Musical Mazel Tov

Composer Michael Rose loves to argue so much it’s a wonder he didn’t become a bloodsucking trial lawyer. “I’ve spent my entire life arguing,” says Rose, a longtime composition professor at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music. “In fact, it’s the essence of my Jewish faith. Moses argued with God about the golden calf, and Job argued with God about being treated badly. I think Moses and Job would have made good lawyers.”

Rose’s passion for robust debate will take musical form on March 24, when the Nashville Chamber Orchestra under Paul Gambill gives the world premiere of Rose’s new concerto, the aptly named Arguing With God, at Schermerhorn Symphony Center. That concert will climax a two-week Jewish American Music Festival that will also feature the screening of the documentary A Cantor’s Tale at the Belcourt Theatre, along with chamber music performances, Jewish song, fiddle music and a mock (yet authentically staged) Jewish wedding.

“This will be Nashville’s first big Jewish music festival,” says Connie Valentine, the NCO’s executive director. “We decided to sponsor it because it seemed like a natural extension of the chamber orchestra’s mission, which is music without boundaries. This festival is people without boundaries. But it all evolved out of our commission with Michael Rose for a concerto.”

It should perhaps come as no surprise that Arguing With God began with a fundamental disagreement. The NCO hired Rose to write a concerto for orchestra and klezmer band, with the idea of bringing in the renowned klezmer quartet Brave Old World to perform with the orchestra. Rose dutifully wrote out his score and showed it to Brave Old World pianist Alan Bern. But the pianist raised an immediate objection.

“Many composers think all they have to do is write out a folk theme note for note and, voilà, they have an authentic piece of music,” says Bern. “But klezmer music is like bluegrass. A lot of it is improvised, so writing out a klezmer score note-for-note doesn’t do justice to what a band like Brave Old World can do.”

As luck would have it, Bern turned out to be something of a musical polyglot, an artist who was fluent in both classical music (he has a doctorate in classical composition) and klezmer. So like a United Nations ambassador, he was able to serve as an intermediary between the classical and klezmer worlds and forge a compromise.

“One of the first things Alan said was that the violin part wouldn’t do honor to [Brave Old World fiddle player] Michael Alpert, so I took that part and gave it the chamber orchestra’s concertmaster,” says Rose. “Alan and I then went through the concerto measure for measure and made changes wherever needed.”

Those changes mostly involved creating spaces in the score for the klezmer band to improvise. For instance, in the opening measures of the first movement (titled “Dark Enough to See”), Rose instructs the fiddle player to vamp on a traditional Jewish mode (or scale pattern) for two full measures. In the second movement, Rose included blank spaces in the score (which he called “song spaces”) for improvisation. Obviously, keeping an improvising klezmer band together in a tight ensemble with an orchestra will be a risky business, Rose concedes. “But if you want to argue with God, you have to be willing to take risks,” he says.

Another Rose piece, this one called Songs of Rest and Unrest, will be performed at a March 15 festival concert at the Blair School of Music, on a program that will also include the music of Osvaldo Golijov.

An Argentine-born American composer, Golijov (pronounced GO-lee-hoff) is to contemporary classical music what Barack Obama is to politics: he’s the golden boy of the moment. He first gained prominence in 2000 when the Bach Academy in Stuttgart, Germany, commissioned him to write a Latin American setting of the St. MarkPassion. In the years since, he has produced a strikingly original musical stew that combines classical music with klezmer, tango, flamenco, fado and Sephardic song. In no small way, Golijov is responsible for making contemporary Jewish music a hot commodity. “Golijov’s genius has been his ability to make a very specific kind of ethnic music seem universal,” says Rose.

Golijov may be the big man of classical music, but the star of the upcoming Jewish music fest will likely be Cantor Jacob Mendelson, the focus of Erik Greenberg Anjou’s documentary A Cantor’s Tale, which shows March 13 at the Belcourt. Mendelsohn is a larger-than-life personality whose musical talent is matched only by his wry sense of humor. When asked what makes music Jewish, he immediately launched into a Saturday Night Live-style Hanukkah song, decorated with mournful, weeping phrases. “What instantaneously makes music Jewish is the musical modality, the most recognizable of the modes being the Phrygian,” says Mendelsohn. “It’s nicknamed the crying mode.”