OK, so I've previously written about La Pasion Segun San Marcos at length at least twice, but Golijov is finally premiering new pieces again, and it's worth making at least a brief post on him, or at least related to him....
La Pasion Segun San Marcos is the kind of work, like the St. Matthew Passion and The Creation and Don Giovanni and Beethoven's 9th and Mahler 3 and Cunning Little Vixen and Le Sacre and Berio Sinfonia that follows you on every stage of a life's journey and means something different at every point. Yes, I could be proven laughably wrong about that, but I do think it's that good, and even if I'm the only person in the entire music world to stick my neck out like this, I will happily die on this hill (try not to crucify me though...). How few works of art have their been over the years in which the line between sublime and vernacular feel entirely obliterated and unnecessary?
It should probably go without saying that in the 21st century, composition is an utterly different process than it used to be. I'm not going to go deeply into it to explore problems with the exact points I've made dozens of times, but here's the basic point: The sheer mass of cultural information at our fingertips is so exponentially enormous in relation to our ancestors that it seems almost impossible to synthesize into something meaningful without it taking something essential from its creators with every new achievement. Philip Glass seems to churn out a new piece every day, but because he does, a lot of the music is inevitably terrible. Golijov has only returned recently with a new piece after ten years of creative silence, and said he didn't write because of depression in the wake of a plagiarism scandal which wasn't much of a scandal.
Most great artistic creators are not Mozart or Shakespeare or Picasso who can keep repeating the same magic from work to work. Most artists have to consider themselves lucky if they get a half dozen moments of transcendence in a lifetime of trying. Tolstoy could only finish two novels, Leonardo only has twenty surviving paintings, Welles and Coppola tried their whole lives yet never again got another shot to make something on the scale of Citizen Kane or The Godfather epic, and Mussorgsky?... He could barely cobble together a single work. But there is also something special about these creators who can't focus, who were perpetually distracted, perpetually human. Their distractedness is more like the rest of us, and their work speaks for the rest of us in a way that some of the ones who always have new work to premiere don't. There's something a little inhuman about the artists who can replicate the magic again, and again, and again. That kind of discipline takes the humanity out of people, their whole identity is their work, and there isn't much room in their work for the full richness of a human condition they've never gone out of their way to experience.
How much more true is this in 2021 when the world has grown so enormous? We have no idea about the full richness of the artistic world around us. Even the most obsessive specialists among us will never get to more than a small fraction, and for every Golijov who seems to connect the whole world in a piece of music, there must be a dozen or a gross of works out there with this level of insight into the world which we have never heard, and sadly, nobody may ever hear.
As both a would-be composer and a would-be novelist, I find both a terribly difficult process. You can dream of the world finding meaning in what you do, but you don't make art because you want to tell the truth to the world, you make art because you feel the need to make art. The point of making art is to derive meaning in your own life, nobody else's, because when you're making it, it's only you and the work, you have no idea who will appreciate it if anybody at all, and all you can do is make something which you find personally meaningful and hope that it will be of value to somebody else. As artistic creators, we all know when we've done something that's personally meaningful and gives us satisfaction. It may give no one else satisfaction, but no one else is in the room with us when we're making it. All that matters is you and that blank page, those silent instruments, the blank canvas, and putting something on it that gives you the catharsis you seek.
And this is why Golijov's best works are such a miracle (particularly La Pasion, Ayre, and Last Round). Golijov is an Argentinian Jew living in Boston who studied in Israel with Yiddish speaking Romanian grandparents. He is the ultimate proof that personality can only get a person so far - there are certain parts of the psyche to which no person can transcend without having lived the experience of being the person they are, in the locale they live, in the demographics from which they hail. For all the ways lefitsts exploit Identity Politics, they are correct that the central facts of a person's essence cannot be imagined into. You are who you are, and speaking as artists, and your work is usually most meaningful when you delve into the parts of your existence which make you you. And therefore, those who share identities between cultures, like Golijov, like Obama, like August Wilson, like Zadie Smith, understand those little details of authenticity that can only reside in limbic-system familiarity with multiple cultures, and render them in the context of a new world where all these tensions between groups will always intersect.
I am about as mono-identity as a single person of my generation can possibly be. Not only Jewish, but raised fully among Jews until I was sixteen, raised to speak Yiddish and Hebrew (both badly by now...), my only meaningful gulf to bridge for connection is between the Jews of today and the Jews of history. I will mine that historical postage stamp for every nugget of meaning I can ever find, but I doubt anything I come up with could ever have potential to speak for the souls of a particularly wide audience. What is amazing about Golijov is that in this era of so many misunderstandings, he is uniquely able to bridge so many of those divides: popular to classical, electronic to oral tradition, modern to folk, sacred to profane, conveying the most literally transcendent story in the history of the world with the most demotic street music, connecting contemporary world problems to the conditions of antiquity.
One of the few things Golijov is not is a Christian, and yet, we are all Christians. We all grow up with the Passion story, and no one has more 'lived' experience of the Passion Play than Jews. The end result of all this talk about identity is that as we all interact more, perhaps even as we fight more, the exclusive property of one culture becomes the property of all cultures.
I can't think of a good ending....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Gop93JBx-g
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