T he meaning and impact of a good song depends upon the delicate interdependence of music and words. Melody and musical "accompaniment" carry and nuance a text’s meaning, and words can influence how we hear the music to which they are paired. The Milken Archive’s Volume 9, The Art of Yiddish Song: Yiddish and Hebrew Lieder, presents a collection of evocative Yiddish and Hebrew poems set for voice and piano that follow in the tradition of lieder, or art songs.

The Jewish art song arose in the early 20th century and can be traced to the emergence of the Society for Jewish Folk Music. Founded in St. Petersburg in 1908, the Society for Jewish Folk Music collected and preserved Jewish folk music and advocated for the creation of a "national" Jewish music. Neil W. Levin has observed that composers affiliated with the Society "began the road from folk to art song by fashioning artistic piano accompaniments to well-crafted arrangements of Jewish folksongs that were known throughout large swaths of the Pale of Settlement." Art songs were one of many genres in which these composers worked as they aimed to create art music based on Jewish folk and religious musical traditions.

Though its roots lie in the Pale of Settlement and the urban centers of Russia, the Jewish art song followed the migratory paths of the majority of Eastern European Jews. Its development is thus most productively viewed through a triangle connecting the Russian centers with Israel and New York.

The corpus of songs featured in Volume 9 can be viewed from any number of angles. The volume’s current structure is organized primarily by composer, with Lazar Weiner comprising roughly the first half of the volume. The songs could also be arranged chronologically or according to the author of the poems. This exhibit takes a text-centered, thematic approach in an attempt to look more broadly at the milieu in which the majority of these songs—and the poems that supply their texts—were composed. It aims to address such questions as:

What ideas occupied the minds of the poets whose words found new expression in the songs they inspired?

Which composers were drawn to which themes and poets?

Further, as the majority of the poems were written during the height of Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe, what can they tell us about Jewish life during this period of great upheaval?

Though not exhaustive, a thematic approach can shed light on such questions, or at least compel us to view the repertoire in a new light.