The Fine Art of Listening

I’m ending the last weekday of the Jewish High Holy Days with the final movement of Bernstein‘s Chichester Psalms. You can read about the piece and hear the first movement here. The second movement is famous for a beautiful solo sung by a young boy, singing the popular text “The Lord is my shepherd …”; this serene solo is contrasted by a choral “why do the nations rage …”.

The final movement, however, is my favorite. It opens and closes with music identical to what you hear in the beginning of the first movement, making this a cyclic piece (that’s a fancypants word that just means that musical material you’ve heard before comes back in a different movement or section, solidifying the multi-movement work as a “complete thought” as opposed a separate ideas pasted together for the sake of making a concert. The most famous example of this is the lover’s theme of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique.) But after the angular melodic opening (it uses quartal harmony – harmony based on a wider interval (a fourth) as opposed to thirds (the longstanding standard)), the music melts into a gentle swaying lullaby. The meter is 5/4 – five beats per measure; this is also out of the ordinary, but Bernstein succeeds in making it feel completely natural. It also helps prevent the lullaby from falling into a “too-much-of-the-same-rhythm-seasickness”. The melody is deceptively difficult to sing; the close chromatic notes are hard to keep in tune.

After the lullaby, the cyclical quartal melody returns, but soft and sweet, with a feeling of gemütlichkeit. It’s almost like a mother rocking her baby to sleep, and as she puts it down in the cradle, she whispers the words of the psalm, “how good and pleasant it is …”

What makes something art? Can something designed purely for function (say, a urinal) be art? Does something have to be essentially useless for it to be art?

I’m not going down that road – come to your own conclusion.

It is an interesting thing to ponder, though. There is plenty of gorgeous music written for functional use. Take William Byrd‘s Mass for Five Voices – this setting could be sung on any Sunday as a regular Christian Mass, but is so exquisite that you can just as easily find it in a secular concert hall. Meanwhile, the infamous Missa “My Little Pony” would be booed off any concert stage, yet sadly remains sung in churches. And any church music director who demands on singing Bach’s Mass in B minor will surely be fired once the priest realizes that the first of three Kyries takes over 10 minutes – but concert-lovers will drive for hours to hear a B-minor mass in a hall.

Jewish sacred music seems to be free from the function/art woes that have become a norm for Christian texts. Perhaps this is because musical instruments were not used in synagogues until relatively recently; unaccompanied choral music took a backseat to instrumental music from the baroque to the late romantic. I have had difficulty finding functional sacred Jewish music that rings as both function and art. Perhaps anti-Semitic trends have suppressed Jewish sacred music from becoming mainstream concert music in the way Mozart’s Masses have. Or, perhaps there is just less of this music than I expect. If you know of any Jewish sacred music that is both (liturgically) functional and high art, please let me know!

The only Jewish Service I’ve heard performed in a concert setting is by Ernst Bloch. If you knew nothing of Judaism at all, you would still enjoy this work as a romantic choral symphony – the work’s flavor is not unlike the Brahms Requiem. However, this service could be sung at your local synagogue, while the Brahms (in its entirety) is exclusively performed as a concert piece.

This is the final part of the service, the Aaronic blessing. You’ll hear the cantor singing the blessing and the choir responding, “Amen”.

May the Lord bless you and guard you;
May the Lord make His face shed light upon you and be gracious unto you;
May the Lord lift up His face unto you and give you peace.

The full service can be found here.

Not surprisingly, I’ve learned a lot from writing this blog. Sometimes it lets me dig a little deeper into music I know and love. Other times, like today, I discover something completely new to me. The story of Jacob Weinberg is a great testament to the power of music and the resilience of the human spirit.

Weinberg was born in the Ukraine in 1879, and educated as a lawyer in Moscow. He preferred practicing piano over practicing law, and became a musician. In the early 20th century, nationalism was a common theme in Art Music, and there was a booming interest in folk melodies. Russia had its own group of nationalistic composers, but this group would have excluded Jewish music and composers due to growing anti-Semitic feelings throughout Europe. So, Russian Jews formed their own nationalistic Art Music movement, which Weinberg helped to found. The Bolshevik Revolution resulted in the killing and imprisonment of thousands of Jews; Weinberg fled to Palestine, where he composed the first Hebrew opera. He used the earnings from this opera to move to New York, where he spent the rest of his life as a performer, composer, and teacher.

Weinberg’s String Quartet op. 55 is a perfect example of the Jewish Art Music movement – here, sacred melodies associated with Rosh Hashanah are presented in a concert form. I read here that the sacred melody is the ma’ariv, but I will admit to not knowing this tune, nor can I find it in the piece without some real time and research (which I intend to do later). If you know this melody, and can identify it, please let me know!