Shabbat Chazon 2010

Shabbat Chazon 2010

Good Shabbes!


Where are we? We are in Ivri time. We are in Hebrew time. We are in Yisra-El time. I invite you to leave behind American time. In Ivrit there is no verb for “to be”. Like many other language cultures around the world where there is no verb for “to be,” our ritual lives are cyclical - and our religious texts renew us and we renew our texts in a never ending wave of possibility. When the linearity of time goes away, our words focus on the potentials of our actions, on the deep levels of intents of our being, and on the potentials uncovered once actions have happened.
Some say our word for “to be” is nothing less than the name of god – Yud, Hey, Vav, Hey. The sages teach that Hashem - the holy name of g-d - can be read as as Yud Hey and Hey (after all, vav means “and”), which is Yah with and extra Hey for potential, for the strong force that binds the world together, for gravity. That is what, where, and when we are as a people - we are an embodied state of potential. We are the extra Hey. We acknowledge with every living breath that we have the power to heal the world, or enact its opposite.
In Ivri time, we are at the banks of a multiplicity of rivers across a multiplicity of events. In our torah portion, we are with Moshe at the banks of the Yardein, the Jordan river, waiting to cross over into the Land that was promised us, and we remember the forty year journey that brought us there. In our haftarah, we are with Isaiah at the swift waters of a great and powerful foretelling, a great chazon, a foretelling of sorrow and destruction and …even…some hope. And as we approach Tisha b’Av, we are at the banks of the Euphrates weeping for the land that we lost, the temple that burned, Isaiah’s foretelling fulfilled. We are at the banks, at the edge of the water, afraid to dip our feet in and acknowledge that we are entering an unknown, scary place. Over the ages, our ancestors, our Avot, added many other great sorrows, when we were also at the banks, and they wrapped up those sorrows into this conjunction of our life cycle, - at the banks, in the month of Av, the month which means Father.
Midsummer in the desert of Arabia is dangerous! It is as dangerous as midwinter in the frozen arctic of Lapland. It is hard for us, in this valley, a comparative Gan Eden in its own right to connect to this. But the people who inhabited that land – Avraham Avinu before he set out, and our forefathers who wound up back there in exile, and the people who brought them back there - they experienced life that we can scarecly imagine, unless we have been there. In the month of Av, sweltering heat, desert winds, cracked earth and whithering crops lead you to cry out to your divine essence as your elders pass away from dehydration and your wells begin to dry. Consider that today’s weather forcast for Nahiriya is 120 degrees Fahrenheit. On the ninth of the Father month in Babylon, the Talmud teaches that our fathers joined their conquerors in lament.
This month of Av is the month of our Father places. We all have them, men and women, boys and girls. That place in your heart that is where you keep the essence of dad-ness and grandpa-ness that you experience from your forebears, and if you are a parent yourself, that place that binds your parenting to the parenting of your avot. And even if you don’t have a father, never knew your father, you might have spent energy filling up those father spaces with your imagination. Even if your father spaces are filled up with negativity, with evilness, with abuse or hard times, you still have them. You know you do. We – all of us - do. This is the month to approach god as our Father, and to fill our father places with light. We have our Mother places too, of course, and perhaps the month of sh’vat half way around our cycle was in ancient times a month of Mother places. But that is for another d’var, another day.
Our Father places are not pure. They never are. This is the season when our ancestral fathers brought destruction on themselves time and time again. The point of Tisha b’Av is to acknowledge and lament. But there is hope. Our Haftarah, the foretelling of the destruction and exile, is traditionally chanted alternately in the trop mode of Lamentations in the sad parts, and in the regular trop in the hopeful parts. We sing our lament and we sing our hope and we sing Ani Maamin that the moshiach will come.
Then, once we are past the point of crisis, we call the month “Menachem Av” – “Father comforts.”
So…let us be solemn and lament. Let us examine our father spaces, fill them with light where they need light, fill them with comfort where they need comfort. Fill ourselves with the knowledge that we, men and women both, have deep connections to our fathers and our fathers fathers, to the beginning of time. Let us mourn our temple, and let us acknowledge in our hearts the imperfections of our fathers that we bring into ourselves, so that we may break the cycle of destruction that we lament this week. And … let us celebrate that aspect of Hashem … that comforts us. Let us take that light, and use it to fill the father spaces in our souls.

Avinu, I want to kneel with you.
Avinu, I want to stand with you.
Avinu, I want to parent with you.
Avinu, I want to child with you.
You stand with me,
You serve with me,
You are father,
You are source.

7/16/2010

So I'm now a musicologist

who would have known?
A couple years since my last post, and I've been converted from composer to a musicologist. Go figure.

Bill Maddex ז"ל

Bill Maddexhas passed away, from cancer. He is the first member of my generation at our hometown synagogue to die. Condolences to his family. May he be remembered for a blessing.

Almost Shabbes

The sun isn't anywhere near set yet, but with our baby and a cat, we decided to bring in shabbes with a couple birthday candles so nobody with idle hands our paws could get hurt, and before Tzip and I put Mr. Goobs (the baby) to bed. This is my first shabbes without some sort of gig in a while...the Saturday before last, my ensemble (an a capella vocal octet that specializes in new music and early music) performed a psalm setting on a doctoral student's recital, then last shabbes we had a recording session for a previous project, and we sang two songs from my Refugiado cycle this Tuesday and finally sang a Kyrie on Wednesday by a senior undergrad.

It's not so easy to be a Jew in the music world. I feel like I have to constantly compromise on some level to participate. I can see how my distant cousin, Felix Mendelssohn, must have been under tremendous professional pressure to give up already and assimilate, which he did. Although I think a marriage theoretically had something to do with that, too. I have one Jewish friend who is conducting a local church choir. I'm not sure any of them know he's Jewish. I would never be able to be comfortable doing that.

Most often, I have to compromise by performing or rehearsing on shabbes. Which I don't really have a problem with. (Note from Tzipporah - I do. Big problem. Oh well.)

Less often, but in an all-permeating way in the vocal world that can really get me upset, pissed off, I feel like I'm the victim of a directed proselytizing campaign. I don't mind singing Christian music or liturgy as long as the setting is academic and artistic. I do have a problem when I am told I can't interpret without belief. I had it out with one professor so far, over a year ago now, who was somewhat over the top, although she apparently didn't mean to come off that way. Something like 25% of the choir was Jewish or otherwise non-Christian, but none of the undergrads in the ensemble would sign on with me to complain, so I did it alone. That professor apologized, and also wound up not getting tenure (I'm not sure how much the complaint weighed in).

But, on the plus side, I get to be an artistic ambassador for our people. I wrote a setting of a prayer from the the Amidah that my group performed, and even got read by a professional group. When a visiting conductor from Estonia was in residence, I got to have a candid talk about Estonian Jewry with him. And of course my Refugiado cycle, while not overtly religious, is a universal expression that happens to come from the Jewish experience. I hope to get it more performances, once I get the score in publishable shape.

-Bad Cohen
PS Tzip felt she had to correct some of my grammar. And sneak an editorial into my post.

"Different from"
"Different than"
"Different from"
"Different than"
"Different from"
"Different than"
"Different from"
"Oy...You could be right."

How's that hora go?

Man,
Tzip and I were at a birthday party at a park today, and there was dancing and singing.
"uvshavte mayim vesason..." nobody could quite remember all the steps to the dance. Sad.
I knew the steps when I was 10. But that was a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away.

Arnold Schoenberg's Wrong Notes

I just gave my first ever graduate level music theory presentation. They subject was the Piano Piece Op.33a, by Arnold Schoenberg. This piece is in the "expressionist" musical style known as twelve tone. That is to say, all twelve pitches are arranged into a row; this row can be played forwards, backwards, upside down, or backwards and upside down (not to be confused with upside down and backwards, that was Stravinsky when he discovered twelve tone, and is not the same thing at all!). The end result sounds like ... well .... um ... find a piano, take your hand, and bang randomly. But on paper, it looks pretty and is great fun for theorists to analyze.

It's kind of like musical Sudoku with a 12 x 12 matrix instead of 9x9. You can never repeat a note in a row or column, and you can make other partitions where notes aren't repeated if you want to; the parts of the puzzle that make up those other partitions need not be adjacent. Like sudoku, that's where each three by three box can't have repeats. In twelve tone music, we call it hexachordal combinatoriality - boxes of six notes that go together with other boxes of six notes to make up all twelve.

The thing is, I'm not a theorist, I'm a composer. And a tonal composer to boot. Which means I go to great lengths to sound exactly like not-Schoenberg, and yet still be somewhat modern sounding.

Which brings me to my presentation, and why I was giving it at all, since it is not even something that was assigned for a grade. Our prof is writing a book on Schoenberg which includes an analysis of this piece, which he presented in class. You see, this particular piece has what have been called the 'famous wrong notes.' That is to say, if you make the sudoku matrix for this piece, following the standard rules and operations, and align all the notes in the score with the top row form from the matrix, you get two 'wrong' notes. Apparently they have for the most part been analyzed as such. However, I was thinking like a composer - we care about things like counterpoint - and blurted out that it looked like if you circled all of the notes in the adjacent measures that repeat, you get the melody, but up a tritone, and that note is one of the repeated notes, so it can't be wrong. It's one of those basic rules of counterpoint - the long/held repeated note is alway right, unless the composer is a complete idiot, in which case we wouldn't be studying him anyway, and Schoenberg wrote several books on counterpoint. (Crap, now I have to go look at my own music to find where I have been an idiot by that definition.) Furthermore, those repeated notes are going forwards slowly while the other notes are going backwards fast, so there's some complex counterpoint involved.

This is the only time I can remember in my education where, sitting in class, I saw something that apparently nobody had considered before, at least that the prof knew of. That was pretty cool. (It does turn out that one theorist considered the theory behind my solution but didn't bother to address in his publication, or the 'wrong notes' in particular, because that was outside of the scope of his paper.)

So the professor told me to work it out, present it in class, and he's interested in helping me publish it. It went well, and I have a couple nice Powerpoint slides which I can drop into my paper later on.

Except that I have to change the color, because I found the exact shade of blue that doesn't photocopy. I forgot about that color, that photocopiers ignore, and I just picked a nice light blue.
I made copies for everyone and there was a gap in the middle of one of the pages.

Oh, since this is my Jewish blog, Schoenberg was Jewish. Then he wasn't. Then he was again. Then he wrote a setting of Kol Nidre. Then he got so scared of the number 13 that he dropped dead of a heart attack on Friday the 13th.

Jewish Poetry and Homeland

I am a master's student in music composition, and for more that a year off and on, I've been working on a song cycle about the refugee experience. I started the project with an idea in mind, that I wanted to use poetry that was Jewish in nature and yet universal, and which reflected the feelings of many diaspora refugees I have known. More specifically, I wanted to find poetry that conveyed a sentiment of longing for the place the refugee left, the lost homeland.

This turned out to be more difficult than expected. You see, there has been a formula used in Jewish diaspora poetry which seemed almost universal. You see, homeland must refer to Israel. Always. I'm not going to cite poets right here and now, because it's been a while, and this is not an academic treatise on the subject. And I want to finish the post before Shabbes. I suppose I could have written my own, but as Tzipporah says, I should keep my day job and leave lyrics to the professionals.

But I lucked out. I found an amazing book of poetry by marrano (converso) authors. [A side discussion about whether they were actually jewish might be interesting.] The book is Marrano Poets of the Seventeenth Century, and in it are several works by some amazing poets. I found the works of Antonio Enríquez Gómez to be particularly inspiring. He was a man who fled the Spanish Inquisition, and wound up in France. Eventually, for unknown reasons, he went back to Spain and was imprisoned, and died awaiting trial. One particularly moving epic is the Ballad in honor of the divine martyr, Judah the Believer, martyred at Valladolid at the hands of the Inquisition. In three parts, it covers the martyr's execution, an argument for following Torah, and a prophecy that will stand your hair on end. One day I will set this piece as a monumental work, when I am a better composer than I am now. This poem will blow you away.

It was another poem, When I consider that glorious past of mine, that was exactly what I needed. It is a long poem and I chose the following stanzas. (These translations are by Oelman; I set the Spanish text.) Some time in the future I will link to a recording. So far only a few individual songs (one per stanza) have been performed, and it will only be performed in its entirety next winter.



"To Thessaly I would go and suffer there

(so as to erase the visions of the beast)

The one who lights the day to consume me.

When I consider that glorious past of mine

Where I am found no more, the remembrance

Of my state, I fear, is bound to die with me.

I mourn my homeland, from her I am absent,

An accident of birth must have been its cause—

The cross of origin the unsuspecting bear

I left behind my sweet and tender dwelling

And left behind my free will with my soul,

For on foreign soil I stand bereft of all.

Such a bird my homeland was, but who would say

That it should be without the nest of my soul

And that it should lose the wings of my love?

Laughing, I went off to a different clime,

Fondly imagining, like a tender child,

That what I was seeing was my own homeland.

In an instant I found myself surrounded

by more Babels than on the plain of Shinar

that giant of unyielding pride constructed.

I speak and they do not understand me; this

I feel so keenly that I am struck dumb,

Sweeping aside, unsure, my understanding."

Text quoted from:
Oelman, Timothy, ed. and trans., Marrano Poets of the Seventeenth Century: an anthology of the Poetry of João Pinto Delgado, Antonio Enríquez Gómez, and Miguel de Barrios. The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. Rutherford, Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1982.