Saturday, July 6, 2019

May the Words (2019): A Short Motet for Men’s Voices for a 15th Anniversary Celebration

My longest professional tenure is as Choirmaster at Congregation Adath Jeshurun in Elkins Park, PA. I have been a professional/staff musician there continuously since the fall of 1985.

I started there as the bass singer in the professional choir—which, back then, was accompanied by organ, and sang Friday evenings, Saturday mornings, Festivals, and, of course, the High Holy Days—truly substantial musical work in those days!

Over the years, the congregation’s taste, priorities, and finances changed, and so did the role of the professional choir: first, Friday nights were eliminated; later, congregants who were to celebrate a bar or bat mitzvah were given the option to have or not have the professional choir & organ in the service, and an increasing number of bar & bat mitzvah families began opting not to have choir & organ in those Saturday morning services; until, finally, the professional choir was relegated to only appearing on Rosh Hashanah (the New Year; in the evening and the two daytime services) and Yom Kippur (the evening—Kol Nidrei—and the entire day, which normally lasts from 9 AM to c. 7–7:30 PM, during which the choir & organist get a total of maybe 2–2.5 hours off for Torah readings and sermon) plus the very occasional Saturday morning service if someone was willing to sponsor a choir & organ service.

I had the privilege of working for Cantor Charles Davidson from my hiring in 1985 until 2004 when he retired. Almost everything I know about Jewish liturgical music I learned from him—to the point of having subbed for him for 6 weeks at one point! His thorough codification of Shabbat, Festival, and High Holy Day service music (which I call “The Davidson System” for integration of a choir into Jewish services and about which I would like to write at greater length at some point) was what made it possible for the professional choir and organist to follow most everything that went on in services without a prayer book—unlike many choir situations, including some in which I have taken part over the years, when all that the choir singers were given were individual extracted voice parts to the liturgical pieces, just like instrumentalists; and wherein the service was run a cappella and the cantor did not have perfect pitch!

Hazzan Howard Glantz, one of Cantor Davidson’s many, many students from Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, arrived in 2004. His arrival coincided with a huge revision of the prayerbook for the High Holy Days—and no particular recognition by the rest of the synagogue leadership of what that meant for the High Holy Day choir & organist.

In a normal synagogue situation, the rabbi simply tells the cantor what they want done/done differently in a service, and the cantor has sufficient background and experience to make it happen. Not so when a choir & organ (or even just a choir) is involved—everything has to be codified and written out. So: preparation for the 2004 High Holy Days was about as frantic as you could possibly imagine. Both my wife, Pam Hitchcock, & I worked day and night on the newly required liturgical music from proofs of the new prayer book and recordings by Hazzan Glantz of new congregational melodies to be introduced along with the newly expanded liturgy—and more than once pulling close-to-all-nighters to get everything ready, including one on Kol Nidrei!

Over the succeeding years, more and more of the High Holy Days liturgy was codified, modified, corrected, and, finally, over the past three summers, fully engraved and indexed until, for the 2018 season, the upgraded choir books for the High Holy Days were finally completed—15 years later!

This past May, Hazzan Glantz was honored for his first 15 years of service to Congregation Adath Jeshurun. Now: within the past 10 years or so, Hazzan Glantz founded a men’s choir from the congregation and asked me to be their music director. Hazzan & I worked up music for the conclusion of the Saturday morning Torah service and also for the Musaf—the so-called “additional”—service specifically for Shabbat and Festivals. The men’s choir did not participate in services for a few years (the new rabbi at that time didn’t like their participation), but they were called upon this past May to reprise their liturgical role in that service.

Which, finally, brings me to my newest original piece.

One spot in services where choral participation is almost always appropriate is at the conclusion of the Amidah—sometimes referred to as the “standing prayer”—all or the 2nd half of which of which is recited privately by the congregation. It is customary to bring that private prayer time to a close with a quiet setting of one of the concluding texts of this prayer, which may be a choir piece or which may be a congregational melody. One of these texts is Psalm 19:14: “May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock [or strength] and my Redeemer.”

Since the men’s choir hadn’t sung for a while, we didn’t have anything for that point in the service that would go together in the one rehearsal and warmup that we were allotted for this service (more on that below). So: the week prior to the rehearsal, I wrote a simple a cappella setting for TBB of the above words as a tribute to Hazzan Glantz. As we rehearsed it, he was sufficiently happy wth what heard that he recorded our rehearsal run-through of the piece—which is now the first and only recording I have of it!

This is not my first setting of this text. My first setting dates all the way back to June, 1973 after my freshman year at Temple University, about which I wrote in my inaugural blog post which you may read here. That setting of May the Words is now published by Musicspoke.com; and you may see & hear that piece via the Musicspoke link above.

Nor is this my first setting of this text for the Adath Jeshurun men’s choir. I wrote a more extended setting for them in Hebrew in 2011 (followed by the Oseh shalom text—“May the One who makes peace in the heavens make peace for us, for all Israel and all who inhabit the earth. Amen.”) which we sang in services & elsewhere a number of times—but we’d have needed more than one rehearsal to put it back together. I do hope to get a good recording of it and get it published at some point.

The new piece uses material similar to the 1973 setting, but is much more concise and, again, designed to go together quickly.

You may listen to this new piece here—enjoy!

Wednesday, July 3, 2019

A New Facebook Page for my Musical Activities; and: Two Harry Warren Songs, Arranged for Barbershop Performing Forces (Updated July 4, 2019)

I’m not even going to look at the date of my last post here until I actually post this—it would be worse than embarrassing. (I just did…embarrassing!!)

Explaining the lapse will be time- and bandwidth-consuming, so: if you really want to know where I’ve been in the interim, feel free to ask me elsewhere or in the comments section below, and I’ll try to fill in the gaps for you.

Two sets of circumstances have converged into a very good reason for picking up where I left off right now.

First, I have just launched a new Facebook Page:

Robert A.M. Ross Music is to be a clearinghouse page where I shall work to keep everyone interested abreast of what I’m up to as a composer, arranger, editor, etc.…if you’ve been following me to any extent, you know to some extent the breadth of my musical activity. And, I would think this sort of social media presence will be a little easier to maintain than this outlet has been.

I’m planning to make this page a repository of links to things I’ve done for the past few years so that everything is available in one centralized location. This will include past blog posts, links to Soundcloud.com recordings, the occasional stray YouTube video, and links to the few extant places where my music has been published and is still available. So, please visit and like the page! I will be sending out “Like” invitations via Facebook; maybe via Twitter, and, eventually, perhaps via Instagram (which I joined only recently & for which I am still in the learning phase).

Update: Yesterday (7/3/19), I created the page, calling it Ralamar Music. However, I received some swift and sage branding advice since putting the page up (that was fast, no?). I am changing the name of the page to Robert A.M. Ross Music as stated above. First: apparently I have to get past my reluctance to use my name as a brand. Second: I have to take Ralamar Music down and start all over with Robert A.M. Ross Music because for some arcane and algorithmic reason, Facebook won’t let me simply change the name of the existing page. So: please stay tuned and look for the new page (and new invites) later today.

Second: I have placed two arrangements with SMP Press, the relatively new publishing arm of sheetmusicplus.com, who, among many other things, holds copyright permissions on hundreds of pop tunes and “standards”—hence: if you are an arranger with a version of a tune for which they hold copyright permissions but never got direct permission to arrange, you can place it with SMP Press (as long as the 1st page prominently contains the sometimes-lengthy copyright notice in full exactly as they have worded it).

This is exactly what I did with two Barbershop Quartet arrangements that I wrote in 1998 for a professional Barbershop quartet named the Synchromatix with whom I sang Tenor (which is really countertenor under any other circumstances, contrary to what the Buffalo Bills sounded like in the movie version of The Music Man—the Barbershop sound paradigm has changed significantly since then).

The two arrangements—That’s Amore and Chattanooga Choo-Choo—were written for the Synchromatix for an outdoor wedding in Philadelphia. I remember absolutely nothing about the event, where it was, why (the groom, I think) wanted these two selections, or even why I was asked to write these arrangements. Nonetheless, this all happened, and now the arrangements are commercially available.

Here’s further background on That’s Amore

…and on Chattanooga Choo-Choo.

I find it interesting that both of these were originally songs written for movies. Even more interesting is that Glenn Miller’s original recording of Chattanooga Choo-Choo was the 1st Gold Record winner ever, the 78 having sold c. 1.2 million copies.

The listings for both of these pieces include instrumental renditions (thank you, Finale®️ sound-files!) as well as score samplers. So: if you conduct or sing with a men’s choir or Barbershop group of any sort, please look these over and spread the word!

And: if any of the above links don’t work properly, please tell me yesterday so I can fix the problem!

And, once again: please visit and like Robert A.M. Ross Music!