Literature
Art
Life

Composing an Electro-Acoustic Kaddish

There is a Jewish bias toward the abstract, the tendency to conceptualize as much as possible, and then there is a certain Schwärmerei, a state of perpetual and exalted surprise—sometimes disgust—at the sensuous and sentimental data of existence which others take for granted.

—Clement Greenberg, “Under Forty” (1944)

If my earlier electro-acoustic composition Invocations (1981) incorporated prayers as spoken in over two dozen languages, reflecting my intention to reveal sounds that are common to all prayers, I thought it would be appropriate to do a sequel about a single prayer declaimed in various ways, with various accents and intonations. Likewise speech-music, where spoken words, organized in ways more typical of music than literature, this would express acoustic qualities without instrumental accompaniment. The best text for my purposes was the Jewish prayer for the dead, the Kaddish (though I suppose the Catholic Dies Irae could have served just as well). As with Invocations I felt that religious professionals would be the best speakers, in part because of their experience in reciting the prayer, and beginning in 1983 I started recording them on my own time, usually in the course of travels related to something else.

However, since the piece would require extensive field recording, as well as assistance in understanding Hebrew, and then a sophisticated multitrack audio studio similar to EMS in Stockholm where Invocations was composed, I applied here and there for support. German radio, in this case Klaus Schöning the Hörspiel or ear-play department of Westdeutscher Rundfunk, agreed to support the project much as Invocations had been supported—with funds sufficient only for someone with a low standard of living. However, elsewhere I had no success. Private Jewish foundations in America were of no help, just as they neglected the prize-winning films I made in the mid-1980s about the great Jewish cemetery of Berlin with Martin Koerber. (All funds for those six short documentaries came from German agencies.) One operating rule with Jewish-American foundations appears to be that the applicant must have in hand a celebrity (of the rank of, say, Abba Eban or Theodore Bikel) to frame the work, on the dubious assumption that Americans wouldn’t otherwise pay attention. Obviously, my Kaddish needed a celebrity no more than the cemetery films. I also tried several times the National Endowment for the Arts and fewer times at the New York State Council for the Arts, both of which apparently found better projects to support. (Here and elsewhere, I’ve noted, first, that projects with Jewish themes are rarely supported by public funders, on the assumption that purportedly intelligent Jewish philanthropy should do underwrite them, and then that that major artistic projects funded by German agencies do not get equal support here, on the principle, apparently important to some “Americans,” that, when such art gets done, it is better that Germany get total credit for supporting it.) As a fulltime independent I’m reluctant to commence major projects without sufficient support, in part because I know from experience that otherwise they won’t turn out as well, and so until 1989 I put Kaddish aside for books, videotapes, holograms and other audiotapes.

All through the 1980s I have accepted interns, as they are called—students who come to me for experience, in exchange for work, in my case hands-on. The model is the medical internship in that I don’t teach but provide practical opportunities. Some interns have worked on editorial projects; others on an experimental film long in progress (and still in progress). When a Hebrew-speaking NYU student arrived in the fall of 1987, I petitioned Westdeutscher Rundfunk for a formal commission; but by the time it arrived, the semester had ended and the intern had gone. The Kaddish project languished until the summer of 1989 when Ophir Finkelthal appeared. A senior-to-be at Yale, he had done his entire schooling at Ramaz, a New York institution whose principal language of instruction is Hebrew.

Initially we recorded together, among other discomforts arising at dawn to attend daily services on the Lower East Side; but later he went on on his own, finding rabbis and cantors, in addition to occasional laypeople, both male and female, descending from Germany, Rumania, Hungary, Russia, Lithuania, Galicia, Holland, Ireland, England, South Africa, North Africa, Syria, Georgia (USSR), Tajikistan (USSR), Israel, America, India, Yemen, and Ethiopia, which is to say the full scope of the Jewish Diaspora. We did nearly one hundred separate readings, perhaps two-thirds of them usable. A final element in making this project possible was a 1990 grant from the Media Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts.

The second element necessary for this underfunded project to happen was a recording studio. Were I to use a standard multitrack machine comparable to what made Invocations at EMS in Stockholm, the cost would be approximately $25.00 per hour, and I figured that given the amount of raw material I had, added to the complexity of the mixing I wanted to do, I would need at least forty, perhaps fifty, hours to get Kaddish done. Were I to return to Sweden, where the studio would be made available to me free, I would still need to pay for my carfare and lodging, as well as hiring an audio engineer. Even with field recordings in hand, I hadn’t expected to compose Kaddish until a sufficient grant came.

However, out of the blue came a letter from Frank Cunningham, who had been my engineer during a guest residency at WGBH-FM in Boston several years before. He explained that he was now working at Lexicon, Inc., a Waltham high tech audio manufacturer that had developed the Opus, a two-hundred-thousand-dollar digital audio editing machine. Would I like, he inquired, to use it as his guest? It could handle as many as ninety-nine different inputs, he told me, and would work best for a composition about twenty minutes long, which was exactly what I had in mind. Instead of laying tracks, as I had done at EMS, we would be “loading” the individual recordings into a computer and then organizing them on screen before hearing the results of such arrangements. Instead of fifty hours, we worked on Friday evening and all-day Saturday with a little clean-up on Sunday, composing the speakers into a sequence of solos, duets, a quintet, a quartet, a sextet and, thanks to Finkelthal, a montage of several voices declaiming the prayer one line at a time. Oh yes, the Lexicon was free, though I did tip Cunningham for his collegial generosity.

Because these speakers were all asked to declaim a single text, which is incidentally the most poetic in Jewish liturgy, what this composition reveals, amid the constancy of a single text, is the various sounds of all those countries and cultures in which Jews have settled, which is to say the acoustics of the Diaspora. Here as elsewhere in my audio compositions, I use familiar texts to reveal acoustic experience beyond syntax and semantics, which is in this case the sound of a culture. As in his earlier work, I also use the unique capabilities of audiotape composition to put into the same acoustic space individuals who would never perform in the same physical space. Now that the radio commission is fulfilled, it would be good to get sufficient support to remix the acoustic material to emerge from any or all of eight loudspeakers distributed over a resonant space—a make a Mechanical Opera, a continuous theatrical installation, in the tradition of Bauhaus theater and Edgar Varèse.

Below is a score constructed after the fact, with the names of individual speakers placed within a grid acknowledging when they began speaking and their position in the stereo spectrum:

[Score To Come]

The speakers included, in order of their initial appearance, Oberkantor Estrongo Nachama, Berlin; Rabbi Robert A. Jacobs, then at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York City; Cantor Nitza Amit from Israel; Cantor Benjamin Hayeem from India; Seth R. Rubenstein, once affiliated with a Babylonian synagoge in Los Angeles, later residing in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; the congregation of Chasam Sopher in New York City; Shlomochai Niyakov, a Russian; Pamela Hoffman and Ophir Finkelthal, both from New York City; Cantor Leo Roth, Berlin; Cantor Erwin Hirsch from Mannheim, Germany, later in New York City; Rabbi Fritz Winter from Berlin, later in Montevideo, Uruguay; Cantor Isabelle Ganz, Houston, Texas; Cantor David A. Tawil from Syrian background, later in New York; Amiel Tzbari, from Yemenite background, later residing in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada; Jacob El-Hanani, a Moroccan-Israeli artist still living in New York; Professor Ephraim Isaac, born in Ethiopia of a Yeminite Jewish father, later living in Princeton, New Jersey; Cantor Gershon Silins, New York; Cantor Edward Fahri from Syria, later in Brooklyn; Albert Asher from Egypt, later residing in Scarsdale, New York; Cantor Chaim Greenfield from Hungary, later in Brooklyn; Rabbi Clifford Kulwin, New York; Rabbi Toba August, North Fort Myers, Florida, USA; Rabbi A. James Rudin initially from Alexandria, Virginia, USA; Rabbi E. Sherry Miller, New York City; Rabbi Geoffrey Goldberg, initially from England; Cantor Robert Abelson, New York; Samuel Zeltser from Poland; Hyman Genee from Greece; Cantor Josie Wolff from Holland; Cantor Abraham Lopes Cardozo from Holland and New York; Rabbi Raul H. Tapiero, a Syrian from Buenois Aires now in New York; Elijah Jirhad from India; Yakov Mosheev from Tajikistan, USSR; Rabbi Spiegel and the members of the Roumanian-American synagogue on the Lower East Side of New York; Cantor Max Waldberg, Philadelphia; Rabbi Abraham Ashvil from Georgia, USSR; Rabbi Marshall T. Meyer from New York and Buenois Ares; Elizabeth Neuman from Dublin, Ireland; and Cantor Ygal Altschuler from Russia.

Not unlike other underfunded projects in this Age of Grants, this Kaddish depended upon the generosity and consideration of a lot of people.