The OP's link to a site on "
Jewish Musical Nationalism" (my webspace), contains only a few of the 200+ scores that were digitized as part of the American Society for
Jewish Music's project. All 104 scores that we digitized at the
Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTSA), including solo piano works by Joel Engel and Solomon Rosowsky, are available at the JTSA website:
http://sylvester.JTSA.EDU:8881/R/Q2YNDK ... on_id=1250
(If the link doesn't work, follow "Browse Collections" --> "Music Collections" --> "
Jewish Art Music")
The solo piano works in this collection include:
Joel Engel's "Dybbuk Suite" -- this is a concert suite, arranged by the composer for solo piano, from his incidental music to the well-known Yiddish play by Sh. Ansky. It is based on Eastern European
Jewish folk melodies (including the famous "Ale Brider" at the start of the second movement, "Beggar's Dance") and dance rhythms. Engel was a successful music critic in Moscow, supposedly the only one that Rimsky-Korsakov read with interest, and later became one of the founders of
Jewish musical nationalism.
Solomon Rosowsky's "Poem" -- this is a fascinating piece based on "trop" (the short melodic motifs used for singing the Hebrew bible). Rosowsky was a pioneering music theorist who discovered that the Torah trop were fundamentally based on pentatonic scales and quartal harmonies. Thus, he loaded this particular piano work with quartal harmonies, in addition to the trop themselves and a passage marked "quasi synagogal".
Rosowsky's "Badchan (grotesque)" -- Badchans are traditional
Jewish wedding jesters. They improvise rhymes to a set tune, which are performed for the bride before the ceremony. Typically, the badchan would first try to make the bride cry -- by reminding her that she will soon be a slave to the kitchen, that her parents have died, that her childhood is over, anything -- and then, when all the tears are gone, strike up the band and entice her to be joyful on her wedding day. This tradition is less common today, but still exists in the form of comic acts performed by wedding guests during the reception to make the bride and groom laugh.
On the link to my webspace ("
Jewish Musical Nationalism") are also several neat solo piano works, which we digitized at Gratz College:
•
Moshe Milner - "Baim Reb'n zu Mlave-malke" (At the Rabbi's House after Shabbat). It is based on an Eastern European
Jewish folk melody, which is developed through "changing background variation" (a favored technique of the Russian nationalists). After a climax that resembles (at least in my mind) the piano opening of Brahms's first concerto, the piece ends quietly, with the following Yiddish words written under the last line of notes: "Omar Abaje: Tejke blajbt an" ("Abaye says: it remains a draw.") This is a reference to the rabbi studying Talmud (a collection of
Jewish legal debates) after a wild post-Shabbat festive meal full of singing and dancing. Abaye is an ancient rabbi frequently mentioned in the Talmud.
•
Joel Engel - "Five Pieces", Op. 19. All of them are miniature piano solos based on Eastern European
Jewish folk melodies. The style of the music is very orientalist - full of augmented seconds, drones, syncopations, and descending chromatic lines. This is typical of Engel.
•
Jacob Weinberg - "Volksweisen aus jusidischem Leben" (Folk songs from Jewish Life). This is a set of 5 virtuosic concert miniatures, composed in the 1920s in Palestine, probably for Weinberg's own use as a concert pianist. Like Engel's Op. 19, they are based on
Jewish Folk Melodies and are written in the Russian orientalist style. They are also very virtuosic, including Liszt-like figurations and cadenzas.
•
Samuel Alman - "Pilpul". The word "pilpul", which resembles the Hebrew word for "black pepper", refers to a "spicy", nit-picky style of Talmudic debate among students. Appropriately, the piece is in moto-perpetuo, with constantly "chatty" 16th notes and sharp, frequently changing accent patterns.
