Elohai N'shamah
Steve Cohen
About this work:
I met and became friends with Marcy Kadin at the North American Jewish Choral Festival in the summer of 2002. She joined the Zamir Chorale that fall, and I got to hear her full and resonant voice a lot. As she started studying for the Cantorate at Hebrew Union College, I was often hired by her to transpose music into her range. I picked up a lot of hazzanut doing these assignments. By way of thanking her for my education by osmosis, and also congratulating her on completing this long and arduous journey, I have written a musical setting of a liturgical text, specifically tailored to Marcy’s voice and temperament, and dedicated to her. Because I find the low notes of her voice so soulful, I have selected the prayer “Elohai N’shamah” as my text.
When I told Marcy of my plans to write a piece for her, she mentioned that her senior thesis was about contemporary composers who utilize nusach in their music. It seemed important for me to try to take more traditional settings of “Elohai N’shamah” into account, and see if I could incorporate aspects of those, while continuing to write in my own style. Cantors Jack Mendelson, Lori Corrsin, Jeffrey Shiovitz and Faith Steinsnyder were all very helpful in steering me to the proper sources.
I hit upon the idea of having the nusach quotations in the piano accompaniment, and letting the voice part float freely above (or in Marcy’s case, below) the piano. I noticed that many of the traditional settings used the repetition of small melodic motifs as a way to organize the piece, so I decided to follow suit. The piano introduction is built on a small motif of five notes, (B-flat, C B-flat, A, G) and this motif continues throughout the accompaniment, and even finds its way into the voice part. The music starts softly and mysteriously, builds toward a broad climax (on the words “Ribon kol hama-asim” - “Lord of all creatures”) and moves back and away to end softly, having shifted from minor to major.
Year composed: 2008
Duration: 00:03:00
Ensemble type: Voice, Solo or With Chamber or Jazz Ensemble:Solo Voice with Keyboard
Instrumentation: 1 Piano, 1 Alto