How I Wrote My Dissertation
12 years ago, in the Fall of 2007, I was an undergraduate music history major at the University of Michigan. Combining my passions for performance and research, I had decided earlier that year to organize a recital called "Around the World in 60 Minutes." The program would consist of selected works from nationalist composers around the globe – but not only the big names like Grieg (Norwegian), Tchaikovsky (Russian), and de Falla (Spanish). I was also interested in lesser-known figures, representing those nations that somehow never made it into the Western European-centered discourses around musical nationalism: composers from Cuba, Croatia, China, Egypt, Australia, and... among other places, Israel.
For several years, I had been composing my own "Jewish classical piano music," under the assumption that such music didn't exist. I grew up with a deep love for my Jewish cultural heritage, and it seemed only natural to look for Jewish composers for my "Around the World in 60 Minutes" concert. But what could that mean, Jewish classical music? There's no country called Jewland where Jews compose Jewish music, analogous to Russian composers in Russia, Cuban composers in Cuba, or Chinese composers in China. There is, however, Israel. But Israel was founded in 1948, decades after Romantic nationalism gave way to avant-garde serialism. In the wake of the Holocaust, and influenced by anti-diasporan Zionist ideologies, early Israeli composers seemed reluctant to express their Jewish identity in musical forms that I, at that time, could understand as "Jewish."
But one score piqued my interest: a collection of "12 Bagatelles" for solo piano by the Israeli composer Joachim Stutschewsky (1891-1982), which featured both harmonic devices and movement titles that jived with my understanding of Jewish identity. Researching Stutchewsky led me to discover an early 20th-century organization in Russia: the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music. Evidently, the Society's members had done exactly what I had always assumed had never been done. They composed not only arrangements of Jewish folk melodies, but also "Jewish" sonatas, concertos, symphonies, and operas. Although my "Around the World in 60 Minutes" concert never took place, this was the initial spark, that initial "aha" moment, that would ultimately lead to the completion of my PhD dissertation 12 years later.
In fact, it was a dissertation that fueled this initial spark into a blaze of interest. I learned that Rabbi David Marc Posner (1947-2018) had written a PhD dissertation on Russian-Jewish piano music for his degree in piano pedagogy at Columbia University. When my mother asked me what I wanted for Chanukah that year, my answer was clear and decisive: a printed copy of this man's dissertation.
Dr. Posner's dissertation blew my mind. In it, I read for the first time about the history of Jewish musical nationalism, which arose as a direct response and analogue to the various musical nationalisms I had studied in my musicology courses. But more importantly, the dissertation concluded with a series of annotated scores: a Chassidic fantasy by Moshe Milner; Jewish folk song arrangements by Joel Engel and Lazare Saminsky; a 20-movement suite by Joseph Achron inspired by the melodic contours of Torah chant; and other unusual pieces. This was EXACTLY the sort of "Jewish classical music" that I had always dreamed of finding but had always assumed didn't exist. It was literally a dream come true.
I took these scores to the piano, and then to my professors at the University of Michigan: to my piano teacher, Dr. Louis Nagel; to my music theory teacher, Dr. Kevin Korsyn; to my musicology teacher, Dr. Roland John Wiley; and to my Russian-Jewish literature teacher, Dr. Mikhail Krutikov. With the exception of Professor Krutikov, none of them had ever heard of these composers. But their curiosity and support nudged me along farther on this path of research. Professor Krutikov nominated my term paper on the concept of "Jewish music" for an award from the university's Slavic Studies department, which I was honored to receive. Professor Wiley oversaw my independent study research on Moshe Milner's Yiddish art song, In Kheyder, which resulted in my first journal publication, in the Nota Bene Undergraduate Journal of Musicology. At the encouragement of my graduate student instructor Nathan Platte, I also had the opportunity to present this paper at a graduate student conference, Conversations in Music. Professor Nagel helped me prepare not one, but two senior recitals devoted exclusively to the music of Russian-Jewish nationalist composers, while my weekly conversations with Professor Wiley helped me to write extensive program notes.
To my great frustration, however, locating both scores and scholarship was terribly difficult. Searches for sheet music by Russian-Jewish composers such as Moshe Milner, Joseph Achron, and Ilya Ayzberg on WorldCat.org, an international database of library catalogues, brought up very few results. It appeared that most of their works, in fact, had never even been published. Scholarship was just as sparse, and most of it was in German, Hebrew, Yiddish, or Russian, wedging a sky-high language barrier between me and my research.
But there was one book, one brand new book in English that had only just been published: Dr. Klara Moricz's Jewish Identities (2008), which used the tools of music theory to critique the Society for Jewish Folk Music's ideological underpinnings. So I googled Klara Moricz. It was on page 7 or 10 or 20 of Google results that I discovered she'd be speaking at a roundtable discussion in New York City one week later, in honor of the Society for Jewish Folk Music's 100th anniversary. There was no way I could attend that event. I had no money. I had no time. I was in Michigan. But almost without thinking, and almost immediately, I had booked my flight.
Before flying to New York, I emailed Dr. Moricz and Dr. James Loeffler, who would both be speaking at the event, to ask if I could meet them while I was in town. (Both said yes.) Dr. Loeffler would later become an invaluable colleague and would ultimately sit on my PhD dissertation committee as one of my core readers. I cannot express deeply enough my gratitude to Dr. Loeffler for our many phone conversations and e-mail exchanges over the years, during which he mentored me on my research, helped me network among Jewish musicians and scholars, assisted in locating rare materials, actually sent me scans of rare materials, helped me acquire financial support for my various projects, and offered significant feedback on my grant applications, conference papers, and early drafts of my dissertation. I have also been deeply inspired by his own scholarship on Jewish musical nationalism, including a book and several articles.
During that fateful roundtable discussion with Drs. Loeffler and Moricz at the Center for Jewish History in the Fall of 2008, Cantor Dan Pincus noticed me wildly scribbling down page after page of notes. Afterwards, he introduced me to Michael Leavitt. Michael was, and still is, the president of the American Society for Jewish Music, an organization whose founding had been inspired by the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music. I told him that scores were maddeningly difficult to find, but that I had been able to locate a dozen or so through the magic of WorldCat.org and inter-library loans. And since these scores were so hard to find, I had recently begun scanning and uploading them to my website. After all, why should others have to spend so much effort searching for what I had already found?
Michael saw an opportunity and immediately proposed that we collaborate on building a free, digital archive of Jewish classical sheet music. On the spot, he offered me travel grants to dig through the mountains of uncatalogued sheet music at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (New York City) and Gratz College (Philadelphia). During one of my vacations, I spent two days at Gratz College, where I scanned almost a hundred pieces of sheet music, many of which, according to WorldCat, didn't exist anywhere else. The college's music librarian, Dr. Marsha Bryan Edelman, herself a renowned scholar of Jewish music, was an invaluable resource to me as I waded through drawer after drawer of uncatalogued materials. (She also hosted me in her home for my two-day adventure, where, along with her kids, I ate chicken nuggets for dinner.) Then, after completing my degree at the University of Michigan, I spent four weeks living out of relatives' apartments in Long Island (Uncle David Tetove and Aunt Sue Tetove), commuting daily into the city to scan over a hundred scores at the Jewish Theological Seminary. JTS's music librarian, Dr. Eliott Kahn not only enabled my research by pre-selecting relevant scores from their massive troves of uncatalogued boxes, introducing me to the library's preservation staff, and discussing how to go about digitizing the materials. He also took me under his wing. Long after my month of scanning had ended, he remained a mentor and friend. Back at the American Society for Jewish Music, Michael Leavitt was thrilled with our success. The St. Petersburg Score Project would eventually contain hundreds of scores, all available for free online at the website of the American Society for Jewish Music.
Michael Leavitt's encouragement of my foray into the mysterious world of Russian- Jewish nationalist music didn't stop there. He began introducing me to prominent scholars in the field: Dr. Paula Eisenstein Baker, Dr. Jascha Nemtsov, Dr. Edwin Seroussi, Dr. Lyudmila Sholokhova, and Judith Pinnolis, among others. He even arranged opportunities for me to briefly discuss my research with two of my childhood idols, the pianist Evgeny Kissin and the violinist Itzhak Perlman. Over the course of the next 10 years, Paula Eisenstein Baker would become a particularly close colleague of mine. We exchanged hundreds, if not thousands, of e-mails, diving deeply into shared research queries, swapping scans of archival materials, and offering feedback on each other's published and unpublished research. She became a true mentor for me, and I can't begin to express either her full significance in my growth as a scholar of Jewish music or my full appreciation and gratitude for her support.
After graduating from the University of Michigan in May 2009, I spent three years independently researching not only the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music, but specifically the life and works of Joseph Achron (1886-1943). While creating the St. Petersburg Score Project, digging through hundreds of materials at JTS and Gratz College, I had naturally begun looking for music to include in my senior piano recital. Curiously, I had found more music by Joseph Achron in these collections than I had by any other single composer. One night, sitting on a bench in the baggage retrieval area of the Detroit Metro Airport, I began to look more closely at Achron's music. I was blown away not simply by the fact that he had composed "Jewish" classical music, but by the intricate compositional craft of his works. It was at that moment, sitting on this bench in the airport, when it suddenly dawned on me: why isn't Achron as well-known as Beethoven or Brahms? His music seemed just as complex, intricate, and genius.
The only published biography of Joseph Achron that I could find was another dissertation. During the early 1960s, Cantor Philip Moddel (1910-1997) wrote his dissertation on Achron's life and work, a portion of which was published in 1966 by Israel Publications in the form of a 40-page, double-spaced biography. Reading Moddel's book blew my mind. On one hand, I was astonished by Achron's life story as a prodigy violinist who performed across the Russian Empire, before becoming one of the most celebrated violinists in Europe and a pioneering leader of Jewish musical nationalism. On the other hand, reading of such an extraordinary life and legacy led me to wonder: why had nobody else written Achron's biography? Why had every scholar to mention Achron's name focused exclusively on his involvement with the short-lived Society for Jewish Folk Music, while practically ignoring everything else he did?
Achron became my obsession. In May 2009, the month that I graduated college, I downloaded and indexed hundreds of historical newspaper clippings mentioning his name in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. That same month, I drove to Toronto to meet and discuss Achron's work with the late Cantor Louis Danto (1929-1910). He and his wife, Rouhama Danto, showered me with encouragement. The following month, I flew to Los Angeles to meet with Lance Bowling, who discovered, and provided me a copy of, the only known recording of Achron's speaking voice, from a roundtable discussion with other composers in 1942. (Achron died in 1943.)
The following spring, after participating in a leadership mastermind called "Building Future Leadership" in Jerusalem, I founded the Joseph Achron Society with the aims of raising awareness of Achron's life and work, creating and publishing first editions of his manuscript works, and networking musicians and scholars globally. Michael Leavitt mentored me on this project; over the next half decade, we spent dozens of hours on the phone and in person, discussing everything from marketing strategies and music editing techniques to the logistics of writing out score rental contracts and printing and shipping full orchestral parts. He is the sort of person I could call at any time of day with a quick 5-minute question, and an hour later he'd still be on the phone giving me advice. I am beyond indebted to Michael for his support, as well as to other colleagues and friends: Paula Eisenstein-Baker; James Loeffer; Jascha Nemtsov; Judith Pinnolis; Rabbi Jonah Rank; Jack Zaientz; Miriam Kramer; Haggai Shaham; Philippe Graffin; Aron Zelkowicz; Jason Calloway; Rachel Surden; Shirelle Dashevsky; David Ben-Gershon; Yoon Cheung; David Wynn Finkelstein; Joshua Walden; Avery Griffin; Yuval Waldman; Leonid Butir; Nathan Platte; and many others. I am particularly indebted to Bob Goldfarb, who arranged for the Joseph Achron Society to have a fiscal sponsorship with the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity in Beverly Hills, CA, enabling us to fund our sheet music publications with tax-free donations. And I am indebted to the generous financial support of Charles and Robyn Krauthammer (and to Jim Loeffler who, as Artistic Director of Pro Musica Hebraica, helped me gain their support), who donated around $10,000 over the course of several projects.
It was through my work with the Joseph Achron Society that I met Dr. Mai Kawabata, who would later sit on my PhD dissertation committee as one of my core readers. While preparing Achron's manuscript Paganini transcriptions for publication, I asked Dr. Joshua Walden, who had written the introduction to our first edition of Achron's 3rd Violin Concerto, to also write the introduction for our Achron-Paganini edition. Swamped with work, he referred me to Dr. Kawabata, who had recently published a monograph on Paganini's virtuosity. She was hardly familiar with Achron's name, but with great interest agreed to write the introduction. It is no exaggeration to say that Dr. Kawabata's analysis of the Achron-Paganini Caprices was a significant achievement in Achron scholarship. It was the first time that I had ever seen anyone dive into Achron's music with such attention to musical detail, picking apart the harmonies, textures, rhythms, timbres, and stylistic nuances, while placing them within a larger historical context (and taxonomy!) of composers' arrangements of the Paganini Caprices. And not only that. This was an analysis of a significant body of Achron's compositional work that had nothing to do with ethnic or national identity! Her work on the music of Joseph Achron (which she had only just found out about, on commission from me) proved beyond a doubt what I had always suspected: that deep, non-ethnographic music theory analysis of Achron's works could reveal a composer of great artistic and historical significance. Later in my graduate studies, as I became increasingly interested in the subjects of musical virtuosity and transcription (inspired by recent scholarship by Drs. Jonathan Kregor, Dana Gooley, Joshua Walden, and Jim Samson), I found myself turning more and more to Dr. Kawabata for advice and feedback. I am so grateful that she agreed to sit on my dissertation committee, despite sitting on the other side of the ocean in Oxford.
By the time I started my graduate work at New York University in the Fall of 2012, I had already begun dreaming of my future dissertation: the first comprehensive biography of Joseph Achron, with a thorough music theory-based analysis of his entire life's work. To a certain extent, one could say that I had even already been working on such a dissertation for the past 3-5 years, beginning with my undergraduate research and continuing through my work with the Joseph Achron Society. The present dissertation is a much more focused project than I had initially intended, but it fulfills all of my earlier dreams of diving deeply into Achron life and works, not exclusively as those of a "Jewish composer," but as those of a talented classical composer who happened to also be a pioneering composer of Jewish classical music.
From the moment I began my studies at New York University, Dr. Michael Beckerman became more than just my mentor. He was also my champion. One of my first memories with him involves me showing up at the beginning of my first semester, and him explaining to me how stubbornly he had fought with the editors of a forthcoming volume to let me, a mere grad student, co-author a chapter with him -- entirely without my knowledge, and weeks before my first semester! Having won that battle, he had even initiated (and won, of course) a second battle with the editors: for me, a mere graduate student, to be listed as the primary author of the co- written chapter. Of course, it took us three years to write our brief chapter on "Jewish Art Music, 1925-1945," because, no matter how many hours we spent arguing in his office, we still couldn't agree on how to define either "Jewish," "art," or "music!" We did agree, however, from the very beginning that most readers would expect a chapter on "1925-1945" to focus exclusively on the Holocaust, and we were having nothing of it. While briefly touching on the Holocaust via the music of Gideon Klein, we spent most of the chapter discussing the ontology of Yiddish translations of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Tchaikovsky in New York and Chicago, contemporary debates over the very concept of "Jewish music," and, of course, the many difficulties we ourselves faced in writing this chapter. Although, in the end, our chapter was never published, the process of collaborating with Mike Beckerman helped me develop my central values and goals in this dissertation, while also deeply intensifying my intellectual skepticism and critical thinking.
During my first two semesters at NYU, I attended graduate seminars taught by Dr. Maureen Mahon, who would later sit on my dissertation committee. Her seminars on "Music and the Construction of Race" and "Genre and Popular Music" helped me to see the intricate complexity of these topics, which people often assume are straight-forward and simple. They also significantly deepened my interests in these subjects, so much so that they would both end up resting at the very core of almost every term paper and conference presentation that I would write in the ensuing years. While my dissertation does not explicitly address issues of racial and ethnic identity to the extent that I had initially planned, it is safe to say that my dissertation would not be what it is without Dr. Mahon's early influence.
My first encounters with Dr. Martin Daughtry, who would also later sit on my dissertation committee, involved his role as the head of the Qualifying Exams Committee during my second year at NYU. To be honest, I found his approaches to be maddeningly frustrating. I was used to having teachers tell me exactly what they wanted me to do. Granted, I often didn't do what they asked me to do, because I was eternally developing my own ideas and approaches, but the top-down structure had always been there to contain my rebellious nature. By contrast, Martin gave us almost no guidelines whatsoever in preparing for our exams. He also gave us very little sense of what we'd actually be asked to do during the exams, which differed conceptually from the traditional Comprehensive Exams that we'd all been expecting (and fearing). The process was painful, particularly when I failed and had to redo one of the sections (because I had very characteristically written an entire essay explaining why the essay prompt was ridiculous). However, it was one of many pushes from the department that helped me abandon my reliance on pre-existing structures, methodologies, and assumptions. It also helped me to further deepen my thinking on musical genre, as a great deal of my preparation involved compiling a list of almost 100 journal articles on this subject (and reading a good quarter of them, at least), not only from musical perspectives but also from literary, social, and technological perspectives.
During the years after passing my Qualifying Exams, my relationship with Martin deepened. I participated in his seminar on Russian guitar poetry, for which I learned on-the-fly how to play guitar, sing in Russian, and drink horseradish vodka. My term paper, on the ontology of cover songs, carried me further along in my studies of musical genre and identity, as did reading Martin's fascinating dissertation. (Just as importantly, attempting to transcribe cover songs for this term project reminded me how AWFUL my aural theory skills were, prompting me to pursue an independent study the following semester. That independent study, under Mike Beckerman's supervision, was absolutely pivotal in my development as a musician and scholar.) Martin and I also shared a passion for the Russian language; he mentored me on language learning opportunities, connected me with Russian teachers at NYU, helped me think through the logistics of archival research in Russia, wrote and graded my Russian exam (to fulfill one of my two language requirements for graduation), and occasionally greeted me in the department with a hearty "dobriy den, starik!" ("hello, old friend!")
I am grateful to my other professors and mentors at New York University, all of whose influence can be felt at various points in my dissertation: Dr. Brigid Cohen; Dr. Suzanne Cusick; Dr. Louis Karchin; Dr. Stanley Boorman; Dr. Jaime Oliver; Dr. David Samuels; Dr. Su Zheng; and Dr. Marion Kaplan. Guest lecturers, including Dr. Mark Slobin, Dr. Mark Kligman, and Dr. Neil Levin broadened my view of Jewish music. Dr. Kligman remains a supportive colleague and mentor. I was also privileged to participate in several graduate seminars at the CUNY Graduate Center, taught by Dr. Anne Stone, Dr. Kofi Agawu, and Eric Wen. I am particularly indebted to Dr. Agawu, whose seminar on topic theory influenced my thinking on music analysis and composition more than any other course I have ever taken.
I would not have been able to complete this dissertation without the ability to read in various languages. I began my study of Yiddish at the Yiddish Book Center (Amherst, MA) during the summer of 2009, under the daily instruction and mentorship of Dr. Yuri Vedenyapin and Dr. Hankus Netsky. While I continued to learn Yiddish on my own, I gained a tremendous amount from my interactions with other Yiddish speakers, particularly Binyumen Schaechter; Naftali Ejdelman; Menachem Yankl Ejdelman; Meena-Lifshe Viswanath; Arun Viswanath; Paula Teitelbaum; Yankl Peretz Blum; Hanan Bordin; Jordan Kutzik; Temma Schaechter; Stephen Cohen; and many others. I began learning Russian with an old friend, Vil Sadikov, at a Starbucks in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, in 2011, as well as on my own with Rosetta Stone. In 2013, I participated in Middlebury College's summer Russian program, where I took daily classes with Dr. Petia Alexieva, Dr. Colleen Lucey, and Dr. Molly Peeney, in addition to committing to only speaking Russian during the duration of the entire 8-week course. In 2014, I attended several Russian language courses at NYU taught by Professor Irina Belodedova. I am grateful to Shirelle Dashevsky and David Ben Gershon for their help with translating handwritten Russian materials.
Jakub Waszkowiak, a Franciscan friar from Poland, taught me basic Polish during the Fall of 2013, in exchange for my editing his English-language dissertation. Our weekly meetings at the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem – Jakub in his full Franciscan robe, and me in my tsitsis and kippa – will always hold a fond place in my heart.
James Loeffler and Jascha Nemtsov helped me on numerous occasions with my reading of German texts. My wife, Rachel, helped me translate 19th century Hebrew newspaper clippings, which were in a poetic mix of Biblical, Rabbinic, and Liturgical Hebrew. I couldn't have done this without her help.
I am grateful to Achron's distant cousins, Liora Achron and Adina Rosengarten, and to Achron's friend from Los Angeles, the late Annette Kaufman (1914-2016), for agreeing to multiple interviews with me. Jean and Michael Levin provided me with audio and written transcriptions of their interview with Achron's piano accompanist, Rebecca Burstein-Arber (1894-1993), which I have quoted with their permission in this dissertation. The late Maia Helles (1916-2016), daughter of Achron's early colleague in the field of Russian-Jewish musical nationalism, Arie Abilea (1885-1985), offered some fascinating insights on Abilea's work and life during our interview in 2010. Access to archival materials was granted to me at the National Library of Israel (Gila Flam); the Rubin Academy of Music and Dance; the Felicja Blumental Music Center & Library (Jochewed Schwarz); the Philadelphia Free Library (Kile Smith); the Library of Agudas Chassidei Chabad; the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (Sarah Diamant); YIVO (Gunnar Berg and Alex Weisser); Hebrew Union College (Yoram Bitton); Temple Emanu-El NYC (Lori Corrsin); Hebrew College (Lynn Torgove); the Library of Congress; Yale University; and elsewhere. I am also grateful to Jascha Nemtsov, Paula Eisenstein Baker, and Jim Loeffler for sending me scans of materials from Russian and German archives.
Garret Moddel discovered a massive trove of Achron's manuscripts, scores, and personal documents, which had all previously been thought destroyed, and he mailed them all to me in 2017 for use in my research. These materials include autobiographical documents, Achron's passport, a copy of Achron's birth certificate, rare published scores that I have not been able to locate elsewhere in the world, manuscript sketches, a scrapbook of newspaper clippings from Achron's childhood, photographs, and more. Garret discovered them after the death of his father, Philip Moddel (1910-1997), whose biography of Joseph Achron had sparked my obsession with Achron so many years ago and who evidently had kept all of these materials in his possession. I am in the process of donating these invaluable materials to a library for archival preservation.
I would like to thank the staff at various franchises of Starbucks, Dunkin' Donuts, Seven Stars Bakery, and Wildflour Vegan Bakery & Café for fueling countless hours of writing and research.
Finally, I would like to thank my family for their undying support and enthusiasm as I devoted the past 10 years of my life to researching Achron's life and works. My wife, Rabbi Rachel Zerin, was there for me when I cried through trying to translate Russian and Yiddish newspapers, marveled at new discoveries, babbled, babbled more, and babbled even more. She was there with me when I travelled for archival research, prepared conference presentations, binge ate Cheez-Its, failed to acquire much-needed grants, and celebrated the grants that I did receive. But she didn't just support and accompany me on my journey. She also helped me with translating 19th century Hebrew newspaper articles. She helped me with my grant proposals and conference abstracts, and I learned a lot from her in our conversations about Jewish music, biographical writing, and research. She also helped with the logistics of publishing Achron's music through the Joseph Achron Society. It is a cliché, of course, to conclude acknowledgment sections in academic publications by thanking one's spouse (if one is married). But there is a reason why it has become so cliché. None of us works on an island in the vast expanses of our internal discourse. We are all indebted to those around us who support, inspire, and accompany us, both explicitly and implicitly, on our life journeys. Thank you, Rachel. And thank you to anyone else whom I might have forgotten to mention in these acknowledgments. (Gosh, there are just so many of you!)
For several years, I had been composing my own "Jewish classical piano music," under the assumption that such music didn't exist. I grew up with a deep love for my Jewish cultural heritage, and it seemed only natural to look for Jewish composers for my "Around the World in 60 Minutes" concert. But what could that mean, Jewish classical music? There's no country called Jewland where Jews compose Jewish music, analogous to Russian composers in Russia, Cuban composers in Cuba, or Chinese composers in China. There is, however, Israel. But Israel was founded in 1948, decades after Romantic nationalism gave way to avant-garde serialism. In the wake of the Holocaust, and influenced by anti-diasporan Zionist ideologies, early Israeli composers seemed reluctant to express their Jewish identity in musical forms that I, at that time, could understand as "Jewish."
But one score piqued my interest: a collection of "12 Bagatelles" for solo piano by the Israeli composer Joachim Stutschewsky (1891-1982), which featured both harmonic devices and movement titles that jived with my understanding of Jewish identity. Researching Stutchewsky led me to discover an early 20th-century organization in Russia: the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music. Evidently, the Society's members had done exactly what I had always assumed had never been done. They composed not only arrangements of Jewish folk melodies, but also "Jewish" sonatas, concertos, symphonies, and operas. Although my "Around the World in 60 Minutes" concert never took place, this was the initial spark, that initial "aha" moment, that would ultimately lead to the completion of my PhD dissertation 12 years later.
In fact, it was a dissertation that fueled this initial spark into a blaze of interest. I learned that Rabbi David Marc Posner (1947-2018) had written a PhD dissertation on Russian-Jewish piano music for his degree in piano pedagogy at Columbia University. When my mother asked me what I wanted for Chanukah that year, my answer was clear and decisive: a printed copy of this man's dissertation.
Dr. Posner's dissertation blew my mind. In it, I read for the first time about the history of Jewish musical nationalism, which arose as a direct response and analogue to the various musical nationalisms I had studied in my musicology courses. But more importantly, the dissertation concluded with a series of annotated scores: a Chassidic fantasy by Moshe Milner; Jewish folk song arrangements by Joel Engel and Lazare Saminsky; a 20-movement suite by Joseph Achron inspired by the melodic contours of Torah chant; and other unusual pieces. This was EXACTLY the sort of "Jewish classical music" that I had always dreamed of finding but had always assumed didn't exist. It was literally a dream come true.
I took these scores to the piano, and then to my professors at the University of Michigan: to my piano teacher, Dr. Louis Nagel; to my music theory teacher, Dr. Kevin Korsyn; to my musicology teacher, Dr. Roland John Wiley; and to my Russian-Jewish literature teacher, Dr. Mikhail Krutikov. With the exception of Professor Krutikov, none of them had ever heard of these composers. But their curiosity and support nudged me along farther on this path of research. Professor Krutikov nominated my term paper on the concept of "Jewish music" for an award from the university's Slavic Studies department, which I was honored to receive. Professor Wiley oversaw my independent study research on Moshe Milner's Yiddish art song, In Kheyder, which resulted in my first journal publication, in the Nota Bene Undergraduate Journal of Musicology. At the encouragement of my graduate student instructor Nathan Platte, I also had the opportunity to present this paper at a graduate student conference, Conversations in Music. Professor Nagel helped me prepare not one, but two senior recitals devoted exclusively to the music of Russian-Jewish nationalist composers, while my weekly conversations with Professor Wiley helped me to write extensive program notes.
To my great frustration, however, locating both scores and scholarship was terribly difficult. Searches for sheet music by Russian-Jewish composers such as Moshe Milner, Joseph Achron, and Ilya Ayzberg on WorldCat.org, an international database of library catalogues, brought up very few results. It appeared that most of their works, in fact, had never even been published. Scholarship was just as sparse, and most of it was in German, Hebrew, Yiddish, or Russian, wedging a sky-high language barrier between me and my research.
But there was one book, one brand new book in English that had only just been published: Dr. Klara Moricz's Jewish Identities (2008), which used the tools of music theory to critique the Society for Jewish Folk Music's ideological underpinnings. So I googled Klara Moricz. It was on page 7 or 10 or 20 of Google results that I discovered she'd be speaking at a roundtable discussion in New York City one week later, in honor of the Society for Jewish Folk Music's 100th anniversary. There was no way I could attend that event. I had no money. I had no time. I was in Michigan. But almost without thinking, and almost immediately, I had booked my flight.
Before flying to New York, I emailed Dr. Moricz and Dr. James Loeffler, who would both be speaking at the event, to ask if I could meet them while I was in town. (Both said yes.) Dr. Loeffler would later become an invaluable colleague and would ultimately sit on my PhD dissertation committee as one of my core readers. I cannot express deeply enough my gratitude to Dr. Loeffler for our many phone conversations and e-mail exchanges over the years, during which he mentored me on my research, helped me network among Jewish musicians and scholars, assisted in locating rare materials, actually sent me scans of rare materials, helped me acquire financial support for my various projects, and offered significant feedback on my grant applications, conference papers, and early drafts of my dissertation. I have also been deeply inspired by his own scholarship on Jewish musical nationalism, including a book and several articles.
During that fateful roundtable discussion with Drs. Loeffler and Moricz at the Center for Jewish History in the Fall of 2008, Cantor Dan Pincus noticed me wildly scribbling down page after page of notes. Afterwards, he introduced me to Michael Leavitt. Michael was, and still is, the president of the American Society for Jewish Music, an organization whose founding had been inspired by the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music. I told him that scores were maddeningly difficult to find, but that I had been able to locate a dozen or so through the magic of WorldCat.org and inter-library loans. And since these scores were so hard to find, I had recently begun scanning and uploading them to my website. After all, why should others have to spend so much effort searching for what I had already found?
Michael saw an opportunity and immediately proposed that we collaborate on building a free, digital archive of Jewish classical sheet music. On the spot, he offered me travel grants to dig through the mountains of uncatalogued sheet music at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (New York City) and Gratz College (Philadelphia). During one of my vacations, I spent two days at Gratz College, where I scanned almost a hundred pieces of sheet music, many of which, according to WorldCat, didn't exist anywhere else. The college's music librarian, Dr. Marsha Bryan Edelman, herself a renowned scholar of Jewish music, was an invaluable resource to me as I waded through drawer after drawer of uncatalogued materials. (She also hosted me in her home for my two-day adventure, where, along with her kids, I ate chicken nuggets for dinner.) Then, after completing my degree at the University of Michigan, I spent four weeks living out of relatives' apartments in Long Island (Uncle David Tetove and Aunt Sue Tetove), commuting daily into the city to scan over a hundred scores at the Jewish Theological Seminary. JTS's music librarian, Dr. Eliott Kahn not only enabled my research by pre-selecting relevant scores from their massive troves of uncatalogued boxes, introducing me to the library's preservation staff, and discussing how to go about digitizing the materials. He also took me under his wing. Long after my month of scanning had ended, he remained a mentor and friend. Back at the American Society for Jewish Music, Michael Leavitt was thrilled with our success. The St. Petersburg Score Project would eventually contain hundreds of scores, all available for free online at the website of the American Society for Jewish Music.
Michael Leavitt's encouragement of my foray into the mysterious world of Russian- Jewish nationalist music didn't stop there. He began introducing me to prominent scholars in the field: Dr. Paula Eisenstein Baker, Dr. Jascha Nemtsov, Dr. Edwin Seroussi, Dr. Lyudmila Sholokhova, and Judith Pinnolis, among others. He even arranged opportunities for me to briefly discuss my research with two of my childhood idols, the pianist Evgeny Kissin and the violinist Itzhak Perlman. Over the course of the next 10 years, Paula Eisenstein Baker would become a particularly close colleague of mine. We exchanged hundreds, if not thousands, of e-mails, diving deeply into shared research queries, swapping scans of archival materials, and offering feedback on each other's published and unpublished research. She became a true mentor for me, and I can't begin to express either her full significance in my growth as a scholar of Jewish music or my full appreciation and gratitude for her support.
After graduating from the University of Michigan in May 2009, I spent three years independently researching not only the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music, but specifically the life and works of Joseph Achron (1886-1943). While creating the St. Petersburg Score Project, digging through hundreds of materials at JTS and Gratz College, I had naturally begun looking for music to include in my senior piano recital. Curiously, I had found more music by Joseph Achron in these collections than I had by any other single composer. One night, sitting on a bench in the baggage retrieval area of the Detroit Metro Airport, I began to look more closely at Achron's music. I was blown away not simply by the fact that he had composed "Jewish" classical music, but by the intricate compositional craft of his works. It was at that moment, sitting on this bench in the airport, when it suddenly dawned on me: why isn't Achron as well-known as Beethoven or Brahms? His music seemed just as complex, intricate, and genius.
The only published biography of Joseph Achron that I could find was another dissertation. During the early 1960s, Cantor Philip Moddel (1910-1997) wrote his dissertation on Achron's life and work, a portion of which was published in 1966 by Israel Publications in the form of a 40-page, double-spaced biography. Reading Moddel's book blew my mind. On one hand, I was astonished by Achron's life story as a prodigy violinist who performed across the Russian Empire, before becoming one of the most celebrated violinists in Europe and a pioneering leader of Jewish musical nationalism. On the other hand, reading of such an extraordinary life and legacy led me to wonder: why had nobody else written Achron's biography? Why had every scholar to mention Achron's name focused exclusively on his involvement with the short-lived Society for Jewish Folk Music, while practically ignoring everything else he did?
Achron became my obsession. In May 2009, the month that I graduated college, I downloaded and indexed hundreds of historical newspaper clippings mentioning his name in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. That same month, I drove to Toronto to meet and discuss Achron's work with the late Cantor Louis Danto (1929-1910). He and his wife, Rouhama Danto, showered me with encouragement. The following month, I flew to Los Angeles to meet with Lance Bowling, who discovered, and provided me a copy of, the only known recording of Achron's speaking voice, from a roundtable discussion with other composers in 1942. (Achron died in 1943.)
The following spring, after participating in a leadership mastermind called "Building Future Leadership" in Jerusalem, I founded the Joseph Achron Society with the aims of raising awareness of Achron's life and work, creating and publishing first editions of his manuscript works, and networking musicians and scholars globally. Michael Leavitt mentored me on this project; over the next half decade, we spent dozens of hours on the phone and in person, discussing everything from marketing strategies and music editing techniques to the logistics of writing out score rental contracts and printing and shipping full orchestral parts. He is the sort of person I could call at any time of day with a quick 5-minute question, and an hour later he'd still be on the phone giving me advice. I am beyond indebted to Michael for his support, as well as to other colleagues and friends: Paula Eisenstein-Baker; James Loeffer; Jascha Nemtsov; Judith Pinnolis; Rabbi Jonah Rank; Jack Zaientz; Miriam Kramer; Haggai Shaham; Philippe Graffin; Aron Zelkowicz; Jason Calloway; Rachel Surden; Shirelle Dashevsky; David Ben-Gershon; Yoon Cheung; David Wynn Finkelstein; Joshua Walden; Avery Griffin; Yuval Waldman; Leonid Butir; Nathan Platte; and many others. I am particularly indebted to Bob Goldfarb, who arranged for the Joseph Achron Society to have a fiscal sponsorship with the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity in Beverly Hills, CA, enabling us to fund our sheet music publications with tax-free donations. And I am indebted to the generous financial support of Charles and Robyn Krauthammer (and to Jim Loeffler who, as Artistic Director of Pro Musica Hebraica, helped me gain their support), who donated around $10,000 over the course of several projects.
It was through my work with the Joseph Achron Society that I met Dr. Mai Kawabata, who would later sit on my PhD dissertation committee as one of my core readers. While preparing Achron's manuscript Paganini transcriptions for publication, I asked Dr. Joshua Walden, who had written the introduction to our first edition of Achron's 3rd Violin Concerto, to also write the introduction for our Achron-Paganini edition. Swamped with work, he referred me to Dr. Kawabata, who had recently published a monograph on Paganini's virtuosity. She was hardly familiar with Achron's name, but with great interest agreed to write the introduction. It is no exaggeration to say that Dr. Kawabata's analysis of the Achron-Paganini Caprices was a significant achievement in Achron scholarship. It was the first time that I had ever seen anyone dive into Achron's music with such attention to musical detail, picking apart the harmonies, textures, rhythms, timbres, and stylistic nuances, while placing them within a larger historical context (and taxonomy!) of composers' arrangements of the Paganini Caprices. And not only that. This was an analysis of a significant body of Achron's compositional work that had nothing to do with ethnic or national identity! Her work on the music of Joseph Achron (which she had only just found out about, on commission from me) proved beyond a doubt what I had always suspected: that deep, non-ethnographic music theory analysis of Achron's works could reveal a composer of great artistic and historical significance. Later in my graduate studies, as I became increasingly interested in the subjects of musical virtuosity and transcription (inspired by recent scholarship by Drs. Jonathan Kregor, Dana Gooley, Joshua Walden, and Jim Samson), I found myself turning more and more to Dr. Kawabata for advice and feedback. I am so grateful that she agreed to sit on my dissertation committee, despite sitting on the other side of the ocean in Oxford.
By the time I started my graduate work at New York University in the Fall of 2012, I had already begun dreaming of my future dissertation: the first comprehensive biography of Joseph Achron, with a thorough music theory-based analysis of his entire life's work. To a certain extent, one could say that I had even already been working on such a dissertation for the past 3-5 years, beginning with my undergraduate research and continuing through my work with the Joseph Achron Society. The present dissertation is a much more focused project than I had initially intended, but it fulfills all of my earlier dreams of diving deeply into Achron life and works, not exclusively as those of a "Jewish composer," but as those of a talented classical composer who happened to also be a pioneering composer of Jewish classical music.
From the moment I began my studies at New York University, Dr. Michael Beckerman became more than just my mentor. He was also my champion. One of my first memories with him involves me showing up at the beginning of my first semester, and him explaining to me how stubbornly he had fought with the editors of a forthcoming volume to let me, a mere grad student, co-author a chapter with him -- entirely without my knowledge, and weeks before my first semester! Having won that battle, he had even initiated (and won, of course) a second battle with the editors: for me, a mere graduate student, to be listed as the primary author of the co- written chapter. Of course, it took us three years to write our brief chapter on "Jewish Art Music, 1925-1945," because, no matter how many hours we spent arguing in his office, we still couldn't agree on how to define either "Jewish," "art," or "music!" We did agree, however, from the very beginning that most readers would expect a chapter on "1925-1945" to focus exclusively on the Holocaust, and we were having nothing of it. While briefly touching on the Holocaust via the music of Gideon Klein, we spent most of the chapter discussing the ontology of Yiddish translations of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Tchaikovsky in New York and Chicago, contemporary debates over the very concept of "Jewish music," and, of course, the many difficulties we ourselves faced in writing this chapter. Although, in the end, our chapter was never published, the process of collaborating with Mike Beckerman helped me develop my central values and goals in this dissertation, while also deeply intensifying my intellectual skepticism and critical thinking.
During my first two semesters at NYU, I attended graduate seminars taught by Dr. Maureen Mahon, who would later sit on my dissertation committee. Her seminars on "Music and the Construction of Race" and "Genre and Popular Music" helped me to see the intricate complexity of these topics, which people often assume are straight-forward and simple. They also significantly deepened my interests in these subjects, so much so that they would both end up resting at the very core of almost every term paper and conference presentation that I would write in the ensuing years. While my dissertation does not explicitly address issues of racial and ethnic identity to the extent that I had initially planned, it is safe to say that my dissertation would not be what it is without Dr. Mahon's early influence.
My first encounters with Dr. Martin Daughtry, who would also later sit on my dissertation committee, involved his role as the head of the Qualifying Exams Committee during my second year at NYU. To be honest, I found his approaches to be maddeningly frustrating. I was used to having teachers tell me exactly what they wanted me to do. Granted, I often didn't do what they asked me to do, because I was eternally developing my own ideas and approaches, but the top-down structure had always been there to contain my rebellious nature. By contrast, Martin gave us almost no guidelines whatsoever in preparing for our exams. He also gave us very little sense of what we'd actually be asked to do during the exams, which differed conceptually from the traditional Comprehensive Exams that we'd all been expecting (and fearing). The process was painful, particularly when I failed and had to redo one of the sections (because I had very characteristically written an entire essay explaining why the essay prompt was ridiculous). However, it was one of many pushes from the department that helped me abandon my reliance on pre-existing structures, methodologies, and assumptions. It also helped me to further deepen my thinking on musical genre, as a great deal of my preparation involved compiling a list of almost 100 journal articles on this subject (and reading a good quarter of them, at least), not only from musical perspectives but also from literary, social, and technological perspectives.
During the years after passing my Qualifying Exams, my relationship with Martin deepened. I participated in his seminar on Russian guitar poetry, for which I learned on-the-fly how to play guitar, sing in Russian, and drink horseradish vodka. My term paper, on the ontology of cover songs, carried me further along in my studies of musical genre and identity, as did reading Martin's fascinating dissertation. (Just as importantly, attempting to transcribe cover songs for this term project reminded me how AWFUL my aural theory skills were, prompting me to pursue an independent study the following semester. That independent study, under Mike Beckerman's supervision, was absolutely pivotal in my development as a musician and scholar.) Martin and I also shared a passion for the Russian language; he mentored me on language learning opportunities, connected me with Russian teachers at NYU, helped me think through the logistics of archival research in Russia, wrote and graded my Russian exam (to fulfill one of my two language requirements for graduation), and occasionally greeted me in the department with a hearty "dobriy den, starik!" ("hello, old friend!")
I am grateful to my other professors and mentors at New York University, all of whose influence can be felt at various points in my dissertation: Dr. Brigid Cohen; Dr. Suzanne Cusick; Dr. Louis Karchin; Dr. Stanley Boorman; Dr. Jaime Oliver; Dr. David Samuels; Dr. Su Zheng; and Dr. Marion Kaplan. Guest lecturers, including Dr. Mark Slobin, Dr. Mark Kligman, and Dr. Neil Levin broadened my view of Jewish music. Dr. Kligman remains a supportive colleague and mentor. I was also privileged to participate in several graduate seminars at the CUNY Graduate Center, taught by Dr. Anne Stone, Dr. Kofi Agawu, and Eric Wen. I am particularly indebted to Dr. Agawu, whose seminar on topic theory influenced my thinking on music analysis and composition more than any other course I have ever taken.
I would not have been able to complete this dissertation without the ability to read in various languages. I began my study of Yiddish at the Yiddish Book Center (Amherst, MA) during the summer of 2009, under the daily instruction and mentorship of Dr. Yuri Vedenyapin and Dr. Hankus Netsky. While I continued to learn Yiddish on my own, I gained a tremendous amount from my interactions with other Yiddish speakers, particularly Binyumen Schaechter; Naftali Ejdelman; Menachem Yankl Ejdelman; Meena-Lifshe Viswanath; Arun Viswanath; Paula Teitelbaum; Yankl Peretz Blum; Hanan Bordin; Jordan Kutzik; Temma Schaechter; Stephen Cohen; and many others. I began learning Russian with an old friend, Vil Sadikov, at a Starbucks in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, in 2011, as well as on my own with Rosetta Stone. In 2013, I participated in Middlebury College's summer Russian program, where I took daily classes with Dr. Petia Alexieva, Dr. Colleen Lucey, and Dr. Molly Peeney, in addition to committing to only speaking Russian during the duration of the entire 8-week course. In 2014, I attended several Russian language courses at NYU taught by Professor Irina Belodedova. I am grateful to Shirelle Dashevsky and David Ben Gershon for their help with translating handwritten Russian materials.
Jakub Waszkowiak, a Franciscan friar from Poland, taught me basic Polish during the Fall of 2013, in exchange for my editing his English-language dissertation. Our weekly meetings at the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem – Jakub in his full Franciscan robe, and me in my tsitsis and kippa – will always hold a fond place in my heart.
James Loeffler and Jascha Nemtsov helped me on numerous occasions with my reading of German texts. My wife, Rachel, helped me translate 19th century Hebrew newspaper clippings, which were in a poetic mix of Biblical, Rabbinic, and Liturgical Hebrew. I couldn't have done this without her help.
I am grateful to Achron's distant cousins, Liora Achron and Adina Rosengarten, and to Achron's friend from Los Angeles, the late Annette Kaufman (1914-2016), for agreeing to multiple interviews with me. Jean and Michael Levin provided me with audio and written transcriptions of their interview with Achron's piano accompanist, Rebecca Burstein-Arber (1894-1993), which I have quoted with their permission in this dissertation. The late Maia Helles (1916-2016), daughter of Achron's early colleague in the field of Russian-Jewish musical nationalism, Arie Abilea (1885-1985), offered some fascinating insights on Abilea's work and life during our interview in 2010. Access to archival materials was granted to me at the National Library of Israel (Gila Flam); the Rubin Academy of Music and Dance; the Felicja Blumental Music Center & Library (Jochewed Schwarz); the Philadelphia Free Library (Kile Smith); the Library of Agudas Chassidei Chabad; the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (Sarah Diamant); YIVO (Gunnar Berg and Alex Weisser); Hebrew Union College (Yoram Bitton); Temple Emanu-El NYC (Lori Corrsin); Hebrew College (Lynn Torgove); the Library of Congress; Yale University; and elsewhere. I am also grateful to Jascha Nemtsov, Paula Eisenstein Baker, and Jim Loeffler for sending me scans of materials from Russian and German archives.
Garret Moddel discovered a massive trove of Achron's manuscripts, scores, and personal documents, which had all previously been thought destroyed, and he mailed them all to me in 2017 for use in my research. These materials include autobiographical documents, Achron's passport, a copy of Achron's birth certificate, rare published scores that I have not been able to locate elsewhere in the world, manuscript sketches, a scrapbook of newspaper clippings from Achron's childhood, photographs, and more. Garret discovered them after the death of his father, Philip Moddel (1910-1997), whose biography of Joseph Achron had sparked my obsession with Achron so many years ago and who evidently had kept all of these materials in his possession. I am in the process of donating these invaluable materials to a library for archival preservation.
I would like to thank the staff at various franchises of Starbucks, Dunkin' Donuts, Seven Stars Bakery, and Wildflour Vegan Bakery & Café for fueling countless hours of writing and research.
Finally, I would like to thank my family for their undying support and enthusiasm as I devoted the past 10 years of my life to researching Achron's life and works. My wife, Rabbi Rachel Zerin, was there for me when I cried through trying to translate Russian and Yiddish newspapers, marveled at new discoveries, babbled, babbled more, and babbled even more. She was there with me when I travelled for archival research, prepared conference presentations, binge ate Cheez-Its, failed to acquire much-needed grants, and celebrated the grants that I did receive. But she didn't just support and accompany me on my journey. She also helped me with translating 19th century Hebrew newspaper articles. She helped me with my grant proposals and conference abstracts, and I learned a lot from her in our conversations about Jewish music, biographical writing, and research. She also helped with the logistics of publishing Achron's music through the Joseph Achron Society. It is a cliché, of course, to conclude acknowledgment sections in academic publications by thanking one's spouse (if one is married). But there is a reason why it has become so cliché. None of us works on an island in the vast expanses of our internal discourse. We are all indebted to those around us who support, inspire, and accompany us, both explicitly and implicitly, on our life journeys. Thank you, Rachel. And thank you to anyone else whom I might have forgotten to mention in these acknowledgments. (Gosh, there are just so many of you!)