Composer Jorge Liderman Receives Guggenheim Fellowhip

By Genevieve Shiffrar, June 11, 2003

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded a Guggenheim Latin American and Caribbean fellowship to composer UC Berkeley Music Professor Jorge Liderman in recognition of his exceptional artistic creativity.

Wendy Allanbrook, Chair of the Music Department, describes Professor Liderman and his music: "Liderman is a skilled and powerful composer, whose music is impeccably made and imaginative, projecting a distinctive individual voice. His works, which borrow from the techniques of minimalism but with a strong lyrical overlay, display widely various expressive temperatures and often a wry and quizzical wit."

Professor Liderman will use the fellowship award to compose a new opera on the life of a seventeenth-century Mexican nun, Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz. A poet, playwright, and songwriter, Sor Juana was a firebrand who asserted her right to be both a nun and a producer of secular creative work. The opera will be based on a play about her life by Carlos Elizono Alcaraz, El Sueño y la Agonía.

While he has written a wide variety of shorter pieces, Professor Liderman has produced two theater pieces also based on texts about and by powerful female figures. The Sor Juana opera will complete this quasi-trilogy.

The first of the three works, Liderman's opera Antigona Furiosa, was based on a play by Griselda Gambaro. Gambaro adapted Sophocle's Antigone story to be set in modern Argentina and brought attention to the thousands of people missing during Argentina's military regime. Liderman's opera was commissioned by the distinguished German composer Hans Werner Henze and won the BMW International Music Theater prize in conjunction with the Munich Biennale.

Liderman's second major work is a three-movement cantata setting to music the bibical text, the Song of Songs. A poem about the sexual awakening of a young woman known as the Shulamite and her lover, the Song of Songs is perhaps the most remarkable book in the Hebrew Bible. Liderman adapted Chana and Ariel Bloch's lyrical translation of the Song of Songs, and worked closely with Chana Block to benefit from her insights into the original language of the work. The Song of Songs cantata had its world premiere in March 2002 in UC Berkeley's Cal Performances subscription series. In a laudatory review of the première, the San Francisco Chronicle's Joshua Kosman called the work "a resourceful and vivacious setting…music that is both tender and hard-edged, with a strong rhythmic profile and a wonderful variety of instrumental sonorities."

To compose these works, Professor Liderman has made himeself into a scholar as well as a composer. He thoroughly researches the textual and musical sources of his subjects, and frequently uses indigenous music as "found objects" in his works. For example, he incorporated Sephardic and Ashkenasik melodies into the music of the Song of Songs. To pursue his research, Liderman was awarded a highly competitive University of California President's Research Fellowship in the Humanities. As Chair Allanbrook points out, "It is highly unusual for a creative artist to be awarded a major research fellowship in the humanities. Liderman was able to make clear to the reviewers the importance of this kind of musical research to his creative work." 

Professor Liderman is also an international figure. Not only has he had his works performed in North and South America, the Middle East, and Europe, he is also "something of a cultural chameleon," according to Allanbrook. "Of Argentine Jewish descent, he is a cosmopolite who has put down roots in South America, Israel, and now Berkeley, California, not to mention Australia, England, and Italy."

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation grants fellowships to accomplished artists, scholars and scientists through two separate competitions. One is open only to citizens and permanent residents of the United States and Canada. The other is available to citizens and permanent residents of Latin America and the Caribbean. Professor Liderman was one of 37 awardees of the Guggenheim Latin America and the Caribbean competition. 

With this fellowship, Jorge Liderman will be able to delve into understanding the life and times of the nun Sor Juana in preparation for his opera.

¡La communidad internacional espere la producción! — The international community awaits the production!