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.

You’d think that naming the “bestest choral piece ever written ever” would be a subjective matter. Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s not; this is nothing short of hard science. If you disagree with me, it’s because you’re wrong. Sorry.

German joke time – Johann Sebastian Bach was a “sechs” maniac. He wrote six (sechs) Brandenburg concertos, six English suites, six French suites, six organ trios, six violin suites, six cello suites, six flute sonatas, (the list goes on …), and six motets. Joking aside, it is said that this is an homage to God’s making the world in six days and resting on the seventh – Bach wouldn’t presume God-like perfection by writing a seventh concerto, suite, motet, etc. Little did he know that he actually had achieved God-like perfection in practically every note he penned.

The motets were mostly written as funeral pieces. When a person died, Bach’s choir of St. Thomas church would gather outside the home of the deceased and sing a motet before the body was processed to the church for the funeral service. This motet is written for two 4-voice choirs, and is a tour-de-force of what styles were expected of a baroque composer and what the baroque voice was expected to do. This stuff is exceedingly difficult (but fun) to sing; the writing is simply amazing. A quick outline:

• 0:00 a vocal courante, sung antiphonally between the two choirs
• 2:17 one choir begins singing a fugue, accompanied by the other’s choirs continued courante
• eventually the other choir joins in on the fugue – both choir simultaneously sings the fugue AND the dance
• 4:40 a vocal chorale prelude – one choir sings a hymn, while the other provides commentary
• 8:40 another vocal antiphonal dance, this time a bourrée
• and because that’s never enough for Bach, at 10:07, a marvelous fugue which both choirs sing together

Sing this at my funeral, please.