music – From Under the Fig Tree

The beat goes on…

joselitApril 17, 2016November 16, 2017Leave a comment

I mean that literally. It’s not just that I spent much of this semester exploring the ways in which sound --intonation, volume, accent, music and noise -- define the Jewish historical experience. I’ve also had the wonderful opportunity to take things even further by producing and hosting a concert this past week that featured one of my students, David Freeman, and his musical ensemble, Sha’ar.

It’s always a thrill to see one’s students perform outside the confines, and constraints, of the classroom. The thrill is greater still when their performance not only builds on their training but also extends, and enhances, its meaning.

And so it was last Tuesday evening, when an old-fashioned musicale with newfangled music unfolded amid the grand salon of a beautiful Dupont Circle home. Inspired by the compositions of Yedidia Admon, an Israeli composer whose work drew on both Western and Middle Eastern musical traditions, Sha’ar gives them a new spin -- and, correspondingly, a new lease on life -- introducing Admon to contemporary American audiences.

Sound filled the high-ceiled room, sweeping us up in its embrace. Some of us tapped our feet, others bobbed their heads and still others counted beats. It was hard to resist the pull of the music whose fusion of bass, clarinet, electric guitar and drums simultaneously put us in touch with the past and propelled us into the present.

I can’t imagine a better note on which to end the semester.

Sound effects

joselitJanuary 10, 2016November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Much of my winter break, or what used to be called “intersession,” was taken up with work: fine-tuning a manuscript, fiddling with footnotes (yes, that again), preparing for the new term and with it, a brand new graduate seminar on Jewish musical expression and sound.

Now and again, I surfaced to see a movie as well as some dance, treated myself to a leisurely, boozy lunch or two and even kicked up my heels at a friend’s son’s wedding.

What this Country Needs by Benjamin Kukoff — Source: Amazon

While all of these activities were immensely satisfying, gratifying the senses and the soul, they were not the highpoint of the holiday season. That distinction belonged to a poetry reading.

Braving the elements as well as the vagaries of the NYC subway system which, on the night in question, had all but ground to a halt, I ventured downtown last week to hear my friend, Ben Kukoff, read from his recently published collection of poems, What This Country Needs.

I knew, of course, that Ben (a.k.a. 'Bernie') was a man of parts, with a very successful and varied career in television, theater and film. I knew, too, that he was a compelling story-teller, having invited him to my class on several occasions, where he handily won over the students, the toughest of audiences.

What I didn’t know, and what bowled me over, was his way with words. At once economical and shapely, rueful and hard-hitting, Ben’s poems go straight to the very heart of things: to the vexed relationship between fathers and sons, the indignities of aging, the intractability of nature and of history, especially American Jewish history.

Each poem is alive on the page and requires little by way of intervention. Still, it was a real treat to hear Ben give them voice, his wry line readings inflecting this word and that with just the right amount of oomph or restraint.

A push here, a gentle nudge there -- and Ben’s words summoned up a universe. I don't mean to fawn -- that's not my m.o. -- but this poetry reading was one for the books. It sent me out into the cold, and unto the new semester, invigorated and renewed.

Year end

joselitDecember 27, 2015November 16, 2017Leave a comment

I was casting about for an appropriate topic for my end-of-the-year blog. Since everyone, from The New York Times on down, was busily engaged in compiling a list of 2015’s most memorable moments, its highs and lows, I thought I’d follow suit -- but with a twist: I’d take stock of this year’s most memorable academic moments. Perhaps, just perhaps, something approximating a pattern, or, better yet, a theme might emerge, endowing this exercise -- much less 2015 -- with an internal unity, even a degree of symmetry.

Original Fiddler on the Roof Broadway window card/Wikipedia

What if I were to summon up some of the more arcane administrative forms that had to be filed and re-filed over the course of the year, or recall the buzzwords, those equally arcane phrases, that filled the air at faculty meetings and conferences? Maybe recounting the grammatical gaffes and fatal mis-spellings committed by my students as well as chronicling my own mis-steps in the classroom might yield a profitable insight or two?

Just as I was about to compile my list, a brand-new production of Fiddler on the Roof debuted on Broadway, and to glowing reviews. Before I could say “Tradition,” I found my subject. Good-bye to my top ten; hello, once again, to this evergreen of Broadway musicals.

Between last year and this one, we’ve studied Fiddler in class, tracked its provenance and explored every nook and cranny of its production history to the point where we seemed to have exhausted every conceivable angle.

Not quite; there’s more. That the new production takes place within the context of an international refugee crisis freighted this tale of dislocation with even greater plangency.

Its ongoing resonance extended beyond the Great White Way. In honor of the play’s revival, a prominent synagogue in New York actually integrated Fiddler’s lyrical “Sabbath Prayer” into a Friday evening service, where it was sung full-throttle by not one but two cantors.

Now that’s what I call symmetry -- and a fitting conclusion to the year.

Building blocks

joselitMay 5, 2015November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Talk about engaging the senses is thick on the ground in contemporary educational and museological circles, where everyone and her cousin makes a case for enriching the classroom or the gallery with more than meets the eye. All too often, though, it remains just that: talk, talk, talk.

Model of Beth Alpha Synagogue (Jezreel Valley, Israel, 6th century). Displaycraft, 1972/YU Museum

But last Thursday evening, within the precincts of Yeshiva University Museum’s gem of an exhibition, “Modeling the Synagogue – From Dura to Touro,” the promise of synthesizing object and text with sound was fully realized. I don’t mean one of those sound cones under which small groups of visitors dutifully huddle, or the counterpoint of a soundtrack that wafts and drifts throughout the exhibit space. I mean honest-to-goodness, full throttled sound: that of the human voice, the cello and the clarinet.

“Modeling the Synagogue” takes the form of a series of beautifully rendered maquettes of synagogues from yesteryear. There’s one that represents Toledo and another Florence; a third depicts a synagogue from Dusseldorf and a fourth, one from Newport, Rhode Island. Much like dollhouses whose appeal rests largely on their miniaturization of detail and space, these models also stimulate the imagination. We peer inside, trying to conjure up what it might have been like to lean against a Moorish-styled column, to have sat upright in a wooden pew, to be surrounded by light.

But our imaginations can go only so far. We take the measure of these wondrous spaces but stop short of inhabiting them -- which is where music comes into play. An animating presence, it enables us to connect.

Under the sensitive, deft and playful direction of Elad Kabilio and his ensemble, “MusicTalks,” each synagogue model generated its own musical associations, from a haunting Ladino folk song to a touching rendition of Copeland’s “Simple Gifts.” As we moved from model to model, from one time and place to another, we were accompanied by the cello, the clarinet, and the human voice as well as by a varying set of sounds.

Most of the time we listened raptly, attentively to the performers. But on one occasion, those in the gallery couldn’t help themselves and, unbidden, began to sing along with the professional soloist as she gave voice to the refrain of an age-old Yom Kippur piyut.

I don’t know how the soloist felt about this spontaneous musical eruption, but I’ve never experienced anything quite like it, certainly not within the hallowed, and usually silent, halls of a museum. Touching and affirming, enlivening and inspiring, the sound was as much a marvel as the musicianship, and the history, it brought it to life.

Mystic chords

joselitOctober 18, 2014November 16, 2017Leave a comment

The other evening, I attended a concert that had as much to do with movement as with listening. I found it hard to stay in my seat -- and I was hardly the only one. The performance featured Zach Fredman and the Epichorus Big Band as well as Dan Nadel and Musicians, two groups whose musical intelligence enlivens and invigorates the contemporary Jewish music scene.

Drawing on a mix of spoken and musical sounds, on western instruments like the violin and on eastern ones like the oud and the riq; on improvisation and form, on flamenco and piyut (yes, you read that correctly); on contemporary renderings of age-old melodies, the two groups offered a musical experience that was nothing if not layered: at once an exercise in cultural reclamation and re-interpretation.

The setting in which the concert took place was itself a study in layering. I can’t imagine a more perfect venue in which to receive and absorb this music that the sanctuary of B’nai Jeshurun, a riot of color and decorative motif that ought not to hang together, but which does in ways that make our current fondness for minimalism look utterly misplaced. The sanctuary, which dates to the 1920s, reflects an Art Deco vision of Moorish architecture -- smack in the middle of Manhattan.

Recently, the New York Times discussed the difficulties faced by the contemporary orchestra, from a diminishing base of subscribers to latter-day listening practices, which are somewhat at odds with the protocols of the traditional concert hall.

Given the immersive, engaging musical experience I enjoyed the other evening, I can’t help wondering whether that kind of concert might be just the ticket.

The voice

joselitOctober 1, 2014November 16, 2017Leave a comment

During the 10-day period that spans Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, it’s customary to attend to your soul, contemplate your shortcomings, and resolve to do better. Some of the rabbis I know call this “spiritual work.”

Yentl Theater J — Yentl. Source: Theater J

Mine took the form of going to the theater with a number of my graduate students in tow. Appropriately enough, the play we went to see was Theater J’s absorbing new production of Yentl.

This version of the I.B. Singer short story Yentl, der yeshive-bokher, places sexual ambiguity, or “spiritual androgyny,” as the title character puts it right at the getgo, at its core. Earlier versions, especially the 1980s Barbra Streisand vehicle, placed a premium on feminism, on yearnings that had more to do with the intellect than the body.

What struck me as I compared the merits of both productions wasn’t so much the realization that each generation fashions a Yentl that speaks most directly to its singular set of concerns. What struck me most forcefully was the power of the voice or, more to the point, the power of multiple voices, joined together in song and conversation.

From listening to the performers sing and act to engaging in lively discussion about the play with my students the very next morning, I came away heartened, even energized, by the possibilities that lie in store for those fortunate enough to use our voices in song, speech and prayer.

Sound waves

joselitJuly 28, 2014November 16, 2017Leave a comment

This past week, I thought a lot about sound. My aural consciousness was aroused, in part, by what’s currently going on in Israel and Gaza. As sirens wailed and missiles hit their targets, it was hard to concentrate on much of anything apart from the sounds of war.

But then, that wasn't the only thing that got me thinking about soundscapes. The recent publication by Yale University Press of Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material Religion, a handsomely produced volume of essays edited by the redoubtable Sally Promey of Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music, also put me in mind of the centrality of sound in our lives, especially when it comes to the practice of faith.

This book, much like A History of Religion in 5 1⁄2 Objects, which I reviewed for The New Republic a few months ago, makes the claim, convincingly, that religion is as grounded in the sensory -- in sound and smell, visuality and tactility -- as it is in grand abstractions about sin, heaven and the prospect of deliverance.

Its tantalizingly brief section on what Promey smartly calls “audible religion” suggests the plasticity of the approach she and the other contributors to this volume roundly endorse. Religious pluralism, it turns out, isn't just a matter of making room for others at the table. It also takes the form of exploring how some American municipalities accommodated the Muslim summons to prayer and how one Christian seminary reckoned with an art installation, whose use of Hindu ritual bells intruded on the rhythms of the day.

The week drew to a close harmoniously, and soothingly, with a ceremony honoring Laura Cohen Apelbaum for her 20 years of service as director of the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington. The program was held within the intimate precincts of its late 19th century red brick building, formerly a synagogue, now located at 3rd and G in downtown D.C. Although I've had the good fortune to visit any number of times, its pews were usually empty of people. This time around, they were filled to capacity.

The presence of people and the sounds they projected, especially when, at the ceremony’s conclusion, everyone enthusiastically joined together to offer a prayer of thanksgiving -- in Hebrew -- gave shape, texture and meaning to the Society’s efforts at historical reconstruction and preservation. Enlivened by sound, an historic space that once housed a congregation was no longer a mute witness to the past. It had come alive.

The sounds of music

joselitMarch 2, 2014November 16, 2017Leave a comment

The other evening, I -- along with 1,999 others -- crowded the concert hall at the Kennedy Center to hear the internationally renowned pianist, Evgeny Kissin, perform.

Some members of the audience were drawn by the opportunity to see Kissin in person. Others were drawn by the program, which featured a number of works not usually part of his repertoire: sonatas and rhapsodies by Alexander Abramovich Krein, Mikhail Milner and Alexander Moiseveich Veprik, Russian Jewish composers of the interwar years whose compositions are known only to the cognoscenti. And still others came out that chilly wintry night warmed by the prospect of seeing and hearing one of the world’s leading musicians not play, but speak -- and in Yiddish, no less.

Whatever their varied motivations, everyone in the hall was mindful that the evening’s performance was an occasion or, as one of my fellow seatmates put it succinctly, a “moment.” After all, it’s not often that Chopin gives way to Milner.

The opportunity to hear a musician’s voice is rarer still. Most of the time we get to hear them say a few words when announcing the name of the encore they’re just about to play, but then, typically, the sound of their voice is drowned out by rumbles of appreciation from the audience. As for a soloist of any caliber, let alone one of Kissin’s stature, to get up from the piano, stand all alone and unencumbered, at center stage, and recite the poetry of Bialik, Peretz and Glatstein, what can I say? You had to be there!

Applying his textured, powerful and colorful pianism to Yiddish, Kissin made the language dance. He animated its words, sending them forth into the vast reaches of the auditorium. Even if you didn’t know Yiddish, or had only a passing and highly sentimentalized understanding of it, you couldn’t help be moved by the ways in which Kissin brought out its tensile strength, drollery and clear-eyed view of the human condition.

A celebration of sound as well as an homage to Jewish culture, the concert was produced by the Kennedy Center and Pro Musica Hebraica in yet another of its smartly and imaginatively conceived programs. It reminds us that music is as likely to be found in the cadences of Yiddish as in those of the classical tradition.

De trop

joselitNovember 24, 2013November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Earlier this week, I was lucky enough to get a seat on a very crowded Metro and unceremoniously plopped myself down without paying too much attention to my seatmate. Engrossed in her music, she didn’t pay me much mind, either. But within minutes, both of us were chatting away with one another as if we were long lost buddies or kindred souls -- and in a way, we were.

It turns out that the music my seatmate was playing was not Mozart or Miles Davis but the cantillation for Parshat Shemot. In one hand, she held a xerox of the Hebrew text of the Torah passages she was scheduled to layn (recite) at her Reform synagogue in the coming weeks. Her other hand clutched an iPod, whose musical selection -- marked “God” -- consisted of the trop (the musical notation) that defined how the text was to be sung.

Before long, the exchange of furtive glances characteristic of Metro etiquette gave way to open and animated conversation as we traded notes on the ease or difficulty of the Hebrew, the relative merits of memorization vs. actual knowledge and the degree of preparation with which each of us felt comfortable before publicly reading from the Torah.

Over the years I’ve had lots of memorable conversations on the Metro, but none quite as memorable as this one. In the time it took to travel from my home to my office, so much of what I study, teach and write about, from the relationship between technology and religion to the fluidity -- and portability -- of Jewish identity, came together harmoniously, if unexpectedly.

Given the hordes of people who travel daily on the Metro, the odds of running into my Torah-chanting seatmate are far and few between. But should the occasion present itself, I’ll spare no time in telling her how she brightened my day.

Come Blow Your Horn

joselitNovember 17, 2013November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Cue the trumpets: GW has just launched a brand new MA program in Experiential Education and Jewish Cultural Arts. A sibling to the MA program in Jewish Cultural Arts, which made its shining debut just a few short months ago, it will supplement that initiative through its attentiveness to the ways in which the practices and pedagogy of experiential or informal education enhance Jewish culture -- and the other way around.

The wonderful details -- of which there are many -- can be found on the respective websites of each program: Master of Arts in Jewish Cultural Arts and Experiential Education and Jewish Cultural Arts.

What I want to herald here, within the context of the blog, is the broad communal significance of these two undertakings. At a time when the American Jewish community is feeling rather beleaguered and perhaps even unloved and under-appreciated, GW’s decision to throw its weight behind the formation of not one, but two, programs devoted through and through to the critical study, promotion and dissemination of Jewish culture is something to cheer about.

What’s more, that the Jim Joseph Foundation, one of the Jewish community’s most far-sighted and imaginative philanthropies, saw fit to make the MA in Experiential Education and Jewish Cultural Arts possible through its generous support and thoughtful stewardship, should encourage us to cheer more loudly still.

Jewish culture, as growing numbers of people have come to understand, isn't just a tool of engagement or an alternative form of commitment. Yes, it contains all those possibilities. But what truly renders Jewish culture such a vital and generative phenomenon -- let’s call it a life force -- is its status as a gift. From one generation to another and from one iteration to another, Jewish culture gives us license to be creative.