Volume 04: Digital Album 8

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Sabbath Eve - Individual Settings, Pt. 2/2

(Continued from Volume 04: Digital Album 7)

Five settings of V’shamru open this second album. Two by Cantor William Sharlin bear echoes of traditional hazzanut (cantorial art) but more closely resemble modern art song and choral music. The settings by Samuel Adler, Herbert Fromm, and Zavel Zilberts are more reminiscent of a Central European approach, featuring a cantor and choir accompanied by organ.

The inclusion of Fromm and Adler here points to the important role that individuals and small groups can play in shaping the course of history. Fromm, along with Samuel Adler’s father, Hugo Adler, belonged to a generation of composers who spearheaded an American renaissance in Jewish liturgical music in the early–mid-20th century. Much of the Jewish liturgical music outside of the folk-oriented repertoire in part owes its existence to this renaissance. At the same time, it reveals history’s uneven hand: Adler and Fromm were both successful musicians in Germany prior to the ascension of the National Socialist Party and emigrated to America for the sake of survival. Like many émigré composers of that scene, Fromm’s involvement in Jewish liturgical music began in America largely out of necessity. (See a video excerpt of Samuel Adler discussing this topic.)

While figures like Binder, Fromm, and Adler set the stage for American innovations in Jewish liturgical music, artists like Friedman soon took it over. The folk-oriented approach to Jewish worship services became so widespread and influential that Friedman received a faculty appointment at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion. Yet, the contention most have with the folk-pop oriented approach is not that it exists but that it has too large a share of the market.

If at first glance it seems that the world of Jewish liturgical music is divided between the traditionalists and the folkies, this obscures the richly diverse field that it is. For it’s a field large enough to accommodate an Adon olam by Sol Zim that sounds like it came straight out of a Persian night club, alongside one by Robert Stern that is dreamlike, ethereal, and invokes the close-interval harmonies of Bulgarian choral music. It is a field that welcomes the idiosyncratic stylings of Max Janowski, the modern classical orientation of David Schiff and Samuel Adler, the popular approach of Friedman and Craig Taubman.

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