Areas of Unrest

11 December 2007 - Almost Any Melody

There was no sign of the mouse today, but, then, I didn't actually open the file drawer it had lurked in yesterday.

My major accomplishment of the day was going to the DMV to change my address. It turns out that, since my driver's license was going to expire in less than a year, I could just renew it with the new address on it. And I was able to take care of changing my voter registration at the same time.

SInce that's about it for things I actually did today, let me continue on with Jewish music. It wouldn't be fair to skip over liturgical music. My father listened to recordings of cantorial music (mostly Yossele Rosenblatt) and I certainly heard enough of my grandfather practicing to reduce the drama for certain pieces you should really only hear annually (e.g. Kol Nidre, the famous "release from vows" prayer for Yom Kippur). Actually, my real issue with cantorial music is that cantors can get too showy, making the service too non-participatory. I don't want to feel like somebody is praying for me.

Which brings me to the problem of "Adon Olam." This is a prayer sung at the end of the Shabbat service and is one of the first ones every kid learns at Hebrew school. The problem is that its poetic structure lets it be sung to nearly any melody you can think of. Well, not quite, but there are a lot which work. There are traditional melodies and all sorts of composers of liturgical music have written settings for it. For example, Shul Music's Adon Olam page has midis of 31 versions. (The two I would characterize as the most common from my youth are numbers 28 and 31.)

But, to illustrate what I mean by "nearly any melody," here's a list from a synagogue in Rochester, NY (with several midi files of examples). I find this list both fascinating and frightening. Do I really want to be singing anything in synagogue to the tune of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" or "They Can't Take That Away From Me" or "America the Beautiful"? (The latter works scarily well, by the way, as does Beethoven's 9th, which they don't include a midi of.) The part that annoys me a bit is that they claim it's fun for the congregation to try to guess the melody.

I actually think singing along is fun. It's hard to do that if you're still trying to figure out what the song is.

By the way, even though tonight is the last night of Chanukah, I have at least one more Jewish music topic (and, no, it is surprisingly not Klezmer) so don't be surprised if it shows up at some random time.