As a boy, he found God at the synagogue. Then he discovered classical music – Haaretz
Posted By admin on December 20, 2021
STOCKHOLM Jacob Mhlrad used to be a bad student. A very bad student. Because he suffered from dyslexia, he had difficulty reading and writing, and at school they thought he was unmotivated and lacked proper learning skills. Although he came from a middle-class Jewish family living in an affluent neighborhood in west Stockholm, he was seen as a problematic child. A lonely boy, he suffered from panic attacks and depression at the age of 9, disturbed his teachers in the classroom and got into fights in the schoolyard. All that was accompanied by other, physical health problems.
Today Mhlrad, who grew up in an assimilated Jewish home, is considered one of the worlds most promising young classical composers. At the age of 30, he is the youngest composer to have written for the Royal Swedish Opera. Beyond that, he has been commissioned to create works for the leading orchestras and choirs in Sweden, where he has also won scholarships and awards, his music has been performed in concert halls all around the world, including Carnegie Hall in New York and this year an album containing four of his choral works was released by Deutsche Grammophon.
While he has been called a wunderkind on several occasions, as a young boy Mhlrad was not interested in music at all. That all changed when he was 15. The trigger for that may be familiar to people who grew up in Israel (and other countries) in the last 40 or so years: an episode of the classic, animated French television series Once Upon a Time, created and produced by Albert Barill, which was broadcast on educational channels in the 1980s and 90s.
The TV was on and suddenly I heard music. It was a work by Bach, Mhlrad recalls in an interview with Haaretz at a local cafe. I heard it as something spiritual and it affected me deeply. One day I heard my sister, Hannah, playing the piano. She was a good student, I wasnt; she played the piano, and I didnt. I was just looking at her and tried to imagine what it felt like to play like that. She played a Bach prelude. I remember wanting to feel that way too. That summer, my father had a broken electric keyboard that my sister once received for Hanukkah, repaired. At first, it didnt interest me at all, but eventually I started playing around with it. It was easier for me to connect to a plastic instrument than to a shiny, polished piano. My mother suggested that I take a lesson with my sisters teacher, Regina Steinboch. At first I resisted, but eventually I took a lesson and I was immediately hooked.
At first, Mhlrad experimented with his new toy. I pressed a button that started a pre-programmed piece, he remembers. It was a familiar work by Mozart, Rondo Alla Turca (the final movement of the Piano Sonata No. 11). I tried to play it myself, to find the right keys, and I did it. It was easy, I just played it. Then I showed the piano teacher. She laughed at the weird way I played it. I almost felt like a clown. She talked to my mother and told her what every Jewish mother wants to hear that her son was very talented. My mother was always very supportive of me. But I wanted to learn more, and I wanted to learn faster. When I watched Once Upon a Time on TV again, I asked my teacher the name of the piece that opens it. She said it was Johann Sebastian Bachs Toccata and Fugue in D minor. When I asked if she could teach me how to play it, she explained that the piece was written for organ and that I could play it in perhaps five years. It needs to be done step by step, she explained. But I hate doing things step by step. Ive never done anything step by step. She said that I couldnt learn it without reading sheet music, I said I could mimic her fingers and she claimed that that way, it would take forever. We finally agreed that wed try to do it my way and if it didnt work out, wed do it hers.
In the next lesson she arrived with the piano arrangement of the piece. She played the first phrase and then I imitated her. I played it several times and asked to move on. I didnt know what a scale was and I didnt read notes, but I recognized the shapes and structures intuitively and saw their logic. I learned the piece in the same way youd memorize a lot of phone numbers. It took about two months, I practiced with etudes. Finally, I completed the piece and even played it successfully at a student concert. After that, I studied Chopins Impromptu Fantasy. Regina tried to teach me to read the music, but I resisted again because I didnt want to feel stupid like I did at school.
As a teenager, his teacher introduced Mhlrad to Staffan Scheja, one of Swedens leading classical pianists and musicians.
When I met Staffan, he also laughed at my technique, Mhlrad says. He said I had anarchist fingering and he was skeptical about my inability to learn notes. I felt embarrassed and tried to fake note-reading.
Scheja was one of a series of teachers who influenced Mhlrad. As a result, the young man realized, as he progressed, that he needed to learn a broader repertoire to get into the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm. His task now was to learn several complicated and challenging works in the same way he had learned to play the Bach Toccata and Fugue. He undertook works by Beethoven, Liszt and Chopin and another piece by the 20th-century French composer Olivier Messiaen.
I imitated my teacher, Staffan, Mhlrad recalls. I studied the repertoire, showed him what I had learned and he said I could get in to the academy, but that I had to learn to read notes a particularly difficult challenge due to his learning disabilities.
Mhlrad says that when he first began to play piano, he didnt really understand the difference between playing and composing: When he played, he would improvise. At 16 he improvised a piano piece that he called Emunah (belief, in Hebrew): I realized I had to learn notes, but at 18, I didnt know exactly what my path in music would be like. But I knew I loved music and that I wanted to dedicate my life to it.
Psalms and hymns
And then, in 2009, came another formative event.
I was invited to be a pianist at a social event, held in the villa of family friends of my sister, Mhlrad recounts. I was supposed to play Liszts Liebestrume, which I had studied. I was ready, but then for the first time in my life, I got stage fright. Before I started playing, I heard that Swedens best-known composer of modern art music [serious contemporary classical works], Sven-David Sandstrm, was at the party. I went over, said hello, and was very impressed by him.
After that, when I started playing, I suddenly had a blackout. I just stopped. It was a panic attack and it was horrible. I suddenly became my own enemy. My sister looked at me as if she were saying What the hell are you doing? Then I said that instead of the Liszt piece, Id play something else, something Id composed myself. And I started playing Emunah. When I finished, Sven-David approached me, gave me his business card and said, Call me.
The encounter with Sandstrm opened the door for Mhlrads journey as a young composer. A few years of hard work later, he would already be a big star on the international music scene. But to understand his deep connection to music, the conversation with him must go back in time, years before the villa event and the Once Upon a Time series.
Recounting a somewhat surprising detail about his childhood, he explains that my music writing has a very personal context, my background is always there and it has a profound impact on me. When I was 6, I was very religious, I thought I could speak to Hashem [literally, the name a euphemism for God]. At the age of 9, I studied Psalms, hymns like Anim Zemirot, [the liturgical poem Song of Glory, from the Shabbat morning service], and I was exactly the opposite of what I was at my school, which wasnt Jewish: I believed in God very much and wanted to learn as much as possible.
How did this happen even though your parents werent very religious? Who taught you? What made you become an Orthodox boy with a kippah and sidelocks?
I used to go to [an Orthodox] synagogue with my dad on Saturdays. But I wanted to know more and my parents set me up with tutors. First, I studied Psalms and Hebrew at the Jewish center in Stockholm. When I got the Book of Psalms, I was so happy that I would go to bed with it. I studied on my own in a regular way, like other children go to soccer and hockey or other after-school activities. At first, I went only once a week but I didnt want to stop. Later, when a Chabad rabbi arrived in Stockholm, I studied with him before my bar mitzvah. I never wanted to finish my class with him either. When it came to Jewish studies, I acted like I did later on when studying piano. I didnt want to go step by step, I jumped right into the hard stuff: Midrash, kabbalah, Mishna and Gemara. My mom supported me, even though it wasnt easy; for example, when I decided I was only eating glatt kosher, or when I decided it was wrong to drive a car to the synagogue on Saturdays. During this period, she walked with me to the synagogue and it was almost a three-hour walk each way.
In ultra-secular Sweden where, of the 15,000 to 20,000 Jews, a very small minority is religious yours is a unique story. Do you have any idea where this all came from?
I felt Gods presence. I knew he existed and I felt as if I understood what he was demanding. When things are truly clear, and if God demands why wouldnt you do what he says?
When did you stop being religious? Was there a sudden end to it or was it a long process?
I remember studying with Chaim, the Chabad rabbi, and being very interested in philosophy. If youre interested in Rashi, in Jewish ethics or religious ideas, it makes sense to be also interested in philosophy. A friend of the family talked to me about Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. I didnt understand what he was talking about. How could that be? Those were not Jewish names. Then I realized there was also philosophical thought that wasnt Jewish. Shortly after my bar mitzvah, I downloaded Nietzsche and Kierkegaard books from the internet. Id skip school, play video games and read the books. Those were weird years, but I was open about it. I would tell Rabbi Chaim that I was afraid about having doubts. I continued to explore the subject of Jewish thought, and just as I thought then that philosophical thought was always Jewish until I discovered Nietzsche, I thought religious music was always Jewish [prayer or cantorial] music.
But then came the electric keyboard and the Toccata and Fugue. When I discovered music, I was no longer afraid to lose my faith. When I started playing, I lost my fear and started believing but believing in something else: believing in music. I felt that God was in the pitch of the sounds, in the vibrations of the music. The piano was the beginning of the change. It didnt all happen in a day, but falling in love with music did happen in one day. This was the first time I felt that there was something that was fun and easy, but I had no feelings of guilt. In my religious studies, the deeper I got, the more guilty I felt about doubts I was having. And thats something that doesnt go away. Even now I hesitate before I eat bacon. The piano was spirituality without guilt and without judgment.
Pianist or composer?
Without music, Mhlrad says, he would have been a different person. After all, he didnt care about his studies at school. He felt lonely, depressed and meaningless. He cant explain now where those feelings came from, but half-jokingly suggests that they were part of his Jewish DNA inherited traumas. And the stomach problems I had and still have are typical of Ashkenazi Jews. Im just built that way. Im still neurotic but Ive learned to live with it. Later in life came the stage fright, and I still try to avoid being on stage as much as possible. I could have been a kid who plays soccer instead of going to a rabbi twice a week, but I just wasnt. I have no explanation for that.
Back to Sven-David Sandstrms business card.
I called him and he didnt answer, Mhlrad remembers. Maybe eight times, but no answer. In those days he didnt take on students, but I called because he suggested that we meet and talk about composition. In retrospect, he said he didnt answer my calls on purpose, just to see if I was really serious. Eventually he became my teacher. Hed come to my high school and teach me for free. It was amazing, he came all the way to me someone who didnt know anything once a week. He invested in me and I owe him my career. At first, he taught me some basic techniques but after a few sessions he asked if I wanted to be a pianist or a composer. At that point, I already knew that I wanted to compose. Playing has set rules that others have decided upon; there is a correct and incorrect way of doing things. Composition is different. I would be in charge of whats right and wrong. I would be able to create worlds.
In response, Sandstrm said the obvious. In order to be a composer, Mhlrad would have to learn to read music.
After high school, Sandstrm sent Mhlrad to a composition school that he himself had helped to found, on the Swedish island of Gotland. During this time, Mhlrads friends and peers who remained in Stockholm enjoyed student life of the big city. Mhlrad, on the other hand, sat alone on a distant, isolated island and put his all into hard work. He changed his habits and focused on things that were previously completely impossible for him to do like learning to read music. At the school in Gotland which Mhlrad describes as a kind of musical Hogwarts he also discovered choral compositions.
I remember going to a workshop. I wrote a regular D minor chord but added a B flat; on the piano the chord sounded good, but when I heard it performed by human voices it was just divine, it was amazing. I also remember going to a concert where The Messiah, a choral work by Sven-David, was performed. Immediately afterward I bought the CD and listened to it nonstop; it was divine, it was exactly what I was missing. And then I wrote a piece for a choir, followed by another. The second one was my Anim Zemirot. I never would have thought that 10 years later it would be released by Deutsche Grammophon.
Mhlrad gives credit to people he met during his studies and afterward who helped him achieve a breakthrough in his career among them a journalist who wrote about him and supported his work, a choreographer who asked him to write music for a ballet, and a businessman named Simon Strand, a nonmusician, who became part of Mhlrads life as a consultant, a psychologist and more importantly a friend. With that tailwind, the young composer returned to Stockholm and to the Swedish Royal Academy of Music, in 2012. Mhlrad worked hard studying and composing, spent a semester at the Royal College of Music in London, and collaborated with the Swedish Radio Choir for which he wrote a piece called Nigun, which means religious song or melody, in Hebrew. It was with that work, he says, that he found his musical voice.
The premiere of Nigun was in 2014, which was when his mother was struggling with cancer, which naturally took an emotional toll on him. Thats when the fear started, he says. How was I going to make a living out of this? Who actually makes a living from composition? The anxiety grew and I felt I had to act today in order to make it work tomorrow. I was open to as many projects as possible, I did everything I could to get more premieres, I even composed for free. After Nigun, the Swedish Radio Choir commissioned a piece from me, which was delayed but eventually performed in 2018. Its called Time, and its a work thats inspired by the biblical story of the Tower of Babel.
My choral pieces evolved, my chamber music compositions evolved and so did my media presence, Mhlrad says about those years. A cellist friend asked if I could write something for him that would be performed at Carnegie Hall. That was in 2016 and the composition was called Pan. And then I received the Micael Bindefeld scholarship.
Bindefeld, a 62-year-old Swedish Jew, is an event organizer and well-known PR consultant who began granting scholarships seven years ago to individuals who promote Holocaust remembrance in Sweden. The scholarships are announced each year on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, and on that day in 2017, Mhlrad received 300,000 Swedish Crowns (about $11,800) and embarked on one of his most important works Kaddish, for a cappella choir.
Again, five children
Rewind again to Mhlrads familys past. Michael Bliman was born in Beznik, not far from Warsaw, in 1905. He worked as a cobbler and specialized in fitting shoes for people with special sizes of feet or orthopedic problems. In retrospect, its possible that this is what helped him survive. After marrying his first wife, Fella, the couple had two children, Yitzhak and Nathan. Then another child, a daughter named Malkah, was born. In the 1930s, their situation deteriorated, they suffered from antisemitism, and after the war broke out they were imprisoned in a ghetto like millions of other Polish Jews. In the ghetto, the couple had two more children, twins, but a few days after the babies were born, in 1942, the family was caught by the SS while hiding in an attic. The officer who found them executed the two babies, who had not yet been named, in front of their parents. The SS took Fella and the other three children, loaded them onto a truck and drove off; her husband was badly beaten, loaded on another truck and taken in a different direction. That was the last time he saw his family.
Michael Bliman was taken to Auschwitz where he worked for a German officer who had foot problems and needed special shoes. The officer was often drunk, and would beat Bliman; on one occasion he stabbed him in the stomach with a bayonet. Bliman survived only because another inmate, who was a doctor, stitched him up with a copper wire. Toward the end of the war, Bliman was sent to another camp, Stutthof, and then from there to Bergen-Belsen, where his task was to put dead bodies in piles, as his grandson puts it. The situation in Bergen-Belsen was so bad that years later, Bliman said that he actually missed Auschwitz when he was at the second camp. At the end of the war, after surviving three death marches and weighing less than 40 kilos, Bliman arrived in Sweden with the White Buses organized by the Swedish Red Cross and the Danish government, which evacuated survivors from Nazi concentration and death camps in 1945. In Sweden, he remarried and had five children. Again, five children.
One of the five was Rosie Bliman, Jacob Mhlrads mother, who is 65. Mhlrad himself is used to telling his grandfathers story, although he was a child when Bliman died. Still, the grandchild-composer mentions it in interviews, and its clearly an important part of his identity and clearly influences his work. Bliman had managed to tell his whole story to Rosie and to her husband, Jacobs father. Indeed, the latter, the son of a German Jewish immigrant and a Swedish Jew of Russian origin, filmed Blimans testimony while Jacob and his older sister, who were then very young, were playing in the background.
Four years ago, Mhlrad used the testimony when composing the lyrics for Kaddish, which incorporates his grandfathers words, Hebrew phrases from the Kaddish prayer of mourning and names of family members murdered in the Holocaust.
Until Kaddish, I wasnt interested in telling stories with my music, says Mhlrad, but with this piece it was different. I wanted to try to tell my grandfathers story. Obviously, its impossible to catch a persons life and fate in a 25-minute piece, so I tried to find the core of his experience. The structure of Kaddish is based on an imaginary dialogue that I never had with my grandfather. I didnt get the chance to ask him things, so I used my dads questions and made up my own questions to match my grandfathers answers.
Using a Hebrew title like Kaddish is not uncommon in Mhlrads body of work. Other of his compositions also bear Hebrew names beyond those already mentioned, there are, Magid, Tefila and Sheva, meaning, respectively narrator or preacher, prayer and seven.
Ive used Hebrew as a kind of sound palette. I knew how to read Hebrew, but didnt understand what I was reading. So, I just produced the sounds and sounds are what define music. One of my favorite composers and thinkers, Edgar Varse, defined music as organized sound. For me, Hebrew is beautiful sounds and writing for a choir is writing sounds for the mouth. It was natural for me to use Hebrew.
Do you remember what it felt like when you first saw Kaddish performed?
I remember that at the end of the premiere I walked up to the stage and felt relief. I was glad I was able to actually complete the piece, and during the process it felt like I got to know my grandfather again. But there was an ambivalent feeling. My mother was sitting on my right during the concert and I saw she was very sad because she remembered him and all the horrible experiences he had. There were a lot of emotional overtones, mixed together in a complex way. When the concert was over there was a standing ovation. And that felt almost wrong. Music can be entertaining, but this felt more religious, and just like there is no applause in the synagogue, it felt weird to be applauded for this.
Mhlrad says that he is currently working on a piece called Pi for four choirs from four different continents, which is due to premiere in the fall of 2022. His orchestral composition Rems named after the rapid eye movement stage of sleep was first performed in September by the Royal Swedish Philharmonic Orchestra. It was a fascinating event that impressed both the audience and the critics alike, at Stockholms Konserthuset venue, where the public, which knows Mhlrad mainly for his choral compositions, heard what he can do with a full symphonic ensemble for the first time. But Mhlrads musical activity has also occasionally extended beyond concert halls: In recent years he has written music for the theater, composed and arranged songs for Swedish rapper Silvana Imam and also collaborated with the Swedish House Mafia group.
Do collaborations such as working with Imam and Swedish House Mafia have an artistic value of their own, or is this primarily a commercial initiative or cultural adventure for you?
Im very curious. Ill always like to explore and experiment with different collaborations. When I was religious, I didnt hang out with religious people. Id sit with my sidelocks and kippah with completely secular friends. In the same way, even today I dont just hang out with classical music people. I meet people and sometimes interesting musical encounters come out of these meetings.
Similarly, Mhlrad doesnt aim his music only at listeners with a musical education or experience with art music. I dont see myself as an avant-garde composer who uses atonal music that only professionals can hear. I want people to think that my music is accessible, but I also want people who think that my music is as avant-garde as it gets.
Listening to his latest work, Rems, gives an idea of what Mhlrad means. Naturally, it doesnt sound like 19th-century romantic music, but neither is it inaccessible or truly atonal. The piece deals with sleep, dreams, the subconscious. Its turbulent, magical and influenced, like all his compositions, by his Jewish heritage, as well as other cultures that are expressed in the texture and colors of its tonality, and oriental scales.
De-coding ugly works
The press sometimes calls you a pop star of classical music. What do you think of that?
Maybe its a bit like that, but I wasnt aiming for that. That image is a by-product of my presence in the public eye. Usually, composers of art music are less public than soloists and conductors, but that needs to be rethought. I hate live TV and I dont like to be on the radio either, I dont enjoy it but I do it so that art music will be at the forefront, so it will have more exposure.
Youve said that your profession involves organizing sounds in such a way that vibrations in the air that reach the human ear will create a chemical reaction. Youve also said that music is like a religion to you, that when you accelerate sounds and tones to a very high speed, one sound is created, and that sound is an entire world. You said, The sound is God and God is one. That sounds a bit mystical, doesnt it?
I feel that making music is like practicing religion. I think my audience appreciates that, too. Everyone feels different emotionally, but for me its about the state of being. Im interested in defining what God is in terms of music, in terms of sound. For me its very beautiful that one pitch has, in theory, an infinite number of overtones which define the sounds timbre or tone color. This is what gives each musical instrument or human voice a different and unique sound even when they play or sing the same note.
Every single pitch is in that core of every sound. Its amazing. It shows how sound contains everything different kinds of light, colors. I dont know why, but I think the spirituality of music is in its timbre [i.e., the sound of its overtones]. This helps me when I make music. When I create different intervals, for example, they have an underlying rhythm, within the interval. [German 20th-century composer Karlheinz] Stockhausen wrote about the way we perceive music. When youre playing slowly, it sounds like a melody, when youre playing fast, its a gesture and when its even faster it becomes a pitch again. Its one sound that has everything.
What are your preferences at the moment when it comes to instruments and different types of ensembles?
Now Im interested in the combination of choir and orchestra. Its like a collective. Its very interesting to create the preconditions for rich textures and more colorful music. For example, the clarinet has very few overtones, but if there is a marimba [a percussion instrument similar to a xylophone] with an alt flute and double bass, there is a rich and colorful timbre.
And what about your musical preferences? When did Bach and Mozart make way for Stockhausen and Schoenberg? Do you still listen to Bach?
Of course I still listen to Bach. But when I was in school in Gotland everything changed. I was shocked by the music I was exposed to. I learned to de-code works that at first I thought were ugly, and I learned to love them. Im also influenced by electronic music. Its like [20th-century American composer] John Cage wrote: The first cars imitated horses and wagons, but then cars became something else, something of their own, and then they imitated themselves. In the same way, in the past, electronic music imitated existing music and existing instruments. Today, it is interesting to imitate electronic music with acoustic music.
Despite his achievements, Jacob Mhlrad is only at the beginning of his musical career. A far cry from the lonely Jewish child he was, but still believing in an almost fanatical way in the power of music, in its truth and in its necessity to a human existence in the world.
Continue reading here:
As a boy, he found God at the synagogue. Then he discovered classical music - Haaretz
