, followed by an elegiac and contrapuntal reprise of the D-S-C-H theme in the concluding movement.
—Nicholas Cords
Indian American composer Reena Esmail works between the worlds of Indian and Western classical music, and brings communities together through the creation of equitable musical spaces. Her life and music were profiled on PBS’s Great Performances: Now Hear This, as well as Frame of Mind, a podcast from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She divides her attention evenly between orchestral, chamber, and choral music. She has written commissions for ensembles that include the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Seattle Symphony, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and Kronos Quartet, and her music has been featured on multiple Grammy-nominated albums, including The Singing Guitar by Conspirare, Bruits by Imani Winds, and Healing Modes by Brooklyn Rider. Many of her choral works are published by Oxford University Press. She is the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s 2020–2025 artist in residence and was Seattle Symphony’s 2020–2021 composer in residence. She also holds awards and fellowships from United States Artists, S&R Foundation, American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Kennedy Center.
Esmail holds degrees in composition from The Juilliard School and the Yale School of Music. Her primary teachers have included Susan Botti, Aaron Jay Kernis, Christopher Theofanidis, Christopher Rouse, and Samuel Adler. She received a Fulbright-Nehru grant to study Hindustani music in India. Her Hindustani music teachers include Srimati Lakshmi Shankar and Gaurav Mazumdar, and she currently studies and collaborates with Saili Oak. A resident of Los Angeles, she is an artistic director of Shastra, a nonprofit organization that promotes cross-cultural connections between music traditions of India and the West.
In September 2018, I developed an infection in my throat that wouldn’t subside. For two weeks, it became increasingly difficult to swallow, to breathe, and especially to speak. During this time of intense, painful silence, I thought about what this loss of voice represented for me—of how many times in my life I had been rendered voiceless, either by others or by my own doing. Healing, in this case, was not about enduring the pain, but about releasing the poison I have always swallowed—that didn’t belong to me. It was only when I felt myself begin to release that poisonous energy that I felt the physical infection begin to subside. This piece was conceived during those dark weeks and is simply about that release. It uses two incredibly beautiful Hindustani raags: the dark and mysterious Todi and the mournful Bhimpalas. While working on this piece, I was also working on a setting of a beautiful Hafiz poem that ends “When the violin can forgive / every hurt caused by others / the heart starts singing.” That is very much the spirit of this piece, too.
—Reena Esmail
And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and played with his hand; so Saul was refreshed and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him.
(I Samuel 16.23)
The power of music to heal body, mind, and spirit was a belief held from the ancient Greeks up through the ages. The topic is just as relevant today, where the synergy between music and healing is being passionately explored in the field of modern brain science (with some astounding findings). Whether the music itself is directly restorative or if it serves as a powerful and guiding metaphor has been long debated, but nevertheless, Beethoven’s inherent belief in music’s healing power is well illustrated by a visit he paid in 1804 to his former student, pianist Dorothea von Ertmann, following the death of her three-year-old son. Offering music, he prefaced an hour-long improvisation with the sparsely chosen words: “We will now speak to each other in tones.” Beethoven’s intimate friend Antonie Brentano also recalled that “... he visited me often, almost daily, and then he plays spontaneously because he has an urgent need to alleviate suffering, and he feels he is able to do so with his heavenly sounds ...” The Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132, is the second in a series of five late quartets that represent an exquisite culmination of Beethoven’s output as a composer. Evidence of the deaf composer’s own suffering and search for higher meaning is found scattered throughout his notebooks during his final years, and Op. 132 powerfully embodies the musical essence of late Beethoven: an autobiographical world that wrestles with questions surrounding life, death, and spirituality.
A harbinger of music to come, an almost obsessive drive towards overarching motivic and thematic unity permeates this quartet. A pair of semitones separated by an expressive leap is introduced in the opening bars of the first movement, these tones (in a great multitude of pitch values, inversions, and durations) serving as fodder for all that follows across the five-movement structure. Even with the sweetness of the second theme, the opening movement is generally characterized by a brooding and highly combustible tendency. In contrast, Beethoven often relied on pastoral settings across his output to explore a sense of repose and spiritual renewal, here reflected in the amiable second movement. Flowing over a gentle topography, the material is still informed here by the semitone motif, though with stormy tendencies much subdued. Notable is the hurdy-gurdy trio section on an A drone, filling the listener with the restorative powers of the fresh air.
In the early spring of 1825, Beethoven found himself in the throes of an infected bowel—far more serious an affliction in the day—pausing his ability to continue work on the quartet. This episode is reflected in the sublime center of this five-movement quartet, the Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart (Song of Thanksgiving from a Convalescent to the Deity, in the Lydian Mode). At this time in his life, Beethoven often looked back in the musical tradition for inspiration and as a way to imagine the future. Borrowing from the ancient church modes with his use of the Lydian scale (F major with a raised 4th scale degree), Beethoven’s choice was most certainly not random; 16th-century Italian theorist Gioseffo Zarlino observed that “the Lydian mode is a remedy for fatigue of the soul, and similarly for that of the body.” Three serene and prayerful Lydian chorale prelude episodes—each occurrence increasingly intermingling the pure tones of the half note chorale with embellished prelude material—gradually create a sense of heavenly ascension across the movement. Modulating with the simple hinge of a C-sharp, two D-major sections break these reveries with joyous expressions of new strength and convalescence. But the Heiliger Dankgesang is not only a celebration of feeling new physical strength, it is essentially an expression on the renewal of the soul. For Beethoven, the return of his physical health likely ran of secondary importance to a return of his creative powers. Touchingly written in the margin of a sketch for this movement is a note surely not meant for his doctor: “Thank you for giving me back the strength to enjoy life.”
Beethoven seems to scorn those of us moved to tears by the sublime conclusion of the third movement with the interjection of a raucous march, bringing us back to earth with bold force. This very brief movement leads into a heroic violin recitativo that recalls the choral finale of his Ninth Symphony, catapulting us into the highly turbulent world of the finale. Searching in various guises for resolution amidst strains found across all of the preceding movements, the virtuosic writing shows Beethoven very much writing for the future; how foreign the interlocking rhythms and gnarly contrapuntal figurations must have felt at the time (they still do)! And at the end of this monumental musical journey—one that invites the listener to confront and transcend their own fragilities—the music is drawn to conclusion with an effervescent coda, almost Mozart-like in its exuberance. Here is Beethoven once again playing with our emotions; it’s either a joyful summation of our human ability to rise above life’s challenges or a rebuke for taking ourselves too seriously. Or perhaps both.
—Nicholas Cords