Vol. 38, No. 18

1-18-2007
By: Julia Harris

Music fest bridges East and West

Jewish music series inspires

Ask an ordinary, non-music expert to name some prominent Jewish musicians and you’re likely to get the names of one or two Broadway composers like Irving Berlin or Oscar Hammerstein.

To a triumvirate of music scholars affiliated with Ohio State’s Melton Center for Jewish Studies, that’s a statistic they’re hoping to change.

“There’s so much more out there,” says Steven Glaser, associate professor of piano.

“Bob Dylan is Jewish,” adds Amy Horowitz, a scholar in residence in Jewish music and folklore at the Melton Center.

The last four years, Horowitz and Glaser — together with Jan Radzynski, a professor of composition in the School of Music — have produced a series of concerts and musical performances called Jewish Music East & West.

The 2007 series kicks off on Jan. 25, with the provocatively titled “Thwarted Voices: Music by Composers Driven into Exile or Murdered by the Nazis.” Pianist Phillip Silver, an internationally recognized performer, will present works by Paul Ben-Haim and Viktor Ullman — who was transported from one concentration camp, Terezin, and killed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz in 1944.

“The title kind of hits you in the face, doesn’t it?” says Horowitz. “And that’s by design, because it’s important for us to reclaim not only the music of those who were murdered in the camps, but the reality of what really happened there.”

Other offerings in the 2007 series include a performance by Pharaoh’s Daughter, an eclectic folk-rock band (co-sponsored by CityMusic); works by Argentinian-Jewish composer Osvaldo Golijov; and the premiere of Radzynski’s own “Sonata for Cello and Piano.”

It’s fitting that a Radzynski piece should find its setting in this series, since it was Radzynski who first came up with the idea. He launched the inaugural series in 2002 to expose audiences to music they may not have heard before. Designed originally as a one-time shot, it so entranced Horowitz that she convinced Radzynski and Glaser to make the series an annual one. They formed a music committee that meets regularly to discuss, tussle over and ultimately decide upon the selections for each year’s slate of concert productions.

“While we’ve never actually vetoed anyone at our committee meetings, we do challenge each other,” Horowitz says. “Together we’ve conceived of a series that includes classical chamber music as well as popular folk music. We use the idea of east and west to communicate that Jewish music is all over the map. There’s music from Israel, from Europe, from Libya and Iraq and India.”

The series has succeeded in bringing a wide variety of musicians and performances to Ohio State. The inaugural series featured Russian Jewish music from the first part of the 20th century, choral music from the 19th century composed primarily for synagogues and music composed in Israel by European Jews who settled there after World War II.

For the March 2005 concert, Horowitz and her colleagues brought in a group of artists who presented Yiddish theater songs from New York City as well as Tel Aviv, Paris and Buenos Aires. Another concert from that year featured works from Ernest Bloch, a Swiss-born composer from the early to mid 1900s.

“For that concert, we decided to perform a string quartet by Bloch that is rarely performed because of its length,” Radzynski says. “It was one hour long and it was wonderful.”

Embedded in the process is an effort to educate the university community about the music and its context. Musicians brought in for the series often give lectures or lead master classes to interact with students and faculty. For this year’s series, Horowitz says, faculty from different specialty areas around the university are bringing their classes to relevant concerts. Instructors of Latin American studies courses, for instance, have already indicated they will bring students to the March 18 concert featuring Golijov.

“You don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy these concerts or to be interested in this music,” Glaser says. “Come for the artistic enjoyment or the intellectual stimulation, and you might learn something too — that would be a bonus.”

For details about the five performances, including dates, venue and ticket costs, visit meltoncenter.osu.edu.

Behind the scenes

The “Thwarted Voices” concert on Jan. 25 spotlights the lost voices of artists who were killed in the Holocaust — artists like Viktor Ullman. Ullman was transported in 1942 to a Czech concentration camp known as Terezin, where the Nazis had confined a number of prominent artists, composers, musicians and other creative individuals. In what may seem reminiscent of the band that played while the Titanic went down, these musicians wrote and performed a volume of operas, plays and concerts during his captivity. Ullman wrote 23 works in just 24 months. (For a complete list of compositions created at Terezin, as well as more details about the camp itself, visit interdisciplinary.neu.edu/terezin/music/legacy.html)

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