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Cover Art Sacred Services A MESSAGE FROM THE MILKEN ARCHIVE FOUNDER Dispersed over the centuries to all corners of the earth, the Jewish people absorbed elements of its host cultures while, miraculously, maintaining its own. As many Jews reconnected in America, escaping persecution and seeking to take part in a visionary democratic society, their experiences found voice in their music. The sacred and secular body of work that has developed over the three centuries since Jews first arrived on these shores provides a powerful means of expressing the multilayered saga of American Jewry. While much of this music had become a vital force in American and world culture, even more music of specifically Jewish content had been created, perhaps performed, and then lost to current and future generations. Believing that there was a unique opportunity to rediscover, preserve and transmit the collective memory contained within this music, I founded the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music in 1990. The passionate collaboration of many distinguished artists, ensembles and recording producers over the past fourteen years has created a vast repository of musical resources to educate, entertain and inspire people of all faiths and cultures. The Milken Archive of American Jewish Music is a living project; one that we hope will cultivate and nourish musicians and enthusiasts of this richly varied musical repertoire. Lowell Milken A MESSAGE FROM THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR The quality, quantity, and amazing diversity of sacred as well as secular music written for or inspired by Jewish life in America is one of the least acknowledged achievements of modern Western culture. The time is ripe for a wider awareness and appreciation of these various repertoires—which may be designated appropriately as an aggregate “American Jewish music.” The Milken Archive is a musical voyage of discovery encompassing more than 600 original pieces by some 200 composers—symphonies, operas, cantorial masterpieces, complete synagogue services, concertos, Yiddish theater, and folk and popular music. The music in the Archive—all born of the American Jewish experience or fashioned for uniquely American institutions—has been created by native American or immigrant composers. The repertoire is chosen by a panel of leading musical and Judaic authorities who have selected works based on or inspired by traditional Jewish melodies or modes, liturgical and life-cycle functions and celebrations, sacred texts, and Jewish history and secular literature—with intrinsic artistic value always of paramount consideration for each genre. These CDs will be supplemented later by rare historic reference recordings. The Milken Archive is music of AMERICA—a part of American culture in all its diversity; it is JEWISH, as an expression of Jewish tradition and culture enhanced and enriched by the American environment; and perhaps above all, it is MUSIC—music that transcends its boundaries of origin and invites sharing, music that has the power to speak to all of us. Neil W. Levin Neil W. Levin is an internationally recognized scholar and authority on Jewish music history, a professor of Jewish music at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, music director of Schola Hebraeica, and author of various articles, books, and monographs on Jewish music. Credit for the concept behind this new national style, as The Composers and Their Milieu well as its Mediterranean label, was assigned in 1951 by critic and writer Max Brod to Alexander Uria Boskovich Exemplars of a New Israeli Style (1907–64), also one of Israel’s leading immigrant composers of that era. Boskovich, who immigrated to PAUL BEN-HAIM [Frankenburger; 1897–1984] and the y’shuv from Romania (Transylvania) after studies in MARC LAVRY [Marcus Levin; 1903–1967] were two of Vienna and Paris, achieved recognition as one of the the most successful and most prominent composers in first composers formally and ideologically to address Israel, dating from their involvement in the musical life the issue of a collective Jewish national style. He is of the y’shuv (the Jewish settlement in Palestine during believed to have dubbed the effort “Mediterranean,” the British Mandate). On the international music scene, but he appears not to have used that label in any of they were the composers most often associated with his writings. the embrace of indigenous eastern Mediterranean For its melodic sources, rhythmic impulses, and modal and Near Eastern musical elements and influences flavorings, the Mediterranean style drew upon Arabic, within the context of Western forms—a synthesis that Druse, Circassian, Turkish, and Bedouin wellsprings, became emblematic of the new cultivated art music of in addition to the many diverse traditions of North modern Israel. African, eastern Mediterranean, central Asian, and Near Eastern Jews living in Palestine. Perhaps less The Mediterranean Style directly, it was also nourished by the sounds of nature with which the region pulsated. Thus did European Of all their contemporaries in the music establishment émigré composers often respond to surrounding of the y’shuv, and then in Israel, Ben-Haim and Lavry pressure as well as to internal impetus as they related were the two whose music—through at least the musically to the unique character of the Jewish 1960s—was the most frequently performed in America. ancestral land and its richly variegated folk melos. Their popularity derived in large measure from the novelty of exotic sounds, idioms, and reflections of On the other hand, many composers came to Palestine the land of Israel and of the wider Jewish orient, all solidly grounded in the canon of European art music; clothed in more familiar and relatively conservative they had not anticipated, during their student days Western formal garb. That brew was fermented or afterward, becoming geographically or culturally within the context of a quest for a musical aesthetic uprooted. With few exceptions, whatever their that would characterize the spirit of Jewish national individual backgrounds, orientations, or sympathies, regeneration in an environment foreign to the they would not have thought of themselves as cultural sensibilities of the European settlers in Israel. “Zionists” (Ben-Haim and Lavry included) prior to This came to be known as the Mediterranean style, immigration—especially in the nonvicarious sense or “Mediterraneanism.” Perceived as the road to a of the label that appertained then. Thus, despite distinctive collective ethos that could in turn form an their welcome in the y’shuv as refugees from the appropriate signature music of modern Israel, it was a persecutions in or related to the Third Reich, many much-heralded development, of which Ben-Haim and of them felt a sense of cultural displacement for Lavry were leading exemplars. some time. 8.559452 Maintaining a clutch on links to their common art music. Earlier, in the first decade of the 20th European musical heritage—in the guise of formal century, composers affiliated with the Gesellschaft für structures, techniques, compositional devices, and Jüdische Volksmusik (Society for Jewish Folk Music) performance forces—could provide an effective balm in St. Petersburg (with branches in other cities in the for the trauma of cultural disorientation. From external Czarist Empire) had turned to Jewish folklore and folk perspectives, even as the newly “Mediterranean- music as a source for a new Jewish national approach oriented” composers willingly relinquished Europe to composition. The paths, goals, motivating forces, as their exclusive source for musical substance, their and artistic substance, however, diverged sharply and music could still resonate with classical music audiences fundamentally between the two episodes. in the y’shuv—which were essentially European in makeup or cultural origin, dating to one immigration In the Russian case, Zionist sensibilities had wave (aliya) or another. influenced the awakening to Jewish national-cultural consciousness and identity in certain urban-intellectual This Mediterranean style, then, for all its melodic, circles, where an interest arose in identifying, modal, and rhythmic reliance upon the East, was preserving, and ultimately assimilating Jewish folklore never severed from its European anchor nor isolated and folkloristic properties into art music. And, as from the Western classical continuum. Instrumen- in Palestine, the lure of the exotic—although a very tation remained confined to European standards— different type of exotica—played a major role. But the without forays into ethnomusicological-organological aesthetics were primarily eastern European, heavily experiments. Basic tonal skeletal traits, even within tilted in the secular realm toward Yiddish and Hassidic opposing modalities, were generally upheld on folksong—the very musical materials that dedicated balance; and the standard ensemble types and young Zionists, once they had arrived in Palestine performance norms were preserved. Perhaps most to settle the land, wished urgently (though perhaps significant in the long run was the retention of the rashly) to leave behind as unwanted reminders of, in basic counterpart forms that were enshrined in their minds, a subservient Diaspora Jewry. the Western canon: the string quartet (and similar chamber music structures); the symphony, along The Russian-Jewish national music movement with related but less structurally rigorous symphonic represented a type of ethnic-cultural nationalism even suites, sonatas, concertos, songs