Hi All! Thought you might enjoy this-
Sue Horowitz
York, ME/Educator, TI Dover, NH
>From: robertjadler (at) aol(dot)com
>Reply-To: robertjadler (at) aol(dot)com
>To: rwhorowitz (at) hotmail(dot)com
>Subject: NYTimes.com Article: Tradition, Tradition, Tradition? Not in American Jewish Music
>Date: Fri, 7 Nov 2003 08:16:54 -0500 (EST)
>
>This article from NYTimes.com
>has been sent to you by robertjadler (at) aol(dot)com(dot)
>
>
>Sue thought this looked interesting.
>
>
>robertjadler (at) aol(dot)com
>
>/-------------------- advertisement -----------------------\
>
>FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: IN AMERICA - IN THEATRES NOVEMBER 26
>
>Fox Searchlight Pictures proudly presents IN AMERICA
>directed by Academy Award(R) Nominee Jim Sheridan (My Left
>Foot and In The Name of the Father). IN AMERICA stars Samantha
>Morton, Paddy Considine and Djimon Hounsou. For more info:
>http://www.foxsearchlight.com/inamerica
>
>\----------------------------------------------------------/
>
>Tradition, Tradition, Tradition? Not in American Jewish Music
>
>November 7, 2003
> By ALLAN KOZINN
>
>
>
>
>
>During his two decades on the faculty at the Jewish
>Theological Seminary, Neil W. Levin has been studying the
>evolution of Jewish music in America, and he has come to a
>pair of conclusions that, on the surface, seem
>contradictory. The first is that the earliest Jewish
>communities, in colonial times, considered it so crucial
>that the music of the Sabbath and holidays be preserved in
>all its traditional details that they imported cantors to
>sing the services decades before they brought over the
>rabbis.
>
>The second is that, this early traditionalism
>notwithstanding, the American experience so thoroughly
>reshaped Jewish music, both secular and sacred, that much
>of what is regarded today as deeply traditional is actually
>comparatively newfangled. The Yiddish musical theater that
>thrived on Second Avenue in the early decades of the 20th
>century is an almost entirely American form, and the
>klezmer dance music that has had a revival and expansion in
>recent years was influenced by both jazz and the Yiddish
>theater. And those popular forms - as well as some from
>outside the Jewish world - influenced sacred music as well.
>
>
>Exactly how this evolution came about, and how it has
>reflected the broader social history of Jewish life in the
>United States, is the subject of "Only in America," a
>five-day conference and concert series that runs through
>Tuesday. Presented by the Jewish Theological Seminary and
>the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music, "Only in
>America" has a split focus.
>
>It is, in part, a slightly early celebration of the 350th
>anniversary of the establishment of the first Jewish
>community in what became the United States.
>
>Actually, the anniversary is next year. In 1654, a group of
>Dutch Jews who had settled in Recife, Brazil, fled the
>colony when the Netherlands lost it to Portugal. (Portugal,
>like Spain, had undertaken a program of forced conversions
>and expulsions in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.)
>After an eventful journey, 23 of the Jews from Recife
>landed in New Amsterdam. Congregation Shearith Israel, an
>Orthodox synagogue on West 70th Street and Central Park
>West, traces its origins to that first group of refugees.
>
>Beyond the anniversary, though, the conference celebrates
>the first CD releases in the Milken Archive of American
>Jewish Music series on the Naxos label, a compendium that
>will eventually include about 600 works on 50 to 80 compact
>discs, to be released by 2006. Mr. Levin is the artistic
>director of the project, which was supported by the Milken
>Family Foundation and started when Lowell Milken, the
>chairman and president of the foundation, decided that the
>vast repertory of Jewish-American works - including those
>by non-Jewish composers on Jewish themes - should be
>methodically documented. Since 1990, the foundation has
>spent $17 million on the project, which includes everything
>from sacred music of the colonial era, ecstatic Hasidic
>music and modern services composed for synagogue use to
>Yiddish theater songs and classical concert works and
>operas.
>
>"I'm not actually an expert in music - I'm a historian of
>American Judaism," said Jonathan Sarna, a professor at
>Brandeis University, who is to give the keynote lecture at
>the "Only in America" conference on Sunday afternoon. "But
>I think the CD series is something that will be looked back
>on as one of the great legacies of the 350th anniversary.
>
>"I think that making this music available will lead to an
>outpouring of research on Jewish-American music, which has
>not been much studied, especially the sacred music. And the
>music is important in studying American Jewish culture,
>because the debates concerning music in the synagogue that
>have taken place since the beginning of the 19th century,
>if not through the whole 350 years, have been second only
>to the debates concerning the participation of women in the
>synagogue service."
>
>Women and Music
>
>To a significant degree, in fact, debates about music and
>debates about women have been intertwined in Judaism. The
>traditional view is that women not lead services or sing as
>cantors or in choirs, on the ground that a woman's singing
>voice may be so alluring as to distract men from the
>service. Reform Judaism, as well as many Conservative
>synagogues, have abandoned that notion. Modern Orthodoxy
>has, in recent decades, juggled ways to involve women in
>the service without breaking traditional taboos concerning
>"kol isha" (or, the woman's voice). In Hasidic communities,
>the traditional approach prevails.
>
>Women's voices aside, the relationship between Judaism and
>music has been fraught for much of the last 2,000 years.
>Music was a crucial element of the service from ancient
>times, and among the duties of the Levitical priests - in
>addition to conducting the sacrificial services - was
>overseeing the instrumental and choral music heard in the
>Temple in Jerusalem.
>
>It is clear from the Psalms that instrumental music was an
>important part of worship in ancient times: Psalm 150
>offers a preferred orchestration, advising that God should
>be praised with the trumpet, harp, lyre, reed organ, flute
>and cymbal.
>
>Soon after the destruction of the Second Temple by the
>Romans, though, instrumental music was prohibited by
>rabbinical decree, as a sign of mourning. Over the
>centuries, this ban became conflated with the idea that
>instrumental music was not to be a part of the Sabbath
>service in any case, because it constituted a variety of
>work prohibited on the day of rest. Actually, performance
>itself does not violate those restrictions, but repairing
>or even tuning an instrument is considered equivalent to
>putting the finishing stroke on a piece of work, so
>instrumental performance was banned to prevent that
>transgression.
>
>Different Rituals
>
>In the diaspora, the ritual and musical elements of the
>service developed differently in different parts of the
>world. Ashkenazic Jews, descended from those who settled in
>Eastern Europe, and Sephardic Jews, including those who
>remained in the Middle East and those who fled there after
>the Spanish and Portuguese explusions, developed distinct
>approaches to everything from the chanted melodies used to
>read the Torah to music created for secular use. Although
>the Ashkenazic approach was more dour at first, the
>development of Hasidism in the 18th century went a long way
>toward restoring a joyful musical component to the service,
>and spawned a literature of ecstatic melodies, the
>performance of which remained strictly vocal.
>
>With the birth of Reform Judaism, in early 19th-century
>Germany, the radical notion was advanced that continued
>mourning for the Temple made less sense than using
>instrumental music to enhance the beauty of the service,
>and since the movement also advocated a less stringent
>reading of Sabbath restrictions, concerns on those grounds
>were swept away.
>
>In the United States, all these approaches collided in
>distinctly American ways. One thing Mr. Levin hopes to do,
>in the course of his conference, is to turn the clock back
>and revive a baseline service of sorts, against which later
>changes can be put in perspective. Tomorrow morning at the
>Jewish Theological Seminary, the cantors Henry Rosenblum
>and Aaron Benssousan will preside over a re-creation of a
>Sabbath service from the colonial era. To anyone familiar
>with a modern Jewish service, the music may be surprising,
>since many of the melodies heard in even the most
>traditional synagogues today were composed in the 19th or
>20th centuries.
>
>"There will be a choir," Mr. Levin said, "which in colonial
>times would have been men and boys. But it won't sound
>choral; it will sound participatory. We've pinned down, as
>far as one can, the music that was sung and the way it
>sounded in colonial times."
>
>And yet concessions to modernism have been made as well.
>Because the Jewish Theological Seminary is an institution
>of Conservative Judaism, women will sing in the choir and
>read from the Torah, and seating will be mixed rather than
>separate, all of which would have been scandalous to Jews
>of colonial times.
>
>A Divisive Force
>
>This illustrates an unusual point that Mr. Sarna hopes to
>make in his lecture, which is that music has often been a
>divisive force in American Jewish culture.
>
>"There have been three kinds of disputes," Mr. Sarna said.
>"One has been about the kind of music that is appropriate
>to the synagogue. In colonial times, music was very tightly
>regulated, and by the way, the same is true of Protestant
>music as well, and that probably is no accident. But the
>idea was, you were to sing the music that was customary,
>and you were not invited to introduce new music. There was
>very little flexibility.
>
>"The second debate concerns who should sing the music.
>Should everybody sing? That was certainly the case in the
>colonial era, and again, the same was true in many
>churches. But in the wake of the American Revolution, and
>changes in approach to religion generally in the late 18th
>and early 19th centuries, we see people forming classes to
>improve the music of the synagogue, and those classes
>become choirs. That raised the question of whether there
>will be a musical elite, which will seize control of the
>service. And at some synagogues, you begin to see rules
>that say explicitly that only the choir will sing: the
>congregation - men and women - become auditors."
>
>The Role of Choirs
>
>The move from congregational singing
>to polished choruses, Mr. Sarna added, led to the
>harmonization of the service's melodies. That appears not
>to have caused great upheaval, but the constitution of the
>choirs did: Reform choirs included women, Orthodox choirs
>did not but recruited boys who could sing soprano and alto
>lines.
>
>"The third debate," Mr. Sarna continued, "is about the
>accompaniment of the singing. The introduction of the organ
>was meant, just as in churches, both to create an
>atmosphere that is awe-inspiring and to create order when
>the service begins, by drowning out cacophonous singing. It
>sets the mood and solves musical problems. And the debate
>is between people who support it for what it does and those
>who argue that it is a violation of tradition and
>practice."
>
>Eventually, synagogues that used organs began bringing in
>other instruments as well, and in the 20th century Reform
>synagogues in the United States began commissioning
>established composers - Darius Milhaud and Joseph Achron,
>for example - to write music for Sabbath or holiday
>services with full orchestral accompaniment.
>
>Several of the conference events will explore that
>repertory. The services tonight at Congregation B'nai
>Jeshurun, a Conservative synagogue (257 West 88th Street),
>will include settings of the Friday evening psalms and
>prayers by 20th-century composers, among them Kurt Weill,
>Max Helfman, Charles Davidson, Isadore Freed, Julius Chajes
>and Samuel Adler. For the occasion, Mr. Adler is to conduct
>what is billed as a "Choir of a Thousand Voices" -
>actually, the congregation and conference participants, who
>have had a few rehearsals.
>
>More of this music, as well as a newly commissioned work
>for cantor, choir and klezmer clarinetist, by Ofer
>Ben-Amots, will be heard in "Voice of America: A Musical
>Salute to Cantor Richard Tucker," at ***** Tully Hall on
>Sunday evening. Tucker, one of the Metropolitan Opera's
>star tenors in the 1950's and 60's, worked as a cantor at
>the Brooklyn Jewish Center in Flatbush long before he began
>singing opera, and he continued to make cantorial
>recordings, as well as appearances as a guest cantor,
>through his entire life.
>
>The Tucker tribute, however, skirts an issue that may be
>raised at some of the conference discussion sessions: that
>in the United States, at least, Jewish sacred music goes
>through fashion cycles just as other music does. At the
>moment, there is a pervasive feeling at Orthodox
>congregations that operatically inflected cantorial singing
>of the kind Tucker specialized in is a thing of the past.
>
>Exploring Jewish Themes
>
>In recent decades, the preference
>has been for more straightforward readings of the service
>and for the music of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, a charismatic
>New York rabbi who, starting in the 1960's, wrote reams of
>simple, catchy melodies in a style that combines the
>influences of folk music and Hasidic song.
>
>But more formal compositions, of the kind to be heard in
>the B'nai Jeshurun service and the Tucker tribute, found
>their way into the concert hall. Works on Jewish themes by
>Aaron Copland, Miriam Gideon and Stefan Wolpe are to be
>discussed during a conference session on Sunday morning; a
>session on Monday, moderated by Milton Babbitt, examines
>Schoenberg's music, with a Tuesday session devoted to music
>of Weill, Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Ernest Bloch.
>
>Some of the concerts celebrate this music as well,
>including one tomorrow evening at the Manhattan School of
>Music, in which Paul Schoenfield's "Klezmer Rondos" will
>split the bill with Kurt Weill's "Eternal Road." A vast
>biblical pageant on which Weill collaborated with the
>playwright Franz Werfel and the director Max Reinhardt,
>this is regarded by many as Weill's great unappreciated
>masterpiece, and by others as a score so unwieldy as to be
>unworkable.
>
>Composed soon after Hitler's rise to power, in 1933, the
>work is set in a synagogue where a group of Jews are hiding
>during a pogrom, listening to their rabbi recounting
>stories from the Bible as a way of putting their destiny in
>perspective. At its premiere, at the Manhattan Opera House
>in 1937, the four-act work required 245 performers and more
>than 1,700 costumes, and ran until 2 a.m. Since that first
>production, it has never again been staged intact, although
>several truncated versions have been attempted.
>
>For the Milken Archive project, Mr. Levin spent two years
>reconstructing the score, in a collaboration with the Kurt
>Weill Foundation, and selected 73 minutes of music for the
>recording, in which Gerard Schwarz conducted the Berlin
>Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Ernst Senff Choir and seven
>soloists. Mr. Schwarz will conduct the same excerpts - he
>prefers to call them a suite - tomorrow.
>
>"This is quintessential, exquisite Kurt Weill," Mr. Schwarz
>said. "It has its issues as a theater piece. It would be
>extremely difficult to produce in the way it was
>envisioned, with four stages on top of each other, each
>with different action, and a huge cast. But I believe this
>music deserves to be heard. And I think it's important to
>remember what it is - a piece that portrays the devoutness
>of this group of Jews, assembled in their synagogue,
>telling their stories and discussing their fate."
>
>Mr. Levin observed that he has tried to balance scholarship
>with events meant to appeal to the more casually curious.
>"These conferences are not just for the ivory tower," he
>said. "When I proposed the first one, in 1987, the seminary
>said: `O.K., but if you get 40 people, we'll consider it a
>success.' But we had 250 people, mostly laymen. And at the
>last one, six years ago, we had to turn people away."
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/07/arts/music/07JEWI.html?ex=1069211014&ei=1&en=0a482b4a8328102a
>
>
>---------------------------------
>
>Get Home Delivery of The New York Times Newspaper. Imagine
>reading The New York Times any time & anywhere you like!
>Leisurely catch up on events & expand your horizons. Enjoy
>now for 50% off Home Delivery! Click here:
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/ads/nytcirc/index.html
>
>
>
>HOW TO ADVERTISE
>---------------------------------
>For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters
>or other creative advertising opportunities with The
>New York Times on the Web, please contact
>onlinesales (at) nytimes(dot)com or visit our online media
>kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo
>
>For general information about NYTimes.com, write to
>help (at) nytimes(dot)com(dot)
>
>Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company