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Levend Joods Geloof # 3 Chanukah 1996
In this issue:
Jewish choirs in The Netherlands - Shirah Lachmann
Lazar Weiner, composer of Yiddish art-songs - Manja Ressler
Three Canadian composers of synagogual music - Cantor Benjamin Maissner
The old tradition of cantilation - Cantor Josee Wolff
The new Cantor: from superstar to spiritual leader - Cantor Michael Shochet
Leo Smit, a forgotten composer - Herman Passchier
Jewish choirs in The Netherlands - Shirah Lachmann
One of them sings Jewish music to bridge the gap with the past. The other has a passion for chazzanut. A third loves Yiddish with all her heart. Members of the Lewandowski Choir, the Amsterdam Synagogue Choir and Haimish Zayn talk about their motives to sing Jewish-liturgical or Yiddish music.
Spring 1994 musicologist Anton Molenaar and Cantor Avery Tracht of the Liberal Jewish Congregation of Amsterdam founded the Lewandowski Choir. Lydia Frankenhuis, soprano and president of this young choir, explains that this happened on the occasion of the 100th Yahrzeit of the German synagogual composer Louis Lewandowski. 'He was one of the first to write Jewish-liturgical music that included female voices.'
Musicologist Molenaar wanted music that was forgotten to be heard again. Lydia Frankenhuis: 'Everybody knows the masses and requiems of Brahms, Mozart and others; but outside the synagogue nobody knows the work of Louis Lewandowski, even though it is wonderful music. Originally we only sang Lewandowski and did a few concerts with just his music. Now we are beginning to add music by other composers. ' She has to think hard who they are and after a while comes up with the name of Ernest Bloch. 'I just listen to the melodies, I think they are wonderful. I like the harmonies and the way the sound changes from modest to exuberant. That is what Jewish music means to me. And the names of the composers... well, I don't care so much aboutr those names. Lewandowski I remember because it is the name of the choir as well.' Later on she lets me know that the choir, consisting of 35 members, also performs works by Zoltan Kodály, Bonia Shur and William Sharlin.
Frankenhuis joined the choir after she read a notice asking for new members at CREA, the cultural organisation of the University of Amsterdam. 'I took a couple of people with me and told others about it.' Grinning: 'I sang already for two years in the choir of the "enemy", the CREA Oratorium Choir, conducted by Ira Spaulding. I was attracted to this choir because of his enthousiasm to perform beautiful music.'
But if she already belonged to a choir, why did she join the Lewandowski Choir as well? 'I don't go to shul.' She is quiet for a moment, then continues: 'There is the second generation story again, it is so annoying. It is as if the war has left a gap in something which usually continues and I want to bridge that gap. My father became absolutely anti-religious because of the war. I was born with a feeling that I remember things that I have lost. I experience religion through this music, I am glad that it happens this way, through music. Before the war my father was a professional musician. He played the trumpet in the VARA Dancing Orchestra (radio) and sometimes with The Ramblers. After the war he couldn't play anymore. He was one of the people on whom Tuberculosis-experiments had been conducted; he had only half a lung left.'
This is part of an article which you can find in Levend Joods Geloof # 3, Chanukah 1996
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Lazar Weiner, composer of Yiddish art-songs - Manja Ressler
The name Lazar Weiner probably does not sound familiar to most people. Outside a group of admirers this important contemporary composer of art songs is almost forgotten. Which is a pity, because his songs, set to modern Yiddish poetry, are very beautiful.
In 1897, next year a hundred years ago, Lazar Weiner was born in Cherkassi in the Ukraine. When he was seven years old, he became a member of the synagogue choir en later he joined the children's choir of the Kiev Oper. Lazar Weiner grew up in a family with a strong jewish identity, though not very religious.
After his voice changed, he started playing the piano. In 1910, at the age of thirteen, he was admitted to the Kiev Conservatory, where he studied piano, musical theory and composition until the Weiner family emigrated in 1914 to the United States. In New York Weiner worked als piano and voice teacher and as accompanist of well known hazzanim like Yossele Rosenblatt, David Roitman and Zavel Kwartin. Through his work with singers his understanding of the possibilities of the human voice developed. This eventually led him to composing songs. In 1920 he composed settings to three Yiddish poems. He sent the songs to Joel Engel, a pioneer in modern jewish music. Engel liked the music, but thought it too Western Classical. He gave Weiner the advice to 'compose Jewish music to Yiddish texts.'
Choirs
While he still continued his study of classical composition, Weiner now also began to study Yiddish folk-music, trope (cantilation) and nusach (traditional melodies for the prayers).
In the 1920-ies Weiner began to conduct Jewish choirs; he collected and arranged existing Yiddish folk-music as well as composed new music for them.
In 1926, when he was naturalized, he became the music director of the Central Synagogue in New York, conductor of the Workman's Circle Chorus and music director of the weekly radio program The Message of Israel. In the Central Synagogue he conducted worldpremieres of liturgical works by Ernest Bloch and Darius Milhaud. In 1939 Weiner was one of the founders of the the Jewish Music Forum, which promoted the work of important Jewish musicians. After this organisation ceased to exist in 1960, Lazar Weiner helped to found the Jewish Liturgical Music Society of America. From 1953 Lazar Weiner for many years taught at the Scholl of Sacred Music of the Hebrew Union Colle-Jewish Institute of Religion and the Jewish Theological Seminary, both in New York.
Sensitivity
Weiner was, according to musicologist Albert Weisser, the greatest composer of Yiddish songs in his time. 'His sensitivity for the sound and structure of Yiddish is unparallelled among modern composers. Weiner's method is never to work completely literal, making it possible to play with the inner life and essence of the language, so that the rythm of the music never seems forced, but comes directly from what Weiner finds in the poetry,' writes Weisser in the Journal of Synagogue Music January 1986.
Weiner was inspired by his sudies of Yiddish folk music and trope, but also by his analysis of the works of Joel Engel, Alexander Krein, Mosos Milner and other early 20th Century pioneers. From the work of one of those musicians, Joseph Achron, Weiner learned to enrich his music by experimenting with harmony and contrapunct. He composed many liturgical works, among which some complete services, in different styles, from simple ones with meodies close to nusach, to complex works in which he used modern techniques. Beside his songs Weiner also wrote an opera, Der Golem and several cantatas. His songs are though considered his best work.
'If he would not have used Yiddish, but German or French texts, he would no dougt be counted among the best composers of the 20th Century, certainly the equal of Poulenc and worth more recognition and honour than many well-known American composers,' writes Albert Weisser in the quoted article about Weiner. But Weiner was attached to Yiddish and there are anecdotes that he would fly in to a rage whenever there was a concert of Jewish music without Yiddish songs on the program. His fascination with Yiddish poetry began when in the early nineteentwenties he became friends with N.B.Minkoff, who introduced him in circles of Yiddish avant garde poets. Weiners best songs are settings to poetry of these poets, who belonged to two important literary groups, Di Yunge (The Young Ones) and Di Inzikhisten (The Introspectives). Some of Weiners beste songs were written to texts by Jacob Glatstein and N.B.Minkoff.
Workers' Culture
His interest for Yiddish and its culture included organisational involvement in the Jewish Workers'culture, which was still very much alive at that time. In 1923 he founded the New York Freiheit Gesangsverein, an amateurchoir of hundred Jewish workers. Because there was not enough Yiddish repertoire for choirs, Weiner translated works by Mendelssohn into Yiddish and he made choir-arrangements of Yiddish songs. In his enthousiasm for Yiddish he founded even more choirs, among which the Yiddish Culture Chorus and the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union Chorus. His greatest success though was in conducting the Workmen's Crircle Chorus, with which he began in 1930. In the 35 years in which he conducted this choir, he succeeded to make a professional sounding esemble out of this amateur choir. Also for this choir he had works by composers like Schumann, Mozart, Beethoven and Rossini translated by the best Yiddish poets of is time. The choir also performed works by Weiner himself. There were annual concerts together with orchestras like the New York Symphony, the NBC Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic in Carnegie Hall and Town Hall, where Weiner's A Mol in Tsayt (1939), Mentsh in der Velt (1939), Hirsh Lekert (1943) and Tsu Dit, Amerike were first performed.
Manja Ressler
I would like to thank Cantor Faith Steynsnyder Gurney, the Jewish Theological Seminary Library in New York and YIVO's Krysia Fisher for their help.
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Three Canadian composers of synagogual music - Cantor Benjamin Maissner
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The old tradition of cantilation - Cantor Josee Wolff
In this article Cantor Josee Wolff tells the history of cantilation, explains the meaning of the signs (Ta'amim in musical as well as grammatical respect and describes some of the many different traditions around the world.
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The new Cantor: from superstar to spiritual leader - Cantor Michael Shochet
When most people hear the title 'Cantor', they tend to think of the famous Jewish operatic voices of yesteryear. Virtuosos such as Moshe Koussevitsky, Zavel Kwartin, David Roitman, Yossele Rosenblatt and Moise Oysher were some of the cantors who captured the hearts of Jews worldwide who flocked to the synagogue to hear star voices intone the prayers.
Not so today. The cantor of the nineties is a new breed. An evolution has taken place in the Cantorate and out of that has come a religious leader, a clergy person, ordained by a seminary to fulfill the many spiritual needs of today's Jew.
'Many cantors are called upon to serve as counselors, teachers, educators and administrators,' says Cantor Howard Stahl, Executive Vice President of the American Conference of Cantors. Stahl, a Reform Cantor, sees the profession in flux. As synagogues have less resources to meet the growing spiritual needs of their congregants, they require fewer and better trained professionals. The position of the cantor has evolved into a multi-faceted role serving the many needs of the congregation. Today, the rabbi, cantor, educator and administrator usually make up the totality of a synagogue's professional staff. 'And so it is very common for the cantor today to serve as a teacher in the religious school, in the adult education program, as someone who provides pastoral care, visiting the sick and comforting the bereaved,' says Stahl.
First and foremost, however, the cantor or hazzan (in Hebrew) is the musical leader of prayer. The cantor is calles the Shaliach Tsibur, the representative of prayer from the congregation to God. 'I think music is what we are, it's in the core of our being, it's why we are here,' says Cantor Martin Levson of Tulsa, Oklahoma. 'We are blessed to be able to do with music some things that words can not convey,' he says.
Cantor Paul Silbersher of Kansas City, Missouri, sees his role as spiritually igniting his congregation. 'The cantor tries to get the congregation to reach out to God; to inspire them.' Music has always been an important element in connecting one's soul to God. 'The most wonderful compliment I ever received from a congregant was from a woman who said, "when you sing, I know there is a God." And that has to be our goal,' says Cantor Sara Sager of Cleveland, Ohio.
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Leo Smit, a forgotten composer - Herman Passchier
This article recounts the tragic history of Dutch-Jewish composer Leo Smit, who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943. He was a promising young composer many of whose works had already been performed by the Concertgebouw Orchestra and who was considered very talented by his contemporaries. During the last few years his works have been performed again and a Leo Smit Foundation has been established to guard his heritage and that of other Dutch-Jewish composers who were killed in the Shoah.
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