Third International Festival of New Jewish Liturgical MusicAbout the ComposersSteve Cohen* received his training at the Manhattan, Juilliard and Eastman Schools of Music, and has composed a large catalog of symphonic, chamber, liturgical and musical-theater pieces, including the operas The Cop and the Anthem and La Pizza Del Destino. His orchestral composition Juggernaut won the 2004 Composer’s Award given jointly by the West Virginia Symphony Orchestra and the Museum in the Community. His vocal settings of Psalms 84 and 121 took first and second prizes in the 2006 Susan Galloway Sacred Song Award contest, and his setting of Hashkiveinu (chosen for the 2006 Shalshelet Festival) won an award from the New York Treble Singers in 2007. He has arranged and orchestrated numerous scores for orchestras, touring shows and other performing groups. He is a member of New York’s Zamir Chorale and is active in the musical life of Larchmont Temple (where, among other things, he plays Haman each year in the Purimshpiel). http://stevecohenmusic.net/
Julian Dawes began his musical training in Birmingham, England, and continued at the Royal College of Music in London. He has worked extensively as an accompanist and teacher, holding posts at Drama Centre London, Birmingham University, the The Arts Educational Schools in London, and The Oxford School of Drama. He has directed music for numerous theatre productions in England and internationally. As Musical Director of The Cherub Company London, he composed scores for The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, and Kafka’s The Trial, among others. His Caucasian Chalk Circle and Edward ll are both recognized scores for these plays held by the Brecht Estate in Berlin and have been realized in many productions. In addition, he has composed many works for solo instruments and chamber music. His Songs of Ashes, a setting of fifteen poems by Polish poet Jerzy Ficowski about the Holocaust, has been broadcast in Israel. His cantata The Death of Moses and his oratorio Ruth were performed in London in 2003 and 2005. He is Music Advisor to the European Association of Jewish Culture. http://www.juliandawes.com
HélPne Engel is an opera singer, musicologist, composer, lyricist and arranger. She has a degree in music therapy from Université du Québec in Montréal, and in France received a Masters Degree in Musicology from the University of Strasbourg and a diploma from the Conservatory of Cergy-Pontoise. She made her professional debut in opera but has maintained a strong interest, both as scholar and performer, in exploring diverse musical traditions and languages. She specializes in Jewish folklore in Judeo-Spanish, Yiddish, Hebrew and other languages of exile. Performance tours have taken her throughout France and to major folklore festivals in Europe and North America. She has produced five recordings, most recently Voyage in 2007. She also serves as occasional cantorial soloist at Temple Emmanuel - Beth Shalom in Montreal, where she now lives. http://www.helene-engel.com Mary Feinsinger* serves as cantor at the Rossmoor Jewish Congregation near Princeton, New Jersey and is conductor/arranger for the "Broadway at the Y" Chorus at the 92nd Street Y in New York. She is a graduate of Barnard College and has a M.M. in voice from The Juilliard School where for many years she was on the piano-accompanying staff. She has music-directed at many New York area theaters and cabarets and was conductor/arranger of Shlomo—about the life and works of Shlomo Carlebach - for Jazz at Lincoln Center. She recently presented a reading of her musical-in-progress, The Ballad of Rom and Jules, at the Dramatists Guild in New York; Understood Betsy premiered recently in Florida and Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys will premier in Vermont this Fall. With the West End Klezmorim (which she co-founded) she has performed at such venues as Carnegie Hall, The White House, Lincoln Center, and Symphony Space. She co-wrote and performed in the off-Broadway revue Hot Klezmer, and composed the score for the feature film The Apology. For Transcontinental Music, she produced, arranged, and music-directed Kol Dodi, arranged and produced Songs from a Passover Haggadah, and was an editor and music director for Shirei T'shuvah - Songs of Repentance. Among her many awards are a 2006 Composition Grant from The Children’s Aid Society Chorus and a 2008 ASCAP Plus Award. Currently she is on the voice faculty at the Mannes College of Music Extension Division, maintains a private studio, and serves on the board of directors of the American Society for Jewish Music. Cantor Arlene Frank studied voice and music theory at the Mannes School of Music, and was ordained as a Cantor/Teacher in Israel in 2003 at the Academy for Jewish Religion. She served as Student Cantor at Adas Emuno in Leonia, New Jersey and since 2003 has served as Cantor at Temple Beth El in Spring Valley, New York. She is inspired to write music when she cannot find the setting she needs for one of her choirs or students. Her Sukat Sh’lomecha is included in Transcontinental’s The Complete Jewish Songbook for Children, Vol. II. Born on the island of Mallorca, Manel Frau-Cortes is currently enrolled as a cantorial student at Gratz College. He studied piano and composition at the Ciutat de Mallorca’s Professional Conservatory, as well as jazz piano and arrangements at Taller de Músics, a contemporary music school in Barcelona. He also earned a Masters in Hebrew-Aramaic Letters from Barcelona’s Central University and is a published translator and music scholar specializing in Medieval Hebrew literature. His career as a composer, arranger, producer and performer spans styles from folk to jazz-fusion and New Age. In addition to liturgical settings, he has composed soundtracks for several short films, including Drop Plot (1993), as well as music for theatre including Membria d’en JuliB (2000) by Iguana Teatre and Una Noche Contigo by Haché de Teatro. Cantor Marcelo Gindlin, born and raised in Buenos Aires, now lives in southern California where he serves as Cantor of the Malibu Jewish Center & Synagogue and teaches at the University of Judaism. In addition to certification as Hazzan & Ba’al Tefillah from the Latin American Rabbinical Seminary, he has earned two degrees in music therapy and has extensive experience as a teacher, composer, choir director, and performer. His music can be heard on two CDs, Alfie’s Bark Mitzvah (accompanying the book by the same name) and Tot Shabbat with Cantor Marcelo. He has performed with the Los Angeles Jewish Symphony, at CAJE national conferences, and at synagogues around the U.S. In 1986 he performed in Buenos Aires with Ofra Haza (z”l), and in 2007 he was selected to officiate at Kabbalat Shabbat on the occasion of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s visit to the University of Judaism. Mark Glicksman came to music composition after beginning piano lessons at around age 50. In addition to composing choral pieces, he enjoys writing songs in styles ranging from calypso to doo-wop, singing in the choir at Reconstructionist Congregation Or Hadash in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, gardening, and cooking for family and friends. His day job is in engineering and software design. Hazzan Devin Goldenberg’s compositions and arrangements have been performed and recorded by a wide array of artists and professionals, synagogue, church and university ensembles worldwide. He has a long list of theatrical, television and film credits as actor, musician, writer, director and producer. Having led congregations in California, Arizona and Massachusetts for over twenty years, he is now on the faculty of the Maimonides School in Brookline, Massachusetts. David Goldstein is a composer of Hebrew chant and sacred choral works. His Song of Songs Suite for Women's Choir was recently premiered at West Virginia University. He is the leader of the Tikkun Chant Circle in Pittsburgh, and a recent graduate of the Kol Zimra Chant Leadership training program led by Rabbi Shefa Gold. He was formerly Composer in Residence at East Liberty Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh. David is also a business director at PPG Industries, Inc. He lives with his family in Wexford, Pennsylvania. Sylvia F. Goldstein* brings a classical music background and love for and knowledge of Jewish music to her compositions, which have been featured in the Annual Women Composers Festival of Hartford since its inception eight years ago. In addition to composing, she has been a director of temple music, taught at community college, and directed a JCC choir. She is currently Piano/Keyboard Department Chair of the Hartford Conservatory of Music, where she teaches classical piano and theory. Born in Brooklyn, New York, she studied at the Juilliard School of Music Preparatory Division, Cornell University, Brandeis University and the University of California at Berkeley. She has a BA and MA in music, and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Connecticut State Music Teachers Association, Women Cantors Network, and The Guild of Temple Musicians. Steven Greenman is a klezmer violinist and composer of klezmer music. He produced and is lead performer on Stempenyu's Dream which contains his original Jewish and klezmer compositions. A co-founder of the Khevrisa ensemble, he also co-produced and is lead performer on Khevrisa-European Klezmer Music on the Smithsonian Folkways label. He currently leads the Stempenyu's Dream ensemble, Di Tsvey, and the Steven Greenman Klezmer Ensemble. He has taught klezmer music at KlezKamp, KlezKanada, KlezFest London, Internationales Klezmer Festival Fuerth and Klezmer Wochen Weimar and has performed at the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow, Poland and at Toronto's Ashkenaz-A Festival of New Yiddish Culture. He also performs Hungarian nota, Romanian lautari music and urban East European Gypsy music and performs with the ensemble Harmonia, which he co-founded. He has been a regular guest soloist with the Cleveland Pops Orchestra performing his own arrangements of traditional East European Gypsy violin music and klezmer music. http://www.stevengreenman.com Cantor Terry Horowit* taught herself guitar at the age of 10 and started writing folk songs a couple of years later, continuing to compose for guitar and voice through graduate school at Brown University. After a hiatus of many years, her lifelong love of folk music combined with a profound respect and appreciation for Hebrew text led her to begin composing settings for prayers and liturgical texts. Her music has been chosen for all three Shalshelet Festivals. She completed the cantorial certification program at Ma'alot Seminary in Rockville, Maryland where for 15 years she tutored b'nei mitzvah and taught adult classes in cantillation and aspects of Jewish practice. She also was lead vocalist with the performing group Shalshelet (not affiliated with the Shalshelet foundation). In 2007, Terry moved with her family to Albany, New York where she is now the process of establishing herself as a teacher of trope and nusach, and meeting local musicians. She hopes to create a new performing group and to fulfill her dream of recording an album of her original songs. Sharone Horowit-Hendler is a rising senior at Brandeis University majoring in linguistics with a minor in mathematics. She is currently working on the topic for her senior thesis, concerning pragmatics of the Hebrew language. Sharone composed her first melody at the age of twelve, a new tune for B'zeit Yisroel. She is self-taught on the guitar and tin whistle. Her hobbies include LARPing, watching and reading sci-fi, having fun with her friends, photography, and playing with her cats. Katy Jordan, an Austin, Texas native, is a kinesiology major and athletic trainer at Stephen F. Austin University in Nacogdoches, Texas, and hopes to be one of the few professional female athletic trainers in the NBA. She is one of very few Jewish students at her large university, which has made her very strong and extremely proud to be Jewish. She is thankful to her parents for sending her to Greene Family Camp for Living Judaism in Bruceville, Texas, and is also grateful to Birthright Israel for the opportunity to experience her homeland. She cut her musical teeth playing trombone for 6 years, and she fondly remembers singing to Debbie Friedman’s Live at the Del CD during long road trips to Colorado on family vacations. She and her mom, Robbi Sherwin, have collaborated on three songs together; one is the title cut on Sababa’s first CD, Pray for the Peace. She was 13 years old when she co-wrote Ma’ariv Aravim. Cantor Wayne Krieger* has a degree in music education from the Hartt School of Music and certification as a music therapist from Montclair State College. At Hartt he studied Hazzanut under Cantor Arthur Koret. Over the course of 27 years he served communities in Arizona, New York, Connecticut and Florida as a cantor, Jewish educator and professional storyteller. Currently he is the Cantor at Congregation Ohev Shalom in Marlboro, New Jersey. He sang for three years in Connecticut’s first klezmer band, Katz & Jammers. In 1994 he and his wife Nancy formed the musical duo Shisha Neharot. They have performed extensively in Israel, New England, Florida and New Jersey. At the 1995 CAJE Conference, he conducted the Cantors’ concert which featured his compositions and arrangements. In 1997 he was a winner in the professional category at the North American Zionist Song Competition, and his composition V’chol Banayich was chosen for the 2006 Shalshelet Festival Yosl (Joe) Kurland took up violin in second grade in the Bronx and for years played only classical music. Later he learned guitar, singing the songs of Pete Seeger and The Weavers and the Yiddish folk songs he heard on Theodore Bikel’s records. (Little did he know the day would come when he would be singing in Yiddish on the stage of Carnegie Hall with Pete Seeger.) While in graduate school in Chicago, he began playing for international folk dance and performed with the Balkanske Igre Balkan dance troupe. He was a founder of the Wholesale Klezmer Band in 1982 and composed his first Yiddish song, the title number of the group's first album, Shmir Me, in 1988. His formal study of Yiddish began only after he turned 40, but he considers Yiddish to be the native language he didn't learn as a child, a language in which lends itself to speaking intimately with and about God. Having grown up with traditional cantorial music in the synagogue, he realized that in order to hear it in rural western Massachusetts where he now lives, he would have to learn and sing it himself. He serves as ba'al tfile for High Holiday and occasional Shabbos services at two synagogues near his home. His day job involves printing ketubot and other artwork designed by his wife, calligrapher Peggy Davis, as well as his own photographic work. His songs appear on four albums released by the Wholesale Klezmer Band. Judi Lamble performed in musical theatre and cabarets in her teens and 20s, sang soprano with the Chicago Symphony Chorus in her 30s, and made music as a featured vocalist with Minneapolis’s Temple Israel Nefesh Shabbat band in her 40s. Throughout, she composed, beginning with pop and jazz numbers for solo voice and piano and migrating to serious choral music as her commitment to Judaism deepened. Her choral and congregational works are now regularly performed by the Nefesh Shabbat band and Temple Israel’s congregational choir and have been solicited by secular and sacred choirs around the country. In the interstices between musical adventures, she graduated from Barnard College, earned a law degree from the University of Michigan, married, practiced law, and reared two daughters—a flautist/drummer and a pianist/vocalist. http://www.jewishvocalmusic.com/ Orit Perlman is a singer, cantorial soloist, and composer who specializes in Jewish musical traditions. She studied voice at the Rubin Academy of Music, Tel Aviv University, and completed the program for Israeli cantorial soloists through Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. She has led tefilah and life-cycle ceremonies all over Israel, and is now based at Congregation Ohel Avraham in Haifa. In collaboration with HUC Jerusalem’s Sadna program, she created the CD Tefilotai, and she continues to teach childhood educators on the topic of prayer. Her performances in Israel and the United states include chaznut, melodies in Hebrew, Aramaic, Yiddish, Ladino, and her own compositions. She plays qanun, oud and percussion in performance with musicologist Dr. Shoshana Weich-Shahak, and with the ensemble Merenjenas. She lives with her family on the Carmel. http://www.oritperlman.com/zimratya_eng.htm Rabbi Geela Rayzel Raphael*, a songwriter/liturgist, was ordained at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. She also studied at Indiana University, Brandeis, Pardes and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Currently she is the Rabbi of Beth Israel Congregation in Woodbury, NJ. She consults with the Jewish Women's Spirituality Institute and InterFaithways: an Interfaith Family Support Network of Greater Philadelphia. She teaches in numerous locations in the area as well. She performs with the a cappella trio MIRAJ, which recently released the CD Healing Chants for the Soul, and with Shabbat Unplugged. She can also be heard on her CD, Friday Night Revived. http://www.shechinah.com Born in Fairfax, Virginia, Lance Rhodes grew up in Ormond Beach, Florida. His musically active family included a grandfather who was a pianist and composer and played sixteen instruments, and a grandmother who was an actress and singer. He wrote his first major composition in high school, a symphonic poem for 23 instrumental parts which he conducted at graduation. He received a Bachelors of Music from the University of Miami in 2003. While there, he directed several music groups, composed soundtracks for several student films, and headlined as the main performer/composer for events such as the March of Dimes Walk and University of Miami 9-11 Vigil. For a brief period after graduation he worked as a free-lance arranger for Warner Brothers Publications. During that time he wrote the theme-song for Comedy Night School, a national television show. He currently attends the H. L. Miller Cantorial School at the Jewish Theological Seminary where he has served as student cantor in many synagogues and has begun composing for Jewish settings. Cantor Robbi Sherwin, of Austin, Texas, grew up in an Air Force family in small towns all over the U.S. and was first exposed to the riches of Jewish music at summer camp. She became certified as a cantor in 2003 after a decade of study while raising three children (including co-composer Katy Jordan). Currently the spiritual leader of Congregation B’nai Butte in Crested Butte, Colorado (where at 9,800 feet above sea level the community creates it’s own “Rocky Mountain Chai”), she has also served congregations in Austin, San Antonio and El Paso, Texas, as well as Denver and Evergreen, Colorado. She has released two CDs, Todah La’Chem and Aish Hahodesh, and her melodies have been recorded by many other artists. Her Hu Ya’aseh, co-written with Rich Glauber, appears on the CD Voices for Israel II. As a member of the trio Sababa! she has performed throughout the US, England and Israel, and she can be heard on their new recording Pray for the Peace. She is chairing the 2008 Women Cantors’ Network Conference in Austin, June 22-25, open to all women who transmit our heritage through music. Y’all come on down! http://www.robbisherwin.com Maggid Jhos Singer received a degree in music from the University of California, Los Angeles (despite warnings from well meaning advisors that this choice would likely have a negative impact on his future income-earning potential). Miraculously, this diploma and training have come in very handy in his career as a Jewish cleric. Ordained as a Maggid in 2001 by Rabbi Gershon Winkler, he has written many liturgical pieces for lifecycle rituals and worship. Some of these can be heard on the album Shirat HaLev. He teaches in and around the San Francisco Bay Area and writes often for Jewish Mosaic. He and his wife Julie Batz co-lead the Coastside Jewish Community in Half Moon Bay, California. http://www.jhossinger.com Jeremy Stein is a fourth year cantorial student at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. A native of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, he studied flute and arranging at Berklee College of Music in Boston. After graduating, he toured with his jazz/rock band Flutopia. In addition to performing with his band, Jeremy has recorded film scores, composed radio jingles, and played at countless Jewish weddings. He recently performed at Carnegie Hall with The Zamir Choral Foundation, sharing the stage with Theodore Bikel and Debbie Friedman as well as hazzanim Jackie Mendelson and Alberto Mizrahi. For the past several summers, he has served as Rosh Shira at Camp Ramah in New England.
* previous Shalshelet Festival honoree
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