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Historical Record : Previewing Volume 01

In its newest multimedia volume, The Song of Prayer in Colonial and 19th-Century America, the Milken Archive of Jewish Music tackles the oldest American Jewish music in existence. It is music of the Western Sephardi tradition, a legacy of sacred song that was carried to the shores of colonial America by Jewish immigrants whose own ancestors fled religious persecution in Spain and Portugal. Volume 01 also features the music of the 19th century American Reform movement: songs of worship in German, English, and Hebrew set to melodies inspired by traditional Jewish music or borrowed from classical compositions and arranged in the style of Protestant hymns. Crafted by Jewish and non-Jewish composers alike, these original works were created in response to the unique desires and tastes of a distinctly American Jewish community. The volume will be released online this Tuesday, but you can hear a preview now.

Going Green: Tu b'shevat

Ready the garden hoe and soil! Tu b’shevat, the Jewish “New Year of Trees” starts at sundown on February 7. Considering it is too cold in most parts of the world to plant trees, the Milken Archive suggests donating to charities who are more adept at this work and instead curl up and imagine warmer weather with the Milken Archive’s appropriately named Volume 02: A Garden Eastward. This volume, which is themed around the rich and variegated legacy of Sephardi Jewish culture in America, features works like cantor Aaron Bensoussan’s L'kha dodi, Bruce Adolphe’s Ladino Songs of Love and Suffering and Hugo Weisgall’s vocal-orchestra setting for which the volume was named.

Musical Theater Maestro: Joseph Rumshinsky

Joseph Rumshinsky, along with Sholom Secunda, Alexander Olshanetsky and Abraham Ellstein, was one of the “big four” of the Second Avenue Yiddish musical theater scene when it was at its zenith. It was a mission of Rumshinsky’s -- who died February 7, 1956 – to edge Yiddish musical entertainments toward his theoretical ideal of a new American genre of Yiddish light operetta (or, as one critic later characterized Rumshinsky’s admittedly unfulfilled aim, operetta in Yiddish). Like the other three composers of the Second Avenue “big four,” Rumshinsky never abandoned entirely his sacred music roots and his youthful cantorial exposure, and he composed a number of enduring liturgical pieces once he was firmly established in the theater.