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| | Email this article • Print this article | Singing God into Jewish lives
Shalshelet Jewish Music Festival slated for next week
by Aaron Leibel
Arts Editor
Despite a year of hard work, Shalshelet: The Foundation for New Jewish Liturgical Music's festival next week will mark a new beginning for the nonprofit.
We want the festival to raise the importance of the liturgical texts, enhanced by music, and to create an atmosphere where people will feel comfortable at a synagogue, says Cantor Ramon Tasat of Temple Shalom in Chevy Chase, a founder of Shalshelet and the group's president. Hopefully, this will help bring the presence of God into their lives.
We wish to make the music that new composers write available to a much larger audience, and we hope the participants at the festival will take the music home with them and sing it in their everyday lives.
The festival also will mark the start of disseminating the new music to synagogues throughout the country and world.
The festival's organizers are thrilled by the response from composers to their call for musical works for the event.
We never imagined we would get 169 submissions of new music from all over the United States, Chile, Argentina, Mexico and Poland, says co-founder and vice president Norma Brooks of Chevy Chase.
That number has been whittled down to 32 -- 15 will be performed at the festival's concert, with the remainder introduced at the festival's workshops the following day. Submissions must have been written in the past two years.
The compositions include tunes for congregational singing, cantorial solos and choral pieces in styles ranging from Chasidic, to jazz, to African rhythms, to South American, to American pop. The composers come from a variety of Jewish denominations and backgrounds.
The festival will present three workshops:
•Meet the Composers -- attendees will meet eight composers whose work they heard at the concert and learn about the process of creating new liturgical music. We want direct relationships between the composers and people who come to the festival, says Tasat;
•Seventy Faces of Prayer -- participants will listen to and compare different music by Shalshelet winners to traditional melodies for well-known prayers;
•Music for Less Common Texts -- workshop-goers will listen to new melodies for less commonly sung texts.
One local person whose music will be played at the concert is Silver Spring's Wendy Morrison, a musician and teacher.
Of the 15 pieces she submitted, three were chosen to be played at the concert. Her work, Mipi El (God Will Bless Israel), deals with God, Moses, Torah and Israel.
A second of her pieces, Tzur mi shelo (From What Is His), a Shabbat meal song, will be discussed in the Meet the Composers workshop.
Morrison's third piece, Im Ein Ani Li, Mi Li (Hillel's If I am not for myself, who will be for me?), has alternating Hebrew and English rhyming verses.
Other local winners are Carol Boyd Leon of Burke and Terry Horowit of Rockville.
Tasat expects some 700 people to attend the festival.
The real work of getting the music out will begin after the festival, with the group planning to produce a CD and a book on its work. Both will be put up for sale to help cover Shalshelet expenses.
A continuation of fund raising will be a priority for Shalshelet next year. So far, the group has received grants from the Rita Porestsky Foundation and other groups and individuals.
Since its founding last year, the organization -- which takes its name from the Hebrew for chain and a rare cantillation found in the Torah -- has been working on establishing itself and preparing for the festival.
Our [10-person] advisory board functioned as staff people because we couldn't afford staff, Tasat says. Many of the board has been working nonstop for months on an accounting system, fund raising and publicity.
The board has apparently succeeded in publicizing the group -- There is a buzz out there, on Shalshelet, says Brooks, who hopes the group will be able to hire a staff person to take the pressure off the board of directors and its six-person advisory board.
And, of course, the group will have to get ready for next year's Jewish Music Festival.
The festival concert and workshops will take place at Temple Shalom in Chevy Chase. The concert begins at 8 p.m. on Nov. 13. The workshops will be held from 1:30 to 5 p.m. the following day. Tickets for the concert and workshops are $30 in advance, $35 at the door; concert tickets are $20 in advance, $25 at the door; the workshops alone are $15 at the door. Children 16 and under are admitted free. Tickets can be purchased by sending a check (made payable to Shalshelet) to Temple Shalom or via at www.Shalshelet.org.
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