Notes for: July 28, 2015
Judging from the spate of performances and recordings of his works in the past decade, Paul Schoenfield has become one of the most popular American composers born after World War II.
Born in Detroit and growing up in Arizona, Schoenfield began studying piano at the age of six and wrote his first composition the following year. He studied music and mathematics at the University of Arizona, and then, at the age of 22, received a doctorate from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
He has since received commissions from the Cleveland Orchestra, the Opera Theatre of St. Louis and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Bush Foundation, and Chamber Music America. Many of his compositions have a Jewish theme, and he and his family now live in Israel.
In 1985, Schoenfield was introduced to the music of the chassidic Jews of Eastern Europe when he was given a book of such melodies and asked to provide dinner music for a synagogue banquet. According to the composer, “The tunes — some ecstatic, others reflective — enchanted me, and becoming absorbed by them eventually led to the composition of a piano suite, Six Improvisations on Hassidic Melodies.”
This evening we hear another work of chassidic origin, Schoenfield’s four-movement Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano. Schoenfield has provided the following program note for the work:
In 1986, clarinetist David Shifrin asked me to write a chamber work for violin, clarinet and piano, but it was not until summer of 1990 that I was able to begin the project. In addition to the primary goal of composing a work for David, the trio realizes a long-standing desire to create entertaining music that could be played at chassidic gatherings as well as in the concert hall.
Each of the movements is based partly on an East European chassidic melody. The exact source of many chassidic melodies is unknown. Frequently they were composed by the tzadikim (holy men) of the 18th and 19th centuries, but often as not, they appear to have been borrowed from regional folk songs, cossack dances and military marches. In their chassidic versions, however, the melodies and texts were completely reworked, since the borrowed tunes, which originated in a completely different milieu, could not satisfactorily express the chassidic idea that regarded the exuberant expression of joy as a religious duty.
The trio opens with a freylakh, a popular dance from the world of klezmer – a musical tradition of the Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe. The genre originally consisted largely of dance tunes and instrumental display pieces for weddings and other ghetto celebrations. In the United States, however, klezmer evolved considerably in the dance hall, assimilating the rhythms and styles of American jazz. A freylakh – the Yiddish word for “festive” -- was an excited circle dance, typically played by the piano, accordion, and string bass, with a duple oom-pah beat.
The Freylakh is followed by a swaggering march, still with a klezmer flavor. In a change of pace, the ensuing Nigun is a slow vocal movement of introspection or prayer, sung often with repetitive sounds such as “bim-bim-bam” or “ai-ai-ai!” instead of formal lyrics, and marked by considerable improvisation.
The trio concludes with a sometimes frantic, sometimes moody, Kozatske, originally a Ukrainian dance of the Cossacks, but over the years becoming part of the Jewish chassidic tradition as well.