552 PART 4 | SINCE WORLD WAR II
the classical sphere’s contemporary wing, seems more parochial
than praiseworthy.
One of the most widely performed composers active today
is Jennifer Higdon. Growing up in Georgia and Tennessee, Hig-
don heard little classical music until she was in college; from the
fi rst, she was more interested in modernist music than the tra-
ditional classical repertory. Her music is unabashedly roman-
tic: tonal, melodic, and with a rhythmic verve and colorful
sense of timbre. In 2010 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for
her Violin Concerto, composed for Hilary Hahn, her former stu-
dent at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. (Hahn, an exemplar
of the new generation of classical performers, has also recorded
American violin concertos by Samuel Barber and two Los Ange-
les émigrés, Arnold Schoenberg and Erich Wolfgang Korngold.)
Also representative of new trends in classical music is the
Argentinean American composer Osvaldo Golijov. Born in Bue-
nos Aires to a family of Eastern European Jewish descent, Golijov
lived in Israel for a few years before emigrating in 1986 to the
United States, where he studied composition at the University
of Pennsylvania with George Crumb. For the past two decades
he has been based in Massachusetts, where he teaches composi-
tion at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester. A number of
Golijov’s works incorporate the sounds of klezmer, most notably
The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind (1994), a chamber work for
clarinet and string quartet. One of his most ambitious works to date is La Pasión
según San Marcos (2000), an epic work for vocal soloists, choir, orchestra, and
dancers. In it he combines Latin American popular and folk music, from tango
to salsa, with Afro-Cuban rhythms and Brazilian capoeira; much of the orchestral
writing could be described as postminimalist, while the harmonies are some-
times on the verge of atonality.
Another Spanish-language work based on the New Testament is John Adams’s
opera-oratorio El Niño (2000), which uses music, dance, and fi lm to recast the
Nativity story as a tale of undocumented immigrants. El Niño is a worthy addition
to the string of politically engaged works that Adams began in the 1980s with
Nixon in China and continued with the 1991 opera The Death of Klinghoffer, about
the 1985 hijacking of the passenger liner Achille Lauro by members of the Palestine
Liberation Organization. Since 2000 he has also composed On the Transmigra-
tion of Souls (2002), a commemorative symphony commissioned by the New York
Philharmonic shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and the
opera Doctor Atomic (2005), about the scientists at work on the World War II–era
Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, which led to the creation of the
atomic bomb. In all of these works, Adams writes in a postminimalist style that
combines propulsive rhythms and clear if unconventional tonality with color-
ful orchestration and glittering textures. Adams has impressively demonstrated
that serious music on serious topics can appeal to wide audiences, and his music
has enjoyed frequent revivals and successful recordings.
Like Adams, Steve Reich has occasionally touched on political themes in his
music since his earliest works, as in Come Out (1966), discussed in chapter 18.K Hilary Hahn (b. 1979)
has championed several
American violin concertos,
including that of Jennifer
Higdon.Doctor AtomicSteve Reich172028_22_531-558_r3_sd.indd 552 23/01/13 11:21 AM