For the month of December, Voices’ Artistic Administrator, Wesley Chinn will be curating a selection of Holiday music from recent Candlelight Christmas and Family Holiday Concerts.

Every time a Jewish holiday appears on the calendar, for some reason I have to do the math in my head: “Do they really mean that’s the first day or is that the day we celebrate?” The issue being, of course, that Jewish holidays are celebrated beginning at sundown so inevitably the celebration of Hanukkah (or Chanukkah as we prefer to spell it in my house so that we can intentionally mispronounce the initial consonant with a hard “ch” as in “cheese”) begins the evening before it appears on the calendar. In other words, tonight, begins the celebration of Hanukkah.

For me personally, Hanukkah is a good chance to reflect on the universality of holidays celebrated around the winter solstice throughout the world. The lighting of candles and feasting, whether it be a Menorah and latkes or Christmas lights and roast goose reflects a common theme of chasing away the darkness around the shortest day of the year that is probably nearly universal to any human culture in a part of the world far enough from the equator to have a cold and dark season.

Let me be honest: in my experience, there isn’t really a ton of great Hanukkah music for chorus, especially compared to the wealth of music written for Christmas. The reasons for this are complicated, including the general tendency of traditional Jewish liturgical music to be for unison congregation, and that Hanukkah is really more of a home holiday than a Synagogue one. In fact, the truth as I was taught it growing up is that Hanukkah was traditionally a fairly minor holiday, and became more widely celebrated (including the introduction of gifts to the celebration) mostly so that Jewish boys and girls wouldn’t feel left out at Christmas time. Minor or not, I always appreciate the chance to kindle some light in the darkness, and the goal of having fewer people in society feeling left out seems to me to be an incredibly laudable one that we can all strive for in our own ways.

For this festival of light, it seems appropriate to share the voices of children raised in joyous song, from our 2019 Family Holiday Concert: The Third Street Music School Preludio Choir, under the direction of Kaitlin Stark, performing Adam Paltrowitz’s arrangement of “O Hanukkah.” – Wesley Chinn

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O Hanukkah (Arr. Adam Paltrowitz)

Third Street Music School Preludio Choir
Kaitlin Stark, Director
Robert Randall, Accompanist

Recorded live at the Voices of Ascension HOLIDAY FAMILY CONCERT
Wednesday, December 17, 2019, The Church of the Ascension, New York City