Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, September 9, 1994 TAG: 9409090031
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: By SETH WILLIAMSON SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
You can find out this weekend when the Audubon Quartet and other area classical musicians give two concerts inaugurating Virginia Tech's new Judaic Studies program. "An Evening of Jewish Music" will be presented Saturday at 8 p.m. in Tech's Squires Recital Salon and again at 7:30 p.m. Sunday in Temple Emanuel in Roanoke.
Figuring out just what qualifies as Jewish music isn't as easy as it might sound. Audubon Quartet first violinist David Ehrlich, who grew up in Israel, has pondered the question this summer.
"It's not just music that happens to have been written by Jews," said Ehrlich. "For example, when I lived in Israel there were composers who said, 'I'm a universal composer. I'm a student of Schoenberg or the Second Viennese School and I continue in that style and I just happen to live in Israel.'''
On this weekend's programs, some of the more interesting music falls into this category. The Audubons, along with pianists Teresa Ehrlich and Nitza Kats and cantor Garnett Carroll of Temple Emanuel, will perform music composed by musicians who died in Nazi concentration camps. Though these pieces, some quite rare, will get a performance, Ehrlich says he doesn't necessarily consider them "Jewish music."
"What we today call 'Jewish music' in general is the music that was transferred to us from Russia, Poland. For many of the Jews who lived there, there was no other profession for them but to entertain. The Hassidic movement believed in serving God through song and dance. They encouraged people to learn to dance and play instruments. This music has a very strong signature on it. You listen to it and you say immediately, 'This is Jewish music.'"
In the film "Schindler's List," the long section of John Williams' score titled "Schindler's Workforce" - which on the screen accompanies a panoramic sequence of Polish and Eastern European Jews from diverse social backgrounds - has a pronounced Hassidic flavor.
"But if you really look into it, Jewish music goes way back, long before the Hassidic movement," said Ehrlich. "We'll never really know how it sounded. There was a whole Jewish community in Yemen, which later moved to Israel, and they developed their own music which doesn't sound like Hassidic music, but that for sure is Jewish music. There's no way to bring all this to one concert, but we'll have some music from Israel, some music from the camps, and some music from the Hassidic movement."
Related to Hassidic music is klezmer music, an Eastern European genre that's been called "Jewish jazz." Klezmer music has undergone a small renaissance over the past decade in America, and the final section of this weekend's concerts will be a sequence of Jewish wedding music performed klezmer style by Ehrlich, Audubon cellist Tom Shaw and pianist Teresa Ehrlich.
One characteristic piece of Jewish music is so important that concertgoers will hear it in three different incarnations. The Kol Nidrei, which is the most solemn of the prayers chanted on the eve of Yom Kippur, will be performed in Max Bruch's famous arrangement for cello and piano, in another version for viola and piano and finally in its traditional form by cantor Garnett Carroll.
David Barzilai, who teaches political thought and humanities courses at Virginia Tech and who worked for two years to get the university's Judaic Studies program off the ground, recalls a family incident he says illustrates the universality of Jewish music.
"When I first met the grandfather of my wife he was in Amsterdam. He was from Surinam and he was 80 years old. ... The next day we talked about our heritage and he started singing songs that he remembered from his childhood in Surinam - and they were the same songs that I remembered from synagogue in Israel!"
Barzilai agrees that it's hard to pin down precisely what makes a given work Jewish. But real Jewish music always betrays the influence of the Bible, he said, as well as a certain Oriental or Slavic feel.
"Israel and the Jewish people were influenced from all over the world. We came from all over the world and we brought the music from all over the world. It's only the touch of Hebrew and the Bible and some hidden element that makes it Jewish," said Barzilai.
by CNB