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Selichos/Transformation
Center for New Jewish Culture (former Union Temple)
17 Eastern Pkwy, Brooklyn, NY 11238New music in the cantorial tradition for two voices and chamber orchestra
by Jeremiah Lockwood
Composed for and performed by Riki Rose and Yoel Kohn
Conducted by Alan Pierson
Commissioned by the Center for New Jewish Culture
The Selichos service is the beginning of the High Holiday season. For cantors, Selichos is the debut in a series of high stakes high wire performances, the first moment in a period of heightened tension and emotional focus during which they lead the community in self-probing and transformation. In the words of the liturgy, on these days it is written who will live and who will die. The musical ritual takes this allegory of the life and death of the soul as seriously as if we stood on the precipice of a mountain. The cantor is both virtuoso artist, enunciating the sound of the community, and advocate, ferociously sparring with the Throne of Mercy on behalf of the abject and suffering, pleading for a little more time.
Khazones (the Yiddish term for the music of the cantor) is an art form that has largely moved to the margins of mainstream American Jewish life. But in the current moment of reckoning with questions about why and how to proceed with expressions of identity, khazones has been reclaimed as the basis of a musical revival, especially in the Brooklyn Hasidic community. Two generational vocal talents, Riki Rose and Yoel Kohn, both born in Satmar Williamsburg and now pursuing paths outside of their birth community, are outstanding interpreters of the “golden age” cantorial repertoire heard on classic phonograph records of the early 20th century. Composer and scholar Jeremiah Lockwood (founder of The Sway Machinery and author of Golden Ages: Hasidic Singers and Cantorial Revival in the Digital Era) has created a new work to showcase their remarkable talents in a piece of music that is deeply imbued with the tradition of cantorial contention with the Divine.
Selichos/Transformation is a new piece of music setting the traditional Selichos liturgy—its lineages include the work of Lockwood’s grandfather, Cantor Jacob Konigsberg, and father, composer Larry Lockwood, as well as the sounds of the lost generation of khazntes, women cantors of the early 20th century. The musical palette of the piece draws on a breadth of musics that recontextualize the aesthetics of non-classical performance in the texture of the orchestra, including Stravinsky’s Les Noces, and the collaboration of Pharaoh Sanders and Floating Points, to name just a few salient points of reference.