[HANASHIR:8951] Birkat Hamazon and Moshe Nathanson

[Jeff Klepper <jeffklepper...>]

Neil wrote:

> I haven't followed this whole thread,
> but has anyone mentioned that the
> melody most often used for the main
> part of Birkat HaMazon did not come
> down from Mt. Sinai with Moses, but
> was actually composed by Moshe
> Nathanson (along with several other
> so-called "folk tunes")?

I once took a course with Richard Neumann, z'l, a beloved Jewish
musicologist and arranger, and he told how Cantor Moshe Nathanson, having
come back to NY from Palastine - as it was called then - (and where he had
written the words to Hava Nagila - see Vel Pasternak's great book 'Beyond
Hava Nagila' for the full story), was hired to direct music for all of the
Orthodox day schools.  On a visit to one of the schools he observed the
students doing Birkat Hamazon after lunch:  after the opening lines they
davenned the entire prayer in a mumble, only to break out into the familiar
Oseh Shalom at the end.  That melody, which sounds like a children's song,
must have been brought over from Germany, as the line 'aleinu v'al kol
Yisraeil...' resembles the Woodchopper's Song from Humperdink's opera Hansl
un Gtretl.  Nathanson, so the story goes, was so taken by the student's
enthusiasm in singing Oseh Shalom that he set out to compose the opening
paragraph we all know so well.  He used the same major key mode used for
Kiddush, and since the Oseh Shalom melody started from the top down, he
began 'Baruch ata...' from the bottom up!  It wasn't long before many other
tunes crept in, probably at summer camps, and it is amazing that they all
share the same Nursery rhyme sing-song character.  In Tara's 'Zmirot
Anthology' (excellent book, btw) Neil Levin annotates the various tunes and
offers his (mostly) negative opinion of them.  It is a wonderful example of
the evolution of a 'folk-song' in our century.  Our colleague Cantor Erik
Contzius wrote his cantorial thesis on Birkat Hamazon and probably can offer
up much more information than I.  Final thought:  I, for one, happen to love
the melody Nathanson composed.  If you study it I think you'll see how
brilliantly he worked the angular lines of the text into a flowing metric
melody.  But if you compare what Nathanson worte - it is published in a
number of songbooks - with what kids sing today, you'll see how much stupid
shtick has entered in over the past quarter century.  Anyway, it is sung all
over the world, even in Sephardic communities whose traditions have remained
faithful for hundreds of years, mainly because it is the tune sung in
Israel. Young people learn it there and bring it back to their home
communities.  What also helped was that Nathanson wrote a tune for a prayer
that had none in the first place!  Sorry for the long post.

Jeff Klepper

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