Peter Golub’s protean interest in film, theater and music composition describes a man who admits to one character flaw: an inability to rule things out. So, along with nursing along film scores and a musical theater piece, Golub, a Pacific Palisades resident, spent the last four months composing a commissioned work for the opening concert by Chamber Music Palisades on October 19. His schizophrenic passion for both dramatic and concert music emerged early. Following a familiar route for accomplished musicians, the New York native, whose parents each played an instrument, started piano lessons at 6. In high school, he discovered drama and formed a troupe with a group of classmates who tackled plays by Pinter, Ionesco and Beckett. Golub studied composition at Bennington College and later earned a doctorate at the Yale School of Music, where he was encouraged by the revered composer Toru Takemitsu to explore different forms of music and, more importantly, to rejoice in his multiple interests. Takemitsu, who was a visiting professor at Yale in the mid 1970s, also followed his artistic impulse in nonmusical art forms’painting, poetry, theater and film’and became a lifelong inspiration for his student. ’He was really a down-to-earth guy, who was fun, loved jazz and encouraged us not to followed the modern European music [atonal] that was dominating music schools at the time,’ Golub says. ‘He advised us not to make music overcomplicated, and he didn’t see a dilemma over choosing film or theater.’ Golub followed his interest in dramatic music, finding an exciting niche in the New York theater world. He composed scores and worked with some of the most energetic and influential directors. He collaborated on several productions at La Mama, the experimental theater on the lower East Side, which Ellen Stewart founded in 1961 on the principle of developing new work, particularly musical collaborations. For 10 years, he was composer-in-residence at the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, Charles Ludlam’s brainchild, playfully mixing theatrical traditions and the avant-garde. In 1987, the New York theater world was heaped in tragedy when two giant talents Michael Bennett and Charles Ludlam died. Ludlam had been planning to direct Shakespeare’s ‘Titus Andronicus’ for Joe Papp’s Shakespeare in the Park. Despite his overwhelming grief, Papp, mourning the death of his friends and his own son, was more committed than ever to his enterprise. ‘Joe felt that he had to go on. His own son was dying, but he was a real fighter,’ Golub recalls. With Ludlam’s death, Papp decided that he would direct ‘Henry IV, Part I’ himself and turned to Golub to write the music. ’It was eventful working with Joe; nobody knew as much about Shakespeare as he,’ says Golub, while acknowledging Papp’s famed irascibility. ‘But I think his frustration came as a result of his difficulty in communicating his vision of how a scene should be played. Joe was good to writers and directors, giving young talent a chance.’ Golub’s New York period came to an end in 1996, when he arrived at a professional crossroads. He had been teaching composition both at Bennington and Reed, and was debating whether to stay in academia. He had done a bit of film work in New York, so he took the leap to Los Angeles, moving with his wife Cristina and their son Phillip to the Marquez neighborhood. (Cristina plays piano and has recently taken up the cello. Phillip, now a senior at Crossroads, is following his own musical adventures in jazz, classical and composition. His humorous windwood quintet ‘Wood ‘n’ You’ debuted at Chamber Music Palisades in June. His younger brother Alejandro, 5, has started piano lessons with Palisadian Mary Ann Cummins.) Over the last decade, Golub’s primary focus has been on film music. He has scored both fiction, such as ‘Frozen River’ and ‘American Gun,’ as well as documentaries, including ‘Wordplay,’ and ‘I.O.U.S.A.’ He is also wrote the score for the documentary ‘Countdown to Zero,’ about the escalating nuclear arms race. For last dozen years, he has also been the director of the Sundance Film Music Program, where he runs the yearly composers lab, an intensive, two-week workshop for aspiring film composers. ’I like collaborative work on film,’ Golub says. ‘Each film calls for something from you that you might not have written on your own.’ But having said that, he admits that the process is intense and time- consuming. ‘In film, you have to please the director, and the way it is nowadays, you have to make a mockup of the score, because the director doesn’t read music. If successful, the composer-director relationship continues to grow to the point where you develop a vocabulary and a trust factor after you’ve been on a couple of dates together.’ In film, Golub is not the boss. Not so in a chamber piece. ‘You’re the director,’ he says. For the Chamber Music Palisades piece, he says that he flourished in the freedom. ‘Dee [Stevens] said ‘Write whatever you want,’ so I decided to write a piece for oboe and strings. I had always had this wish to write for the oboe,’ He notes that there is nothing in the literature that he knows of that uses this grouping. The Quintet for Oboe, String Trio and Piano consists of three movements, the first two of which have the quality of moving from one kind of music to another, faster, slower, while the third is in the elegy mode. ’When I’m writing, I listen to a lot of music, in this case Shostakovich, Britten, Prokofiev, but then I let the material lead me. I actually don’t know exactly what I’m doing. There’s this notion of anxiety of influences where you intentionally work against your training, and I think that in my case I was steering away from being overly formalistic. This piece is more intuitive; there are tonal elements, but the harmony comes and goes and there is also rhythm, pulse and melody. I believe in all that.’ Golub says that it was by playing chamber music that got him started writing. He continues to be impressed with the many chamber groups in Los Angeles. ‘I am impressed with the manner in which Dee Stevens and Susan Greenberg program the classical literature in with the commissioned work.’
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