The first fruits of a hugely ambitious project to resurrect 350 years of American Jewish music are hitting the stores any day now
Perry Farrell, the Jewish lead singer and front man for Jane's Addiction, which helped define 90s rock 'n roll, is currently making a comeback with the band, releasing an album called "Strays" and setting out on a nationwide tour. It is highly unlikely, however, that Farrell or his music will ever make the cut for the archive of American Jewish Music the Milken Foundation is now beginning to issue.
An initial five-disc release is to be followed by monthly CD issues until 2005 or 2006, when the foundation plans to release a box set totaling 600 pieces on as many as 90 CDs, as well as DVDs containing oral histories based on hundreds of interviews. There are also plans for a book chronicling 350 years of Jewish American music by the archive's artistic director, Neil W. Levin, of the Jewish Theological Seminary.
The likely absence of selections from Farrell's oeuvre, not to mention those of Neil Diamond, Sammy Davis, Jr., Randy Newman and a host of other Jewish pop singers is due principally to the fact that their recordings are already widely available; one of the $ 17-million project's stated goals is to record and make available material that is otherwise out of reach to the public. But there is an added factor working against them and many other Jewish composers and artists past and present: Being Jewish alone is no guarantee for entry into the compilation. Or, as Levin put it to The Report during an interview at the Milken Family Foundation headquarters in Santa Monica, California, "There is no musical racism here."
"Someone's birth or private life is irrelevant," the animated musicologist elaborated. "What is relevant is if the music was part of a Jewish experience, of which there are many kinds. (They include) the Jewish secular experience - by which I mean non-religious, not anti-religious: theater, songs that arose from the Jewish labor movement, songs that arose in Yiddish, and songs asso-ciated with the Zionist experience."
Of the 600 pieces, 500 are new recordings of lost or never-preserved music, commissioned by Levin from orchestras, choirs and soloists in 15 cities in the U.S. and Europe. These include Sephardi liturgies from the American Colonial pe-riod; recordings of complete Orthodox, Conservative and Reform services; klezmer-influenced concert works; ecstatic hasidic music; Yiddish theater work with reconstructed orchestrations; and works commemorating or otherwise influenced by the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel.
Most of the compositions had never been recorded before. Many of the Milken versions were prepared from manuscript copies, the project's directors say. The "Genesis Suite," which features the work of such 20th-century masters as Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Toch, is presented in its first modern commercial recording. And dozens of songs from the heyday of Yiddish theater, vaudeville and radio have been newly orchestrated according to historical performance practice.
The first five discs, which should cost less than $ 10 each and are being distributed by the Naxos label, include music by Kurt Weill ("The Eternal Road") and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, the Italian-born composer of both concert music and film scores (whose pupils included John Williams, Henri Mancini and Andre Previn), with performances by soloists such as klezmer clarinetist David Krakauer and tenor Alberto Mizrahi, and orchestras led by such eminent conductors as Gerald Schwarz.
The Milken Archives of American Jewish Music is the brainchild of Lowell Milken, chairman and co-founder in 1982 (with brother Michael) of the Milken Family Foundation, which concentrates on education and medicine. (Michael Milken, often referred to as the "junk bond king," pleaded guilty to six felonies related to securities fraud in 1991 and served time in prison.)
Lowell launched the archives project in 1990 out of a personal interest in the rich and diverse repertoire of music specifically related to the American Jewish experience, whether sacred or secular. While much of this music has become "a vital force in American and world culture," the London-based Milken wrote in a prospectus, "even more music of specifically Jewish content had been created, perhaps performed, and then lost to current and future generations."
The mission to retrieve this lost corpus began under the direction of composer and producer Michael Isaacson, who enlisted faculty and students at the Eastman School of Music, in Rochester, New York, to make several recordings of liturgical and contemporary chamber works. The project didn't take off, though, until the mid-90s, when the foundation created an editorial board and appointed Levin as its chairman and artistic director.
A crucial step involved finding a re-cording company that would be prepared to take on a mammoth, and perhaps commercially marginal, series of discs. The foundation found its partner in Klaus Heymann, the Hong Kong-based founder of Naxos, a label renowned, since its founding in 1987, for creating first-rate classical recordings with top-notch orchestras for cut-rate retail prices. In the words of BBC Music Magazine, "In the history of the gramophone, no company has more thoroughly overturned the classical record business."
Levin and his board spent nearly two years resolving what they meant by Jewish music, whether to re-record extant works, and just how widely they would cast their nets. Ultimately, they went for the broadest possible spectrum of music and genres, from 350-year-old liturgies through Tin Pan Alley, Second Avenue Yiddish Theater and contemporary Jewish pop.
Quite to his surprise, Levin told The Report, Zionism proved to have been a major influence on American Jewish music, even well before the establishment of Israel. "Every aspect of Jewish life was impacted by the Zionist movement, including the Hanukkah songs that came out of Hebrew culture, which was the fascination of the 1920s and 30s. Nearly all of the Hebrew Hanukkah songs not associated with Zionism, and unknowingly not prohibited by those who didn't want anything Zionist or Israeli, were in fact from Jewish Palestine. They just didn't know that. The very fact of being connected to and interested in the Hanukkah story was a plug-in for political Zionism."
Levin offers as an example a song that became popular among Yiddish speakers during the early part of the 20th century called "Der Hanukkah Licht," by Morris Rosenfeld, who spent time in Palestine, came back to America and subsequently became known as the "poet of the sweatshops" because of his ardent support for and association with the Jewish Labor Movement. "The poem became so popular it was exported back to Europe."
Levin found it odd, in fact, that despite the internationalism people like Rosenfeld supported, the poem harks back to a time "when we had our own nation… when you had an army and weren't always defenseless."
"This was well before any hope for or realization of a state," Levin notes. "It shows that not everybody in the American Jewish world was anti-Zionist and not everyone in the socialist community was anti-nationalist."
Another Rosenfeld song, "Mein Yingele" (My Little Boy), bemoaned the conditions in the sweatshops. Although he wrote it in the U.S., it became famous in Europe. "You didn't need technology," says Levin. "It traveled in a flash to labor movement groups in the Ukraine and elsewhere. In Eastern Europe, it and others like it were adapted to European folk tunes."
The establishment of the Jewish state in 1948, says Levin, spawned no end of musical tributes, both symphonies and concertos. "You mention 'Artza Alinu,'" he says. "I found a piano concerto nobody knows about by Jacob Weinberg, a serious Russian-Jewish composer, today unfortunately largely a forgotten name. He came from a very intellectual school of Jewish musicians, went to Palestine for a short time, and it completely altered his outlook.
"Here, he composed cantatas for synagogues. He also wrote two piano concertos. One is very nice but I can't find anything in it that isn't just a piano concerto. The other was performed a few times I think, once in New York and once in Canada for sure. We spent two years looking for the complete score, and we almost gave up. And the second movement, it turned out, was 'Artza Alinu' in fully classical rendition, as if Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff had written it. The conductor, who was not Jewish, said he heard (elements of) Prokofiev as well. And yet, in another part, he includes the Avodah, a Yom Kippur melody that goes back to Ashkenazi services of the Middle Ages, and which recalls the priestly rituals in the Temple. And he's building a movement out of this virtuoso piano with full symphony."
If separating the threads that comprised the tapestry of secular American Jewish music proved no mean feat, Levin and his associates found dealing with Jewish religious music equally daunting. "One thread was Orthodox," he says. "But what kind of Orthodox? One of the things we found were profound differences in the music of Orthodoxy as practiced in America, as opposed to that of Europe.
"The fact is that most of the Jewish immigrants who came to America during the early part of the last century were very much the poor and uneducated. The people who attended those big sophisticated European synagogues known as the Chor Shuls didn't come to America. As a result, there was no replication of the sophisticated musical elements of the Chor Shuls here. Only the more folksy elements of hazanut persisted.
"The best example was Yossele Rosenblatt (1880-1933), the most renowned American cantor of the 20th century, known to Jew and gentile alike as the 'Jewish Caruso'" - and who played Al Jolson's father in "The Jazz Singer." "Coming to America from Hamburg in 1912, where he had sung in a very sophisticated synagogue, he had the field completely to himself. And somehow, once in the U.S., he caught the imagination of the opera world. In America he staged these immense cantorial fantasias. But he would never have dared perform them in the Chor Shuls of Europe. For all their sophistication, he would have been considered too showy, and he therefore had to limit his virtuoso displays."
Oddly, Jewish theatrics from the Second Avenue Yiddish theater venues also found their way into synagogue liturgies. The top names in Jewish theater, Levin says, composed for the synagogue, and some of their work was, understandably, theatric. At one highfalutin' Hungarian synagogue in what was then upscale Jewish Harlem, I found that they had adopted the music from a synagogue scene composed by Herman Wall for Second Avenue."
Cut-rate compact discs or not, who, in today's increasingly fragmented and dissipating American Jewish community, where Jewish music can often amount to Kol Nidre and maybe "If I Were a Rich Man," is going to plunk down hard cash - and hundreds of dollars, at that, for the boxed set - for music the likes of which almost none of them has ever heard. A boomer buying the complete works of Led Zep, perhaps. But dozens of CDs of American Jewish Music?
Levin has no qualms. He believes universities, high schools, libraries and substantial numbers of individuals will be interested. (Proceeds from the CD sales are to be directed back into foundation non-profit educational and cultural programs.) "This will appeal to everybody," Levin asserts, "because everybody wants to learn something and because it tells the whole story. It is in no way geared only toward Jews.
"Just take klezmer. Who created it, with all its connotations - since the word klezmer initially meant instrumental musician or wedding musician? Young people during the last 15 years. Now, something that people thought was dead is not only alive, but you've also got bands throughout Europe, many of them formed by non-Jews. In Holland, they've even got a band called The Goyim."
Levin believes that one of the more important developments that will flow from the release of this archive, as well as the book he is writing for lay and academic readers, is that for the first time it will be possible to teach courses in American Jewish music at the senior high school or undergraduate level. Before this project, he notes, no professor or teacher had the time or resources to hunt these treasures down, much less to resurrect them in live performance and make them accessible.
"They tried to do a course like this at Columbia, and they abandoned it," he points out. "And the last overview of Jewish music in book form was published in 1929 by Abraham Zvi Idelsohn. People are still using that book. In what other field would they be using a text that was published that long ago? Hopefully, this will generate a new slew of courses not only in American Jewish music, but in Jewish music worldwide."