Chicago a cappella: Leveraging Repertoire To Build a Brand

A journey through the history of Jewish liturgical music alters a chorus’s path to the future.

“You don’t have to be Jewish to sing Jewish music,” says Jonathan Miller, founder and artistic director of Chicago a cappella. But when it came to assembling Days of Awe and Rejoicing: Radiant Gems of Jewish Music, a CD and concerts featuring more than 20 works derived from centuries of traditional Jewish liturgy, it certainly helped to have Miller leading the minyan that brought the program to life. A singer and conductor in the Chicago Jewish choral community for more than 40 years, Miller wanted to open a window to those unfamiliar with the repertoire while at the same time reawakening the aural memory of those raised with the sound of congregational choral traditions.

The program, originally presented in 2007, was presented again this season in tandem with the release of a CD and a full-on community outreach initiative. “The first time we presented the program it was just a concert,” says Miller. “This time our dream was to go out and do it like rock stars." The result was not just a successful series of concert performances, but also a series of events that became a “game changer” for the organization, according to executive director Matt Greenberg. New partnerships were formed, established partnerships were enhanced, new skill sets were developed, and, most profoundly, a new funder emerged whose support served as a catalyst for transforming the organization.

Crafting the Program

The artistic development of the original program took more than three years, with Miller and CAC music director Patrick Sinozich crafting a concert that stretched from a 17th-century setting of Psalm 112 by Salamone Rossi of Modena to a “rollicking” rendition of the traditional Jewish folksong “Hava Nagila” commissioned from Stacy Garrop of Chicago. In between were works by legendary Jewish liturgical composers Louis Lewandowski and Max Janowski and contemporary composers Shulamit Ran and Paul Schoenfeld.

Arrangements and re-voicing were required to adapt certain works, particularly those originally written for cantor and chorus with organ, but in many cases a cappella versions existed for such works, having been arranged for traditional congregations that prohibited the performance of musical instruments on the Sabbath and High Holidays. Diction coaching was necessary to finesse fidelity to specific texts, but as Greenberg, himself a Chicago a cappella chorister, observes, Hebrew wasn’t a stretch for the ensemble since most members have significant experience singing in High Holiday choirs and are familiar with the language. Familiar, perhaps, but not complacent about transferring those experiences to concert performance requirements. “Anyone who has sung in a High Holidays choir can attest that it’s not a sit-in-the-background choral sing," says Greenberg. "There’s always a solo around the corner.”

It helps to have someone who understands what the Jewish prayers mean, how they function liturgically, but every conductor has to make their own synthesis of style and communicate it to the singers.

From Miller’s perspective the greater challenge was less a matter of fidelity to the text than capturing its intention, in particular striking the aesthetic balance between prayer and performance. “If you have your performance practice but you don’t have the ruach [the spirit of the source] then you’ve lost sight of the most important thing: making music. It helps to have someone who understands what these prayers mean, how they function liturgically, but every conductor has to make their own synthesis of style and communicate it to the singers." Miller applauds Sinozich’s interpretation and encourages artistic directors interested in the repertoire to reach out to local rabbis or cantors to address any questions of language or intention.

Finding the Audience and Leveraging the Outreach

Greenberg’s managerial challenges were significant. “Pulling together several concerts, a CD, radio programs, and managing all of these collaborations added up to a much more comprehensive package than just producing a concert,” he says. His primary concern was that the Days of Awe program might be too thematically narrow to market. “Our programs are typically diverse in styles, but this felt like a risk,” he says. “In some ways it was easier to promote because the specificity makes it easier to determine who to start talking to.”

The Chicago metropolitan area is home to an estimated 300,000 Jews and so it made sense to reach out to every synagogue and Jewish organization and to engage the Chicago Jewish News as a media sponsor. The Spertus Institute, a Chicago-based organization for Jewish education, lent considerable public relations support and also hosted concert previews (with discussions led by Miller), and a CD release reception. The participation of these partners was leveraged by the careful timing of the concerts to coincide (but not conflict) with the celebration of the High Holidays.

Listening Sample

Preview a full track, "Avinu Malkeynu"

from Days of Awe and Rejoicing

The target marketing was a success, and the success was replicated in all concert venues, not just those near higher concentrations of the Jewish community. “It was not a mostly Jewish audience by any stretch,” says Greenberg. The concerts and recording became ideal hooks for feature stories in the mainstream press. Classical radio station WFMT gave the CD unprecedented play, with tracks aired throughout the holiday season. WBEZ, a public affairs station, lent editorial support with substantial coverage in advance of the series. To make the recording more accessible to listeners, the 32-page CD booklet included the text in three formats: the original Hebrew, translation, and in transliteration.

Still, Greenberg was concerned about concert ticket sales, particularly to CAC’s traditional base audience accustomed to more eclectic and generally lighter fare. “We are subscription-based,” he says “but subscriptions are becoming less and less central to our attendance. As our audience continues to grow, many more attendees are buying single tickets." CAC's flexible subscription policy was an easy out for those who might have found the program not to their taste. "The music is important and moving," says Greenberg. "We had to get the message out that this was no different than going to a choral concert to hear a Palestrina mass." In fact, he felt that the audience’s enthusiastic response underscored for CAC that “this choral repertoire is as deserving of professional concert performance and recording as all the other great Christian choral music traditions."

Attendance far exceeded their expectations, second only in popularity to a previous Baroque & Beatles program. “We were shocked by how successful it was,” says Greenberg. “Those who continued to talk about it enthusiastically were not just the Jews in the audience but people who had never heard a note of Jewish music and had never set foot in a synagogue. For them it was simply a moving musical experience." And the word has gotten out in the national choral community as well: Greenberg has noticed a lot of familiar names of choral conductors buying the disc.

The audience’s enthusiastic response underscored that this choral repertoire is as deserving of professional concert performance and recording as all the other great Christian choral music traditions. 

Funding the Enterprise

Funding for the concert and recording came from an unsolicited source. “He found us,” says Greenberg, of Chicago real estate investor Hersch Klaff. After hearing the original concert in 2007, Klaff sent a significant unsolicited donation, which the organization followed up with a long period of cultivation leading to a major gift from the Klaff Family Foundation, not just for the Days of Awe concerts and recording but of additional CAC programs, including a celebration of the 100th birthday of Max Janowksi and a project dedicated to African-American music.

A resident of Chicago for more than 30 years, Hersch Klaff was raised in South Africa, where his heritage combined the Eastern European roots of his father and the more contemporary sounds of a small Reform congregation. “I was schlepped to every single possible service from the time I was two,” he says. It was the connection to those memories that captured his attention and inspired his philanthropy. He has experienced other flavors of contemporary Jewish music, from celebrity cantors to guitar-toting folk balladeers, but to Klaff, “That’s not the real thing; the real thing is somebody standing up with no music. That’s what I grew up with. I never knew what a cappella meant." 

Klaff was so enamored with the Days of Awe recording that he has sent several hundred copies to friends and family all over the world. “They were actually stunned that the soloist wasn’t an absolutely religious chazzan,” he says. “These guys sang it with 100 percent authenticity. You’d think you were sitting in a shul in Johannesburg.”

The Klaff donation, equivalent to CAC's annual budget, inspired a subsequent gift of a similar size from yet another donor. Aware that such unanticipated windfalls can be dangerously disruptive to a nonprofit’s growth trajectory, Chicago a cappella’s board reached out for help by enlisting a consultant through the Arts Work Fund for Organizational Development. “We need to figure out how to take the organization to the next level responsibly,” says Greenberg. “We don’t want to spend it all at once on infrastructure and staff. How do we grow in a sustainable way? It’s a wonderful problem to have.”


This article is adapted from The Voice, Spring 2012.