Composer Judith Lang Zaimont is internationally recognized for her distinctive style, characterized by its expressive strength and dynamism. Many of her 100 works are prize-winning compositions; these include three symphonies, chamber opera, oratorios and cantatas, music for wind ensemble, vocal-chamber pieces with varying accompanying ensembles, a wide variety of chamber works, and solo music for string and wind instruments, piano, organ, and voice.

Judith Lang Zaimont Interview

The following is an excerpt from an interview by Milken Archive with Judith Lang Zaimont on the occasion of recording Sacred Service for the Sabbath Evening, among others.

MILKEN ARCHIVE: Were you brought up as a Reform Jew?

JUDITH LANG ZAIMONT: No, Conservative. My parents were founding members of the Bellerose Jewish Center in very eastern Queens , New York —a Conservative synagogue.

MA: And yet you've used material from the Reform liturgy in your works.

JLZ: Oh yes. After my marriage, my husband and I were members of various Reform congregations in the cities in which we lived.

MA: How did your affiliation with Reform congregations affect your selection of Jewish ideas and text?

JLZ: Almost not at all. I'm very much a person who's connected to the printed word, rather than the socialized experience of liturgy. So I would go back again and again to the service as printed in the [ Union ] Prayerbook. In fact, my setting of A Woman of Valor was commissioned by the late Cantor Paul Kwartin in memory of his mother, Bronia Kwartin, who had been a freedom fighter in Eastern Europe before and during World War II. He had a radio program on WFUV ( Fordham University ), very well known—and he did two broadcasts on his program devoted to my Sacred Service. It was after he heard how I had treated the text in the Sacred Service that he approached me about the setting of A Woman of Valor.

The American Jewish Immigrant Experience

MA: How are you and your family a part of the American Jewish immigrant experience?

JLZ: Three of my grandparents were immigrants to America . My grandpa, Max Lang, was himself the child of an immigrant, but he was the only American-born grandparent. He married Jenny Zinns from Austria —that's my Grandma Jenny. These are my father's parents. And she came over ahead of her brothers and sisters and brought her generation of her family to this country. A very forward-thinking woman who was not educated in college.

It was a working-class family that my father grew up in. My mother's family was more well-to-do back in Eastern Europe . My grandfather, Israel Friedman, my mother's dad, was the son of a learned man in Brest-Litovsk, a well-known metropolitan area.

In 1903—could've been '05—my grandfather Israel was out in the street when the Cossacks came, and he got picked up in some kind of sweep of Jews and was taken to jail. There he began to play chess with his jailor—my grandfather was a really fine chess player—and he built goodwill with the jailor, who could then be approached with a bribe by my grandfather's father to release my grandfather. And he was then probably put on a boat to America . So that's how he left.

My grandmother—Ida Gutman was her maiden name, Ida Friedman after she married—was the daughter of a cantor in Mezrich, Poland, and she and her whole family came to this country. Her brother was a renowned professor of languages back in Poland , but he could not do that in this country [because of the language barrier]. So both he and my grandfather—that is, the two brothers-in-law—went into selling clothing and selling haberdashery when they came over.

And my mother's family had a store in Brooklyn, on Third Avenue and 14th—Friedman's Dried Goods—and that became very well known, because the sailors who came into the ports in Brooklyn would go to my grandfather Israel Friedman's store, since he spoke seven languages. And there was always time for tea, playing a chess game, discussing the news of the day from the old country and the new country. They found a very warm welcome at Friedman's Dried Goods Store, with the little kitchen he had right off the store where he brewed tea for them.

Parental Influence

MA: Were your parents musical?

JLZ: My mother is immensely musical. She's a former president of the New York State Music Teachers Association. It was with my mother that I first studied piano before I began working with Rosanna Levine at Juilliard Prep. I would call my mother "a woman of valor." She was one of five children. All the boys were sent to college, the girls were not. My mother actually was studying for a full year at the Institute of Musical Arts , which is the institution that preceded Juilliard, but when it came time for her next younger brother to go to college, she had to go back and work at home. It was a matter of pecking order but also gender.

She was a marvelously accomplished pianist and was an exemplar for me. She continued doing all those things throughout her life. As a married woman, she always worked. She was a piano teacher, and as I mentioned, was well regarded in her profession. As a matter of fact, right now, in 2005, there are three music scholarships for piano students offered through the New York State Music Teachers' Association that are called the Bertha F. Lang Piano Prize.

My father, bless him, was the best audience in the world. I need to be very clear about this. My father, who's passed on now, was an extremely eminent gentleman. He was a chemical engineer, and under many mayoral administrations in New York City —under Beame, under Lindsay, under Koch—he was New York City 's water commissioner. He later served as an adviser on water pollution control around the world, and as vice president of the World Bank. But in terms of music, he was our first and best listener.

MA: What aspects of composing have been especially gratifying to you?

JLZ: Funny, the first answer that pops out is the fact that what I do takes place in time, out of time. That is, I can spend as much time on a measure, on a figure, on a moment in the music as I need to, to get it absolutely right. What am I comparing this to? Through my teens, and into the first part of my 20s, my sister Doris and I were a duo piano team [as The Lang Sisters]. We toured around the country, we constantly made recordings, we were on radio and television. The Lang Sisters were getting a pretty fair reputation, with lots of experience. But what I found was that the performing almost never was satisfying for me.

MA: Why is that?

JLZ: Things come and go. The passages are there and then they're gone. You can't call them back and fix and correct them. And in composing, you can do that. You can live with the moment for as long as you need to make it right.

On Sacred Service for the Sabbath Evening

MA: Regarding your Sacred Service for the Sabbath Evening, how did you select the passages that became the lyrics for your works?

JLZ: Oh, those are from the Reform service. With some adjustments on my part.

MA: Didn't you use some portions and not others?

JLZ: Yes. "What did I set out to do?" would be the core question. The U.S. Bicentennial was looming. And for some years, I'd been involved as resident composer and accompanist for the Great Neck Choral Society on Long Island . And I watched, year after year, this chorus really do right by the great choral masterpieces of the past and into the 20th century: the Poulenc Gloria, Benjamin Britten's Rejoice in the Lamb. We did the Dona Nobis Pacem of Vaughn Williams. And all of this was drawn from a liturgy that was not my liturgy. I think in years past, they may have sung the Bloch Sacred Service, but I'm not sure. They didn't do the Milhaud, I know that.

And when they came to me to commission a piece to celebrate the American Bicentennial, the conductor, George Rose—who's a wonderful, bold, champion of all good music, new or old—said, "Why don't you write us a mass?" And I looked at George and I said, "George, I will write you a Sacred Service, and I will write you an American Sacred Service." And that's where it came from.

I'm not interested in following in the footsteps of other people. If you're a real artist, you're out to put your imprints on your own art. About two or three years previously, I had made a pilgrimage out to an obscure church somewhere in western Queens , to hear a local chorus sing parts of Miriam Gideon's Sacred Service. And that was the first Jewish music that I'd heard that was written by a woman. Gideon, of course, is kind of a—not a tonal composer, but a modernist, expressionist composer. And this was actually a very lovely, modest, tuneful piece, beautifully written for chorus. And that kind of also sparked my interest, as I saw that this was again territory that was not well populated. I was interested in doing something that was new, and a real contribution. And so from that came the germ of the piece that I was about to write. And I wanted to do it right: for full orchestra, for chorus, for baritone solo.

MA: You must have been pleased.

JLZ: I was pleased that they were so quick in agreement to do this. As a matter of fact, a huge percentage of the population of the Great Neck Choral Society is now and always has been Jewish. And here they were singing all these masses and requiems! So it was time to do something big, and it was time to do something big that was ours. Of course then, the issue of making it American arose. That's why so much of this setting is in English—virtually the entirety of it.

The remainder of the interview can be found at Judith Lang Zaimont interview.