I was feeling alienated from that aesthetic,” Golijov says of the tyranny of serialism and other atonal experiments in the 1980s. “Then, in one week, my first daughter was born and my mother, who taught me how to play piano, died. It was that whole cycle of new life and death. It opened my eyes, and I realized I don’t have to please academic orthodoxy.

“You don’t become a musician to get rich,” he adds, laughing. “So I decided I should do what makes me happy.

RTWT