Steven Reich: Musical Midrash with Dr.Sam Fleischacker

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Thanks to an anonymous donation in memory of Helene Rosenberg z”l this class will be free of charge.

In memory of Helene Rosenberg z”l, who loved both classical music and Jewish learning, this session will feature Steve Reich, a wonderful contemporary composer who has written more explicitly Jewish music than practically any composer before him. Reich is a former drummer. He is fascinated by rhythm and influenced by African and Indonesian music and composers like Stravinsky and Philip Glass. After hearing examples of how he writes music in general, we’ll listen to excerpts from “Different Trains,” his powerful string quartet about the Holocaust; from his setting of a number of psalms in “Tehillim”; and from his video opera, “The Cave,” about the Abraham stories. Throughout, we will consider how music constitutes a kind of midrash for Reich, coloring how we take in familiar stories, and making them new for us today.

 

Sam Fleischacker is a LAS Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at UIC.  He works on moral and political philosophy, and the philosophy of religion. He is the author of several books, including  The Good and the Good Book (Oxford, 2015) and Divine Teaching and the Way of the World (Oxford, 2011), and has taught often, at Helene Rosenberg’s z”l request, at Beth Emet.

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