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March 30, 2007
A celebration of life
Myrna Rabinowitz launches a new CD in April.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY
Well-known local singer and songwriter Myrna Rabinowitz will be
launching her first solo album next month – Hashiveinu:
Songs of Blessing and Prayer, a heartfelt recording of melodies
for important lifecycle celebrations, such as births and weddings.
While Rabinowitz has recorded five previous albums of Jewish music
– three with Tzimmes and two with Shir Hadash, which includes
Hanna Tiferet Siegel and Harley Rothstein – performs regularly
and often leads synagogue services, Hashiveinu is a very
personal undertaking that highlights her love of Jewish music. And
she communicates that feeling in the recording, for which she wrote
the music and determined the arrangements, with input from Arik
Labowitz, her son-in-law and the CD's recording engineer. The piano
introductions and interludes were improvised.
"I felt it was very much a solo effort compared to my previous
Tzimmes and Shir Hadash CDs," said Rabinowitz. "It was
also a family effort, in that my son-in-law recorded the CD and
played the guitar and drum, and my two daughters and son-in-law
sang on the CD as well.
"Largely, it was my vision and my son-in-law, the recording
engineer, helped shape it," she said, adding that she received
encouragement and support for the recording from her friends, family
and the Or Shalom community.
The CD has a calm, lullaby-like quality, which, said Rabinowitz,
"reflects the more soulful, contemplative nature of prayer.
There are a few songs that move from meditative to joyful in nature,
such as 'Hashiveinu' and 'Lecha Dodi,' but largely, they do express
a more soulful expression of prayer."
She notes the power of music to be a calming influence.
"The music helps me to feel peaceful and to get in touch with
my spiritual centre," she said. "Many people have expressed
to me that the music is very calming and centring for them as well.
"The motivating factor for recording spiritual music like this
is so that people will be able to use it either when they pray or
bless a child at a life's passage such as birth, bar or bat mitzvah
or marriage or in any way that is meaningful and helpful for them."
But Rabinowitz's musical interests are varied and her next project,
she told the Independent, is a CD of Yiddish music, which
will largely be secular folk songs. She said she enjoys singing
traditional Jewish folk songs, in Yiddish, Ladino and Hebrew. As
well, she added, "I still enjoy performing on my own and with
Tzimmes and I hope to do more of that as well."
The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Rabinowitz grew up in a Yiddish-speaking
home in Montreal, where she developed her appreciation for Jewish
music.
"I started singing at a very early age and took piano lessons
as a child," she explained. "I learned how to play guitar
as a teenager and started performing then in Montreal."
She attributes the idea of writing original music for prayer to
rabbis Daniel and Hanna Tiferet Siegel, in the early days of Congregation
Or Shalom.
In addition to singing, Rabinowitz is a language teacher, mainly
in the immigrant community as an ESL instructor and ESL teacher
trainer at Vancouver Community College. She has also taught Yiddish
at the Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture and the Jewish Community
Centre of Greater Vancouver. She continues to be an active member
and leader of services at Or Shalom.
"Although I enjoy performing," she said, "my greatest
pleasure is to lead people in singing with many voices singing together
in harmony. Music is the universal language, the language of the
soul. When people sing together, harmony is created at many levels."
Rabinowitz's CD launch takes place in conjunction with the release
of a new CD by Tiferet Siegel, called Seeds of Wonder. The
two women will perform on Sunday, April 29, at the Norman Rothstein
Theatre at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver (JCC),
at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $15 in advance, from the JCC and Banyen
Books, or $18 at the door.
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