Simon Sargon
Simon Sargon was born in Bombay, India, in 1938. His father's Sephardic family had lived in India for roughly 300 years, originating in Cochin before his grandfather moved to Bombay, while his mother came from a Russian Jewish family whose father had emigrated from Pinsk to Manhattan in the 1880s. His parents met in Jerusalem, married six weeks later, and settled in Bombay, where his father established a law practice. When Simon was about one year old, the family left India on one of the last ships allowed through the Suez Canal in 1939, settling first in New York, then Washington, D.C., where his father worked with the Office of Price Administration, and finally Boston.
Raised in Winthrop, near Boston, Sargon attended Winthrop High School and went on to Brandeis University, studying Hebrew at Boston's Hebrew College and music at the Longy School in Cambridge. His musical life began at age six after hearing a piano recital in Washington, and he soon began composing. He pursued graduate work in composition, studying with Irving Fine and Harold Shapero at Brandeis, Vincent Persichetti at Juilliard, and Darius Milhaud in Aspen. Deeply shaped by the Orthodox synagogue of his childhood, the cantor he accompanied as a boy, and summers at Camp Yavneh in New Hampshire, he developed a lifelong devotion to Jewish liturgical, folk, and concert music.
Sargon came to Dallas in 1974 after three years teaching in Jerusalem, and served for 25 years as music director at Temple Emanu-El, where a devoted volunteer staff and choir supported his composing and programming. He joined the SMU faculty in 1984 as a professor and also lectured before Dallas Symphony and Dallas Opera performances. His liturgical works have been performed in synagogues across the country, and his concert pieces, including a clarinet work titled Klezmer-inspired music, have circulated widely. In 1994 he received the first Leon Rabin award in Dallas for contributions to Jewish culture. He and his wife Bonnie, whom he met in Aspen, awaited their first grandchild at the time of the interview.
Full Transcript
my name is rosalind venjet i'm from the dallas jewish historical society today is june 7 2002 and i'm going to be speaking today with simon sargon at his home in dallas and we're going to begin simon you were born in india to jewish paris that's where i was born in bombay in 1938 and my father's family had lived in india as far as we can ascertain for about 300 years they originated in cochin which is the uh south south of bombay about 600 miles and my grandfather had moved from cochin to bombay my mother's family was of russian origin so she was her father came
from pinsk and came to manhattan with the great wave of jewish immigration in the 1880s and then she was visiting her father who had retired to tiberius one of the four holy cities of israel on his retirement and my father who had been studying law in london was coming back through palestine to go back to bombay to set up a law practice so they happened to meet in jerusalem and six weeks later they were married and my mother turned around as new york girl and headed off to bombay and set up a home there so it's a rather romantic exotic kind of story do you
remember anything about honda i have one fleeting memory of a doorstep which i think is my uncle's home there but otherwise no i came i was one my brother was three um and we came back to the states it was the uh the last ship that was allowed through the suez canal in 1939 before it closed with the war so um my mother wanted us to be brought up here in america she was homesick and she wanted to come back and where did where did your family settle when they came back well various places we started in new york we lived in the bronx for
a while and then um we moved to washington dc my father took a job with the opa the office of price administration that was active during the second world war and then when the war ended we moved to uh boston and that's where i was raised more or less i'd say when the war ended i mean this was the second world war this is 45. some of your listeners or watchers maybe this is ancient history and where did you go to school then well i went to winthrop high school which is a small suburb of boston and then to brandeis university and i was studying hebrew at boston's hebrew college and music at the laundry school in cambridge tell us how you started your music education well it started in washington i had gone to a recital of some friends of mine i was six years old it was a piano recital and i heard them play and i wanted to play too so my parents brought me a little piano and i
started piano lessons and then i started writing as soon as i could play i started write down little melodies and you continued doing this oh yes i continued and then in boston very seriously and then when i was at brandeis i commuted into new york for lessons and piano lessons and so forth so it was very intensive was your family religious did they attend synagogue yes my father was very religious and his whole family was very observant they were sephardim and his there was no sephardic community per se in boston so he regretted that a great deal but whenever we went to new york to
visit my new york relatives he was up and off to the spanish portuguese synagogue on 70th and central park west and i used to accompany him to some of those services too i remember hearing they had a wonderful male choir i was impressed by the music and the beam of course was in the center and the rabbi was the cantor and the chanting it was quite a bit different from what i was used to we attended an orthodox congregation and went through it with a wonderful hazaan who had a beautiful tenor voice and of course no choir or anything that was the music but he
was he was a wonderful singer and um what how did your family celebrate jewish holidays well we uh we celebrated mostly in the ashkenazic tradition because that's what was around us um passover we used to go to new york to be with my uh mother's sister and her family we had a huge seder there with all her brothers and sisters and uh the high holidays were wonderful in winthrop um because we were right on the ocean and i remember one high holidays we had these northeasters that used to sweep in from the ocean one it was late september and there was this huge storm and
they had built a sea wall but the synagogue was one block away from the ocean and the waves came crashing over the sea wall and rolled down this which was a decline and when we went to come out of the services from rosh hashanah you couldn't come down as a long flight of steps from the uh from the entrance to the synagogue well nobody could go out because it was all flooded it was a foot of water and so we all had to go back up and go out the back exit of the synagogue but i mean it was right it's a time of impressive
great majestic things so why not have these huge 30-foot waves crashing and this slamming against the wall with that thunder and the water coursing down those streets i mean it was wonderful to come out to it i'll never forget that now your graduate work was in composition yes i studied at brandeis with uh irving fine and harold shapiro and then went on to juilliard i worked with vincent persichetti and during the summer in aspen i was with darius meal um who as many of your listeners or viewers may know is a was a sephardic jew from the south of france and a wonderful man at
the time i knew him he was crippled and confined to a wheelchair but he had this wonderful sense of humor and lightness about him and um i respected and admired him so much because he was he had this indomitable will you could see even though physically he was incapacitated now when did you become interested in jewish liturgical music was it at that point no i always was i was very moved as i said by our cantor singing in the shul and it really touched me and i was very uh honored he was a man in his 50s 60s i was a boy of 12 13.
he asked me to accompany him on his some of his concerts of jewish music so i was playing all of his jewish liturgical repertoire that had been uh arranged for piano accompaniment and at the same time studying in hebrew school we sang all of the songs and of course at home we sang all of the holiday songs on the holidays and then for three summers i went to hebrew camp up in new hampshire it was camp yavna which was run by the hebrew college and um then that was an intensive kind of submersion and all things israeli and we sang israeli folk songs and of
course the holidays were the summer you don't have that many holidays but i remember tisha b'av when we sat on the floor with candles and every shabbat was orthodox shabbat you know everything stopped and and the singing at the in the dining room after every meal the grace after meals and then songs especially shabbat so i was you know just uh inundated with with the jewish music liturgical folk all kinds how does the process of composing work how does it work well what happens when you write a new composition one can only speak uh personally because i know it's very different for every creator for
me it would depend if it's a a text that i'm setting in which case usually the words suggest a musical motive the opening pattern of words and from there i continue that motive as as the poem or the text goes on now a lot of texts don't speak to me that way they just it it's a funny combination of the rhythm of the words the sound of them and the mood that the sound of the words create and it the fire doesn't happen all the time that's like with the psalm 29 i searched and searched for something you know and uh finally that that psalm
just took off for me but not every psalm does some of them you read and re-read and it doesn't come if it's an instrumental piece it's generally from a again an idea that somehow comes into my mind where it comes from is a mystery i think it's from god and composing for me is a very spiritual activity because in a sense i find it frightening i find looking at a blank page very frightening when it has to be filled with black notes and i'll do anything to postpone starting but i find that meditation and prayer help me a great deal and even when i'm uh
having blocks or i'm stuck uh i'll take time out and pray about those too so that i always feel like i can't overcome those myself i need i need something beyond me to help me do that now what happens then between the actual writing and the performing well there are a lot of steps once the piece is written in a sense that work is over for me but the main thing is that it should be come alive and sound and reach other people because that's the whole point of it all unfortunately that doesn't always happen i was lucky at the temple i had a great
choir and as i wrote music i was free to program it and the temple gave me the wherewithal to arrange for the copying and reproduction of music which is costly every new premiere you know you people don't factor in all of those expenses beyond just the creation of the work so the temple assisted me in that and i'll always be grateful for that um so my liturgical music has been widely performed often things premiered at the temple have spread around the country and been used in in synagogues and throughout the country then the non-liturgical non-sacred music usually get started with one performer who will present
it for instance i wrote a piece for clarinet called klezmeziq and it's a concert piece but it incorporates elements of klezmer's style for concert clarinetis it's quite virtuosic and difficult but a lot of fun and very impressive well the clarinetists who've played it have played it at clarinet conventions and so it's heard by other clarinetists and then i get requests coming in it's not published but i get requests coming in for copies and and i know it's been done in england and it's been done in new orleans at the clarinet fest there and and all uh you know just it goes around because it's a
small world of clarinetists and looking for repertoire all the time and that's similar with you know with the flute pieces and the violin pieces and so on and so forth how does this differ from commissions commissions is when uh an individual or an institution will say will you write a piece for us for such an occasion and it has to be due by and it's for such and such these are your musical forces that are available to you um so the parameters are given to you by the performing by the commissioning organization usually uh whereas if you just write what you want to write you're
wide open you know you set it for whatever you want as long as you want and take as long as you want to write it it doesn't matter but of course then you may never hear it because it may never get performed harriet knows all of this very well from a literary standpoint i know but it's the same parallel i think so but wouldn't some commissions be different than others in other words somebody might say would you put a certain psalm to music that's right or would you write a composition that's exactly right yes for instance there was a volunteer choir in indiana in fort
wayne which is a very small jewish community but they had surprisingly enough an acapella non-accompanied choir of about 12 singers who were extremely devoted to their singing they sang shabbat they had a summer retreat and they sang well they commissioned they knew exactly what they wanted it was the setting of the po of the poem the prayer would say from friday night they wanted it for unaccompanied choir it had to be something that amateur singers could learn it couldn't be too difficult or too dissonant or whatever and um it had to be ready so it could be performed for the next high holiday so i
mean there it was all laid out for me that was it whereas when the temple commissioned my farewell piece you know they said write a piece for the choir and that was it so that's why i i wanted to write something doable practical and yet something a little different from the normal organ piece that's why i introduced the timpani which gave it a little bit of special feeling you know we're told that your latest commission is has been given by yale university well oh no i'm sorry that's not the latest that was a few years ago yeah but that's okay um yeah they had a
international seminar on the psalms the psalms of the hebrew bible and invited scholars from all over the country in the world to speak about the psalter and the psalm and the jewish tradition and in the christian tradition and as part of that they commissioned a christian composer and myself to represent the jewish tradition now there they had asked that we both do the same psalm and i was supposed to do it in hebrew and he was supposed to do it in english it was psalm 67 well it was one of those psalms i could not for the life of me get anything going with and
i was so heartened because i when i finally spoke to the organizer she said well the other composer didn't care to set psalm 67 so he said psalm 1. so i said well if he didn't set it i'm not going to set it i said i'm setting psalm 8 so that's how we did it and it's too bad in a way it really is too bad because it would have been very instructive to see how a christian and a jew approach different words you know a different psalm for instance psalm 1 as you know is in hebrew ashrae blessed is the one who does not walk in the path of the wicked but the word is ashrae in hebrew ashrae usually blessed is baruch ashrae connotes oh share which is happiness prosperity well-being in addition
to being blessed this all comes to the man who doesn't follow in the paths of the scornful or the wicked well if i had said the word ashrae i would not have said it the way he set the word blessed because he said blessed blessed it was like the saints are blessed you know and it was a very christian approach to text valid from his point of view because he doesn't know ashrae from adam you know but a jewish person who understands hebrew can't set the word ashrae the way you set the way baruch and it would have been interesting to the audience to have
had that discussed and revealed you know so tell us about the latest commission the latest commission well the last commission i just completed was for a piano quartet piano violin violin cello i think it will be premiered by voices of change next year i hope so and you've also been a teacher for many years yes can you tell us something about what your experiences have been like as a teacher i love to teach and my teaching has been teaching even when i'm not in front of a classroom as the choir knows because i get involved in teaching words interpretation and it becomes an educational thing
to run acquire rehearsal and musical and education and before i i mean i i taught i always taught somehow i mean sunday school when i was going to juilliard i taught at the temple in manhattan and then i taught um at sarah lawrence college in new york and at a catholic school a marymount and then i went to israel i taught at the reuben academy and also at the ju at the hebrew university but then i came back here to the states and i had the temple job in which i really didn't have a teaching job it was working with the choir the junior choir
doing some adult education but in 84 when i joined smu faculty then i started teaching once again as a professor type teacher but i enjoy it very much and i find it challenging and stimulating and i like to be involved with young people especially now at this point in my life i find it an invigorating thing and take great pleasure in excite making them excited about music and getting rid of the jaded working for grades mentality you know and just get back to basic i'm in music because i love it i can't do anything else this is what gives me joy in my life you
know have you worked mainly with music majors or both both um for years i gave course i've not courses but i gave lectures before the dallas symphony concerts uh on the stage of fair park i would discuss one of the pieces that the symphony was going to play that evening and also lectures for the dallas opera i called them opera logs and i would go through the opera and discuss um character plot motivation use of musical motifs motives and so forth and that was like adult education because these were not uh professional musicians but um an audience that really wanted more and they were wonderful
and i i love that too i mean you know it's the same thing as long as as long as the excitement about music can be communicated and and the beauty of it can be enhanced by by people understanding more deeply the the intellectual basis the logical basis of it then that gives me great great satisfaction when you came to dallas um in 1974 yes what were your impressions of the city at that time this is for the historical society well it was not my first visit to dallas actually i had been here twice before i was a new york snob or an eastern snob you
know anything west of the hudson was dropped dropped off the side of the ocean in fact when i was at juilliard looking for a job there was a job posting at the university of texas and i thought god won an outpost and i looked it up in the book and found there were 45 000 students i was astounded but i had been accompanying jenny terrell who was a marvelous singer concert singer opera singer and she she gave a concert here in dallas at mcfarland in 63 for the civic music series and i played for that and then she came back in next year and did
a concert in fort worth at landreth um for their uh university concert series so i had been down here and she was uh john ardoyne worshipped her and he took us both out to lunch and to neiman's and you know all that kind of stuff but it was just a very brief stay and when we came to dallas in 74 it was a very vastly different city from what it is now it was it was so much more of a small townish provincial the city where kennedy got shot kind of thing you know it didn't have the megalopolis and the sophistication in terms of the
restaurants the stores and everything else uh inter more international feeling that it has now um it was curiously enough on the very same latitude as jerusalem i don't know if people are aware of that so we came from jerusalem and the difference climate wise was that there's there's no rainy season dry season here but the heat and the humidity were on a par jerusalem is a little better it's in the mountains but if you're in tel aviv so it took some acclimatization to get used to dallas especially having lived in new york and boston my whole life when i lived in this country then we
went to jerusalem for three years and when we came back it was like coming back to a different country you know because it was not the east coast that i knew but in a way that was very good for us and we were so happy to to raise olivia in a healthy environment here you know physically healthy and have some space it was it was a good city for all of us we were very lucky that somehow we were placed here how how do you think the city has changed and we've been superficially with restaurants etc i think that i think that it's much more
diverse there's an underlying diversity that there never used to be you know it was overwhelmingly bible-buckled christian when i came or at least that was the impression because that's what surrounded you that was what was in the papers and now you feel this thriving asian community of course there's the muslim community there's a very dynamic gay community the jewish community is much more intensive uh much more uh orthodox orthodoxus represented much more strongly than when i when we came i think and somehow these independent and varied strains that are in other parts of the country are here now too and i think it's a lot
healthier and a lot more interesting were some of the memorable experiences you've had at temple media well you know it's just been one wonderful crescendo of events temple it just it was one of those matches that you know bashar it was the place that i somehow needed to be at that point in my life and what i had to give suited what the temple wanted and that lasted for 25 years i had the most wonderful devoted volunteer staff who were helping me when i had a dream i wanted to do this piece or i wanted to to start on this project or start this concert
series they always said let's try it how can we help you know and gave it their all and the choir most wonderful choir you know learning all my music and growing and thriving and and feeding back feeding back this wonderful energy and support and and admiration that gave me because i had so much insecurity it gave me inner strength so it was just a wonderful match it's hard to pick out i mean when we first came did a wonderful program on the american bicentennial which i'll never forget which was sponsored by brotherhood and sisterhood i don't know if you were in that one and um
we had a utopian with the red white and blue and the wonderfully original playlist with all the kids from religious school and and the choir and sisterhood and brotherhood people participating it was just a gala evening and so and we had a wonderful program with rabbi olan i'll never forget it was called um at grandmother's knee and it was all about the yiddish influence of american popular culture and levi did some readings from isaac bashevis singer and from the biography of mark chagall the choir sang yiddish pieces and we had a small ensemble that played copeland's vitepsk trio and prokofiev overture on hebrew themes it
was all kind of eastern europe uh brought over here and it was just a really i had written a narration that threaded it all through it was such an exciting program and then over the years we did so many wonderful choir programs and also to showcase uh different interesting stimulating provocative programs that that i think they were real enrichment for for the whole community and what do you see is the state of jewish music in america now that's a double-edged question and a difficult one if you ask about the state of jewish music in the synagogue that's the cause for concern right now because in
the reform movement um the move the turn away from choirs from formality in music from the performance of pieces composed for choir by accomplished sophisticated composers that's all been being rejected and being replaced by much more simple melodies that the congregation can can pick up just like that because they're not a lot to remember you know they repeat themselves so much and it's not that i'm against participatory services i believe everybody has to participate for the service to be really meaningful to them you can't be a spectator at a worship service and come away from it having been changed or moved or transformed which is
what a worship service needs to do for people but on the other hand if the worship service is all totally participatory then there's nothing elevating to my way of thinking about it it's um it it doesn't enter into a sphere of holiness that is aesthetically pleasing and i really miss that that's something that i have to have when i have a and part of a service there has to be in other words both elements present and reform right now is going towards um jettisoning the whole more serious formal part of things towards a total participation hand-clapping yay kind of stuff so from that kind of
point of view i'm i'm depressed and disappointed about it on the other hand i think we have to take a broader view of this i think that these things are cyclical we may be at the bottom of a trend right now that's a rejection of those very formal services in reform of the 1950s you know and they've come circled this way and that ultimately there'll be a desire for something more elevated and more demanding intellectually and aesthetically from the congregation and it will be responded to in terms of jewish music in the concert world it's fantastic what's happening right now there's this incredible revival of
klezmer you know and that's filtered into the concert world jewish composers are represented uh way disproportionately to uh their their their number in the overall population and you look at the leading composers which had started from gershwin and bernstein and copeland all being jewish and in this generation similarly the the composers are jewish and many of them are jews who are investigating their jewish heritage and not afraid to present it to interpret it in concert to a general mixed public and as a performer when you perform um how do you select what you want to perform for a particular concert for you mean if i
perform as a pianist or a conductor or choir with the choir well i think the first thing in performance is variety you need to offer the audience something that changes with every piece so that they're absorbed you can't have gosh i remember when we went to amsterdam ruth were you on that trip we sang in the synagogue in amsterdam and then i understood why people thought oh god we'll never host a jewish choir because this synagogue choir sang one slow lugubrious melancholy piece after another it was like six you were sitting through them going and i thought well you know if that's what jewish choirs
have to offer i wouldn't hire a jewish choir to be in my concert series either but for me there have to be some fast numbers some upbeat numbers pepe numbers and also what i said in terms of the the stimulation one has to try to raise an audience's level you cannot do all light popular things that are absolutely easy listening there has to be one or two have to be one or two pieces that present a challenge or that relate to history or that there's a stretch that people have to try to understand them or try to is somehow respond to the style of them
because the style is not american pop folk music you know and i see that as part of the responsibility of any programmer we're an age that throws history out the window you know and we are not you just got that report in the newspapers about how high school students they know nothing of the past you know i think as music educators and as programmers and of course with our history of jewish music we can't just say lewandowski's old-fashioned solster's old-fashioned we're not going to do them i think we have to say what is the most beautiful work of lewandowski and how can we present it
the most lovingly and beautifully and meaningfully put in program notes maybe give an interpretation in words beforehand and let an audience know that in our jewish tradition there are giants who are being ignored i read that in 1994 you were awarded the first leon raven award in dallas yes contributions to jewish culture yes i was very honored to receive that and um what do you think about the current state of jewish culture in dallas well i'm i'm very um hopeful about it i think that it's it's uh it's all on the upswing right now and there's a lot more interest in it i think our
concert series at temple which perhaps it was the first and uh and has continued for over 13 years and been extremely successful has been a model for the jcc has now started one share with israel has started one i know to ferath has had a series of concerts where they bring in israeli cantors and so on the jewish festival at the meyerson is a is an auspicious thing the once a year festival there and um for instance the concert the choir gave at smu we had that library of congress uh exhibition the traveling exhibition from the library of congress and the choir did a concert
at smu where we played some of the pieces that were in manuscript in this collection uh and drew a big crowd it was a wonderful thing so i think that this is a kind of a a a swell of of jewish culture that's coming up and it's heartening it's a good thing what changes would you like to see happen as this phenomenon occurs well as i mentioned before i i would like to see quality be to the fore the pandering to um what is easiest and most accessible is upsetting the derivative quality of jewish music where it's copies of christian pop music you know one
could just change the words and it it would be exactly the same style that you know we jews have such a a 2 000 3 000 year history we have biblical chants that are so beautiful and touching why should we have to write music that's like christian 20th century christian pop music i mean it's it should be distinctively jewish because it should draw on jewish sources more you know the problem is if the jewish composers don't know their source material well they'll just draw on pop culture that's all they grow up with so education is part of the whole thing that we have to educate
people in terms of jewish music and then the temples the rabbis the community has to call it forth by commissions by concerts by putting value on this cultural effort from the top from the authority level and what's next for you performing traveling well i don't think traveling we're staying here to usher in the birth of our first grandchild so that's a great joy i think we'll be here most of the summer um i'm going to continue writing i'll continue at smu as a full-time professor i'll be continuing as a consultant for the showcase series of the temple and it's like at the end of that
recent movie with tom hanks where he was on the desert island and he said they said what are you going to do he said i'll wait and see what the tide brings in so that's sort of what we all do in a way but i do that i say well maybe there'll be a phone call maybe they'll be mailed maybe a commission may be an offer to perform whatever the tide brings in i'll try to do it my best can you tell us a little bit about your family today we know that you're going to be a grandfather soon yes it's very exciting it's our
first grandchild and um those of you who are watching who have grandchildren i guess you know how exciting this moment is uh and everybody says it's the the best the best thing that can happen and the best thing in life to do so we've waited a long time my sister in israel had four children and immediately they got married young and started reproducing and my brother had grant had a right away grandchild we waited a long time so we're very excited about this and who are your role models when you were growing up that's a hard one you know in a strange way i felt
spiritually connected to the people that i practiced and somehow playing beethoven and playing shubert and playing brahms they were presences in my life they were people who they they worked to their very hardest to do to be the very best that they could and not be satisfied and to keep working away and to communicate their hearts and what they gave to me is a kind of isolated outsider and sense to my high school world which was not into music nor into jewish studies during to anything they gave me solace and they gave me a sense of of support of real support and i always wanted
to be like them i wanted to write music that was on a level of theirs not that i ever could but they were the ideals that i aspired to and you've done so many things and have so many awards what's most special to you well the most special thing to me is facing my own self and trying to bring it forth in terms of sound and when i can do that everything else pales because i was brought up in a jewish home that was just like all boston jews emphasizing achievement accomplishment prizes awards you know stature it didn't help that leonard bernstein was also from
boston and look what he did you know and i lived with that my whole life and only now have i come to the conclusion that facing myself at my desk and trying to write music and trying to conquer my inner fears and to be the very best that i can be when i do that that's the most satisfying thing in my life right now thank you is there anything that you would like to add that we haven't talked about tell us about your wife she has a great history bonnie bonnie is his source is my pillar and my rock and my source of strength and
um she's been my health meet my friend in the in the best sense of the word uh it's just been a a gift from god my relationship with her so i'm thankful that we met we met in aspen she was a voice student of jenny tyrell and i was studying with meo as i said but as part of my scholarship for composition lessons i had to accompany a certain number of voice lessons and i accompanied for her and that's how we met and we've been through a lot as every couple has 40 years but i'm so thankful that our relationship has kept growing and that
we both as individuals have grown and thank god we've not grown in different in different directions that's what's so good that we still feel as close or more close than we always did so i started in 74. that's when i came over from jerusalem you got enough material