[HANASHIR:8960] Re: Birkat Hamazon and Moshe Nathanson

[Andy Curry <acurry...>]

Jeff,

Ironically, one of the very meaningful moments at last year's HN was when
you led the first paragraph of the Birkat Hamazon, having us speak it
slowly instead of singing it.  It's the first time I realized how beautiful
the words are.  Thanks.

Andy

At 06:04 PM 5/1/01 -0400, you wrote:
>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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>
Andy Curry, Kansas City
acurry (at) san-carlos(dot)rms(dot)slb(dot)com

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