SYMPHONIC MUSIC OF JEWISH EXPERIENCE

Between 1933 and 1940, the composer Herman Berlinski lived in Paris as a refugee. While there, he studied at the École Normal de Musique with Nadia Boulanger, fraternized with Le Jeune France, and wrote music for PIAT, an avant-garde Yiddish theatrical troupe comprised of fellow émigrés, mostly from Eastern Europe. When his father passed away in 1938, Berlinski was compelled to write a musical tribute for him—one that would recall his father and the family’s Polish-Russian origins. Thus was born From the World of My Father, a suite of Hasidic-inspired settings composed for chamber ensemble and featuring a new electronic instrument called the ondes martenot.

When France fell under German control, Berlinski left Paris for the United States in haste, leaving most of his musical compositions behind. Once firmly established in the U.S., Berlinski recomposed the piece in several arrangements, though none featuring the ondes martenot. The orchestral version is presented here.

Like many composers, Leon Stein was fascinated by the central role music plays in Hasidic life, as well as the exuberant and fervent energy found in much of the music that is meant to induce states of ecstasy and bring participants closer to the divine. Though Hasidim have long been a kind of “other” within Jewish culture, the notes to this work’s first recording (1954) are curious—not only for the fact that they refer to the movement in the past tense—even by the standards of the time:

Hassidism (rhapsodic pietism) was a Judaic movement particularly active in Europe during the past century. Its adherents believed in the power of music and the dance to evoke that inspired ecstasy on whose wings the spirit might soar to join its Creator.

Three Hassidic Dances uses actual Hasidic melodies, as well as original melodies that mimic Hasidic style. Stein began composing it for a conducting class in 1940 and completed it the following year. Its first recording featured the Cincinnati Symphony, conducted by Thor Johnson, and was issued on Remington Records in 1954.

Vinyl cover, 1954 (Source)

That there are several pieces bearing identical or near identical titles gives one measure of how widespread the fascination has been, even if it has generally been from a distance and characterized by a kind of selective attention. Neil W. Levin has cited such works as indicative of "American Jewry’s general attraction to the cultural and aesthetic parameters of Hassidism and Hassidic folklore, not necessarily related to theological considerations" and as "evidence of the cultural and aesthetic impact of Hassidism upon the American Jewish imagination, even among circles otherwise bordering on hostility to Hassidic orthodoxy." The example below is by the composer Abraham Ellstein, known primarily for his work in the American Yiddish theater.

Because creativity is not an infinite resource, composers often borrow from themselves. As such, music composed for dramatic or other secondary purposes often finds a second life in subsequent compositions. The three works featured here share the fact that they began their lives as a kind of background music. And though they are vastly different pieces, they share more in common than similar roots.

Their composers—Joseph Achron, Darius Milhaud, and Stephan Wolpe—hailed from vastly different origins, yet their lives followed similar trajectories and overlapped in many ways. All were born in Europe in the late nineteenth century. All were Jews. And all used their musical abilities to escape war and antisemitism.

Achron and Wolpe both spent time in Palestine before settling permanently in the U.S., wrote music for the famous Habima theatre company, and encountered a variety of world Jewish musical traditions that expanded their horizons. Achron and Milhaud were both in New York in the 1920s. Though they were probably there at different times, New York was where Milhaud first heard the jazz music that so inspired him and Achron helped establish the Jewish Music Forum and the Society for the Advancement of Jewish Musical Culture, an outgrowth of his work with the Society for Jewish Folk Music in St. Petersburg, Russia.

The Jewish Music Forum twice invited Stefan Wolpe to deliver lectures. On February 23, 1940, Wolpe walked into 23 West 73rd Street and prodded the audience with a challenge: “The question of Jewish music conceals the questioner. . . . the answer is needed by the unclear conscience of those who would have the clear conscience that they are Jewish composers” (Wolpe 2008: 183-4) His point was to argue against approaches to Jewish music that involved reproduction and imitation, a proposition that most certainly resonated with many in the audience.

Achron, Milhaud, and Wolpe all contributed to the field of Jewish music, and all had somewhat different ideas about how to do so. Achron and Milhaud drew on the motifs of different Jewish liturgical musics, while Wolpe extracted “intervallic constellations” and variants from folk music traditions and deployed them in a highly personal and abstracted style.

Julius Chajes was born in Poland and lived most of his life in Detroit. But a two-year stay in Palestine (1934–36) had a significant impact on his work, leading him to conduct extensive research and transform his style of composition. Such was the extent of this influence that one musician who frequently performed his works claimed, “His music is to Israel what Chopin’s was to Poland, de Falla’s to Spain, and Bartok’s to Hungary.”

Chajes was a great admirer of Ernest Bloch, and dabbled in several approaches to composing Jewish music. Liturgical settings and Eastern European influences figure occasionally in his work, but he most favored the Mediterranean sound he developed while in Palestine. In its depiction of Near Eastern landscapes and cultural sensibilities, Chajes’s Hebrew Suite has an almost soundtrack-like quality. Originally composed in 1939 as a chamber work for clarinet, piano, and string quartet, it was revised for orchestra in 1965.

With ten Oscar nominations over the course of his career, Walter Scharf was known primarily for his work in film. But he was a versatile composer whose output ranged from popular songs to the orchestral world. Composed in 1941 in tribute to his grandmother, the majestic The Palestine Suite was among his first concert works. It was premiered on CBS Radio in 1941 and later performed by Leopold Stokowski for a Symphony Under the Stars concert at the Hollywood Bowl. It appeared in that concert alongside works by George Antheil and Alexander Steinart.

A 2003 Obituary in the Los Angeles Times framed Scharf's composition of classical works as “his antidote to the frustrations of the movie and television industry.”