The Soul Descends on Vimeo.

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Register here for the May 4 performance in Boston.
To order tickets for the New York performance please click here.

 
This event was made possible by a CJP Young Adult Community Grant.
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from “Hedgehog in the Fog” (Ёжик в тумане), a 1975 Russian animation directed by Yuriy Norshteyn

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The Unbearable Lightness: First Candle

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Anthony Russell’s New Yiddish Songbook 

African-American by birth and Jewish by choice, operatic Bass Anthony Russell is a fresh and powerful voice in Jewish Music. Having deeply immersed in the Yiddish repertoire of the famed Sidor Belarsky, Anthony has collaborated with composer Matti Kovler to present new provocative arrangements of songs from Belarsky’s repertoire and beyond.

I used to teach a small class on Jewish music at Northeastern University in Boston- and once I remember asking the students to write (without too much thinking) whatever comes to their minds upon hearing the following three expressions: “Jewish,” “Jewish Music,” and finally “Jewish Music Theater.”

The term “Jewish” produced widely different results – ranging from “bar mitzvah,” to “synagogue,” or even “circumcised.” Defining “Jewish Music” proved to be somewhat more consistent – some students simply left the column blank, others wrote “Klezmer,” “clarinet” etc. And yet, to my surprise, the absolute consensus was around what I naively thought to be the most vague term of them all – “Jewish Music Theater.” Twenty-six out of the twenty-seven students in my class, believe it or not, wrote… (well, I guess you might have figured this out by now). Because when it comes to anything Jewish in Music Theater—one image stubbornly jumps to mind: the “fiddler.” Yes, it was the infamous fiddler they had all mentioned – the one on the roof. Towards the end of the class one student asked if I had intended to show the film in class. Her eyes shined.

Without putting down one of the most beloved and successful Broadway hits of all times – how did it happen, I wondered, that in the eyes of my students Fiddler became synonymous with what might be cautiously called a “genre”? After all, what makes it more Jewish than The Wizard of Oz, for instance? The Klezmer quotes? The dreadlocks? Perhaps the religious affiliation of its creators? (Judging by the former, one could go as far as argue that the entire American musical theater, historically dominated by Jews—from Rodgers and Hammerstein to Gershwin, Berlin and Sondheim—is Jewish!)

And then it occurred to me—what makes the Fiddler quintessentionally Jewish is perhaps its most obvious attribute. The musical epitomizes the core Jewish value of all times: “Tradition, tradition, tradition,” in the words of Tevye. At any cost. What kept the Jewish people alive was the preservation of the traditions of the East European shtetl (village in Yiddish). But what happens now, nearly a century after the shtetl is gone?

In 2012 Jewish music is witnessing a slow renaissance. The old equation “Jewish music = Klezmer” seems no longer sufficient to describe the many streams in this ocean, from Matisyahu hip hop beat-boxing to John Zorn’s “radicalism” and modern day revival of Sephardic piyutim. And yet, when it comes to “music theater”—a hybrid genre on its own right—adding the adjective “Jewish” brings along the nostalgic images of Topol’s Tevye, Barbara Streisand’s Yentel and notable joy-through-tears akin to anything Jewish. Richard Wagner, a towering figure in the world of opera and music theater, famously said: “the Jew is not capable of giving artistic enunciation to his feelings and beholding through talk, for such an enunciation through song his aptitude needs be infinitely smaller”.

But is it true that the Jewish people do not have a tradition to rely on? Absolutely no. To dig deeper, the very combination of words and music as a device to transcend a story—which makes the magic of Music Theater—has been used by the Jews for thousands of years. The art of cantillation (reciting the Hebrew Torah), which corresponds to Vedic chanting, or recitations of the Koran is an ancient historic practice throughout the various Jewish congregations.

My experience at Northeastern has shown that many young Jewish people have a real thirst for vibrant, new, creative expressions of Jewish culture. Music Theater is a necessary part in this equation.

So what would the future Jewish musical theater look like? Will it be related to the American musical theater tradition? Or perhaps this would be a world of spiritual mysteries and religious incantations? I have no one particular answer – we have a rich tradition, constantly continuing to evolve. A new Jewish Music Theater can suggest links between past and present – in a broader sense – and also serve as a “glue” that is able to hold many disparate groups of religious affiliations.

One thing is certain- to paraphrase Tevye’s famous saying- “without creation our lives will be as shaky as fiddler on the roof.” It is about time to bring Jewish Music theater to its next stage.

Matti Kovler