Yiddishbbuk, written in 1992, became Golijov's calling card work, enabling him to snag commissions from important groups and organizations such as the Kronos Quartet. Subtitled Inscriptions for String Quartet, the work was inspired by psalms cited in Kafka's notebooks (did he make them up, or did such a book really exist?). In their original publication, the psalms were surrounded by what could possibly be musical notation, and Golijov tried to imagine what this music would sound like. The music is written in a hair-curling modern musical idiom, and while some may find it off-putting, the emotional impact of this music cannot be denied, an overall feeling of loss, a series of mournful wailings, and in the first movement, cries of terror.

Evoking terror is appropriate in the first movement of Yiddishbbuk as it commemorates three children who died at the Terezin concentration camp, their poems and artwork preserved in the rather well-known Holocaust book, I Never Saw Another Butterfly. Dozens of composers have set these poems to music or tried to evoke the book's sentiment, but none have succeeded as well as Golijov. Bows clatter col legno on strings, musical screams of anguish cut through the frightening textures, and loud, abrasive chords brutally pound away. The remaining two movements are inscribed to Isaac Bashevis Singer and Leonard Bernstein, and although Golijov's harmonies are totally modern, there is no mistaking the doleful tone of these contemporary lamentations...

...Like Golijov, David Stock is another composer who was writing in a modernist idiom, and began to incorporate popular and ethnic musical influences, in addition to allowing tonal chords back into his harmonic palette. In the 1970's, Stock wrote several works in which jazz and modern music co-existed. Stock taught at Antioch when avant-garde jazz composer-pianist Cecil Taylor was there, and he also did a stint at New England Conservatory where the grandfather of Third Stream music, Gunther Schuller, presided, so it's not surprising that Stock would explore that blend of styles. In the 1980's, Stock composed works that incorporated Jewish music, including a work for the same ensemble as Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat which featured a clarinet part straight out of klezmer.

Unlike Golijov, who currently appears to be an uncanny musical chameleon assuming the identity of the popular styles he evokes, Stock's excursions into Jewish music are clearly those of a contemporary classical composer using popular music as source material for his compositions. This is true of Sueños de Sefarad, composed three months ago, which incorporates a number of Sephardic melodies. I'm unfamiliar with the original tunes, but they sounded intact with little elaboration or development, the variety and form created by a different type of accompaniment (based on tonal harmonies with mild dissonances added) for each melody. An unusual formal aspect of this work was that Stock never ended each melody, ending on the penultimate note instead. This created a chain of small-scale pieces, each one propelled into the next by each tune never being resolved. Does this in some way reflect on the expulsion of the Sephardim from Spain in 1492 (which Stock references in his program note)? In Stock's treatment, the Sephardic melodies never come to rest; the final note of a melody, the tonic, is often described as the "home" note in the scale, the ultimate point of arrival and rest. Not until the final section does Stock allow a melody to finally fully conclude.

Most of the melodies chosen were melancholy strains in minor modes, although Stock also used some lively tunes where major chords and fast dance tempos dominated. In a curious coincidence, Sueños de Sefarad began exactly as Gabriela Ortiz's Aroma Foliado: the violins and viola sustain a high, soft, vibratoless, tightly compacted chord, against which the cello enters with a melody. Yiddishbbuk also opens with a high, glassy, cluster, but the chord crescendos from silence to fortissimo, serving as a brief sonic diving board into a pool of loud bow-struck strings and anguished cello wailing. Coincidence? Or contemporary cliché?