Showing Results 1 - 10 of 13
for Aaron Lebedeff (1873–1960), performer on the Yiddish stage
Bewildering clarity of tongues:
names you never heard, food
you never ate, a wild dance
you never learned, light hanging
in the sky…
These program notes were prepared for the Radical New Jewish music performances which were part of the ART PROJEKT Festival held in Munich in September of 1992.American New Music has always been noted…
“Practically everyone has seen the prize-winning musical about the lovable people in that little village in Old Russia called Anetevka [sic]. Well, as far as we’re concerned, ‘Fiddler’ made a goof!” M…
In the city of Warsaw such a long time ago
Two hundred children stand lined row on row
With their freshly washed faces and freshly washed clothes
The children of Poland who never grow old
In the…
The distinction between religious and secular music is not universally admitted. There is a considerable group of people, some of them very learned in the art and science of sound, who claim that…
When I observe a toothless ex-violinist,
with more hair than face, sprawled like Karl Marx
on a park seat or slumped, dead or asleep,
in the central heat of a public library
I think of Uncle Isidore…
What we now routinely call klezmer in the United States—“Do you play klezmer?” “There’s a new klezmer album out”—is a truly American construct in three ways: the word sidesteps aesthetic and political…
For the critic of the future remains the problem of estimating to what degree residence in America influenced the art of Charles Martin Loeffler and of Leo Ornstein. Patent enough to our own day is…
In 1947, when Kurt Weill’s orchestral arrangement of Hatikva received its world premiere in New York, it was still—as it had been for decades—the anthem of the modern Zionist movement, expressing the…
Twenty-three Jews came to America in 1654 and some five million live in the United States today. Though this seems like a long story, it is but a short chapter in the history of Judaism. Anything…