Byline: Milken Archive of Jewish Music

Milken launches site

This two-album anthology was created to celebrate the launch of the Milken Archive’s new website. It features a sample track from each of the archive’s 20 thematic volumes.

The Milken Archive of Jewish Music: The American Experience has launched a new website (milkenarchive.org) that allows visitors to experience virtually every piece of music and every composer that the archive has recorded since its founding in 1990.

The extensive collection – which includes more than 600 works comprising 1,800 individual tracks, 200 composers and 800 hours of oral histories – is organized into webpages that contain links to all of the available related media content collected and created in the course of the archive’s historic work.

“This new site is a vast repository of a musical culture that has continually redefined and reinvented itself as it has responded to the opportunities and challenges of life in a land of freedom,” according to Milken Archive curator Jeff Janeczko.

The new mobile-friendly platform offers a rich experience on a variety of devices to accommodate the diverse needs of Milken Archive’s audiences. From documentary videos and photographs to extended oral histories and articles, each page exists within the context of the cultural and historical narratives that have defined Jewish life in America for the past three-and-a-half centuries.

In celebration of the new site, a digital anthology is available free to all individuals who sign up at the archive’s website. Ten winners will also receive five albums of their choice; five winners will choose 10 albums. A grand-prize winner, chosen at random, will have unprecedented access to all 1,800-plus tracks contained within the archive’s 20 thematic volumes. The deadline to sign up for the free album and contest is Sept. 26.

The Milken Archive repertoire on the free two-album anthology features one sample track from each of the archive’s 20 thematic volumes.

On Album 1, there is: 1. Ikh Bin a “Boarder” Bay Mayn Vayb (I’m a Boarder at My Wife’s) by Rubin Doctor; 2. Celestial Dialogues: IV, Adonai Melekh (The Lord is King) by Ofer Ben-Amots; 3. L’kha Dodi (Welcome, Sabbath Bride) by Aaron Bensoussan; 4. Eshet Hayil by Benzion Shenker (arranged by Stanley Sperber); 5. Hear O Israel: IV, Sh’ma, by Jonathan Klein; 6. Violin Concerto in C Minor, “Nushkaoth,” by Sholom Secunda; 7. Two Hannah Szenesh Poems: II, Ashrei Ha-garfur, by Max Helfman; 8. Amar Rabbi, Elazar, by Moishe Oysher; 9. Stempenyu Suite: III, Freilechs, by Joseph Achron; and 10. Di Naye Hagode: Riboyne-Sheloylem (The New Haggadah: Master of the Universe) by Max Helfman.

Album two comprises: 1. Mayn Rue Platz (My Resting Place), anonymous, arranged by R. Williams; 2. Canticles for Jerusalem by Vivian Fine; 3. Kol Nidrei, Op. 47, by Max Bruch; 4. Ki K’shimkha by Paul Discount; 5. Shofar Service: I, Malkhuyyot, by Herman Berlinski; 6. Genesis Suite: IV, Cain and Abel, by Darius Milhaud; 7. The Day of Rest by Sholom Kalib; 8. Aleikhem Eda K’dosha, traditional; 9. Akavya ben Mahal’el Omer by Lazar Weiner; 10. The Merchant and the Pauper, Act II, Scene 4 (excerpt) by Paul Schoenfield.

Since its creation by philanthropist-businessman Lowell Milken, the Milken Archive has achieved a reputation that extends internationally. The 50 CDs released by Naxos American Classics between 2003 and 2006 gained widespread recognition, including Grammy and ASCAP awards, and the nationally broadcast radio series hosted by Leonard Nimoy has introduced the archive to countless listeners.

“The Milken Archive of Jewish Music is a living project, one that we hope will cultivate and nourish musicians and enthusiasts of this richly varied musical genre,” said Milken. “The sacred and secular body of work that has developed over the centuries since Jews first arrived on these shores provides a powerful means of expressing the multi-layered saga of American Jewry.”

Holocaust memorial music

Musical memorials to the Holocaust tread on sensitive ground. On one hand, they perform a crucial function for humanity’s collective memory. On the other hand, there is significant risk of belittling the topic in the name of artistic expression. Two composers who have successfully navigated the risky waters of this endeavor to produce musically significant works with dignity and veneration are Charles Davidson and Sheila Silver. Released by the Milken Archive of Jewish Music earlier this year, Out of the Whirlwind: Musical Reflections of the Holocaust gives both works their rightful place in the archive’s pantheon of music of the American Jewish experience (milkenarchive.org/volumes/view/19).

Davidson’s I Never Saw Another Butterfly cantata is based on the 1960s publication (of the same name) of poems written by children interned at Terezin, a ruse camp set up by the Nazis to throw off the scent of those who suspected the mass murder of Jews under Hitler’s reign. Though it was simply a waypoint en route to the Auschwitz death camp, Terezin depicted a scenario where prisoners enjoyed relative freedom and produced significant artistic output.

Davidson’s tribute to the child poets comprises nine poem-settings for children’s choir and piano, performed here by the San Francisco Girls Chorus. From touching beauty to foreboding, despair and all points in between, his composition gives unique expression to the range of emotions contained in the poems while conveying its own identity as a work of art. I Never Saw Another Butterfly has been performed more than 2,500 times, including in 1991 at Terezin, in the presence of former Czech president Václav Havel.

Silver’s string trio To the Spirit Unconquered was inspired by the writings of Italian poet and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi. Silver uses a variety of techniques to convey different aspects of the concentration camp experience described in Levi’s writings: fear, through dark string tremolos and crashing, dissonant piano chords; memory, through floating piano lines and swooning strings; barbarism, through quick, syncopated rhythms, staccato stabs, and angular melodies; transcendence, through the soaring melodies of the final movement. In a 1998 interview with the archive (milkenarchive.org/videos/view/112), Silver claimed To the Spirit Unconquered as her most successful piece, stating that it had been widely performed and won over audiences skeptical of modern music. In her own words, it is “about the ability of the human spirit to transcend the most devastating of circumstances, to survive and to bear witness.”

Though both of these works can be appreciated on their artistic merits alone, their grounding in the maxim to never forget imbues them with an inescapable urgency. They command listeners of all faiths and backgrounds to approach them with undivided attention.