WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Story Behind the Song: A Jewish String Quartet and Their Mission to Recover Lost Musical Repertoire from the Holocaust

Episode Date: January 26, 2026

Welcome to Story Behind the Song. I'm your host, Lily Fay Kramer, and I'm here today with Jason Calloway. He's a cellist for the Amherne String Quartet. He's from Miami, or he lives in Miami now. He's a professor at FIU, and he's here at Hillsdale to play with the Choral Scholars concert. So welcome, Jason. Thanks. My pleasure. Awesome. So first, how did you begin music? What made you continue playing? Why did you choose cello? give me a background. Well, like a lot of us in this field, I grew up in a musical house. My parents were opera singers originally, and funny enough, they met at Interlaken and went to U of M, and I was actually born in that area in the northern suburbs of Detroit. Eventually, they moved back to Philadelphia when I was less than a year old, it's where my mom's from. And I was, I was, I was, less than a year old. what's where my mom's from. And my mom ended up becoming a general music teacher in elementary school. And I sang, of course, growing up, sang in choirs and boy choirs and all of that.

I had a very short piano career, began and ended before my fifth birthday. But like so many of us, and even with the musical family, I found the cello mostly because it found me. I went to public school and there was a demonstration of the instruments of the string family. I'm not remembering exactly if it was second or third grade, but I heard those instruments and the violin was too high. The viola I didn't know what it was. The bass was too big. And I'm sure that the cello spoke to me because it sounded like what I heard at home, my parents' voices. And that night I went home and asked for a cello and here we are, almost 40 years later.

Wow. Yeah. Where did you study? So I grew up, as I say, in the Philadelphia area and went to Juilliard initially and then to the University of Southern California for my master's and was very lucky. I have to get this plug in there too as well as the plug for music in the public schools in the sense that I had a wonderful teacher growing up until I was. I was 14 or 15, I think it was, a man in the Philadelphia orchestra named Bob Kaffaro.

And I loved him, and I would have stayed with him till the end of time. I didn't know any better, and he was great, and we got along really well. But then I came home from school one day on a Friday, and I had a message on the voice machine. And he said that you have an audition tomorrow for Orlando Cole, who had taught at Curtis for in the end almost 80 years was the cellist of the Curtis Quartet, you know, a major, major teacher, and someone to whom I would not have had access. My then teacher, Bob Kaffer, didn't know him himself either, but he realized that there was more to give me and more in the world that he couldn't show to me and doors that he couldn't open for me. So he picked up the phone and called Mr. Cole,

discussed my situation with them, and I was invited to audition the next day. The rest was history. I studied with him. And then later, while I was living in New York at Juilliard, I'd studied with one of his former students, Lynn Harrell, who was a famous soloist. And then for my master's, I'd studied with Ron Leonard in L.A. was another one of Mr. Cole's former students from the late 40s and early 50s. and none of that would ever have been possible had I not had the totally unselfish teacher who made the decision to kick his best student out and send me somewhere better. And it's funny because just this fall, I finally, after all these years, finally told him on the phone because I've told everybody this story.

I told him. I could barely tell him without crying, actually, to tell him that I simply wouldn't be where I am had he not made that decision for me. Pretty amazing. That's very selfless of him to give up one of his students. Totally. So you're a chamber musician. How did you decide on playing in a string quartet versus going the soloist route or playing in an orchestra? Well, I think I always dreamt from the time I met Mr. Cole because he had himself,

spent more than 50 years as the founding cellist of the Curtis String Quartet, which was a pioneering group in its time. I mean, nowadays, it's so easy to just assume that our musical landscape in this country has always been filled with string quartets, because there's so many of them now, and the level is so very high. But his group formed in the late 20s when they were students at Curtis, at which time there were precisely zero quartets based in the United States that were touring, and you certainly could barely make a living playing concerts. But they got serious about it as a career in about 1930, and over the course of their musical life, they played five or six thousand concerts, and for the first 15, 20 years, many of the

the places they played were places that had never heard a string quartet before. So I was bitten by the chamber music bug much earlier than most of our colleagues and friends. Most people have very little experience with this until they go away to school. But we had a serious chamber music program. It was called Temple Music Prep, which is the preparatory division of Temple University in Philadelphia for kids like me. And he was involved in. He was involved in founding it. So quartet playing was an integral part of the education on the weekends and I dreamt of being in a quartet. So after many years in school and having played a ton of repertoire, it's kind of amazing when I think about it that I was invited to and joined a quartet now no

longer performing right after grad school. And right as I left that group, I was asked to join another group, an invitation I declined. And then within six months of that, I was invited to join this group because the first violinist and the violist were old friends of my Juilliard classmates. So there's sort of never been a time amazingly since I left school that I haven't been playing quartets professionally. Pretty amazing. That is pretty amazing. Yeah. What kind of music does your current quartet focus on? We like to treat our choice of repertoire in a way that is, I think, inspired by someone who was a mentor to me, Bobby Mann, who was the founding first violinist of the Juilliard Quartet.

And I'm paraphrasing, but the sentiment is clear that when they were founded, the main reason was that the then-president of the Juilliard School, the composer William Schumann, wanted to create a group in-house to focus on the music of living composers. And of course, they were serious musicians, so they didn't play only that repertoire, but also the standard literature, Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and so on.

And he always used to say that we try to play the newest music as if it's already part of the canon and the old music as if the ink is still wet. And that has really informed not just my life, but the way that we approach the repertoire we choose and the way we study and interpret that repertoire so that we're treating it all with seriousness. Of course, playing new music,

we have no way of knowing which of these pieces we play will end up being taken up 100 years from now by the groups of that time. So we owe it to the composers of today to give our very best, take it seriously. But at the same time, just as you take, for instance, the Torah, the ink is dry and the words are never going to change. But what changes is us. And with every year that we study the same texts, religious or musical, we change.

The world around us changes. The circumstances change. And we approach the music of long-dead composers from that. perspective. And then that leads to, of course, a big part of what we do as a quartet of four Jewish guys. And in fact, one of my colleagues, hard as it is to believe it at 48 is a first generation American and his family. All four of his grandparents were Auschwitz survivors. And he grew up speaking Yiddish, actually, as his first language, believe it or not. So the music of broadly, the composers of the Jewish diaspora is a big part of what we do.

And it started really before I was in this group. Growing up in Philadelphia, I had seen as a kid long before I met this man. On the front page of the Philadelphia Enquirer, one day as a teenager, the story of a fellow named David Arben, born Chaim Arbittman. he had been the long-time associate concert master of the Philadelphia Orchestra and he stayed in the orchestra one extra season because they were going to go on tour to Europe including a stop in Poland.

They were playing in Warsaw, I think, and he was from Krakow and had not been back since the war. And the inquire sent one of their reporters and a photographer along with. This whole story was in the paper. He had been, I think, 12, and with his father on the way to or from his violin lesson, when they were picked up by the Nazis, taken away. He lost his entire family, but he had his violin with him. So through a series of camps, these capos that were appointed in every camp,

Jewish prisoners, sadly, to look after the other inmates, always managed to keep him alive because he had the fifth. middle with them. And the Nazis loved classical music. The people of Beethoven and Brahms were also the people of mass murder. And he used to play for their functions. And as was related in the newspaper, one day, his barracks was awakened in the middle of the night, sent into the woods to dig a ditch and line up in front of it and stand and wait to be shot. And the guy to his left was shot in the head, fell in the ditch, and he was next, until the capo happened to see this scene. It said, no, no, not that one.

He's the little violinist boy. And somehow he managed to survive the camps, three or four of them, survived the war. He made his way eventually to a DP camp in Germany, where when Leonard Bernstein came as a young conductor to conduct these orchestras of, skeletal Jews who had managed to survive identified this tremendous talent and that led to his initially meeting Ephraimsymbolist who was famous violinist and then director of the Curtis Institute of Music to hear him, bring him to Philadelphia where he built a life and a career. I read this story. Later I got to know David very well. I played with him a lot. He became a mentor of mine. But somehow even at the age of 15 or 16, this story stuck with me to such an

extent that eventually I knew I would do something with it. And as I was finishing grad school, I think it was that I realized there was a thousand lifetimes worth of repertoire by composers whose names nobody knew, many of whom we still don't know, scores that are, that were in various states of disarray or unpublished or manuscripts that descendants have found in locked trunks and attics and all of this. And so we formed a kind of collective at that time named for the congregation where I grew up, Shi'aumi, which is Song of Our People. The violist in my quartet played in the first concert. My sister is a mezzo, so of course she sang. And we did a fair bit with that. And then, as I say, it was Providence, truly, that I would end up in a quartet

with three other Jewish guys. All of us have totally different backgrounds, but we share a love of doing what we can to discover and to disseminate this repertoire. So we play as broadly as, for instance, the composers of pre-Soviet Russia. There was a group of Jewish students of Rimsky Korsakov at the Imperial Conservatory in St. Petersburg where Jews were not permitted to live, but this group of students had a special dispensation to leave what is called the Pale of Settlement,

this area that now comprises most of Latvia and Belarus, much of Ukraine, this area. They were allowed to live in St. Petersburg because they were in his class at the conservatory, and they asked him what he thought they should do. And he suggested that they do as he had done in drawing on Russian folk sources for his own music and do the same, to take from their tradition, from their traditional music, from their secular music, and build a new musical style. The authorities took a rather dim view of,

the idea that Jews could write music, and so they were given the misleading moniker of the Society for Jewish Folk Music. It wasn't folk music at all. They meant to write for the concert hall, and so they did. And so we've played a lot of that music, initially courtesy of the late Charles Crouthammer and his wife, who ran a concert series at the Kennedy Center called ProMusica Hebraica, and we played on the very first concert four or five times since. So we learned a lot of that repertoire through them. And then of course there are all those composers of the Shoah, which comprised mostly Central Europe, the German-speaking Czech composers, Austrian-German composers, Polish composers, a few French composers. And even now, after having spent

a good part of the last 25 years digging, scratching under every surface, it's nearly every week that I encounter something I haven't heard or found before. So for us as a quartet, we're very lucky in particular with the composer Ervin Schulhof, who was a German-speaking, I guess you'd call him Czech. He might have been nowadays, you might call him Austrian, check something like that, because the borders were kind of malleable at the time. But he was born at the end of the 19th century, so that by the time he died, it was nearly 50, he'd lived a good long life for a Jewish composer of that time,

long enough to have produced a sizable body of music. So there are, are there five or six? quartets and a string sextet and a duo and we've played this music far and wide and we not so modestly take a little bit of credit for having introduced it in virtually every city, state, and country we've played it so that now we go places and occasionally we'll meet students in a master class playing Shulhuff, people who know his name now. If by the end of my life we've gotten one of those composers into the semi-standard repertoire. I think we've done a real a real mitzvah for our field and for the world.

So it's a big part of what we do. So what I'm hearing is y'all like to bring the stories alive from the showa and like the Torah not reinterpret them, but see what its meaning is and demonstrate its relevance to our world today. And I just, I think that's so amazing. What's the most impactful experience you've had? after a concert when someone comes up to you. Have you had an experience that felt really rewarding and validating with what you do?

It's funny enough, you know, we've been playing again this fall, the first quartet of Shulhuff, which is always a little tricky to program because it starts loud and fast and ends soft and slow, not usually the big crashing, loud, cacophonous ending that an audience expects to hear in a concert. And so oftentimes, as a result, we'll program it second right before intermission. And I've been telling people recently, because it came back to me, that one of the performance we gave of that piece in Topeka, for a large and enthusiastic but thoroughly uneducated audience of this piece in that second slot, right before intermission.

It ends in a way that is absolutely indescribable. I mean, it's as if time has stopped and everything is dissolved into the ether. And at that moment, in that place, when we finally put our instruments down and released the tension, the audience gasped and people stood up and went completely crazy.

Right in the middle of a concert, and at the end of a piece that ends as softly and as slowly as can be. And it was at that moment sitting aside the way we feel about the music and our commitment to it. It was at that moment that we realized we are really onto something with this composer that a room full of people could react in the way that they had at that moment on the program. I think about that every time we play that piece, I hope, and I know that if we hold attention just right, people will react that way.

And sure enough, two nights ago in Baton Rouge, last week at home in Miami, there are always people in the audience who audibly gasp as we finish. But there was one other performance that I also think about a lot. Speaking of some of these composers, One of those composers of the so-called Society for Jewish Folk Music in St. Petersburg was a fellow named Leo Zeitlin, who was a violinist and a violist and moved from there to New York in the, I think it was in the mid-20s and built a career later as a composer for the theater. Died young.

But wrote a lot of music. nearly everything is based in some form on usually Jewish secular sources, but occasionally liturgical sources also. That very first concert of Promuzica Hebraica in the Kennedy Center, we did a set of five songs of Zeitland in Yiddish for voice and quartet, and my sister was singing. And the first song was Aili Aili. Anybody who knows, any Yiddish music knows this. and it's a very powerful setting

and I will never forget at the end of the song the composer intones the shamah the first of five songs and they're printed in the program as a group so audiences know

they're not going to applaud and they're not going to react certainly not at the Kennedy Center and to this day I could find you on the website because they have it all archived there was a man in the front row who was so taken

with the way the composer sets the shama which we all feel this especially now when we say this three times a day we all feel it this man leapt from his seat and shouted he was so moved

I couldn't believe it and I still think about it it was just tremendous tremendous especially sorry to take things in a different direction but especially in the last two years for all of us when we think about what that prayer,

that sort of the closest thing we have to a credo, we don't have that, but it is the closest we have, a confession of faith in one God, our one God. There's this famous story that maybe you've heard. I had heard it, but boy did it hit me hard, that the first Rosh Hashanah after October 7th, which was my first Rosh Hashanah back in synagogue, after a long time.

We weren't involved. I wasn't going. Didn't think it mattered. So that's a whole other story for another time. But sure enough, in our rabbi's sermon, he told this famous story of these rabbis from the Jewish agency after the war, American rabbis, who went traveling around in Europe. especially in the northeast of France and the southwest of Germany to convents looking for Jewish orphans. And there is this story of these two fellows at a French convent.

They knocked in the door. They asked if there were any Jewish orphans and were told it couldn't be impossible. They asked twice more. Of course, it was on the third time that the priests invited them in. And they said, let us just observe the children as they finished dinner. and get ready for bed. And the priests were sure there couldn't possibly be any Jewish orphans in there. Remember that the oldest of these children were maybe four, five,

children who didn't know themselves at all. And sure enough, one of the rabbis sang, Shama, Israel, and there were little kids. I can't tell the story without crying, but there were little kids. A few of them said, Adonai, Allahe, Adonai. And they knew these little kids didn't remember their previous lives at all. They only remembered their mothers singing this prayer to them and heard the beginning and responded.

And the rabbi, of course, told this story because, look, how many of us have literally heard the call. And we were involved in this music and the work that we do before that. But boy, has it taken on a new urgency and a new importance since then. So I think we've all heard the call. Even in my quartet, then we're not all observant. We're not all one thing, as any group of Jews would be. If we're a quartet, then we're a minimum of eight opinions, right? But we all hear that call, each of us in his own way.

Have y'all ever played at like a concentration camp or even in Jerusalem? We've actually I've never been to any of the camps, sadly. It's definitely on my bucket list to do a March of the Living. I've been dreaming of doing it for a long time. It's a little tricky for a young guy with a family to just disappear for two weeks, but I'm hoping my wife and I can do it. But as far as in Israel, we have been there as a quartet, I think 10 trips we've made.

And we have played literally from the very north to the very south and in communities that most people had never heard of until October 7th. For instance, we've played in Matula, which has no people anymore. For your listeners, this is one of the towns that's in range of Lebanon

in the very north. It's no longer safe because it's been bombed by Hezbollah. And we've played in Sterroth, which was the largest of the cities in the south that was attacked. And we've played at several of those Kibbutzim within a kilometer of the Gaza border, as well as, you know, all the cities.

We've played in Haifa, in Tel Aviv, in Jerusalem. And, you know, we've played in Bateshemish, which is a very religious area. And of course we've played in everywhere else where it's totally secular. Have you ever played like for your synagogue for Yom Kippur, like Colney Drey or any of religious settings? Very funny that you should ask that because I'm from Philadelphia and I started doing it in my synagogue as a kid. I think that I was 12 the first time and I did it. all those years.

And then when I moved to L.A. for grad school, I had just moved in August. And literally the second day I was there, I had a frantic call from my rabbi back home who said to me, I heard you moved to California. What are we going to do? He said, would you fly home if we bring you here?

And of course I agreed. and I did that for many, many years, and for the longest time, apart from giving a concert, that was my only connection to the synagogue, was flying home to Philly every year to play Colnidre. And then since October 7th, and fully recommitting myself and my family to our congregation, shout out to Temple Betham in Miami, Florida,

I realized a year ago when I missed Yom Kippur in Miami, because I was flying home from Philly, that I just couldn't do it anymore. That. So I had already told them that share me that it would be my last year after 34 continuous years of doing it. And then this year, as it turned out, the people responsible for organizing the musicians, for the High Holy Day services, didn't get the message in time, and they had already engaged the local freelancer who had been doing it for seven or eight years. But for me, this was, you know, as we say from Shumot,

Otomofteim, signs and messages. This for me was a very clear sign that for the first year that the observance really meant something. to me that I wasn't going to have to be worried about playing, but rather I could just sit in the congregation and dov in the service. So this year was the first year in 35 years that I didn't play, Colnidre. It's like you fulfilled your mitzv playing every single other years. And I'll get back to it. Yes. I will get back to it next year, but it was nice to just be a congregate. This year when the liturgy means

so much more to me now and my place in the trajectory of our history feels different to me. Do any of your colleagues in your quartet play for their synagogues, or do you all go to the same synagogue in Miami? Two of us don't go regularly. One of us, I know, has played, although he now goes to a khabad so he doesn't play either um and as i say you know we're we're all connected to it in in very different ways i mean you know the i'd say one of our guys is very culturally jewish i don't love that i don't love that nomenclature too much but i do understand what it means because it was me once. One of our guys, of course, is a Russian

and made Aliyah to Israel when he was 12. So that community, of course, grew up entirely without Judaism. They only knew they were Jewish because their Soviet passports reminded them every day that they were. And they realized they couldn't stay. So he went there. And his Judaism is more connected than anything to being Israeli because it's where he grew up.

As I say, one of my colleagues is a first generation American and grew up Orthodox. So his experience is his own and mine, I would say, is best described by a conversation I had with my wife in May after October 7th. You know, after a year of educating myself and thinking and reading and devouring everything I could get my hands on, after all those years of not being involved, I was on tour in New York in early May, and I hadn't told anybody how I was feeling and, you know, hadn't admitted to anyone aloud this whole I felt in my heart that I knew could be filled in only this way. and I had to talk to my rabbi from home. It was retired in New York, Rabbi Elliot Strom,

and I discussed all of this with him, and he said, well, I think you already know what you have to do. And it's not about what you're going to say. It's about what you're going to do. Because our tradition teaches us it's not about what we feel and what we believe, what we think. It's primarily about what we do with those things. So I flew home.

My wife is not Jewish. She's from Estonia, which is about the least religious place on earth, which has worked out well for us because we have no competing faith tradition in our home. But I flew home to Miami. We went out for dinner. I gave her the non-abridged version of this. All I had done during the year, listening to podcasts and reading articles and, you know, talking about my feelings about my colleagues and the music we play and the thinkers that I love

and every word Stefan Sveig ever wrote that I've read, all of these things. And she put her hand on my face at the end of this literally 30-minute litany and said, you know, I've always known this about you. I'm just surprised it took you so long to figure it out for yourself. And so that's where we are. You know, that's where we are. You know, that's why we're even here giving this interview because two years ago I'd have come here and had a lovely time with my colleagues and nice people here at the college and we would never have connected but for the fact that I wrote ahead hoping I could find a Shabbas minion and here we are wow what's your biggest piece of advice to Jewish musicians like me who may not be

pursuing music academically but still play for fun or still have it as a hobby what like how do you I guess you've already talked about how you weave in your own Jewish traditions with the show awe but how would you recommend people like me do it because with each Jewish community there's a different style that they chant their prayers and like different Torah trope for Saturday services, how would you go about that if you were a young person playing? I would say that the best guidance for us is in Psalm 100, where the Salmists teaches us to serve Hashem with gladness, with joy. And what could be a better vehicle for doing that than any kind of music, right? It's so immediate, and we like to talk in clichés as musicians about how it

conveys all the depths of emotion without words, and often let's admit it. I mean, I play, of course, music that has no words, but in the end, even if it's music, if it's vocal music or pop music or anything that does have a text, ultimately it's not the text that causes people to react in the way that they do. That's why our Jewish tradition is so thoroughly infused from the beginning with music. Why do we have in two places in the Torah?

In Exodus and at the very end, we have these two parshot that speak directly to song to communicating through music, I would say that if one has a music he or she enjoys to listen to or to share or to play or to advocate, now is the best time, perhaps, in our history,

to just stand up and do it. Because we know we've seen this movie before. As my rabbi always jokes, The footage from 1,200 BC, the footage is a little grainy. It's a little hard to tell who's in the movie. But we know what it's all about. We know that what we're experiencing now is not new. It's not even the worst by a long shot.

We've been through this before. There is absolutely nothing they can do to us that we haven't experienced. Our traditions teach us how to handle it, how to carry ourselves, how to reach back into our traditions to carry them forward. Our daily liturgy reminds us to teach our children all the time while they're sitting and while they're standing while they're at home and while they're on their way. Well, they're at home while they're at work. All of that, right?

And music we can have with us all the time. So if we can infuse the music whether it is explicitly Jewish or not, if we can infuse it with the values that we hold dear, and to remind everybody that with the music we play, we every day we do choose life. Moses reminds us, right? Mosul Rabino reminds us again and again, choose life, and we have, and we have music, so why not?

What's a piece y'all are working on right now that you're excited about performing in the future? Ironically, one of the things that we play every year that we're always excited about is Hyden's setting of the Seven Last Words of Christ, which is so deeply moving, and we play it every year, and it's kind of always on our minds. And the concert you're giving tonight, too, how do you, like, You do play a lot of Christian music. How do you relate to that?

How did you become involved and interested in that church setting of music? Well, I am a little bit of an outlier in the sense that having grown up, not just in a musical home, but with parents who were singers, the first music that I remember, apart from opera, is oratorio. You know, tonight at Hillsdale, tonight and tomorrow at Hillsdale, we're playing a Vivaldi's setting of the cradle, we're playing excerpts from the Bach B minor mass,

we're playing another setting of the cradle by the Estonian composer of Aropart. And this music is fundamentally not different from a lot of what we've been talking about here. There's a text, which is moving on its own, whether you believe the message of the text or not. The text is beautiful.

And of course, these composers, especially of that era, lived a life where there was no separation between what they did during the week and what they did on Sundays. It was all one and the same. So Bach, of course, being the greatest example in the history of Western music

who declared at the end of every piece. that what he did was fully and holy in service of God. That's a message, I think, that it truly is universal. Even for a Jew who lives a more particular type of life, the message is universal. That's why people respond to Bach, whether you understand the text or engage with it in any way. So we treat great music like it's great music, no matter from where it comes.

And this music is certainly no exception. Wow. Well, that's all the time we have for today. Thank you so much for joining me, Jason. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. That was Jason Calloway, the cellist for the Amhernet String Quartet, which is based out of Miami. I'm Lily Fay Kramer, the host of Story Behind the Song on

Radio for Hillsdale 101.7 FM.