Catskills Brigadoon -- The North American Jewish Choral Festival, Part I

Last month I went to my first North American Jewish Choral Festival, carpooling and bunking with a fellow alto in my choir and her 7-year-old daughter.  I'm catching up gradually to this annual reunion/conference/love-fest; we only stayed one night out of the four, in the refurbished, partly remodeled Hudson Valley Resort and Spa, known by previous generations as the Granite Hotel.  A very multi-layered experience, making all kinds of connections between past and present.

Spontaneous sing-along in the lobby of the Hudson Valley Resort --
 Two guys wheeled out the piano and Dave Schlossberg,
our wonderful accompanist, sat down to play. 

First, it was a Brigadoon-like return to the Jewish Catskills.  The Catskills were long over their peak, so to speak, by the time I ever stayed at one of the big resorts.  That would have been over thirty years ago with my future husband's family at Brown's, when the comedians still slipped in a good shpritz of Yiddish, or a dozen years later at the Raleigh or Fallsview or Concord, on now-treasured winter weekends as an adult with my husband, kids, their grandparents, aunt, uncle and cousins.  Maybe I was catching the tail end of the peak when, at five years old, I spent a week with my parents and baby sister at the much smaller Jockey Country Club, in Ellenville, the town with my name.None of those places are still in business; the relatively obscure Jockey Country Club never made it into Catskill legend but today Googles up a few picture postcards on ebay and New York Post advertisements in an online retrospective. My folks made lifelong friends there.

But here, in Kerhonkson in 2014 for the five days in July, was a living, breathing, Jewish gathering of 600 in a  hotel that hadn't gone ultra-orthodox or been left to molder in the woods.  People of all ages, cities, headwear and possibly even politics -- but one love for singing Jewish music and by extension, creative community.

After getting over the initial geshtalt of welcome banner, familiar and unfamiliar faces, I recognized the general layout of your old Borsht Belt hotel. Here was your grandly spacious arrival hall;  the long reservation desk, the grand staircase, the paneling installed by long-gone-and-buried contractors.  The double-height doors to the vast dining room. Off the back of the lobby, the sprawling, unchartable wings of guest rooms,  built in different stages and styles over the generations. The tower, where elevators took you to the most centralized, modernized rooms. Also the theater, where our mothers and grandmothers had once come in cocktail dresses, drinking whiskey sours and leaving children to pooled babyitters.

Of course some things had been remodeled or at least refreshed.   The carpeting must have dated to  this millennium.  The dark oversized couches, arranged into four or five separate conversational squares with  coffee table in the middle, were probably brought in within the past decade, from some closing hotel or furniture outlet.  The conference wing might have been altogether new, added in the property's reincarnation as a meeting place for all kinds of groups that required, or at least wouldn't mind, kosher cuisine. The spa may have been new -- I don't think anyone went there from our crowd. The theater had been partially outfitted with row-long tables, lecture-hall style, and a modern sound board and mikes.  

And of course, there was wi-fi. While some of the couch corrals were filled with schmoozing choir members from far away, sharing snacks and drinks, others were occupied by lone email and Web junkies, or presenters making last-minute changes to their workshop materials. Or cantorial colleagues planning joint programs back home, or just comparing notes.

from the Hudson Valley Resort's site..

Filling the hallways, stage, stairs and conference rooms, was a special subset of Jewish clientele; people who'd come to make and hear music, meet the composers whose names are on the sheet music they practice all year. Also to get to know each other better, to share meals and evenings and workshops instead of just weekly rehearsals, with their own members and with singers and players from all over North America. To perform before an audience of peers.  To celebrate the 25th year of this event, its founders and each other.

We could hear the great sound of the most professional groups -- the Zamir Chorales of New York and Boston -- rehearsing as we made our way to registration.

Seven Choirs Communing

I used to think that when my kids were grown and I had more time I would finally indulge my inner ham and join a community theater group.  Before I got around to doing that, though, I followed a friend - a fellow ham but also a wonderful singer -- into a community choir.  Soon after that, Thursday night rehearsals became my favorite part of the week. 

I decided that community theater was no loss; perhaps a clash of egos competing for roles, a potential stress and another source of isolation in an already isolated work week. Choir, on the other hand, is communion. I sing one alto strand that braids itself into all the other strands, spinning and weaving harmonies.  Spiritually and emotionally, a group hug in a warm wrap. 

I found this choir -- where else -- in my Jewish community, following the friend with the voice. (I found the friend through about seven years of Purim shpiels, where he’s typically played Haman and sung the best songs, Snidely Whiplash-style.) He’s excellent -- going pro, in fact --- but our choir isn’t particularly fussy.  Considering that it takes anyone from nearby zip codes who can carry a tune, we sound pretty good.  I hear there were years we played Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center.

Our choir has been directed and conducted for all of its 21 years by two now fifty-something cantors, one male, one female, giving a kind of family-unit feeling to the enterprise.  Many of us "children" have been with the choir for its whole existence. I joined four years ago.

Our repertoire is remarkably varied and sometimes jazzy, coming out of an apparently flourishing composer culture of English, Hebrew and Yiddish choral music.  (Did you know that there’s a whole, quite professional chorus in NYC that sings entirely in Yiddish?)

Speaking good Hebrew and fair Yiddish, I have the linguistic advantage, but I don't read music, and that would be the more useful fluency here. I've learned a bunch of Italian music terms. I've also gotten a teeny bit better at guessing note intervals and keeping note length and tempo in mind, but I have to memorize the music by hearing it, and fast -- unless the conductors have recorded the parts for us, to CD or web. I find musical memory fascinating… Ever notice how there’s no conscious storage or retrieval? If you’ve got it down, the notes just spool out. 

It would help if I could read, though. I am too easily swept off the alto track and onto the soprano line. I often throw ego aside really late into the rehearsal schedule to sit next to a more steadfast alto, to get the lost pitches back into my ear. 

I'm impressed by the conductors, who can give every section its starting note and hear one mistake among thirty people singing four- and five-part harmonies.  I'm amazed by our accompanist, whose fingers are so brain-mapped to the piano keyboard that he can speak in music, pulling off a wordless joke with a well-timed riff of anything you might recognize, perfectly rendered. He can play anything he hears.

Rehearsal in the pews, with this David, the cantors, the group and a real grand piano is the best part; breaking down the unfamiliarity, internalizing the melody and then "cleaning up" the rough parts till we get the blends, the precision and the modulation that makes an arrangement work and Daddy happy. (Mommy is somewhat easier to please.)

Even better is rehearsing with other choirs, in their churches and in our synagogues. We do this for a couple months before the "Sing Out" festival that's on its way to becoming a biannual tradition at the Newark Museum.   We perform separately and all together, and we practice with people we’d otherwise never meet; the Maplewood Glee Club, the North Jersey Philharmonic Glee Club, the Elmwood United Presbyterian Church Celebration Mass Choir.  A more exciting communion for being shared this wide, across religion and race.  Why do I get such a kick out of being conducted by the musical director of Prospect Presbyterian?  Similar warm-ups, similar directions to shape our mouths, drop the “r”s, breathe or not breathe … in Jason Asbury’s relatively understated style, with his own form of irony. Fascinating…

A lot is made at the concert’s opening remarks of diversity and bridge-building. It's a little embarrassing, as a) there's a sense that any talk of interracial “progress”  more properly belongs to another century; I can picture my kids telling me to get over this “otherness” thing. But b) it's not; where else do I do anything social with African American/black people, aside from an odd friend at my bubble’s periphery? Where else do I have any chance to hear this wonderfully rendered "Here's One," in person?  Yeah, it's got lots of Jesus in it… so not my brand.  But so beautifully hushed and swelled, so beautifully shaped by the conductor's expressive hands...that we're all inspired. 

We're also outclassed. "Ok, you win," says a choir friend in the Celebration choir’s direction, applauding.  This group sings at NJ PAC in Newark and Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta; for sure they're way more selective than us.  But that's ok.  I’ll do my best and look for them on YouTube.

We've also got 60 or so sweet young things from Montclair State, in matching long black dresses and matching length pearls, matching jackets and ties.  Their singers, too, have much more power and training.  They have a soloist who sends everyone to their feet. And maybe 40 even sweeter, even younger members of the Newark Boys' Choir.

At the concert’s end, this past Sunday, all 250 of us get to stand and sing together, led by a famous conductor of symphony orchestras from Vancouver to New Zealand.  Jacques LaCombe conducts an Aaron Copland piece we’d learned separately and run through with our sections combined a few times a few hours before. We sound transcendent.