Search Results

Sign in Modify your search

Narrow Your Choices

Format

Type

Life event

Date

Topic

Era

Region/Country

  • Open Section
    • Open Section
  • Open Section
    • Open Section

Occupation

Availability

 1-4 of 4 Results  for:

  • Peoples and Music Cultures x
Clear all

Article

Hoffman, Stanley  

Byron Adams

Publication History:

Published online:
24 June 2021

(Marc)

(b Cleveland, Aug 28, 1959). American composer, conductor, baritone, and editor. The child of Holocaust survivors, Hoffman studied at the Boston Conservatory, where he received the BM, magna cum laude, in 1981. He earned the MM from the New England Conservatory of Music in 1984, and he received the PhD from Brandeis University in 1993. His teachers included Arthur Berger, Martin Boykan, Hugo Norden, Chris Roze, Harold Shapero, Larry Alan Smith, and Yehudi Wyner. From 1990 to 1998, Hoffman worked as an editor at the music engraving company Scores International in Boston, and he was hired as an editor at ECS Publishing immediately thereafter.

Since the mid-1980s, Hoffman has composed a substantial body of choral music. Many of these pieces reflect his Jewish heritage, and his sacred works can be used in temple services. This music is also sung widely in churches, high schools, universities, and by professional choral ensembles. In addition, he has composed choral works using secular texts along with pieces for keyboard solo, solo voice, chamber ensembles, and full orchestra. Hoffman’s work has been commissioned by ensembles such as the Carolina Brass and ALEA III (a contemporary music ensemble). His piece ...

Article

Jaroff, Serge Alexeyevich  

Donna Arnold

Publication History:

Published online:
28 March 2019

(b Makaryev, Kostroma Province, Russia, 20 March/1 April 1896; d Lakewood, NJ, 9 Oct 1985). Russian émigré choral conductor, founder of the Don Cossack Choir. He studied at Moscow’s Synodal School of Church Singing, and afterwards joined a Don Cossack regiment in the Russian Civil War. Defeated by Bolsheviks and exiled from Russia in 1920, his regiment was interned at a miserable camp near Istanbul. Ordered to found a choir to raise morale, he arranged repertoire from memory and, remarkably, transformed 36 amateur singers into a world-class ensemble. Once liberated, the Don Cossack Choir began a high-profile international career that spanned six decades.

Its concerts, sung in Russian, comprised Russian Orthodox liturgical works and folk, traditional, and soldier songs. Jaroff arranged most of the music. Conducting with minimal hand movements and penetrating facial expressions, he evoked extremely expressive rubatos and dynamic changes that enthralled audiences. The Don Cossacks were particularly renowned for their brilliant technique and superb octavists (whose vocal range extended to an octave below the bass) and falsettists. Jaroff’s unusual inclusion of falsettists was crucial to the choir’s compelling signature sonority and made mixed-choir masterpieces from the Russian canon feasible. Extra-musical factors, especially the very short Jaroff’s strict control of his Cossack giants, fascinated and delighted their fans....

Article

Nigun  

Publication History:

Published in print:
20 January 2001
Published online:
2001

(Heb.: ‘melody’; pl. nigunim

In the liturgical music of the Ashkenazi Jews, an early form of centonized chant, also known as nusa ḥ. Among the East European Ḥasidic Jews, the term refers to a type of vocal music, often sung to nonsense syllables and accompanied by dancing, of which one of the important forms is the ...

Article

Singing  

Owen Jander, Ellen T. Harris, David Fallows, and John Potter

Publication History:

Published in print:
20 January 2001
Published online:
2001

Singing is a fundamental mode of musical expression. It is especially suited to the expression of specific ideas, since it is almost always linked to a text; even without words, the voice is capable of personal and identifiale utterances. It is arguably the most subtle and flexible of musical instruments, and therein lies much of the fascination of the art of singing.

Because it imparts to words a heightened expression that they do not have when merely spoken, or even declaimed in a dramatic manner without musical pitch, singing (or incantation) played a vital role in many early forms of religious ritual, and in the early theatre. Even outside religion, singing has long been held to have moral and cultural value. Aristotle quoted the bard Musaeus, ‘Song is man's sweetest joy’, and went on to warn against using musical instruments, such as the aulos, which interfere with or prevent the act of singing. Athenaeus (...