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Cover Art GENESIS SUITE 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. 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 tremendous diversity of music written for or inspired by the American Jewish experience. Through discussions with contemporary Jewish composers and performers during the 1980s, I realized that 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, the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music was founded in 1990. The passionate collaboration of many distinguished artists, ensembles, and recording producers 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 genre. 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. 8.559442 2 Program Note GENESIS SUITE Written by a roster of some of the leading composers of the was written by an impressive group of seven composers— day, the Genesis Suite was not the first instance of combined Arnold Schoenberg, Nathaniel Shilkret (who commissioned authorship. A number of cases of team composition can be the project), Alexandre Tansman, Darius Milhaud, Ernst found in Western classical musical literature, but few even Toch, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and Igor Stravinsky— remotely as lavish or grandiose as the Genesis Suite, and each writing a single movement. It was a project in which none approaching either its Hollywood grand scale or the the “high art” of European émigré composers converged degree of its aspirations to mass popular appeal. with the dynamo of American popular culture—art negotiating with kitsch. Why was this work commissioned, Apart from its scale, the Genesis Suite differs from any and what motivated these composers to participate? What previous team efforts in a number of important ways, are the stylistic peculiarities that bind the work on the one first because it was really not a “team” effort in an artistic hand yet make it eclectic in a bizarre way on the other? The sense, but rather a string of independently written pieces answers reveal intriguing connections between the Genesis by seven distinct composers—some with radically divergent Suite and the Hollywood film industry, as well as the Los musical-aesthetic views, two of whom barely even spoke to Angeles émigré community. each other. It was bound together more as the brainchild of its commissioner and by its concept, dramatic narration, and occasion. More historically significant, however, was its attempted marriage of “high art” with a perceived Hollywood film music sound—an accommodation between “lowbrow” and “highbrow” orientations. It was a hybrid that might have appeared strange, even unworkable, to many at the time, but it is perhaps far less so today, when the notion of “crossover” has become, for some, nearly a genre of its own. [NB. The following discussion of the Genesis Suite is an edited and abridged version of a paper by James Westby, portions of which were delivered at the 1993 national meeting of the American Musicological Society, in Montreal. It incorporates additional comments from his Ph.D. dissertation on the film music of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1994). The editor is grateful to Dr. Westby for his contribution.] On November 18, 1945, at the Wilshire-Ebell Theater, Werner Three of the seven composers discuss their new work. Janssen conducted the Janssen Symphony of Los Angeles Left to right, Tansman, Shilkret, Castelnuovo-Tedesco. in a performance of a highly unusual work for narrator, chorus, and orchestra titled the Genesis Suite. This work 3 8.559442 Another manifestation of cooperative ventures occurred in 1944. Several of the same musicians who would take part in the Genesis project participated in a national conference held in Los Angeles called “Music in Contemporary Life.” In addition to those composers, the symposium involved a diverse group that included such figures as jazz musicians Hoagy Carmichael and Artie Shaw, musicologist-historians Donald Grout and Manfred Bukofzer, music critic Theodor Adorno, and Viennese émigré Hanns Eisler. The goal was to “mobilize music and musicians in the struggle to create a free world, and to utilize the positive force that is music in the peace to follow.” Apart from its musical significance, the Genesis Suite is memorable historically because it brought together, at least in spirit, two powerful 20th-century musical antipodes, Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Though they lived only a few miles apart in Los Angeles, there was lingering hostility between the two; and during that time frame they probably met only a few times, at public occasions. They were Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Stravinsky in Los Angeles, insulated from each other by opposing camps of ardent 1955. supporters. Castelnuovo-Tedesco ascribed the antagonism to Schoenberg’s publication of a satirical choral work in Money was certainly an incentive that encouraged which one movement referred to Stravinsky as “Kleine participation in this collaboration, but there was more than Modernsky” (though it should be noted that Castelnuovo- that at stake. The Los Angeles artistic and literary émigré Tedesco personally favored the Stravinsky camp in terms community, despite tremendous friction, remained very of both personality and musical predilections). The dress tightly knit and, in fact, collaborated actively on several rehearsals for Genesis Suite had to be organized so that projects. One such project occurred in 1943, when the Schoenberg and Stravinsky would not meet, but they German émigré writer and philosopher Thomas Mann ended up being there simultaneously, and they remained helped organize a group of writers, including fellow on opposite sides of the hall. Schoenberg’s response to a émigrés Franz Werfel and Bruno Frank, to collaborate on a disciple’s request for his reaction to the Stravinsky pieces book titled The Ten Commandments, in which each author was, “It didn’t end; it just stopped.” wrote a short novella based on one of the ten articles of the Sinaitic covenant (erroneously translated and referred Nathaniel Shilkret began contemplating a composition to as “commandments”) stated in the Bible (Exodus 20:2– based on the Bible early in his career. In the early 1920s 14). The book’s agenda was clearly stated in its foreword: he was employed at the Victor Recording Company, where while stressing the Jewish foundations of the Bible, this he organized the Victor Salon Orchestra. His goal with that book would “help to open the eyes of those who still do ensemble was to “strike the sympathetic musical pulse of not recognize what Nazism really is.” all people—the highbrows, sentimentalists, dreamers and jazzers alike.” He initiated