A new Jewish music is making a quiet revolution, pushing the boundaries of both serious avant-garde music and Jewish musical expression. It began slowly with Steve Reich's groundbreaking Tehillim in 1981. Reich has built an important foundation with a handful of other Jewish-oriented works in the intervening years. Different Trains (1988) explored intertwined memories of American trains and the trains of death in the Holocaust. The Cave (1995) echoes with the voices of the three religions that lay claim to the ancestral cave at Hebron by using complex voice samplings and videos. The last two years has seen a flurry of further activity commencing with the 2001 CD debut of Lost Objects by Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe. Using the Torah and Talmud as textual referents that work ponders the concept of loss in a matrix between the mundane and the sublime. In October 2002 the New York premier of the video opera, Three Tales by Steve Reich and Beryl Korot at the Brooklyn Academy of Music examined the Hindenburg disaster, the nuclear tests on the Bikini atoll and the cloning of Dolly as technology gone wrong in contemporary society in light of the biblical Creation and the Garden of Eden. January 2003 saw the premier of David Lang's Psalms Without Words, a suite for solo piano that finds a unique musical equivalent for each word in the Book of Psalms. Expected in October 2003 is the world premier of Lang's World to Come at the new Zankel Hall in Carnegie Hall. This video and cello piece uses the deathbed Vidui (Confessional) as its operative text. Something seriously Jewish is afoot in the downtown music world.

There is of course lots of Jewish music in New York these days. The Carlebach niggunim proliferate formally and informally, and most services, weddings and simchas are filled with traditional song. The klezmer revival has mushroomed into a mainstream movement combining Eastern European klezmer with crossover Jazz, Latin, Western and New Age sounds. Israeli pop and traditional musicians continually find their way to many New York venues. The vast majority of this contemporary Jewish music is rooted in popular music and traditional Hebrew, Yiddish or religious texts. Popular Jewish music rarely challenges the boundaries of musical culture and is simply musical entertainment welded to tradition that makes for easy listening. In stark contrast, Reich and Lang violate boundaries and are determined to redraw the cultural map.

Reich and Lang are the inheritors of an unlikely Jewish musical heritage. Arnold Schoenberg's unfinished 1933 masterpiece Moses und Aron expressed a radical interpretation of the biblical narrative in the equally radical twelve-tone musical system invented by the composer. The two-act opera opens with the revelation at the Burning Bush that introduces Moses to an unknowable and invisible God. The difficulties this abstraction poses for the Children of Israel climaxes in the revolt of the Golden Calf. The attempt of Aron to describe the inexpressible mystery of God to the Jewish people is seen by Moses as a terrible corruption of the concept of a pure, abstract God. Schoenberg struggled with the very fundamentals of Jewish belief exactly at the moment that Nazism gained political power in Germany. He expressed this dilemma in the highly abstract idiom of twentieth century modernism. Reich and Lang carry this dialogue into the twenty-first century by incorporating minimalism and serial musical forms as they engage fundamental Jewish ideas.

Lang's Psalms Without Words utilizes musical abstraction as an expressive response to the concrete reality of the words of Psalms. He composed the sixty-five minutes of Books One and Two as his personal attempt to study and penetrate the meaning of the Psalms. Each word, in English and Hebrew, was examined, sounded and parsed in light of traditional commentaries and then assigned a musical notation, syllable by syllable. Meaning erupted into sound that coalesced into the rhythm of the verses themselves as they grew line by line, psalm by psalm. Reich described the work as "totally under the yoke of the text." And yet as closely linked to the text, it is simultaneously non-descriptive and independent. The frantic beginning immediately captivates the listener as an intense agitated repetition of notes pause for musical breath and then descend into a slow, delicate minefield of complexity. A seriousness of tone is carried through each change of tempo as melodies surface, crystallize, ossify and then finally evaporate at the end of Book One.

Book Two begins spare and delicate as an elegiac melody arises, breathless with expectant pauses that turn into introspective meditations on subtle meanings that progressively become thinner and thinner. As the music's twists and turns it slowly draws us into its own drama. It is incredibly beautiful, like the inside of a magical cave, moving, swooping and descending into sadness tinged with pain. A pastoral interlude borders on the hypnotic with a melody that slowly rises, assuring us in some incoherent way of the validity of our faith. Paradoxically Psalms Without Words rises directly note by note from the sacred text and becomes an independent aesthetic experience of Jewish study.

In contrast Reich's Tehillim never leaves the actual text as expressed by two soprano voices deeply enmeshed in a growing intensity of percussion and orchestral repetition. The voices gradually repeat single words and phrases of Psalm 19: 2-5 in a rhythmic chant that by its hypnotic repetition becomes a meditation in praise of God the Creator. "The heavens declare the glory of God, the sky tells of His handiwork" is woven into a dense fabric of sound and voice that causes us to sway to its rhythms and aspire to higher and higher spiritual sensations.

The next psalm fragment, "Who is the man who desires life, and loves days of seeing good…turn from evil and do good, seek peace and pursue it" (Psalm 34: 13-15) is a chant sung with the persuasive drive of African percussion. Psalm 18: 26-27, "With the devout, You act devoutly…and with the crooked You act perversely" is a quiet exploration of God's mercy and ultimate judgement. The thin high soprano voices echo the Hebrew words praying over and over again, insisting, pleading and finally convincing us. The repetitions, phrase shifts and tonal adjustments all add important layers of meaning to the two verses until the tempo bursts into the final ecstatic Psalm 150: 4-5 "Praise Him with drum and dance…Let all souls praise God, Halleluyah!"

Reich's repetition of verses and musical phrases give us the opportunity to contemplate the specifics of King David's words as illuminated by hypnotic rhythms and female voices. The meaning of the sung Hebrew blossoms and is shaded by shifts in tone, tempo and musical texture. Interestingly these fragments seem to imply the existence of the remainder of Psalms set to music and voices, as yet unrevealed; a vast sea of unheard music waiting to be written.

David Lang, photo by Archie Kent

Lost Objects, a collaborative musical work by Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe with a libretto by Deborah Artman, is an eclectic oratorio that includes chorus, soloists, a baroque orchestra and electric guitar, bass, keyboard and drums. It is intensely textual as it expands biblical (Vayikra 1, 4, 6 ) and Talmudic texts (Baba Mezia) with contemporary riffs on all manner of lost objects and loss in general. The hour long piece begins with the banal "I lost a sock…" and drifts through the possibilities that increase in gravity from "I lost my way" to "I lost my son" and finally to "I lost my resistance." Lost abilities of speech and technologies ascend to a biblical core of loss that all sin implies ; "When any man of you brings an offering…"

With increasing urgency the libretto paraphrases the Talmud as it explicates the mirror image of loss in "I found my enemies… my brother's… my neighbor's ox…I cannot withhold my help, I cannot hide myself…" and segues into the horror of a missing child. Loss and gain are not petty concerns. The biblical and Talmudic sections are pounding, urgent and brazen in a way that is only matched by the section on lost children. There is no denying the texts. The Talmudic contention of "two holding on to a garment," with the questions of ownership, rights and property digs deeply into the nature of what we may have and hold and of course, what we may lose. One cannot lose without possession. Pushing this further, the track, "Not our Darkness that we fear…but our light" reveals the fear of finding that which was lost. Loss may be central to our identity even as the libretto shifts to the mundane world and asks, "Amelia where are you…Somewhere." Without text, the last track simply echoes the past sounds that we the audience have now lost. The oratorio Lost Objects is exhausting and invigorating.

This new Jewish music is not easy music and is certainty not casual armchair listening for all. It is demanding and needs to be repeated over and over again to allow meanings and relationships to emerge and develop. It does not fit easy categories and demands an open ear, an open mind and an open heart. These composers ask us to listen and think, even study and perhaps dissect the text and music in order to reveal its treasures. This new music is just like the Jewish texts and traditions we live by, both obtuse and demanding. If we would but give it the benefit of the doubt, it is clearly the most exciting, challenging and authentic Jewish music of our time.

Richard McBee
June 25, 2003

Moses und Aron (1933), opera in two acts by Arnold Schoenberg;
BBC Orchestra & Chorus; conductor Pierre Boulez; Sony Classical

Psalms Without Words, Book 1 & 2 (2002) for solo piano by David Lang;
Performed Jan. 16, 2003 by Andrew Zolinsky at JCC Manhattan. Unreleased

Tehillim (1981) for 3 sopranos, winds, strings, percussion & keyboards by Steve Reich;
Ossia conducted by Alan Pierson; Cantaloupe Music

Lost Objects (2001) Oratorio; music by Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe; libretto by Deborah Artman; Performed by the Bang on a Can Lost Objects Ensemble and Concerto Koln conducted by Roger Epple;
Teldec New Line

Published in The Jewish Press