Music of the Future

From Paste:

CULTURED CLASH
FROM BUENOS AIRES TO MIAMI BY WAY OF OLD VIENNA, OSVALDO GOLIJOV TURNS RAW DANCE BEATS AND CLASSICAL FORMS INTO THE MUSIC OF THE FUTURE.
By Pierre Ruhe on August 27, 2008


For most of the past half century, the artistic tag “international”—and the “ism” that labeled it a cultural trend—held a vaguely unpleasant connotation. It began cosmopolitan and cool, but then the concept started to drift, eventually landing on the universal yet impersonal, the utopian yet faceless. In architecture, for example, at the tail-end of the International Style movement in the 1960s and ’70s, every city in the U.S. and Brazil and China suffered its cookie-cutter modern office buildings, the ugly fact of “internationalism” made real. Still, a few groovy jet-set buildings turned heads; those old promises continued to hold a measure of sexy optimism.
More recently, a different urge took hold. Food culture led the way, with wine and cheese makers promoting their product’s terroir—the soil and climate and cultivation techniques that
create distinctive flavors, where no two hillsides duplicate the same subtle organic conditions. When every suburban subdivision looks alike, eating food grown in a specific soil with the sharp taste of an exotic place becomes a balm for the soul.

We seem at a precarious point now, balancing these two dominant cultural trends. And no musician makes more from a unified global view and the gritty dirt of the street than an Argentine of Eastern European-Jewish parentage who grew up with tangos, flamenco, Yiddish klezmer and Bach, and—after studies in Jerusalem and Philadelphia—found a home in Boston and a fervent international following. At 47, Osvaldo Golijov has created a catalog of music that comes from many specific places yet speaks with a one-world voice.

Thus, at a time when everything in our society seems niche, and the niches are getting narrower, Golijov (pronounced GO-lee-hoff) is a musician headed in the opposite direction. He’s got a knack for the urgent gesture and for generous expression, not to mention a cosmic sense of serenity..

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