cellio | Entries tagged with jewish music

Today a friend forwarded me a link to this blog post, which talks about a song I was previously not familiar with. The song reinterprets the Yom Kippur afternoon liturgy in a way I find beautiful, resonant, and yet authentic.

Some context: on Yom Kippur when the temple stood, the high priest enacted an elaborate ritual that included offerings to effect atonement for the people. The traditional afternoon liturgy recounts this ritual. (A good chunk of Tractate Yoma in the talmud covers this in detail.) As the high priest splashed the blood on the altar he would count. This song adds some interpretation to the counting -- while mostly including the traditional text in the song.

If you're familiar with this text, I encourage you to listen to Seder Ha'Avodah by Ishay Ribo before continuing. And heck, even if you aren't familiar and don't understand Hebrew, let it play in the background while you read the rest of this. (You can buy the mp3 here. I now have.)

There's a third-party translation that I'll quote from here.

This part is from the liturgy:

And thus he would say
Please, O God, forgive the sins, the wrongdoings and the transgressions
which I have sinned before You, I and my house

The counting here is from the liturgy; the rest is interpretation:

And if a man could remember
the flaws, the shortcomings
All the transgressions, all the wrongdoings
Thus he would surely count;
One, one and one, one and two
One and three, one and four, one and five
He would give up right away
Because he wouldn't be able to bear
the bitterness, the sin
The shame, the missed opportunity
The loss

And similarly for the second petition:

And thus he would say
Please, O God, forgive the sins, the wrongdoings and the transgressions
which I have sinned before You, I and my house

And if a man could remember
the graces, the favors
All the mercies, all the salvations
Thus he would surely count;
One, one and one, one and two
One of the thousand thousand, thousands of thousands and myriad myriads
of miracles and wonders
which You have done for us
days and nights

Both times the people respond by praising God (from the liturgy).

Dov Bear writes in the blog post:

The idea here is that Atonement comes from within. We must recognize for ourselves what we have done wrong and recognize for ourselves all that has gone right and engage with both the good and the bad honestly, without vanity or depression, and through this exercise of introspection, a form of Atonement can begin. [...]

In the song, both counts are overwhelming. The count of failures is crushing, but the crowd comes to the rescue screaming "Blessed be the name of the glory of his kingdom forever and ever!" The next count is equally shattering, but this count of blessings is a celebration and again the crowd provides the momentum screaming the same words "Blessed be the name of the glory of his kingdom forever and ever!"

As someone who has trouble connecting to the temple service and this particular liturgy, I appreciate this interpretation and find a lot to think about in it, especially this year.

Last night was my congregation's annual talent show. (There have been two, so they can now use the word "annual".) There was quite a range of material -- poetry, Yiddish songs, 70s popular music, classical piano music, lots of show tunes, and one religious song (hi). I sang Neshama Carlebach's "Min Hametzar", a song of yearning for God. The performance wasn't perfect (better sight lines between the piano and the bimah would have helped), but I thought it went pretty well and I got a lot of compliments.

This time I was able to get someone to record it and, with permission of the author, share it (the intro contains a text overview):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtX9yWSLwTs

Edit: lyrics and an explanation.

I'm home from the National Chavurah Committee gathering (which I've come to think of informally as "JewCon"). As you might have guessed, I didn't write entries while there, so you get a dump in arbitrary order now. :-)

(Also, I won't be able to catch up on LJ. If I haven't already commented on something you wanted me to see, please ping me? Thanks.)

( Read more... )

A month or two ago I saw a commercial for a new TV show called The Book of Daniel. It looked interesting, but it was a while ago and I had completely forgotten about it -- until some bible-belt protesters managed to get some southern stations to not show tonight's premier, thus making the news and reminding me to set the VCR. (I only saw the one commercial, but it struck me as "respectful but off-beat", like the movie Oh God!, and not the blasphemy the protesters allege.) I suspect we're dealing with either stupid protesters or a smart, manipulative network. I mean, isn't the news the best advertising money can buy?

Erik still needs to gain weight, so he'd been eating mostly canned food. A friend suggested (and the vet concurred) that feeding him baby food might help (more protein), so I bought a few jars of that to try out the idea. He loves that! (Or, to be more precise, so far he loves chicken puree.) Because baby food is intended for people, it has nutrition information -- which tells me that a small jar is 70 calories and 6g of protein. (A baby's RDA of protein seems to be 14-15g.) This makes me wonder what ordinary feline nutrition needs are. Cat food, not being intended for humans, doesn't come with the FDA-required data dump.

I've been listening to a CD by Neshama Carlebach that I picked up recently ("Journey", IIRC). I was surprised to notice that she uses the Sephardi pronunciation of Hebrew -- surprised because her father, who was also a famous singer and songwriter (in addition to being a rabbi) used the Ashkenazi pronunciation. I guess I just assumed she'd follow her father in this, though I'm glad she didn't 'cause Sephardi is what I'm used to and it makes it easier for me to understand what I'm listening to.

I never thought it would be so much hassle to evict a mailing list. I'm currently hosting a list at my shell provider. There is a Yahoo mirror of the list, but for historic reasons that's not the "main" list. Well, I want to stop hosting it, so that's going to change now. This should be a simple matter of moving subscribers, flipping a switch at Yahoo (so direct posting is allowed), and shutting down the current (non-Yahoo) list. In practice, though, moving subscriptions requires the subscribers' active participation (which isn't happening), and only the owner of the Yahoo list can flip that switch (I'm a moderator; the owner is bouncing email), and I'm starting to wonder if moving the list requires sacrificing a goat under a full moon at midnight or some such. (Which would be a problem, as that's pretty likely to be avodah zarah, or alien worship. And squicky. :-) )

Several years ago Transcontinental Music began publishing compilations of new Jewish music. There have been three so far -- 5761, 5763, and 5765. (That's how they name the CDs.) (This year is 5766, for those who are wondering.) I've bought each of them within a year or so of publication.

I still like the first one the best; I don't know if this is because there were more quality submissions for the very first one, or just because my tastes and theirs don't always match up. That said, there is no CD in this set that I regret having bought.

Following are some impressions from each CD. ( Read more... )

A recent issue of Moment magazine came bundled with a CD of new Jewish music -- a sampler, but full tracks and not just teases, so it's something I enjoy listening to. (Yeah, there are a couple tracks I skip, but there are some I like a lot.)

One song that I think is really pretty is "Min Hametzar" by Neshama Carlebach. I find myself understanding some phrases and occasional words, but not being able to put it together. But I think I could probably translate it if I could see it instead of hearing it. For one thing, written text is just easier. For another, I can't quite make out all the words, and anyway I might misspell when trying to write them down, and spelling matters. One thing that particularly trips me up when listening to foreign languages being spoken (or sung) is that I can't always tell where the word boundaries are because people slur text sometimes. For example, until I checked the CD I thought this song was probably called "mi nametzar". And for the longest time I thought the title phrase of "Ivdu et Hashem b'simcha" began with the word "ivduet" (I hadn't yet begun to actually learn the language at that point), which brought me no joy when trying to apply a dictionary.

I've been unable to find the lyrics of Min Hametzar by googling, which doesn't surprise me much. Even if I did find them, they'd probably be in transliteration instead of actual Hebrew, so the first thing I'd try to do is write out the Hebrew and fake it with the ambiguities of transliteration. But I don't think I'll get that far, unfortunately.

(I found an article about the song here -- down toward the end. Aha, it's a compilation of source texts -- so if I had citations I could reassemble it, maybe, but I don't so I can't. Oh well.)

It's fairly rare that Dani wants to do something that could be categorized as "Jewish", so when he does I almost always go along with it. That's how I ended up seeing a concert tonight by Chava Alberstein, who is apparently a big-name Israeli singer.

She's very talented, and the show was fun overall. All of the songs save one were in either Hebrew (mostly) or Yiddish (a little), and there were several where she didn't tell us what it was about, so my comprehension was limited. I was getting a word or two here and there, but not entire phrases.

I knew that some words migrated from English into Hebrew, mostly technical terms. It was still a little disconcerting to hear the word "video" several times in one Hebrew song. (The song was about an immigrant who was working in Israel to feed his family back home, and the recordings he made to send back with the money.) I wonder if speakers of languages from which English has borrowed have the same reaction when they hear English speakers.

She did a group of love songs near the beginning that she sketched out loosely in English. I asked Dani later if they were as sappy in Hebrew as they sounded in English, and he said yes. You can do a lot with sappy lyrics by performing them in a language not native to your audience, though, a trick that opera companies have known for centuries.

She had two backup musicians, a guitarist (she also played guitar) and a percussionist. The latter, Avi Agababa, was really good, and fun to watch. His bag of percussive tricks was quite sizable, though he spent a lot of time on doumbek (or something very like a doumbek -- metal, not ceraminc, and large) and tambourine. When using other items, like cymbals, bells, and something that looked like a bunch of large wooden beads clumped on a cord, he really understood the concept of "less is more".

Now here's the surprising part: we bought our tickets two days ago, asked for "best available", and got third row center. The theatre was about half full (maybe more). Did most of those people really just pay at the door? How did we get such good seats on Tuesday?

Puppy shoots man who was trying to kill him. Good job, Fido! Talk about the underdog winning the day. (Pity he wasn't able to save three of his litter-mates.)

I found this pleasantly surprising: Orthodox Union writes in favor of embryotic stem-cell research (a while ago, but I didn't know before). With precautions, of course, but I find nothing to disagree with in their letter.

Note to anyone who thinks the previous two paragraphs indicate I undervalue human life: make sure you're ready to drink from the fire hose before pushing that button.

innerbitch_rss reports a rumored team-up between NetFlix and TiVo, so that you don't even have to get off the couch to go to the mailbox any more. That'd work. :-)

lefkowitzga gave me a copy a Craig Taubman CD with lots of new music for the (Friday-night) Shabbat service. I have now identified the "Hashkiveinu" that I first heard this summer at HUC and fell in love with. Boy is it an earworm, though! For a song that's supposed to be a bedtime prayer, it hangs on a little too firmly. :-) I recognized some of the other melodies too; I just had not heard attribution for them previously. It's a good collection. Thanks, Gail!

HUC now requires two years of college-level Hebrew (or reasonable facsimile) as a condition of admission (up from one a year ago). Really, I was just looking for the catalog of distance-learning courses (not found, by the way), and the section on the rabbinic program attacked me and made me look. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. (Just to be perfectly clear: Hebrew proficiency would be the least of my challenges...)

A couple of the classes during the Sh'liach K'hilah program were taught by a cantorial student (who is very good, by the way, both as a musician and as a teacher). I mentioned some of this briefly before, but now I'm going into a little more depth.

Early in one of the classes he asked us to brainstorm about things to consider when choosing music for a service. Here's the list we came up with:( Read more... )

He handed out an essay entitled some notes on the future of of Jewish sacred music (yay Google!) by Cantor Benjie-Ellen Schiller. (Aside: we had her as a visiting cantor one Shabbat several years ago, and she's great to work with.) Despite its vague title the essay is good. Excerpt:

Sacred music nurtures meaningful, honest prayer, whether or not the music we ultimately choose satisfies our artistic selves. The real test is whether our sacred music satisfies our spiritual selves, as individuals and as a community. To me, a successful service offers a healthy combination of all three moods of prayer to express an array of three paths toward knowing God.

(Gee, you think there's some debate within the cantorial community? :-) )

Cantor Schiller describes four types of music (three in this essay, one added later):

majestic, expressing awe
meditation, expressing intimacy
"meeting" -- coming together as a community (like when we all sing familiar melodies together)
memory, instantly taking you to another place and time

As you might expect, it's all about balance and appropriateness, matching up the music with the goals of the service -- or rather, that part of the service, because most services will contain most or all of these types of music. We expect Kedusha, the proclamation of God's holiness, to be majestic, so don't use a wimpy low-key melody there. We expect the beginning of the Amidah to be meditative, so that's not the time to be grandiose. We expect everyone to join in on Adon Olam at the end of the service, so choose an accessible tune.

Leigh (the instructor) gave us his "10 commandments of congregational singing", which I enjoyed. (These are for the congregation, not the cantor.) I haven't asked for permission to distribute the document, but here are some highlights:

Thou shalt sing fearlessly, ignoring the possible wondering glances of thy neighbors. They would like to sing with you if they had the nerve and they will sing with joy if you continue.
Thou shalt sing reverently, for music is prayer.
Thou shalt not resist new melodies, for it is written in the book of Psalms, "Sing unto God a new song".

All food for thought as I prepare to lead music this Friday. A lot of the music decisions were made several weeks ago, but my goal was to keep it simple and familiar, and I did have some of these instincts already, so we'll be fine.

Today was a full day. We actually had a real break (almost 30 minutes); during that time I tried to post Monday's entry but saw no evidence that it took. I guess I'll find out when I connect to attempt to post this. I'm sorry for sending large bursts of stuff out all at once.

The campus store and the library have very limited hours during the summer. I haven't yet been to the library (sigh -- who's got time? but I want to), but the store stayed open later today to accommodate us. I think it was worthwhile for them; lots of people skipped part of dinner to buy books and the like. I picked up the JPS Hebrew-English Tanach (I wanted to see it "in the flesh" first to see the size of the print, which is adequate), passed on Braude's Book of Legends this time (highly recommended, but I'll bet I can improve on the $75 price via the used market), and picked up a new talit. I have a talit and it has signifance to me, but there have been times when I wanted the option of a larger one, particularly when leading services. (The one I have, which belonged to Dani's grandfather, is the small "scarf" size.) It turns out that the large size is too big for me (drags the ground, which isn't an appropriate thing to do to tzitzit), but there is an intermediate size that gives me enough material to draw the talit up over my head for the sh'ma, which I can't do with the one from Dani's family. I'd also rather use a larger one when leading services. So now I have that option. I was going to use it for the first time at Friday's service, which I'm helping to lead, but I see wisdom in getting used to it first, so I'll be using it tomorrow.

The planning for that service got off to a rocky start due to logistics (not at all due to the people, who are wonderful), but we finally had a good solid hour and change to go over it tonight. Tomorrow we will meet with our staff advisor about our plans (each group has an advisor), and then tomorrow night we'll solidify things down to the level of who does what and sticking post-it notes in the siddur and stuff. I'm doing all the music leading; that wasn't my plan, but the other two really want to not do this and like me in that role. I introduced them to some new melodies tonight. Some of that was explicit experiment; I figured that if they could pick them up quickly (just by listening) then the others could too. And they did. So we'll be using a niggun that my rabbi taught us at the last Shabbaton, and a new meditation before the Sh'ma (and setting of the Sh'ma) that our cantorial soloist introduced some months back (by Jeff Klepper). Our group feels that in this setting, each service should have a lot that is familiar and some that is new, because (1) we're experimenting and learning and (2) this is a group of synagogue leaders who will then disperse, not an established congregation where you would be much more conservative about change. I'm looking forward to the service; I think we've done a good job of preparing. (I seem to be the unofficial leader of the group, but not for lack of trying to push decisions out to the other two.)

( people in need of a clue-by-four )

All that aside, onward to today's nifty classes.

( class: text study )

( lunch: leadership development )

( class: Jewish music )

( class: shiva/funeral )

( chug: trope )

( class: illness and the community )

( ma'ariv )

This has been a pleasant weekend, for the most part. We've been learning some fun new music at Shabbat evening services lately. Next week's celebration of Shabbat Shira is going to be a big deal musically; this is the parsha where we read about the song at the sea, and we're going to have a more music-focused service than usual. It's also starting an hour earlier so that families with young children can come without hassle. Should be fun.

Saturday morning went well. My rabbi had just come back from a retreat where, among things, they apparently focused on doing more with less. So we skipped some songs and some of the English repetitions and stuff and tried to really focus on the parts we did do. I liked it. I don't like rushing, especially if the rushing is in pursuit of something arguably pointless. (If you've just said the prayer in Hebrew, repeating it in English is pointless to me. If the point is to be friendly to those who can't read Hebrew even with transliteration, then the answer IMO is to sometimes skip the Hebrew. But don't do things twice.)

lefkowitzga joined us for Shabbat lunch, which was very nice. And she found fresh, tasty strawberries in Giant Eagle! I didn't know that was possible this time of year. We had no leftovers. :-)

Gail and I spent some time looking through the collection of Salamone Rossi's liturgical music to choose candidates for the choir. We both like his kedusha (for four voices), so we're going to suggest that. It took me a little while to figure out where the text came from, as I didn't recognize parts of it; it's from Shabbat Musaf, which Reform doesn't do. (Artscroll to the rescue.) Ah, ok. I knew there were differences, but I didn't know they were as significant as they are.

The edition of the Rossi music I have is bad in a couple ways. Some of the transliterations are just plain wrong; the text is also difficult to read in places. This is also someone's attempt to transliterate for French speakers, so it's not the usual mappings. For the last two pieces I retypeset the whole thing, but both times, despite serious proofreading, I managed to make some mistakes. I'm wondering if I should just hand it out as-is this time, hand everyone a pencil, and start reading off the text the way it's supposed to be. Or maybe someone else in the choir is better at transcription than I apparently am. We'll see, I guess. The first step is to get approval for the piece.

Saturday night was our long-awaited D&D game (it's been several weeks), where we rescued the two party members who had been captured by the vampires. It went very well, I thought, and Ralph was able to give us an adventure hook that got us some money and a specific task to pursue. The fight with the vampires, and subsequent rescue, cost a lot of money, so this is a welcome development. (Side note: the character who is largely responsible for this mess in the first place, the wizard, was both ungrateful for the rescue (we didn't get his spellbooks) and presumptuous about the spending of the money. (He got a lot of it for restarting his spellbooks.) He's a pretty ornery character, and in-game we probably would have dumped him long ago. But the player-level dynamics make that hard. I have no idea how much of this the player realizes.)

Sunday dinner was pleasant, except that Dani's been fighting a persistent cough for a couple days and it got worse tonight so we had to bail early. We stopped at a store on the way home to explore alternatives in cough syrup. I hope that whatever he picked out is more effective than what he was using.

Two mechanical annoyances struck this weekend. The first involves the washing machine; I went downstairs to move the laundry to the dryer only to find sudsy water on the floor and (I would later discover) still in the machine. The tub into which the machine drains was almost but not entirely full (and not draining), but I couldn't tell if the water on the floor was overflow or a separate problem. (What would cause the machine to stop, after all? It doesn't know that the tub is full...) So I applied a plunger to the tub and eventually picked out a lot of gunk from the drain; I could tell there was more that I couldn't reach. (What the heck is that and what's it doing in our drain? Eww...) This looked like a job for Liquid Plumber. :-) I rinsed off the clothes from the washer by hand so I could move them to the dryer and started the next load with some trepidation. Nothing went wrong there, so I still don't know what stopped the washer. I do not like this kind of mystery.

The other problem is that either my monitor (CRT) or my graphics card is failing, but I haven't shlepped heavy monitors around yet to test which. (Well, I suppose it could also be a cable. Hmm.) Every now and then my screen flickers and takes on rather more yellow than is normal. My computer has jaundice. Whee. Maybe tomorrow I will investigate further.

Friday night I met Malcolm Dalglish. Neat! (His neice was being bat mitzvah this Shabbat at my synagogue.) Malcolm Dalglish is a very good hammer-dulcimer player, one of several whose recordings I listened to a lot when I was starting to play. I've never seen him in concert and had completely lost track of him, and then my rabbi happened to mention his name in passing at services and my ears perked up. So I tried not to be a fangirl. :-)

Speaking of music, what is the shared musical property that many Yiddish songs have? This is probably really "many songs from such-and-such time and location", but I don't know the genre. But there's something -- a mode, a melobdic pattern, a chord structure, or something -- that allowed me to correctly predict that the song the cantor was about to sing would be in Yiddish, based only on the piano intro. And the song really did sound like the Yiddish songs Dani's mother likes to listen to (those are probably mostly from Russia), though it was not one I recognized. I just lack the sample size to put my finger on what that similarity is. (I don't actually like a lot of this music, so my curiosity will not be satisfied by accumulating a large sample size. :-) )

Saturday morning's ice-breaker question was interesting (though we were trying to keep answers short due to time). Every morning we thank God for making us free. (Orthodox Jews thank God for making us not slaves, instead.) So, looking ahead to 2004, are we more looking forward to "freedom to" or "freedom from" something? (Naming the something was optional.)

I live a pretty privileged life. I have plenty to eat and wear; I have a good job; I have a comfortable home; I have good friends and family; there is nothing that I truly need but lack. So my thoughts turned immediately to "freedom to". Nothing specific came to mind, actually -- I hope to pretty much keep doing the things I've been doing. I have no major changes queued up.

There is one area of concern, though; I hope for freedom from the big-brother government that things like the Patriot act enable. (Were you paying attention? Did you notice that many provisions of Patriot II are now law, and that the FBI can now secretly snoop on you through your bank, credit-card company, stock broker, and even jeweler? What's next, monitoring grocery purchases?) I think our civil liberties are probably at their greatest risk since the McCarthy era. I wish I'd had the presence of mind to say something yesterday; it might have gotten a few more people thinking about it.

The Salamone Rossi music collections I ordered arrived today. This will be nifty to explore. I love Rossi's liturgical music and am looking forward to singing some of it.

There were some surprises, though. First, I thought (from the catalog description) that I was ordering two books that together make up the set of liturgical music called "Songs of Solomon". (There are 33 pieces in the collection, according to the recordings I have.)

What I actually ended up with was one book containing 30 of these pieces (haven't gone through to identify the missing ones yet) and a book of his *madrigals*. The madrigals are in Italian, not Hebrew, and there are no translations. I'm sure they're musically lovely; I'd like to know what they say. I'm not unhappy to have the music -- more Rossi is good! -- but I'm a bit puzzled by what I'm holding.

The other surprise, though, is that these appear to be reprints of editions originally written in *French*. So while the music itself has transliterated Hebrew (not actual Hebrew), the transliterations have occasional funky accent marks and things that are presumably meaningful to speakers of French. (I can fix this because I know what the texts should be, but I'll probably have to re-type pieces that the choir is going to do.) The other effect of the French edition is that there is a long introduction to the book, including a discussion of notation and (I suspect) a discussion of decisions made by the transcribers, which I would very much like to read, and *it's* in French, too. There are also two pages of material in Hebrew (almost certainly not the same text as the French), but sans vowels. (My odds of comprehension go from slim to very slim when you take away the vowels.) Dani should be able to puzzle that out for me, at least.

I'm still very happy to have the actual music -- or rather, some apparently-scholarly transcription of the music -- but I'm frustrated that I can't read the supporting materials. I'm a music geek; I actually read those parts of books.

Hey Fianna or Ray, how's your French? :-)

Monica

a different take on the Yom Kippur avodah

congregational talent show

NHC round-up (part 1)

niggun (voice post)

random bits

Jewish music: Ruach

Hebrew music

Israeli music

short takes

music in worship

Tuesday

weekend

Shabbat (music and freedom)

Rossi music

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