Mysticism and Instinct: Spotlight on Composer David Hertzberg

by ALEX WEISER

“I don’t think about how I’m going to write a piece, I just try to live and breathe it, and make it.”

David Hertzberg is a Jewish American composer, currently living in Los Angeles, the city in which he was raised. He started playing music around age eight, studying violin, cello, and piano, and began composing soon thereafter with a love of Mozart and a deep feeling of kinship for classical music. Hertzberg reflects: “Composing was for me an immediately natural way of relating to music… I was fairly serious about piano for a while, but it was always second to composition.”

Hertzberg grew up in a secular Jewish family and was sent to a Jewish elementary school, where he received instruction in both Hebrew and English. Although he was interested in language and was fascinated by Hebrew, he recalls that when he was young he didn’t develop a personal relationship to Judaism, and approached liturgical texts with skepticism.

Speaking of his musical influences, he waxes poetically, “I love Wagner… there is a rawness, and infusion of something that is beyond thought in that music.” Another major influence is the music of Arnold Schoenberg, a Jewish German composer who famously moved to the United States when the Nazis came to power, eventually settling in Los Angeles. Hertzberg explains how life-changing hearing the music of Schoenberg and his disciples was: “Encountering modern music when I was in high school was an existential crisis… it didn’t sound anything like all of the music I loved so much. I just didn’t know what to make of it.”

This experience prompted him to travel to the famous modernist music festival in Darmstadt, Germany for two weeks when he was seventeen to reckon with this musical lineage. He describes it as an “overwhelming experience,” and explains that he wanted to come to terms with this music: “I felt like I had to make the world one. I wanted to see how everything was connected… the unity behind disparate things” – a feeling, he notes, that  is perhaps related to his experience as a Jewish person.

Hertzberg then went to Juilliard, where he completed both undergraduate and masters degrees studying with Samuel Adler. Samuel Adler is an extremely knowledgeable composer, and also a direct link to the old world of Jewish life: he was born in Germany in 1928 and fled with his family to the United States in 1939. Adler’s father, Hugo Chaim Adler, was a great cantor and composer. In studying with Adler, Hertzberg learned a great deal about Jewish liturgical music, in a way that he described as integrated and related to his learning about classical music.

Under Adler’s tutelage and after a few years of hermetic writing and study, Hertzberg describes a turning point in the middle of his time at Juilliard in which he began feeling liberated from his crisis with modernist music. “There was a big break at some point and I had this reckoning with something that I associate with a certain transformation in my life and my relationship to Judaism and my own Jewish heritage.” He describes the change as his becoming “in touch with something else… something spontaneous, something that’s not divided.” He explains:

“Some paradigm shift happened in my brain and I just eliminated choice. I don’t choose to do stuff now. I don’t think about how I’m going to write a piece, I just try to live and breathe it, and make it… It’s also connected with something spiritual which is actually the role that Judaism has come to play in my life, which is that since that turning point, I have a more religious relationship to music.”

Hertzberg’s interest in Judaism has been particularly manifest in Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism. “It’s become my way of relating to the world in the last few years” he remarks. He characterizes both his musical and spiritual transformation as developing in tandem from a certain naiveté, to an antagonistic struggle, and ending with an embrace, ecstatic love, and fascination with music and spirituality.

We will be featuring music by David Hertzberg in our upcoming Young Jewish American Composers concert on November 2nd.

Based on an oral history interview with David Hertzberg conducted by Alex Weiser on September 9th, 2016 in New York City. Quotes have been adapted from the conversation in consultation with Mr. Hertzberg. The complete audio recording of the interview is now a part of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research’s Sound Archive.

Alex Weiser is YIVO’s Programs Manager.