NYT article (long) on Milken conference

[Sam Weiss <SamWeiss...>]

At 06:30 PM 11/11/03, "Geraldine Auerbach" <jewishmusic (at) 
jmi(dot)org(dot)uk> wrote:
>Can you reproduce the article for those that don't want to subscribe to 
>the NYT

TRADITION, TRADITION, TRADITION? NOT IN AMERICAN JEWISH MUSIC
By Allan Kozinn
(New York Times, 11/7/03)
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 Alice 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."

_____________________________________________________________
Cantor Sam Weiss === Jewish Community Center of Paramus, NJ


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