Paul Trapani Luna Pearl Woolf & Matt Haimovitz

Luna Pearl Woolf: A.B. 1995–96. Composer.
Matt Haimovitz: A.B. 1996. Cellist.

He is: A onetime child prodigy and international star cellist known for playing unorthodox venues—think CBGB, the recently defunct elder statesman of the New York punk scene. A.B. in musicology.
She is: An award-winning composer whose critically acclaimed project Après Moi, le Déluge was the first major work of classical music to commemorate the flooding of New Orleans. A.B. in music composition.
They are: Co-founders of their own music label, Oxingale. Crazy about Bartók. About to become parents for the first time.

Some Harvard success stories—and love stories—don’t begin at Harvard. Cellist matt haimovitz and composer luna pearl woolf both transferred from other colleges (he Princeton, she Oberlin), and might never have met had it not been for an article in an Office of the Arts newsletter profiling transfer students that paired the two of them on the same page. So when Woolf recognized Haimovitz, she approached him and introduced herself.

“I was cramming for an exam and she came up to me and said, ‘Hey, nice article!’ And I said, ‘What article?’” recalls Haimovitz. “After the exam, I read it and was intrigued right away.”

A “comedy of errors” followed, Woolf says from their home in Montreal. “I thought that he didn’t want to talk to me.” In fact, Haimovitz had been busy studying for an exam—and spent the next two years trying to get her phone number. Finally, in the second semester of their senior year, they both wound up in an obscure course on instrumental Ren­aissance music. They made a date, were engaged by the end of the year, and spent the next year together in Paris—Woolf on a fellowship for travel and study, Haimovitz to be closer to his numerous European concert engagements. They married and settled in western Massachusetts.

Today, they are united in the quest to bring classical music to a younger, hipper audience. “We’d been thinking independently about it before we met,” says Woolf, who was raised in Massachusetts’s Pioneer Valley, surrounded by a strong folk music tradition. Haimovitz had a longstanding relationship with the venerable label Deutsche Grammophon, but lamented the lack of young audience members at his international concerts.

When he decided to record the canonical Bach cello suites in 1999–2000 to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the composer’s death, “we had a choice,” Woolf recalls. “Should he go back to [Deutsche Grammophon], or should we go off on our own?

“We thought we could do it together. He had experience, and what I discovered in the role of producer was that there is a very compositional element to producing a recording.”

The couple launched Oxingale in 2000 with Haimovitz’s recording of the Bach suites. He followed that album with a much-touted Bach “listening room tour,” shedding his tuxedo for jeans and playing in intimate urban music clubs across North America and the United Kingdom, “to strip away some of the traditions that apply to the music,” he says.

Six years and nine albums later, they’re on tour promoting their most involved collaboration: Après Moi, le Déluge, a score for a cappella choir and cello commissioned by Haimovitz and written by Woolf. It’s part of his “Buck the Concerto” series, pairing the cello with a big band, a DJ, and even a live audience that “conducts” with wireless digital batons.

Oxingale has thrived as an independent label and allowed Woolf and Haimovitz to experiment with eclectic projects that combine composition, visual art, poetry, and performance.

Although they have a close working relationship, Woolf says, “our individual ambitions and work types are not a competitive thing. I don’t play an instrument and he doesn’t claim to write music.”

Still, their approaches to music—hers creation and his execution—have lent invaluable insight to both careers. “I’ve gotten a much closer idea of the compositional process,” Haimovitz says. “Luna’s music has that rare balance of making an emotional connection while never losing sight of the formal and intellectual architecture.”

And Woolf echoes, “I’ve learned so much about the cello watching him play, teach, practice; that has all informed my string writing. I was maybe an imaginative but unskilled string writer when we met at 20. I now feel that strings are a part of my body, even though I don’t play. I can write adventurously.” In short, these transfer students have achieved a sublime transference.

Woolf on Haimovitz’s style as a cellist: “Brave. He never shies away from the greatest beauty or the rawest anger—there’s nowhere he’s unwilling to go when trying to find what the composer was putting into the music.”
Haimovitz on Woolf’s latest work: “Après Moi, le Déluge, Odas de Todo el Mundo, and I Am a Fish pass my own personal litmus test of great music: Once you have heard it, you cannot imagine the world without it; they sound new and inevitable at once.”

Profile by Kirsten Jerch