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The Multifaceted Legacy of Jewish Music By EDWARD KLORMAN
The Juilliard Orchestra's concert on November 10 in Avery Fisher Hall, at which Leonard Bernstein's Kaddish Symphony is being performed, is just one component of an international conference/festival titled "Only in America—Jewish Music in a Land of Freedom." This event, which will include numerous concerts, lectures, and performance-practice workshops, will take place November 7-11. The conference is jointly sponsored by the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music.
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| Samuel Adler |
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The concert's program will include the Bernstein Kaddish Symphony, Ernest Bloch's Schelomo, and the world premiere of Samuel Adler's The Challenge of the Muse. Adler has been a member of Juilliard's composition faculty since 1996.
The Milken Family Foundation, which co-commissioned The Challenge of the Muse along with the Maurice Amado Foundation, is currently pursuing an unprecedented project to release a series of CDs that traces the history of American Jewish music in a variety of genres. More than 600 works have already been newly recorded for this series, many of which will now be commercially available for the first time. By 2005, some 50 CDs will be available on the Naxos label, most of which will feature the music of a single composer or music associated with a particular Jewish holiday.
This ambitious project will include works by more than 200 composers, about half of whom are living. From opera to klezmer to children's songs, the Milken Archive series will encompass an encyclopedic variety of styles. It will incorporate various popular genres (such as music of the Yiddish theater), political songs of the Zionist movement, and liturgical music from the Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform traditions. Also included in the series will be several works on Jewish themes written by non-Jewish composers, such as Dave Brubeck's cantata The Gates of Justice.
The Milken Archive is an initiative of the Milken Family Foundation. Lowell Milken, chairman and co-founder of the foundation, explained, "My personal interest in music and deep, abiding commitment to synagogue life and the Jewish people united as I developed an increasing appreciation for the quality and tremendous diversity of music written for or inspired by the American Jewish experience."
Adler, who is a member of the Milken Archive's editorial board, is extremely optimistic about the project. "In America, for the first time in the history of the Jews, major composers who happened to be born Jewish also wrote liturgical music. Darius Milhaud, for example, had never written any liturgical music until he was commissioned by Temple Emanuel in San Francisco. The Milken Archive wants to document everything that's been done from 1750 to the present. We even have liturgical music from the Revolutionary period."
Adler dedicated The Challenge of the Muse to Lowell Milken and the Milken Family Foundation. Scored for soprano, tenor, and orchestra, the work is based on a text by Judah Alharizi, a 13th-century Spanish-Jewish poet. In each stanza, the Muse provides a sentence from the Bible and then challenges a poet to write a verse that ends with that sentence. Adler's piece, set in the original Hebrew, includes six of the original 30 challenges.
"This text is wonderful for a composer," Adler said. "When [the Muse] gives the sentence, she sings it with a certain melody, which then recurs when the poet repeats it as a refrain. I was mindful of the great Sephardic tradition [of the Jews who lived in medieval Spain], and I included several excerpts of intonations. I also took two tunes from that tradition and quoted them fully: the singing of the Song of Songs and the prayer Hashkiveinu [Shelter of Peace]."The Challenge of the Muse celebrates two anniversaries in Jewish history: the 350th anniversary of the first Jewish settlers in New Amsterdam and the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, "the night of the broken glass" when, on November 9 and 10, 1938, thousands of Jewish-owned homes, businesses, and synagogues were brutally destroyed throughout Germany and Austria. "This piece shows how someone can take a biblical sentence and create with it a new verse of poetry," Adler said. "The people who came here in 1654 were completely in the dark as to what was here and created a new life. Similarly, many of the victims of Kristallnacht came here and started a new life. They created something out of what was already here and added so much to it."
Adler emphasized the diversity of styles that encompass Jewish music: "I don't think there is such a thing as a Jewish sound. I don't expect people to say that [The Challenge of the Muse] 'sounds Jewish.' People think Jewish music is only that sad, wailing music that moves your heart to tears. That certainly is a tradition—a ghetto tradition—which I'm happy to say we don't need anymore."
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