Psalm 118<\/a>* (verses 19 – 24, anyway) by one of the better songwiters you’ve never heard of, Sholom Secunda. You know a couple of his tunes. Joan Baez popularized “Dona Dona” — “In a wagon, bound for market, there’s a calf with a mournful eye…” back in the ’60s. Secunda’s words for another song had a short life in the Yiddish theatre, but his tune went on to be the biggest hit record ever up to that time — Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen. His setting of Psalm 118 has varied tempos, a solo section that sounds cantorial, rich harmony, everything you want in a choral piece.<\/p>\n* and, cool! from that link I selected “Hebrew (OT)” from the read\/print popup at the top of the page, and a new window with Hebrew script popped up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the greatest parts of being in a Jewish choral group is singing psalms in the original language, where they scan the way they’re supposed to and you can feel that, although you don’t have any idea what the tune was in the first place, you’re singing at least words that people sung 2500 … <\/p>\n
Continue reading “Open the Gates”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rollingonone.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rollingonone.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rollingonone.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rollingonone.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rollingonone.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rollingonone.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rollingonone.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rollingonone.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rollingonone.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}