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!
No comments:
Post a Comment