Jeanne Fischer, a UNC voice professor, said she wanted to exhibit Yiddish music at the faculty recital, “Mayn Goldener Brunem: An Afternoon of Yiddish Art Song,” because the music is beautiful — and most of the pieces haven’t been heard for 50 or 60 years.
Fischer sang 19 Yiddish-language art songs on Sunday afternoon in the Hill Hall auditorium, being accompanied by pianist Deborah Hollis.
Fischer received a faculty research and travel grant from the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies that allowed her to travel to Boston this summer and work on the recital’s music with people who perform Yiddish classical music.
“Basically, most of the people who speak Yiddish now are older because the language is dying out, but the way that Yiddish would be sung in a classical art song is not quite exactly the same as it would be spoken by a day-to-day person,” she said.
“There are some aspects of pronunciation that are a little bit different if you are in a classical context.”
Because of her background as a classical musician, Fischer did not find it too difficult to adapt to singing the compositions in Yiddish.
“Anybody who’s a classically trained singer has a lot of experience in Italian, German and French because that’s part of our training, so Yiddish isn’t so difficult because it is very similar to German with a few obvious differences,” Fischer said. “There’s a little bit of Hebrew kind of mixed in.”
Fischer said the the 19 songs performed at the recital varied in their style and tempo.
“It often contains musical themes from Jewish folk and synagogue music,” she said. “Jewish composers often take musical material from the culture that they are in, so, for instance, if a composer is in Russia, there might also be elements from popular Russian music. There’s not one way to describe exactly how all Yiddish music would sound, but I would say minor keys and Jewish musical themes are common.”
