Since the spring of 2020, soprano Jaclyn Grossman (2021-22 Rebanks Fellow) and the Likht Ensemble have been working to release a series of recitals featuring the music of Jewish artists composed during the Holocaust entitled The Shoah Songbook. The second installment of this project was released on January 27th, 2022 in partnership with the Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company. Sounds Like GGS! sat down with Jaclyn to discuss this fascinating project.
Sounds Like GGS!: Tell us a bit about the Shoah Songbook.
Jaclyn Grossman: This project is the first for the Likht Ensemble, of which I’m a co-founder. The Shoah Songbook is a partnership with the Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company, and each concert has a goal of sharing rare music by Jewish composers from the Holocaust. The first recital, which came out in April 2021, focused on music from Terezín and the second recital, which was released in late January of this year, is music from the Lithuanian ghettos of Kovno and Vilna.
The Shoah Songbook Part Two: The Kovno and Vila Ghettos in Lithuania
SLGGS!: What has been the synthesis of this project?
Jaclyn Grossman: In 2020, I won the Ben Steinberg Music Legacy Award, and I started looking for repertoire for the recital. I quickly came across works by Mahler, Korngold, Weill, all the typical Jewish composers that I know and like. And then I found Ilse Weber. And it was just amazing. This composer's music was gorgeous, and I didn't really understand why I'd never heard it. I showed it to my collaborator, pianist Nate Ben-Horin, and said, “Are you interested in this? Do you like it?” And he said, “Oh, my God, what is this? It's beautiful.” And that sort of began our journey.
This is early February, March 2020. So, cue the pandemic which seemingly made a public recital of these works impossible. But we kept doing the homework through the uncertainty of the past two years and it became an artistic lifeline for the two of us, doing this research, exploring repertoire, practicing it on our own.
I reconnected with a friend from high school named Ilan Waldman, who is a filmmaker and we were joined by another filmmaker, Madison Matthews. Both of them were eager to join this project so it naturally led to it being a filmed recital series. The four of us together are called Likht Ensemble. That's sort of how we got to where we are.
SLGGS!: How did you go about choosing repertoire for this project?
Jaclyn Grossman: It's a good question and it's a complicated question as it's hard to find the music because a lot of Jewish artists were stifled by the Nazi regime. Much of the repertoire was either written in secret or it was hidden – Ilse Weber, who was featured in our first concert, has manuscripts buried in the Terezín gardens, and Edwin Geist’s music, featured on our second recital, was saved by a friend who broke into his sealed apartment and rescued his manuscripts.
At the end of the day, music was thriving in these ghettos. There were certain situations where Jewish people were forced to create art for Nazis, and we have to acknowledge that, but artistic creation was also a form of resilience. Much of this repertoire exists in plain sight but is often overlooked, which I’d really like to change. A lot of it is still in manuscript form, incomplete, or not yet accessible.
We have also worked with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC among other preservation centres and museums. There's a musicologist there named Bret Werb, who is wonderful and supports our work. They helped us connect with some digitized archives of the manuscripts written by hand by the composers. We’re also very fortunate because Nate is a fantastic composer. When we have vocal lines or only the text with an archival recording of the tune, Nate runs with that and creates beautiful arrangements that are true to the original intention of the composer.
SLGGS!: How does this research change your connection to the music?
Jaclyn Grossman: In our first recital, I was surprised by how emotionally connected I felt to the material. I've not really had an experience that was this intense before. I think a big reason was that I fell in love with one of the composers we featured, Ilse Weber, who was a Jewish mother, writer, composer, and radio producer. We know so much about her music, her poetry, and letters that she sent or wasn’t able to send (which were buried in the garden by her husband, Willi). She was this brilliant, sassy, funny and smart woman… and I feel like I could have known her. Feeling that very innate connection with a composer/poet off the bat made it hard to work through the intensity of some of her music. It's become a big part of what I want to do as an artist. At the end of the day, these composers were just good artists and deserve to be heard.
SLGGS!: What might the future of this project look like?
Jaclyn Grossman: We are a troublesome group because we have so many ideas, we can't possibly do them all! But we have a couple of things in the works. We have our five Shoah Songbook recitals with Harold Green Jewish Theater Company. Two are done now and the intention with the next three is that they'll each explore a different location where Holocaust music was being created or a different theme. So it could be Holocaust music surrounding the theme of love, of pain, or whatever the ongoing research we’re doing leads us to. The other project that is in the works is the creation of a music theatre piece called Why Is The World So Quiet? This will explore Holocaust music, composer story portraits, contemporary letters and poetry alongside our personal experiences as Jewish artists in the Western classical music canon and our experiences with antisemitism in our own lives and in the music we perform. It's still in its early conceptual development phases, but that's the next adventure we're turning towards.
