REDISCOVER Jack Gottlieb: A Bernstein "Disciple"

Though Jack Gottlieb (1930–2011) was fascinated by music from a young age, his musical calling came later. During summers spent at the Brandeis-Bardin Institute in Santa Susana, California—under the tutelage of Max Helfman and in the company of myriad other young artists—Gottlieb’s general musical development and his Jewish musical awareness began to converge.

“I was not a very developed musician at that point,” he recalled in a 1998 oral history session with the Milken Archive. “I knew about all of this [Jewish music] before I knew basic theory or who Wagner was.”

From Santa Susanna, California, Gottlieb would go on to become a composer and form close relationships with many of the prominent musical figures of his time. He studied with Karol Rathaus at Queens College in New York, and with Irving Fine at Brandeis, where he also came to know Harold Shapero and Arthur Berger. He was also very close with Leonard Bernstein, and referred to himself as a Bernstein “disciple.” (Gottlieb also plays piano on several Milken Archive recordings of Bernstein’s music.)

Over the course of his career Gottlieb contributed significantly to the world of Jewish music, primarily through liturgical or quasi-liturgical works that betrayed his love of biblical texts and the influence of the composers he most admired. Many of Gottlieb’s works were recorded, under his supervision, for the first time by Milken Archive.

Love Songs for the Sabbath places Gottlieb among the pantheon of composers commissioned by Cantor David Putterman of the Park Avenue Synagogue—a kind of Jewish music hall of fame that includes Kurt Weill, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, David Diamond, and many others. In the audience the night of the premiere was one Sholom Secunda (of Bay mir bistu sheyn fame), who reviewed the work for The Jewish Daily Forward:

The more I heard, the more overwhelmed I was by the young composer’s talents and his dramatic music and all the more forgot where I was: in a synagogue, or in an opera house? 

At the urging of Cantor Raymond Smolover (featured in our recent virtual exhibition), Gottlieb later revised the service to include poetic readings and dance. The new version, on which the Milken Archive recording is based, premiered at Smolover’s synagogue in White Plains, New York, with Felicia Montealegre (aka Mrs. Leonard Bernstein) as reader and featuring choreography by Anna Sokolow. Three Candle Blessings is in a similar, if simpler, vein. Composed in the early 1970s when he served as music director of Temple Israel in St. Louis, it reflects Gottlieb’s ability to write in a more direct and accessible manner without sacrificing integrity.

Psalmistry is an adventurous suite of settings on texts from the Book of Psalms. Gottlieb first composed the work in 1971 but revised it several times, most recently for the Milken Archive recording in 1999. Whereas the first version had been explicitly based on cantorial motifs from traditional synagogue music, in later versions the motifs were highly abstracted and used as thematic material. Accompanying the piece on our website is a short documentary video shot at the recording session in Hattiesburg, Mississippi with conductor Tim Koch and the Southern Chorale. Also drawn from the Book of Psalms is Shout for Joy, a three-movement piece for chorus and chamber ensemble that evokes pastoral serenity and energetic dancing. The Milken Archive has also recorded several of Gottlieb’s individual liturgical settings.

When asked to described his musical style Gottlieb simply said it was eclectic, but he hastened to add: “Eclectic is not a dirty word.”

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