The Great American (Jewish) Songbook

by George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week

In a famous but apocryphal anecdote, Irving Berlin is supposed to have advised Cole Porter that the key to success on Broadway and with the popular song is “to write good Jewish tunes.” It is a bit hard to imagine the notoriously self-protective Berlin giving career advice, and it is equally difficult to imagine the elegant millionaire WASP Yalie from Peru, Ind., writing “Jewish tunes” (although Porter swore that he tried to do just that). But the advice was sound, and the sounds of the American songbook owe a great deal to cantorial filigree and Mitteleuropa operettas written by assimilated Jews.

In fact, it is Joelle Wallach’s thesis that those two disparate influences represent two poles within the Jewish-American world in the first part

of the 20th century. Wallach, a gifted composer in her own right, is teaching a four-session course entitled “The American Songbook as Melting Pot Mosaic” at the 92nd Street Y, beginning with a program on Jerome Kern on Nov. 22. The three talks are a continuation of an ongoing series she has been doing at the Y that she says will take “at least four years” to complete.

Last year, Wallach focused her attention on the East European side of the equation, with classes on Irving Berlin and George Gershwin. This year she is turning her attention to the Austrian- and German-influenced sounds of Kern and Richard Rodgers, in tandem with Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II.
Ironically, though, there is a strong cantorial element hidden in Rodgers’ melodies, too. Wallach points out that when the young composer was living in a brownstone in the then Jewish neighborhood of Harlem, his backyard abutted another brownstone whose occupant was the fabled cantor Yossele Rosenblatt.
“He heard him practicing from the backyard,” she says, “And those strains stayed with him.”

However, what sets that quartet of composers and lyricists apart from their (slight) predecessors is that Kern, Rodgers, Hart and Hammerstein grew up in affluent German-Jewish families, were college-educated (Kern at the New York College of Music, the other three at Columbia), and were born in Manhattan. By contrast, Berlin was born in Russia, Gershwin in Brooklyn to a recently arrived immigrant family, and both had to Americanize their names before beginning their careers.
“At the time Berlin and Gershwin broke in, show business was not a reputable business for a Jewish boy,” Wallach says. “Gershwin came up as a song-plugger, Berlin as a street singer, two of the lowest-level jobs in the business.”

By contrast, Kern and the others were following in the footsteps of Sigmund Romberg, a Jew, and Victor Herbert, Irish-born but closely associated with Johann Strauss and Viennese operetta.

Wallach says that there are unmistakable Jewish elements in the work of Kern and Rodgers, too. She points to the social commentary at the heart of Rodgers and Hammerstein shows like “South Pacific,” the anti-racist message in Kern’s “Showboat” and the scathing social satire in the Rodgers-Hart “Pal Joey.”
“Rodgers and Hart and Hammerstein are very consciously thinking about changing the nature of the Broadway stage and turning to social commentary,” she says. “Their conscious focus was on the impact they were trying to make — perhaps not as Jews — but that artistic consciousness and social consciousness is the hallmark of an American Jew.

“Rodgers and his family weren’t hostile to Judaism, although they were very assimilated,” she adds. “They were hearing a different repertoire, undoubtedly like the stuff that was heard in Reform synagogue. But Rodgers was also hearing Herbert and Romberg and Offenbach [who was, coincidentally, Jewish too]. And there was a Jewish influence within the French opera tradition that Offenbach came from, from men like Meyerbeer and Halevi.”

Wallach’s own childhood inflects her compositions in an unexpected way. Although she was born in New York City, she spent five years of her childhood in Morocco, where her father, a physician, was doing public health work.

“It had a strong influence on my imagination, my consciousness, my sense of what it means to be an American,” she says. It also gave her two distinct musical strains to draw upon, ones a bit unusual for an American composer in the 21st century.

“The Moroccan experience is there, subtly,” she says. Her exposure to the highly sophisticated Sephardic community of Casablanca stayed with her so much that she is now a member of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue. But she also draws upon Islamic musical motifs that she recalls from childhood.
“What you are comes out in your work,” she adds, “Sometimes even when you don’t mean it to.”
And she is often drawn to Jewish subjects in her music. Her chamber piece “From the Forest of Chimneys,” written for the New York Philharmonic Chamber Ensembles at the suggestion of bassoonist Leonard Hindell, was inspired by a 1991 trip to Poland that included a visit to the site of the Birkenau death camp.
“I tried to [reproduce] the different voices of Jews who were killed in Birkenau,” she explains. “Some sound very Jewish but some don’t. The victims who died there included all kinds of Jews, from the most religious to the least.”

She quickly acknowledges the other facets of her identity that manifest themselves through her music: “I write as a woman, an urban person, someone who’s interested in literature, music, dance.”
But just as it runs like a subterranean river through the works of the great Broadway composers and lyricists, Jewish identity is always present so some extent in Wallach’s work.

“I don’t think it’s possible to turn it permanently off,” she says. “It’s one of the rich strands that runs through my life and the life of Jewish artists.” n

“The American Songbook as Melting Pot Mosaic,” part of the series of “Havdalah lectures” at the 92nd Street Y (Lexington Avenue and 92nd Street) will be given by Joelle Wallach on Nov. 22, Dec. 13, Jan. 17 and Feb. 28. For information, call (212) 415-5500 to register or visit www.92Y.org. You can hear one of Wallach’s most recent compositions, “Alley Cat Love Song,” dedicated to the memory of her cat Jasmin, as part of a benefit cabaret program in aid of funding for the rescue of stray and feral cats on Saturday, Nov. 29 at 4:30 p.m. at the Metropolitan Room (34 W. 22nd St.). For information call (212) 206-0440.

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