CANTOR'S CORNER

COME AND JOIN OUR CHOIR

If you love to sing and you love our Beth Shir Sholom music, it's time YOU joined the Beth Shir Sholom Choir! You loved them at the high Holy Days ... now join in as they participate at three special Shabbat celebrations during the year.

Our first opportunity to contribute will be the Friday Shabbat of our annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Interfaith sharing with Calvary Baptist Church, January 15th.

There are only 5 rehearsals for each Shabbat.

 

We're SO happy to announce that BOB PACKHAM (TishTone and Choir Accompanist) will direct the choir during the year!

 

You DO NOT NEED TO READ MUSIC! Just love to sing! If you're interested in joining, or have any questions, please contact Bob Packham directly at jazzzbob@msn.com. Rehearsals will be held on Wednesday evenings, beginning on December 2nd, 6:45-8:15pm in the sanctuary at BSS.

TISHTONES, TISHTEENS and CHOIR

Dec 24            World Concert Series   TBA     Dorothy Chandler Pavillion. LA

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RUACH JEWISH MUSIC SERIES

TISHTONES have submitted four songs from the “10 Thousand Opinions” CD for consideration in the upcoming RUACH series of contemporary Jewish Music. 

“The RUACH series delivers the newest and coolest Jewish rock music from North America and Israel. Continuing the tradition of the NFTY album series, RUACH brings to light the best of cutting-edge Jewish contemporary music [to Reform congregations all over the world].”

The songs include:  Shiru Laadonai, Shalom Aleichem, Mi Shebeirach, & Adonai S'fatai

The TishTones have much to offer the Jewish and non-Jewish world.   We hope this is the first of many opportunities for our wonderful music, creativity, and spirit to be expressed in the greater Jewish community.

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Meet the TishTones   

Ruth Rosen    Violin                                           Bob Packham   Keyboard, Arranger

Peter Quentin     Vocals, Guitar                      Mike Stearn     Vocals, 12-string Guitar

                                                 Rick Kurshner     Percussion

                               Cantor Ken Cohen & Rabbi Neil Comess-Daniels

Stan "the Bass Man"  Brooks

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TISHTEENS

Attention:  Teen Musicians at BSS

TISHTEENS FORMING!

Music at BSS has always been the heart of our special congregation. Our newest musical undertaking is to create an exciting musical ensemble led by our teenagers at the synagogue, called the TishTeens.

We’re looking for musicians interested in sharing the joy of music making. All singers and instrumentalists welcome. Also, if you love to write or arrange music, this is the place to share your gifts.

The TishTeens will be performing at special events, community programs, and Shabbat services throughout the year.  All those interested in building this exciting musical group, please contact Cantor Ken for further information.

Let’s bring the music and rock the house….the house of the song of peace!

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CHOIR

        Beth Shir Sholom Choir

           Firoza Jhabvala    Susan Gabrich    Susan Rubini     Ceryl Feldman         Linda Hoffman       Ari Hahyar

Our choir meets throughout the year,  performing on the High Holidays, World Music Concert at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion, Shabbat Shira (Sabbath of Song), Martin Luther King, Jr. Interfaith Service,  'Our Voices' Program and special musical Sabbaths during the year. 

If you like to sing you're a perfect candidate. Come and join our choir family of singers,

and enjoy wonderful music, camaraderie, and joyous spirit.   Prior experience not necessary, just a love of sharing song.

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JEWISH CHORAL FESTIVAL OF NORTH AMERICA

Held each summer for the past 17 years, The North American Jewish Choral Festival is the premiere Jewish choral event anywhere.   It brings together singers and choirs from across North America, with a renowned teaching staff, conductors, composers and professionals to sing, learn and share the joy of Jewish music. The Festival features five days of intensive workshops, study, performances, concerts, and fun and friendship.  

More than 500 participants take part in daily community sings; "instant ensembles" for all participants, led by acclaimed conductors, which rehearse for four days and perform at a gala closing concert; evening concerts, featuring outstanding vocal ensembles, choruses and soloists; workshops covering everything from vocal and conducting techniques to the history of Jewish music and ritual; and late night gatherings, including Jewish music sing-alongs, videos and more.

The Festival attracts amateur singers, professional soloists, cantors, conductors, and lovers of Jewish music from across the spectrum and denominations in an unforgettable experience.

LINKS TO CHORAL GROUPS

Here are web sites and resources that are part of the Jewish choral network. Please visit and support them.

Shirah: Community Chorus of the JCC on the Palisades

http://www.shirah.citymax.com/page/page/4014972.htm

Zemer Chai

Zemer Chai, "living song," is a choir of 30 singers dedicated to sharing the rich and diverse musical heritage of the Jewish people. Founded in 1976 by conductor and artistic director Eleanor Epstein, the choir sings the full range of the Jewish repertoire: the beautiful late Renaissance compositions of Salomone Rossi, the great European liturgical classics of the 19th century, the works of the great modern Jewish composers, the ever-growing and exciting work of Israeli composers, as well as Jewish folk music from all over the world. In addition to preserving and promoting the wonderful music of the past, the choir also commissions new works to add to the Jewish choral repertoire.

http://www.zemerchai.org/

The Western Wind

Since 1969, the internationally acclaimed vocal sextet, The Western Wind, has devoted itself to the special beauty and variety of a cappella music.

http://www.westernwind.org/

Kol Zimrah

Kol Zimrah, the Jewish Community Singers, is a volunteer civic chorus serving the metropolitan Chicago area. The membership represents a comprehensive cross-section of the city and suburbs. The mission of Kol Zimrah is to sustain and interpret the great tradition of Jewish choral music, to serve as a musical resource for the region, and to encourage the composition of new Judaic choral works. The organization provides a common forum for Jewish singers from many backgrounds in the pursuit of musical excellence.

http://www.kolzimrah.org/

Shir Chadash: the Brooklyn Community Jewish Chorus

Shir Chadash: the Brooklyn Jewish Community Chorus, under the direction of Cantor Natasha J. Hirschhorn, is a four-part chorus with 50+ members.  Now in its 8th season, Shir Chadah's mission is to challenge, enrich, and delight its singing members and audiences through the excellence of its performances. Our repertoire is inspired by the richness and diversity of Jewish music from around the globe, ranging from hauntingly rendered liturgical offerings, to updated arrangements of world folk music in many languages. 

http://shir-chadash.cfsites.org/

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Study of Improvisation & Creativity and the Brain  

Washington - Scientists inspired by the legendary improvisation of Miles
Davis and John Coltrane are peering inside the brains of today's jazz
musicians to learn where creativity comes from. Think dreaming.

This isn't just a curiosity for jazz fans but a bold experiment in the
neuroscience of music, a field that's booming as researchers realize
that music illuminates how the brain works. How we play and hear music
provides a window into most everyday cognitive functions - from
attention to emotion to memory - that in turn may help scientists find
treatments for brain disorders.

Creativity, though, has long been deemed too elusive to measure.
Saxophonist-turned-hearing specialist Charles Limb thought jazz
improvisation provided a perfect tool to do so - by comparing what
happens in trained musicians' brains when they play by memory and when
they riff.

"It's one thing to come up with a ditty. It's another thing entirely to
come up with a masterpiece, an hourlong idea after idea," explains Limb,
a Johns Hopkins University otolaryngologist whose ultimate goal is to
help the deaf not only hear but hear music.

How do you watch a brain on jazz? Inside an MRI scanner that measures
changes in oxygen use by different brain regions as they perform
different tasks.

You can't play trumpet or sax inside the giant magnet that is an MRI
machine. So Limb and Allen Braun at the National Institutes of Health
hired a company to make a special plastic keyboard that would fit inside
the cramped MRI with no metal to bother the magnet.

Then they put six professional jazz pianists inside to measure brain
activity while they played straight and when they improvised. They
played, right-handed, both a simple C scale and a blues tune that Limb
wrote, appropriately titled "Magnetism." Through earphones, they
listened to a prerecorded jazz quartet accompaniment, to simulate a real
gig.

Creativity uses the same brain circuitry that Braun has measured during
dreaming: First, inhibition switched off. The scientists watched a brain
region responsible for that self-monitoring, the dorsolateral prefrontal
cortex, shut down.

Then self-expression switched on. A smaller area called the medial
prefrontal cortex fired up, a key finding as Braun's earlier research on
how language forms linked that region to autobiographical storytelling.
And jazz improvisation produces such individual styles that it's often
described as telling your own musical story.

More intriguing, the musicians also showed heightened sensory awareness.
Regions involved with touch, hearing and sight revved up during improv
even though no one touched or saw anything different, and the only new
sounds were the ones they created.

That doesn't necessarily mean this is the center of creativity. The
brains of highly trained musicians might work differently than an
amateur pianist's, or a painter's, or a writer's, something Limb and
Braun hope to test next.

"We're all creative every day. Are our brains doing the same things?"
asks Braun, who studies the relationship of language and music at NIH's
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.

The study's biggest significance isn't what it found but that it could
be performed at all, opening new avenues of brain research.

"Improvisation always has a sort of magical quality associated with it.
People think when you're improvising you have some sort of inspiration
that's not measurable," says Robert Zatorre of the Montreal Neurological
Institute, a pioneer in the neuroscience of music and himself a
classical organist. "They went forward where everyone else feared to
tread."

Neuroscientists call the brain "plastic," meaning it has remarkable
flexibility to rewire itself. Unraveling how those circuits get modified
in turn helps researchers hunt for treatments for brain disorders - and
the same circuits that process music show strong relationships with
other key brain regions. Studies show patients learning to speak again
after a stroke may improve faster if they sing rather than recite, for
example. Zatorre's team is finding parallels between tone-deafness and
the reading disability dyslexia.

"What we're doing is not necessarily trying to say, 'Well, if we use
music, it will help Parkinson's patients walk.' It might, yes, and there
is some evidence it does so," says Zatorre, whose institute this summer
hosts an international conference on music and the brain.

Instead, the quest is to "understand the rules by which the brain
changes its organization. That's what we need to know," he adds.

Creativity comes in because its root is the spontaneity that defines
everyday life. Consider conversation: Hopkins' Limb wants to image the
brains of jazz musicians "trading fours," where one improvises four bars
and the next answers back with four new bars - a musical conversation he
believes comparable to the talking kind.

And no, Limb doesn't think he's diminishing the magic of music.

"It's like knowing how an airplane flies," he says. "It's still pretty
magical."  =

Sometimes life is so hard, you just have to sing

by Goldy Rosenberg

My father built a sweater factory in the employment-starved Catskills, creating job opportunities in a locale that didn't have many. Then along came the seventies with its sharp-dropping economy and wiped out the factory. All that my father had left was unplugged machines and a shell of a building. He, who had created jobs for others, had no business and no job of his own. So my father sought employment in the nearest metropolitan area, three hours away from home.

The recession-time job market was slim. The situation was desperate as my father had a family to support. He took the first job available, that of night mechanic in someone else's factory. Pay was minimum wage.

A dozen mouths to feed. A mortgage to carry. All on minimum wage. The budget numbers just didn't add up, which is why my father became adept at cutting corners and making do without. The first thing he cut was personal transportation, giving up driving his car. Yet even bus fare from New York City to our home was a strain on an already strained budget. So my father decided to stay in the City all week and only come home for Shabbos. Since he wanted to stretch his meager earnings even more, my father would hitchhike home.

One Thursday night, my father stood on the side of the New York State Thruway trying to catch a ride. No one stopped. It was cold. Time passed. Sleet started to fall, drenching my father. Each passing car sent a shower of icy water cascading towards him.

As my father told me the story, he said, "It was so bad, I just had to sing."

"Say again?!" I wasn't sure I heard right.

He smiled and told me, "Sometimes it is so bad, you just have to sing to God."

As soon as you take away any tension, your instrument won't work. It needs pressure.

Music is an odd invention; it always employs force. Think about it. The drum is a skin stretched to its tightest which you then pound away at with the drumsticks. The guitar is strings pulled taut, which you then pick or strum at, exerting pressure on the right string. The piano works more or less like the guitar, with strings being stretched and then hit. The flute, the clarinet, the oboe -- they take breath pushed strongly through it and constrain it into a narrow space so that there is pressure on that breath, until it escapes through an opening.

All instruments are pressure concepts. As soon as you take away any tension, your instrument won't work. It needs pressure.

David was a shepherd boy spurned by kin and countrymen alike. Alone he grew. Alone he forged his character. Through the pressures of daily teasing, through the tension of being hounded near unto death, David became King David, author of Psalms. From the ultimate pressurized childhood came the timeless songs of David. Pain can make music.

My father realized that only individuals strong enough to withstand tension become the instruments of song in the world. In a world so finely tuned, his moment of pressure must have been orchestrated for a response. So he met every challenge head-on. Were he to buckle from the pain, my father felt he would have failed, like the guitar string that snaps under tension.

That's why in that moment of pain my father sang, bringing his unique music into the world.

Life can get incredibly hard, so I've learned. And my father taught me that if I'm in pain, I'm being asked for a response. I can feel worthy of being picked to be played. And like my father and King David, I can take each pressure, pain or tension and sing a song to the world.

Sometimes life is so hard, you just have to sing.