Through the centuries and across the globe, Jewish composers have created a rich repertoire of concert music that interweaves the sacred and the secular, folk and liturgical themes into one sophisticated artistic tradition. The vast majority of this tremendous creative output remains preserved in unpublished scores and archival manuscripts, virtually unknown to musical audiences, even within the Jewish community.
Pro Musica Hebraica is a new organization founded to bring this great music to the concert hall. We aspire to expose our audience to the magnificent range of Jewish music and to present Jewish composers not as cultural curiosities or ethnic heroes, but as passionate modern artists who embrace the challenge of expressing their Jewishness through the creative medium of music.
Beginning with our inaugural concert in the spring of 2008, we will mount an ongoing series of concerts at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC along with selected performances at other venues around the United States and abroad. Our goal is to reintegrate the Jewish musical past and present into the mainstream repertoire of chamber and symphonic musical performance as well as to explore other vital partnerships with dynamic performing artists in the world of Jewish music today. As time goes on, we anticipate that this project will grow to include commissions of new work, the development of educational programs for use in high schools, music schools, and conservatories, live recordings of rare masterpieces, and other music-related cultural initiatives.
Exactly one hundred years ago, a group of young Jewish musicians in Tsarist Russia, heirs to both the great Russian and Jewish musical traditions, launched a collective quest to promote the richness of the Jewish musical past and inspire its modern creative future in the Jewish community and beyond. In the early twentieth century, these musicians, known as the Society for Jewish Folk Music, gave voice to a new vision of Jewish music as a distinct movement in modern classical music alongside the Russian, French, and other European schools as well as a vibrant cultural force in the global musical world as a whole. We take our inspiration from them.
Charles and Robyn Krauthammer, co-founders