Ken Cohen [00:00:16]  Hello!

Alicia Svigals [00:00:19] Hello?

Ken Cohen [00:00:20] Hi there. Can you see me?

Alicia Svigals [00:00:24] Yeah the volume was off. Hello.

Ken Cohen [00:00:26] Hi there.

Alicia Svigals [00:00:27] Hi.

Ken Cohen [00:00:28] Now I hear you coming through loud and clear. That’s great.

Alicia Svigals [00:00:32] And there’s a little echo right now. The sounds cutting in and out.

Ken Cohen [00:00:39] Oh, that’s not good. You want to try FaceTime on the iPhone or…

Alicia Svigals [00:00:44] Now it’s good.

Ken Cohen [00:00:45] OK, thank you very much for doing this.

Alicia Svigals [00:00:48] You’re welcome. You calling from Paris?

Ken Cohen [00:00:51] Yeah, exactly. I mean, I’m calling from my son’s bedroom. He got this. I don’t know if you can see it, but he got this poster of the Eiffel Tower. And, you know, when he was a little boy, he loved putting things together. And then he became a young man and he said, can I decorate my room with those things that I used to build as a kid? And so. Yeah, so, yeah. Do you have children?

Alicia Svigals [00:01:19] Yeah, I’ve got two boys.

Ken Cohen [00:01:21] Yeah, me too. So you know, when it’s like when the boys, you know, they gravitate to things and we support them on that journey.

Alicia Svigals [00:01:30] How old are your kids?

Ken Cohen [00:01:32] Well I have young men: 24 and 21.

Alicia Svigals [00:01:35] Oh they’re big kids.

Ken Cohen [00:01:35] Oh yeah. Big boys. And luckily they’re in the hood. One’s a little north of me. I have a 24 year old in San Francisco and a 21 in San Diego.

Alicia Svigals [00:01:46] That’s great.

Ken Cohen [00:01:47] Yeah. How about your kids now?

Alicia Svigals [00:01:49] They’re 18 and almost 13.

Ken Cohen [00:01:50] Oh, there we go. So you still have one?

Alicia Svigals [00:01:53] At home.

Ken Cohen [00:01:54] Yeah. Is this the first year that your child is going away from home?

Alicia Svigals [00:02:02] Yeah. My oldest son is freshman in college, so it’s a little sad and empty here but….

Ken Cohen [00:02:07] I know. I was in denial and my wife, you know, she immediately broke down into tears and, you know, felt the sadness and for me I was just pushing pushing it away until I finally realized, you know, that he is starting his life. And the good news is they do come back.

Alicia Svigals [00:02:27] Yeah,  I’m hoping that he’ll boomerang back, you know, just wear his pajamas and write his novel all day. What can I do?

Ken Cohen [00:02:34] Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I know one of my favorite things it still is, is to feed my children. I mean, it’s just like they wake up and I’m in there with, like, eggs and toast, you know, their favorite cheese, eggs or whatever. Now, it’s funny, my wife and I have been, let’s see, without kids in the house for almost three and a half years, and it’s breathtakingly wonderful.

Alicia Svigals [00:03:09] I hope I’ll be saying that. Maybe that in between period is hard.

Ken Cohen [00:03:16] Yeah, I mean, the good news is that they’re close by relatively. So how about your boy? Is he close by now?

Alicia Svigals [00:03:25] No, he’s in Kenyan, up in Ohio so it’s kind of a shelp. But apparently he’s bringing three friends home with him, for the next break. And they’re going to stay here in our little apartment for two weeks we’re going to have [inaudible] in sleeping bags, that’ll be interesting.

Ken Cohen [00:03:48] For two weeks. Wow.

Alicia Svigals [00:03:49] Yeah. Maybe after a week everybody will, you know…They’ll be a new plan.

Ken Cohen [00:03:56]  I know it was really a lot of fun when my son’s friends from Providence, he went to RISD and they used to come back during winter breaks to California. And yeah, it’s really…It’s bittersweet as well one might imagine.

Ken Cohen [00:04:17] So thank you for doing this interview. Just to give you a little background of how I came to it, I’ve been in the cantorate for thirty years and reform and conservative communities and hearing the news that the synagogue world has, particularly the conservative world, is contracted 25 percent disappeared somewhere.

Ken Cohen [00:04:40] I started calling my friends, cantors, and asking them, you know, what was going on in their synagogues. And in the process of them telling me their story and the work that they had contributed in their communities, I realized that I had a deep, passionate spark was created in the telling, and I went on to interview several dozen Cantors. And again, you know, different pieces were animating me in our conversations. And finally on to other Jewish creatives, Jewish musicians and composers, and conductors, singer-songwriters, rabbis, spiritual mentors, artists, leaders of the seminaries, any one that I saw who animated my sensibility, my heart space, as it were. And so last couple of years, two and a half years, I have been videotaping, recording over 200 interviews.

Alicia Svigals [00:05:44] Wow.

Ken Cohen [00:05:44] And yeah. I go for quantity. And it’s very exciting to reach out to people like yourself, you know, people who have, you know, brought so much and just everyday people, I mean, not necessarily those who are recognized for what they bring, but for those who are just people, who inspire us in their own unique way. And so, my sense is putting it out there in the Jewish world through either a book or a documentary or initially a website would be a good way to start a new conversation. And so thank you for agreeing to do this interview. So I had a little taste of the bio that I read online, and I’m hoping that you could tell me a little bit about where you came from, your Jewish music influences, your Jewish influences. You know, what was it like? I caught the first whisp, you grew up where my dad grew up in the Bronx.

Alicia Svigals [00:06:56] Well, I was born in the Bronx, but then we moved to the suburbs, actually.

Ken Cohen [00:06:58] Oh, tell me the story. Tell me the good story.

Alicia Svigals [00:07:01] OK, so my parents were born in the Bronx and they grew up in the Bronx, in the South Bronx, around the Grand Concourse and that area. And then when I was two, they moved us to the suburbs. So that was in the mid 1960s. And so, I don’t remember how old I was, but at some point they, for my Jewish education, they signed me up at the local Workmen’s Circle school to learn Yiddish. So I had kind of a funky, relatively Jewish education compared to the rest of the kids in the suburbs, although actually there was a lot of kind of offbeat stuff going on in Spring Valley and Rockland County where we were, so jumping ahead to high school, all my friends were in Hashomer Hatzair together [Socialist Zionist Secular Youth Movement]. And so that wasn’t the typical Zionist youth camp. But I was going to chamber music camp every summer so I wasn’t involved in that. So my Bas Mitzvah was in Yiddish, I read my Haftarah in Yiddish, it was in our backyard. My Workmen’s Circle school teacher officiated and her husband played the accordion and everybody sang Yiddish songs, and my mother cooked, and it was like that.

Alicia Svigals [00:08:37] Then when they got to my younger brother, I think that was just a lot of work. So they decided to go to Hebrew School. Actually, at that point, what they did was a new shul started up in our area, a reconstructionist shul that was headed by Rabbi David Teutch, he was a young man at the time. Now I think he’s the president of Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia. But he was there in the suburbs and he led a whole Jewish philosophy and science fiction for teenager classes and stuff that I went to. And so my brother had a more traditional Bar Mitzvah he learned with a cantor and stuff, he also went to the Workman’s Circle. But mine was all in Yiddish.

Ken Cohen [00:09:23] What was it like to learn a new language and then to sort of present that through, I would guess, words and music at your Bas Mitzvah. Do you remember any of the process of the training at all?

Alicia Svigals [00:09:39] Well, I think I was pretty young when I started, so we were really about eight, nine, ten. But you know, we were, it wasn’t Bas Mitzvah preparation at that point. It was just Saturday…we’d learn Yiddish, we learned about holidays. It was kind of like Hebrew school but in Yiddish. And so by the time I got to my Bas Mitzvah, I really already knew a lot of Yiddish. So it wasn’t from scratch or anything like my son studying for his Bar Mitzvah now, and it’s all kind of [inaudible] to him. But he doesn’t know the language, it’s all in Hebrew and it’s all kind of phonetic. And, you know, it’s kind of like learning songs in a foreign language that you don’t know, basically. But I kind of understood what I was saying in Yiddish. So that was interesting.

Ken Cohen [00:10:37] Did you study any like Yiddish music or Yiddish poetry or anything cultural?

Alicia Svigals [00:10:44] Yeah, yes. She inserted a lot of Yiddish songs, a few Yiddish songs, into the Bas Mitzvah and everybody sang along and it was 1976. So I had older relatives who had immigrated from Odessa, people were born in the late 1880s, which is kind of mind blowing because it makes me realize how old I am, that people I loved were born in the 19th century that I knew personally and came to my party. So people, you know, grew up with these songs, they sang along, and it was nice. So then….

Ken Cohen [00:11:21] Well, OK, excuse me for one thing. Since you’ve made a career out of Yiddish music, I’m just going to tease one little strand out. So your connection to the people was that they came from Yiddish speaking towns or they were family or friends?

Alicia Svigals [00:11:40] Well, my family on my father’s side came from Odessa in 1905, around the time of pograms there, and my mother’s side came from Minsk. We always had a lot more to do with my father’s side. So I sort of more identify with Odessa, though I shouldn’t be, because I’m also half Minsk. So we would visit my great grandmother, Olia, and her sisters…and eventually she ended up living at the Workman’s Circle old age home in the Bronx. And I’d hear her speak Yiddish with her friends there, and of course, they would speak Yiddish so that we would understand. I would kind of half understand, they would be saying things like, “oh, look how cute the kids are.” So I definitely had a family connection. I mean, I had an idea that this was my language, even though it skipped my parents. When they sent me to school, they didn’t really know Yiddish, although now my mother keeps –it’s funny, as now that she’s older, Yiddish phrases are starting to pop into her head from her childhood. So, yeah, I had this connection.

Ken Cohen [00:13:03] Did you sing with them? Did you sing Yiddish songs with these folks? And what songs did you sing? Do you remember?

Alicia Svigals [00:13:10] “Oifn Pripichik,” “Rozinkis Mit Mandlin,” a little bit and I don’t think their knowledge was very deep of Yiddish music. I think they knew the few big chestnuts, you know whereas there are other people whose grandparents really knew folk music. I think it’s where, I don’t know. I think they were pretty assimilated people, honestly. I mean, the old photos I’ve seen of the people from Minsk, they really look like Jews from the Pale of Settlements. You know, with the long beards and the traditional outfits, but the Odessa people were city people, and they were sophisticated, and I think they’ve been assimilated for a long time. But it’s funny because just recently, I mean, here I am, in my fifties and it just recently occurred to me to try to figure out where my weird last name Svigals comes from, and so I started doing some Googling.

Alicia Svigals [00:14:07] I actually tried to do this like 10, 15 years ago, but there’s a lot more on the Internet now than there used to be. And also, I read a great book about Odessa and I realize I don’t know anything, I didn’t know, I had Odessa all wrong in my imagination. Odessa is actually a new city, younger than New York, and it was founded in 1790 or something, it didn’t even exist before that. So I always think the Svigals come from Odessa, but actually they were there pretty briefly. And there’s a town called Sviagal, which is the seat of a Hassidic dynasty known in Yiddish as S’vil. And so that’s what the Svigal’s are really from, from this Hassidic town, so that was pretty awesome. I think I just digressed, I don’t remember…

Ken Cohen [00:14:54] Oh, no, this is good. When I think back at the genealogical charts of my family, I’m intrigued, I go back and I see this particular town in Lithuania that meets at the confluence of two rivers where there’s a medieval fort and just outside of this city, this 15th-century fort where my grandparents family came from, Merkine in southwest Lithuania. And there’s this incredible forest that actually has some of the most unique species of animals and flora anywhere in Europe. And I’m saying to myself, my grandfather and his five brothers who made it to the United States were probably playing in this forest. And of course with Google Maps, you can [virtually] go and look into the forest.

Alicia Svigals [00:16:03] Isn’t that bizarre? It really is mind blowing. They would probably be like, why do you want to go in that forest? Let’s get we’ve got the heck out of there.

Ken Cohen [00:16:19] We left.

Alicia Svigals [00:16:19] The town of Sviagl turned out to be, it had been settled by Lithuanian princes named Sviagelski. So they probably–I’m sure they weren’t Jewish, but that’s a Lithuanian name I guess. And it’s really wild to start out with this [inaudible] indigenous stuff. Yeah, because it’s harder with a name like Cohen, you know.

Ken Cohen [00:16:43] Yeah, well, my grandfather’s name was Kaddishes.

Alicia Svigals [00:16:47] That’s a lot easier.

Ken Cohen [00:16:48] Yeah, he got to the Port of Boston. They said, what’s your name? And they said, “Avram Kaddishes your new name is Abe Cohen.” That’s [how it went]…

Alicia Svigals [00:16:59] So and then did he like make Aliyahs as a Cohen, like did he consider himself promoted to Cohen status?

Ken Cohen [00:17:08] No, we owned up to our hoi polloy-ness status, we were just regular [Jews, not Cohanim, High Priests].

Alicia Svigals [00:17:15] So did they try to call them up for aliyahs, under the Cohen Aegis, or would he have to always say, I’m not really a Cohen?

Ken Cohen [00:17:24] Yeah, well he he came clean, you know, and I’m glad he did because he wouldn’t have had all the joy in telling me, since my grandparents were devout Orthodox Jews who practiced regularly in the Bronx, Arnow Avenue, the Williamsbridge Jewish Center. And he used to come up and said, you know, “I bought the seventh [aliyah], I bought Maftir.” You know, “I bought the honorary aliyah,” which is always a source of pride for the community. Who is going to step up? That’s how they’d fundraised. You would buy Aliyah’s in the service. And he’d say, “I paid twenty dollars for Maftir this week.” That’s my bad imitation of a thick Polish accent, Lithuanian accent but yeah. You know, I have great memories of my grandparents. Do you have any memories of synagogue life that was inspiring? Where was your first Jewish musical experience?

Alicia Svigals [00:18:29] Well, we used to listen – my family. My parents used to listen to WEVD, on the radio, the station that speaks your language. And I guess it doesn’t exist anymore? But…so we would listen to programs. The music that they would play in the 1970s, was like everything but klezmer. But they played Yiddish folk songs and cantorial music and all this stuff. So then what happened was, like that was exactly the 10 or 15 years when I was growing up, when Klezmer music was unknown and not being heard in the Jewish world, but just shortly before that, it was. Like my uncle for his Bar Mitzvah, he had the clarinetist, Reuben Temple [sic]. Who, I think, is still around. And he was even like pointed out in the Bar Mitzvah invitations, you know “featuring the artistry of Reuven Temple.” So it wasn’t that long a period. People think of the Klezmer revival  as like the revival of ancient Hebrew. But it really wasn’t because it was actually very small gap of time. It happened to be the gap when I was growing up.

Alicia Svigals [00:19:41] So when I was a teenager, my father, who was the superintendent of arts programs when they had such a thing in New York City in the ’70s before all the funding was cut, he had all these young artists working for them. And one of them was the wife, visual artist, the wife of Andy Statman, clarinetist. And he was just getting his research, his NEA funded research with Klezmer clarinetist Dave Tarras off the ground and they would socialize. So, Andy would come over, before Jewish music he was playing bluegrass and he’d come over with his Mandolin and  teach me how to play the blues and stuff. And we went to hear the first big klezmer revival concert, him and Zev Feldman in a town hall in 1977. And so I became aware, of klezmer music through the beginning of the revival, through this guy. And the first time I heard it, I was like, yes, this is the stuff, because it was just like the Yiddish songs, but it was like instrumental music, really rocking, interesting, complex, virtuosic–like it was something for a Jewish musician to do.

Alicia Svigals [00:21:03] So then I kind of filed that away in my mind, and then I went on another path. I went to Brown, I used to go to parties at RISD, they had the best parties. And I was majoring in neuroscience. But at some point I dropped out, because there was no more money to send me to college. I dropped out and I went hitchhiking. I had been playing the violin on the streets of New York to raise my tuition and raise money to go to music camp, I was going to chamber music camp, and so I dropped out and I went to Europe, I hitchhiked around Europe for a year, playing on the streets. And when I came back, I changed my major to Ethnomusicology. So I was then like the only ethnomusicology undergraduate, it was kind of a new field actually in universities in this way. It existed before that, but as something at Brown University it was something you could major in.

Alicia Svigals [00:22:07] And I was into all kinds of music. So when I graduated, I got a job playing in a Greek nightclub. And I became very obsessed learning to play Greek fiddle, and I played in the Cuban Charanga band and all kinds of stuff. And then somebody placed an ad, I was always reading the ads in The Village Voice looking for musicians. And somebody placed an ad looking to form a Klezmer band, and that’s how the Klezmatics formed. So then I was like, oh yeah, that stuff that was so great. And we learned while we earned, most of us in the band. And I joined the band and then set about teaching myself to play Klezmer music. But the whole connection drew on the sort of childhood Yiddish culture education that I had had already. It was the instrumental music version of that stuff that I was growing up with.

Ken Cohen [00:23:02] All right, I’m going to do two things. One is, I’m going to pause, just to close these windows, someone’s doing the lawn mowing. I know probably where you are it’s freezing.

Alicia Svigals [00:23:14] Freezing? No, let’s see…

Ken Cohen [00:23:17] Now, where do you live?

Alicia Svigals [00:23:19] I’m in Manhattan we’re, like, we were freezing in the polar vortex and now I think we’re back to a weird warm weather. But the votex is returning soon and then we’ll be freezing again.

Ken Cohen [00:23:30] OK, well, maybe…what’s that Yiddish expression, “May it not come back for a long time.” All right, here we go. So this is very fascinating, from neuroscience to ethnomusicology. You know, my mind is sort of…. What was it about Ethnomusicology that drew you in?

Alicia Svigals [00:24:10] You know, I I don’t know, maybe it’s just like my active imagination around these things like– this is hard, let’s see if I can articulate it–every different kind of ethnic music I found so magically evocative of a different place and time. And so I think I read a lot as a child, a lot of fiction and I loved historical fiction for children, too, especially. You know, the stories about a child in the castle in the Middle Ages, that type of thing, and somehow I think in a way it was almost this childlike thing that I really… Whenever I heard Irish music, I heard Greek music, I would feel completely immersed and absorbed in a whole different flavored universe; and a real one too, it wasn’t fictional. I think it was kind of the confluence of my fictional imagination and really meeting these other people from this other culture.

Alicia Svigals [00:25:31] So when I went to work in this Greek nightclub, you know, just being… Sometimes I watched and listened and I would play with the band and the music in those modes and the lyrics expressing ideas, thoughts and imagery–I was also teaching myself Greek to understand it–it was so unlike anything in English language songs that I knew. I just felt completely swept away and also I loved meeting new people and I felt connected to these people. So it was like that. In college as part of the major, Providence has a big Portuguese community, actually mostly from Cape Verde, but there was like aFados in there. Interestingly, for them, that was sort of a nostalgic roots thing, since they weren’t from Portugal but from Cape Verde. But I did projects where I would go into those clubs and record people and do musical analysis of, or the vocal ornamentation they used and interviewing people. And I did one also with the Italian American community there. And I would record people singing Italian folk songs and do the same kind of analysis. And I did a project on flamenco. And I guess being a musician, like this is my way to immerse myself in these fantastic other places. So then when it came to Yiddish music, it was like that, plus: this is my story. And that was very powerful.

Ken Cohen [00:27:08] So this is great. Do you know a guy named Sam Chianis?

Alicia Svigals [00:27:16] I know the name. Is he Greek, American and a musician?

Ken Cohen [00:27:22] Yeah, he’s an ethnomusicologist, he may be around I’m not sure, SUNY Binghamton ethnomusicologist.

Alicia Svigals [00:27:29] I knew I knew his name, I don’t know him personally.

Ken Cohen [00:27:32]  I studied with him for two years because I also have a degree in ethno.

Alicia Svigals [00:27:39] Oh you do. From where?

Ken Cohen [00:27:40] From SUNY Binghamton.

Alicia Svigals [00:27:41] Oh wow.

Ken Cohen [00:27:44] Yeah, that was fun.

Alicia Svigals [00:27:46] Was George Kyle there?

Ken Cohen [00:27:49] I don’t know, I don’t remember the name.

Alicia Svigals [00:27:54] I mean that’s a professor, he might have been someplace else.

Ken Cohen [00:27:56] George Kyle? I was there between.. Let’s see I studied ethno between ’77-’79.

Alicia Svigals [00:28:04] Yeah that was before me. The weirdest thing was when we took, you know, it’s such a tiny scene, when we took my oldest son to college and we had our first meeting with a little advisors group with others, like three other sets of parents. One of them was in the Brown Ethnomusicology Department the same time as me. She was one of the graduate students. It was like the most unlikely thing ever.

Ken Cohen [00:28:37] I know, the ways our lives keep intertwining. I know it is kind of bizarre how it unfolds. I’m thinking, so wait a second, when you got back, you responded to an ad in The Village Voice. Talk to me about those initial connections with the Klezmatics, because I know you spent a long time with them. What what was it like in the beginning? Did you just walk in and audition for them? Did you play with them for a while?

Alicia Svigals [00:29:11] I was the one who formed the band, because this guy named Rob Chavez [sic], clarinetist from the West coast, who seemed to disappear from view very soon after that, he was the one who placed the ad in The Voice. So a few of us answered the ad and then he left, you know, a few weeks or a couple months later. And those of us that remained, we went through a couple of other names for the band and then we named them The Klezmatics. So I was one of the people who started the band. And then I was one of them. It was kind of a leaderless operation, but they were like, half of us kind of led it, the other half were less involved in running it so…

Ken Cohen [00:30:00] What does it entail to actually run the band?

Alicia Svigals [00:30:07] Endless, ultimately low paid hours of nonmusical business activity, that could mean like selling widgets, e-mails, faxes, phone calls, contracts, meetings. It’s like running anything, it’s a pain in the neck. Scheduling…

Ken Cohen [00:30:30] OK, so I could feel….and that probably took its toll on the group. Correct?

Alicia Svigals [00:30:37] That’s just–that’s life. If you’re making your money, doing anything, you’re going to be spending time doing business. That’s just the reality of being a musician or anything really.

Ken Cohen [00:30:51] All right, so talk to me about the good stuff.

Alicia Svigals [00:30:56] So, yeah, we were young, I was the youngest.

Ken Cohen [00:31:01] Oh, how old were you?

Alicia Svigals [00:31:05] This was ’86. I mean, I was just out of college basically. So it was exciting, we were on the Lower East Side, we were musicians, I was like a hippie in the early ’80s, a ’60s person in the ’80s. I was playing in the street and I was playing…I loved traveling and just sitting with a band– it’s so different from being an adult, where you just want to go home to your kids. Then we started traveling and touring, and that was so exciting. We had our tour bus and we, do what kids in a band do, sing the whole soundtrack to The Sound of Music on a 12-hour carride.

Ken Cohen [00:31:53] I love it.

Alicia Svigals [00:31:55] It was fun, and we were learning to play Klezmer more authentically. And at the same time, we started very quickly to develop our own approach to it, which was we wanted to separate ourselves from the museum-like, folk-music approach, which was kind of purist and I felt, as someone who did some study of Ethnomusicology, and I was reading theory and stuff, I felt that was bogus from the beginning, that it was very contrived. There was some little slice of time where people were fetishizing. And whatever we did with the [music] was just as authentic as what they were doing 100 years earlier. They weren’t worried about it 100 years earlier. So we pretty quickly scrapped the idea of being pure folk musicians. And we started rocking it out, basically using jazz chords and stuff like that. And we felt very firmly that this was traditional Jewish music.

Alicia Svigals [00:33:06] And that sparked the second wave of the revival, which a lot of people followed in our wake, with that. And it’s still going on, Klezmatics are still out there. After I left they won a Grammy. And I’ve gone in other directions. Like we would play a tune, but played in a way that was very rock band like. So since I left, I’ve started doing this other thing which is more intimate. I have these piano duos where we just kind of more compositional. We deconstruct the tunes and maybe create fugues around them and work with motifs and we weave…So in a way, it’s taking it a step further. And I just wrote a film score for a 1918 film to be played live with fellow jazz pianist also works in Klezmer, Marilyn Lerner, we’ve been touring that.

Ken Cohen [00:34:07] How exciting.

Alicia Svigals [00:34:10] That’s been a lot of fun. I’m trying to go more in the direction of composing. So I’m waiting to hear, I applied for a bunch of grants like the Guggenheim, A fellowship at McDowell…so I want to really be able to sit around and compose all day. So that’s like a summary on one foot of the past 30 years or so.

Alicia Svigals [00:34:36] But what I really wish was that I had actually gone into neuroscience. I’m having my midlife crisis, I read science books all the time and I just pine for that science career that never happened. Like I was such a kind of free spirited hippie, I loved not being in a program. I never did end up getting that Ph.D. In Ethnomusicology. And I loved traveling and whatever, but then eventually I got old and I had kids. But that’s not why. I just can’t do that with science. And I wish I had…I just, I kind of miss using my brain that way. I mean, I’m really deep down a scientist, even though I have nothing to show for that.

Ken Cohen [00:35:18] That’s really interesting.

Alicia Svigals [00:35:23] I’m also a musician. So, my next life.

Ken Cohen [00:35:29] Tell me about your interest in science, specifically that what you’re reading now or that which animated your decision back then. Like, my son is an astrophysicist.

Alicia Svigals [00:35:42] He is?

Ken Cohen [00:35:42] Yeah, and so, I mean he will just sit there, you know, I’m all heart and I see the world first through that lens and then I start to pull back and gain perspective and wisdom from it and start to see its ramifications. And he’ll take the principles of the universe. And, you know, everything is built on everything else. And he’s a senior now, and he will literally spend whatever time is necessary to fully understand the complexity of theories that inform how the universe operates. And like he will literally…He doesn’t leave his seat until…and that type of like that commitment to that language similar to musical language that you need, the calculus, it just goes on and on and on, and it just gets deeper and deeper and richer and richer. And he loves it. He loves philosophy. He loves that stuff. And so what was it what was it in that stuff that you love?

Alicia Svigals [00:36:59] You know, it’s like that. I mean, when I back in the ’80s, it was neuroscience and I especially was grabbed by the whole mystery of consciousness, like, you know, can we find it in the neurons? Or what if you build, what if we could theoretically build a brain synthetically, that molecule for molecule matched a naturally occurring one, would that have a consciousness? Or would it be a machine that seemed to simulate consciousness? Is consciousness this magical extra thing…but I’m a scientist and don’t believe in magical extra things. So I loved that kind of puzzle, but now I’m getting more into this topic because this stuff is happening more, well that was always happening back [then]. For hundreds of years, people have been trying to decipher the nature of matter and so forth.

Alicia Svigals [00:37:51] But maybe because there’s this generation of wonderful engaging writers who’ve been popularizing the stuff for laypeople like Brian Greene and Stephen Hawkins and stuff. So I’ve been reading, like I finished this summer The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. And I read a wonderful book by a philosopher called Why Does The World Exist by someone named Jim Holt. Your son might like it, or it might be too basic for him. He might have already been there, he goes around interviewing astrophysicists and philosophers and all kinds of people who have grappled with the question of why is there something instead of nothing? And I just I love a question like that. Gee, I never thought about it before. Why is there something instead of nothing? And then your head can really start to hurt though, if you think too much about that. So, you know, it’s kind of like going back to freshman year of college. Let’s say everybody, Oh, except for me, is getting stoned.

Ken Cohen [00:39:02] Right.

Alicia Svigals [00:39:02] Future grandchildren, everybody except for me. And you’re all sitting around and you’re like, Oh, my God what is consciousness? Somehow in midlife I’ve come back to that sort of sitting around and thinking about that stuff. So I love…I had a lot of time this summer to read about going deeper and deeper into the question of what is matter? What is matter anyway? And then at some point you get to the point where it’s like, the things you’re thinking about are just nuts, it sounds psychotic, you know. Does it boil down to matter is actually just time? It’s crazy stuff, I love that stuff.

Ken Cohen [00:39:52] It is great stuff.

Alicia Svigals [00:39:53] I can’t get enough of it, but I don’t know, maybe if I had got into it, I wouldn’t have done what I did. So you can’t dance at two weddings with one tuchos.

Ken Cohen [00:40:07] That’s great. But I have to tell you something. You know, in five years, the curtain will part.

Alicia Svigals [00:40:14] Yeah?

Ken Cohen [00:40:15] I mean, once the little one is out of the house…

Alicia Svigals [00:40:18] Ohhh…

Ken Cohen [00:40:22]  I’m 57 and I could only say that for about another month or so.

Alicia Svigals [00:40:27] Happy birthday.

Ken Cohen [00:40:28] Thank you. I’m milking the 57 for as long as I can. But my point is, you know, here I am leaving the structured world of synagogue life, and that’s a pretty square box. And I’m recreating my own interest based on my own heart, wherever I’m led. And I hear this deep in you. Deep, deep, deep. Oh, I can’t wait to see where you take this.

Alicia Svigals [00:41:01] I know it’s science though, where can you take it? If you’re not within an institution, I don’t know…

Ken Cohen [00:41:10] You don’t sound like you would really need much more than guidance from those who have been in the field to direct you. You look like you’re very autodidactic, self-taught. Am I right? I mean, do you feel like that type of person?

Alicia Svigals [00:41:26] Yeah, that’s totally… And sometime’s that’s a problem because then you don’t end up… you’re on the outside. But I was always impatient with trying to learn stuff through a structure, you know, so I taught myself languages and taught myself music. But, you know, that has its drawbacks.

Ken Cohen [00:41:48] All right. So I wanted to go back, we made sort of short shrift, we didn’t really tease it out a little bit. The Yellow Ticket. You’ve written a piano violin score and you performed it around the country. Tell me, I know you were commissioned to do it. Was it your idea? Where did the idea come from?

Alicia Svigals [00:42:13] Actually, I knew nothing about silent films and it was so serendipitous…..a man named Josh Ford, who’s a film person at the Washington JCC. He had presented this very rare film, The Yellow Ticket, years ago out there, they have a very happening festival there. And so he came up with the idea of commissioning a new score for it. And they approached me and I took a look at it, and I was like, wow. Because it was amazing, because it was like those old photos of my great grandparents, but moving, breathing, and the interiors of their homes, I was just like, “oh,” you know, I watch it a few times. And then I was like, yeah, I’ll totally do this. And I wrote the score that they submitted. I had never done that before. They submitted it for the Foundation for Jewish Culture and New Music Network Commission, and it won that. Surprise! That just fell in my lap at that point in time to further develop it. And then we did it at Lincoln Center and it got another grant to work on the film part of it, because we were working with a copy at the wrong speed. And so we brought in the…What do you call it…This 35 millimeter from Berlin, and we had it properly transferred and all this stuff. But the funny thing was that my grandfather was a pianist. He, the reason I exist at all, is because of music for silent film, because he would play for silent film at the theater, which is now Symphony Space, at 95th and Broadway. And it was a movie theater, and he was the pianist for silent films there. And he met my grandmother, she came to see a movie and met him. And it’s too bad I can’t tell him because he’s long gone.

Ken Cohen [00:44:09] That gives me chills.

Alicia Svigals [00:44:10] Yeah, and I live right near there. I live around the corner from that. So I was like, “music for silent film, I’ll do that.” So I would love to do a series of these now, like another ten of them, because they’re great because you’re writing music and you don’t have to answer to anybody, the director and everybody they’re all dead.  So you could do whatever the heck you want. That is a joy of writing for film.

Ken Cohen [00:44:34] That’s great.

Alicia Svigals [00:44:36] Without the….I love working with living people, but there’s something special about having completely free rein.

Ken Cohen [00:44:43] Tonight, I’m meeting a close friend of the family who’s a sound editor for Hollywood. He works with Thomas Newman. And the two of them travel, Western Europe and America, writing and recording the film scores for Hollywood. And he created a device which actually coordinates the timing of conductors, of symphonies with the visual images. And so here we are. I was actually privy to that process over at Sony Studios several times. The first half a half hour of the film Wall-E is an all orchestral score. There’s no spoken word. And so, I’m thinking about the delight in not having to worry about coordinating with any other opinion but your own. And that can be a freeing thing. Who are your ears? Do you have people who you run things by? Who do you…Or  do you trust your own instincts and just put it right out to the world?

Alicia Svigals [00:45:57] I just trust my instincts because, you know, like when I was younger, I did that. And at some point I realized it’s a Rorschach Blot for everybody. You know, some people will love what you do, some people hate what you do, but they’ll hate what you do for reasons you’re happy about that, then you’d be worried. Not because there’s anything wrong with them, or if it’s universally likable, maybe that’s a little bland, right? And then there are people who love things you do you didn’t think were that great. And like you have no choice, it’s all so subjective, all you could do is do what you want to do, and like to do and the rest…Actually, it’s nice to get good feedback, but it means less and less as time goes on.

Ken Cohen [00:46:49] Well said.

Alicia Svigals [00:46:49] It means less and less in terms of what you’re going to do with that, in terms of your next project.

Ken Cohen [00:46:58] So you saw the film three times?

Alicia Svigals [00:47:00] …the first few times. You know, I wanted to do it, but I had no idea…I knew that violin and piano was a good idea, especially I had to learn Marilyn Lerner in mind because she’s very creative and she takes what I write and she kind of runs with it. But actually, kind of with the music was a whole process, that happened in real time. So it was like experimenting with different melodies, singing them against the image, playing them against the image, and seeing what message that sends or how it made the image of the scene feel. And I had never…I had written music for films, documentary films and sort of 30 second or minute long cues here and there. But this is continuous, like writing a symphony, just continuous music for a long time. And so I didn’t hear anything at first. It was really a process and it’s hard to sit with a process like that. You’ve got to make sure not to get frustrated and kind of cut yourself some slack and let it be a process and you know, you’re going to spend a lot of time on something and scrap it all together, just really gotta to be kind to yourself.

Ken Cohen [00:48:15] I really like that idea.

Alicia Svigals [00:48:18] It’s hard, especially if you’re a perfectionist and neurotic, and Type A, and blah, blah, blah.

Ken Cohen [00:48:28] That’s great. That is just great. So, you took your time with the process, you made sure that everything that…That little doggie?

Alicia Svigals [00:48:39] Yeah, sorry. It’s my puppy.

Ken Cohen [00:48:40] Hi little pooch.

Alicia Svigals [00:48:40] He keeps hearing stuff behind the door.

Ken Cohen [00:48:49]  That’s really…Were there any Jewish musical quotes in the film? Is it on recording anywhere?

Alicia Svigals [00:49:02] No, not yet. Eventually we will record it. Well, I recorded it live a few times and synced it to the video. The recording exists, but I use that privately to apply for things and stuff. I don’t want to put us out of business quite yet. When it’s run its course, and it’s settled in and then we’re kind of tired of doing it, then we’re going to record it and release it and sell it.

Ken Cohen [00:49:25] Nice.

Alicia Svigals [00:49:26] Jewish musical quotes? Yeah, I’ve got my Jewish inside jokes in there, not quite all the music, all the melodies are completely original. But what I did do is I’ve got Shofar Calls, that have particular meaning in different scenes and cantorial sounding stuff.

Ken Cohen [00:49:46] Oh really? Where did you put those?

Alicia Svigals [00:49:48] Well, there’s a scene with a bunch of Russian Orthodox priests with very long beards and giant Orthodox crosses hanging around their necks. And to me, they look a lot like a bunch of rabbis. So I sort of thought it was sort of funny to give them a cantorial treatment. And so you got to see the film to understand, like, it’s all about that identify issues; is she Jewish, is she Christian? And  [inaudible] around that and secret identity. And it’s kind of a soap opera, birth mysteries and who’s Jewish and who’s not Jewish, and the priests, and the Jewish father. And everybody got beards because it’s 1918.

Ken Cohen [00:50:35] So you never quite see their face unmasked.

Alicia Svigals [00:50:38] Yeah, well, some of them are more modern than others, so yeah, the younger ones, they’re big mustaches. Some of them are clean shaven. But the Jewish musical references are sort of inside jokes in there.

Ken Cohen [00:50:50] So is there a repository of Yiddish films that have never been set?

Alicia Svigals [00:50:56] Well, there are tons of silent films. I don’t…You know, I haven’t looked into how much there is Jewish. This is not a Yiddish film, it was made by a German film company with Polan Negre, she was a Polish actress, so it was intended for both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences. So the intertitles were in German originally, then they were also released in English. I haven’t looked into it yet about Yiddish, what’s out there in Yiddish, but there was a Jewish theme to this film. But that’s kind of my next project is to queue up some other films to do this with.

Ken Cohen [00:51:43] I’d love to be a fly on the wall of your mind as you see these things and imagine something,  something from nothing. Here we are, something from nothing. You performed all over, I looked at the list of places and occasions and I’m sort of narrowing the question, what’s out there in the Jewish world? What do you sense the Jewish heart is calling for? I mean, you performed for so many years with the Klezmatics. What did your music awaken in them and what and where are Jews today?

Alicia Svigals [00:52:31] That is a really tough question, because I have no distance. It’s hard to put myself in other people’s minds. Like I have seen….for a while I had a Bar / Bas Mitzvah project with dance leader Steve Weintraub, where we were like, oh, the state of Bar / Bas Mitzvahs in the Jewish world is embarrassing: DJ’s and…And there really seemed to be a hunger among parents for, you know, people my age to have something more nourishing and Jewish in these events. And so we created some residences in synagogues where we would teach the Bar Mitzvah-aged kids how to dance, the Yiddish dances, to Klezmer. And then we were playing these kids’ parties, and Steve would lead an hour-long Jewish dance set, you know, teaching people, showing by demonstration how to dance to Klezmer music. And so I do sense a hunger for something authentic and at the same time, honestly, like a complete lack of knowledge of how to find out where to get it. It was interesting to try to get it in through the Jewish institutional world. A lot of rabbis just were not interested at all, not that interested in the arts, cantors obviously tended to be more interested, but didn’t necessarily have pull. So like, there’s kind of a disconnect. There’s a hunger. And this institutional world is not really set up to make this happen.

Ken Cohen [00:54:18] When you say this, do you mean the idea that they could find spiritual connections with Jews out there?

Alicia Svigals [00:54:29] Well, I mean, I am so biased, I have no idea how valid this is. But I think old Jewish culture, music, Yiddish language, literature, song, everything that’s culture, has been kind of missing from the mainstream Jewish, religious, institutional world. And it’s great that that world has evolved and adapted and, responded to the outside world. But it’s a little deracinated to my mind. Also, I mean, you know, Jewish religious music has to evolve and go on. And it was wonderful that there was Debbie Friedman, whom I worked with actually, and she wrote Jewish music in a completely contemporary kind of American pop idiom.

Alicia Svigals [00:55:27] And that’s natural. But probably because of the Holocuast and immigration, there’s a lack of continuity in the culture. I think people really hunger for some connection to the old Yiddish stuff, honestly. And the dances that Steve Weinstraub is teaching, as opposed to having a DJ. There’s  a lot of points of disconnect and it’s not happening through the institutional Jewish religious world that much–the connection to something old in that way.

Alicia Svigals [00:56:03] You know, a lot of it is in the head. It’s Jewish text study. I’m doing this wonderful thing now, which I’m so grateful to be part of. I’m a LABA fellow at the 14th Street Y where this really wonderful scholar named Ruby Namdar who’s a novelist. He just had a novel come out in Hebrew, he’s from Israel, which was received with the hugest accolades ever, I wish I could readi n Hebrew [sic], but he’s also a Talmudic scholar. So what they do is they gather a bunch like a dozen artists in different disciplines, visual artists, composers, theater people. And we all study Jewish texts with this guy once a month. And then we start to produce art based on it and present it. So I think that there’s a lot of that text today out there, but connecting it this way with artists and with art, and traditional Jewish art, is just amazing. And a lot of artists, like me, have lacked that kind of education in the texts. So that’s like a great bridge program. That’s my opinion, but I’m so alive in a weird, quirky, marginal place where I think the center of the Jewish world should be klezmer….so don’t ask me. What do I know?

Ken Cohen [00:57:45] Yeah, I’ve heard the Klezmatics perform, probably with you in it unknowingly, and it’s rich music and it makes me dance. It makes me dance. It makes me feel, not a sense of pride from ego, but just the joy of being [Jewish], of feeling another color of what it is that Judaism offers.

Alicia Svigals [00:58:10] Right. It makes you feel Jewish.

Ken Cohen [00:58:16] Yeah, exactly.

Alicia Svigals [00:58:16]  In a good way.

Ken Cohen [00:58:22] Well, yes, there are – unfortunately there are some….

Alicia Svigals [00:58:26] It reminds me of when I was playing in the Greek nightclub in Astoria [Queens]. This was sort of the template for how I wanted it to go for Jews. So I was playing Greek music with this Greek Band, Greek nightclub, and all these Greeks are there. And I had learned to really carefully to play this kind of Greek impovisation called the Taqsim: it’s sort of the equivalent of cantorial music. And I’m playing it, and this guy yells out from a the table, “I feel Greek!” in Greek. And he said, I feel Greek. I feel Greek. And I was like, wow, I made the guy feel Greek, he’s Greek and I’m not but there’s the music. And he loved that feeling. What is that feeling? It isn’t, you know, ego or nationalistic or it’s not an exclusive thing. It’s a feeling of culture and a culture as a family and a tribe in a good way, it’s a positive thing. It gets misused in horrific ways often. But deep down, it’s it’s about being human.

Ken Cohen [00:59:37] What has been some of the feedback from the Jewish world about the Klezmatics that you could speak to? The differences that you’ve made in their lives? You’ve brought them to this humanity, this greater sense of humanity through your music. I clearly hear that. But how is it articulated? Because part of what I’m noticing, I don’t know if you experienced this, is that when you tried to describe the power of the arts in informing an evolution of a culture. Right? The power of the artists to be able to have vision and lead and call up what’s being spoken, to the powers that be who are more oriented from the head…who speaks the language that for example, can speak to the power of music and through my eyes, the power of the Cantorate and what the cantor might bring to the Jewish community? Have you heard of any authors that speak, that write, in those particular ways that animate what it is and the power of music?

Alicia Svigals [01:00:48] Oh boy, that’s a good question. People who write about it or talk about it. It’s hard to write and talk about. Well, I would have to think about that. I would have to dig through the mental files, because I’m busy reading about science.

Ken Cohen [01:01:13] If I were to have caught you a couple of years ago, yes, but now we’re science. That’s good. There’s a camp called the Brandeis Collegiate Institute, and they, too, similarly to the 14th Street Y…is that what you said you were part of? Is that what it’s called?

Alicia Svigals [01:01:30] It’s called LABA, it’s at the 14th street Y.

Ken Cohen [01:01:30] Right. It takes four or five artists of different disciplines, college aged people for four weeks of intensive work where Jewish texts inform the work that mentors would do with students to cultivate their unique voice within the tradition. So tell me about…You were intimating that to some of the people a lot of the text based wisdom that’s being shared now is sort of new. Tell me what has been your journey with regard to starting from the head and then working to the point of being expressive through the arts?

Alicia Svigals [01:02:27] The interesting thing about this guy was that his view of this stuff, he gets into a lot of like this crazy, nutty Talmudic stories and Kabbalah tales. His view is that it’s kind of dreamy stuff that comes from the same place, and it often looks a lot like dreams. He’s like, these people want to make a moral out of the story, to preach about it, and help [sic] it, and it’s not like that at all. There’s no moral, morally a lot of it is ambiguous. It’s more like art, it’s like dreams, and it’s like art. So studying these texts and grappling with the text, the stories, this is a direct route to art. And I’m really down with that, because maybe it’s just the ones he selects. So we started with Genesis, and we start with the snake and the apple, and Eve and Lilith, and the medieval stories about Lilith, and 19th century stories about Lilith. And this stuff is deep and crazy, it is not a Sunday school catechism. It’s very different. So that’s the link from the head to the you know…You can play with it up in the head space, but it really lives further down in the medulla or someplace. That’s where the snake lives, right?

Ken Cohen [01:03:56] Right. That is very cool. Do you interface with other artists as you create in the other disciplines?

Alicia Svigals [01:04:05] We’re all sitting around the table, and yakking the whole time. Then there’s some collaborations going on between artists. My show isn’t until May, so I really haven’t started yet. But once a month there’s a performance, or some kind of exhibit by one of the artists called Love Alive. You can find it online, on Facebook. It’s fun.

Ken Cohen [01:04:27] Yeah, I was…One of my dreams is to create a community where you get ten very, very exciting, passionate mentors in each of the disciplines. A spiritual community. I don’t want to call it a synagogue, but a spiritual community where people can show up during the week and explore whatever arts they want to explore at different levels, obviously, with people to access the spiritual wisdom of Judaism and to make it real for them.

Alicia Svigals [01:05:02] That would be great.

Ken Cohen [01:05:04] Yeah. Well, it’s so cool that you’re involved in that.

Alicia Svigals [01:05:08] That’s another thing, I felt so lucky to get this thing. They pay us to come learn. So that’s like incredible. I actually have to go in a minute, I have an appointment.

Ken Cohen [01:05:26] Thank you, Alicia, this has been so great. Thank you.

Alicia Svigals [01:05:29] Well, thank you. It’s lovely talking to you, really nice to meet you.

Ken Cohen [01:05:32] Likewise.

Alicia Svigals [01:05:34] Skype is great. I don’t do it often, but it’s so much better than the phone. You can really, meet somebody.

Ken Cohen [01:05:41] Yeah, you can. And this was a real gift. And it was wonderful getting to know you and hearing you know…I know that neuroscience is lucky to get to have…it’s going to…It’s going to happen, and I can’t wait to hear your project. Are you going to be performing in L.A. any time soon?

Alicia Svigals [01:06:03] We’ve been trying to get a show together. I know it’s a good show, so kind of TBA. If you know anybody who might be interested in… I have somebody who is working on this, I don’t know what he’s up to, but it hasn’t happened yet. So if you have any ideas about that, it’s like the right places are like film festivals…we’ve played them on the Miami International Film Festival, we did the Houston Cinema Arts Society and Mass MOCA, and something like that in L.A. would be good.

Ken Cohen [01:06:39] You know, it’s interesting. I’m involved in a regional cantors group that attracts roughly about 100 people in Palm Springs early January, just came back. At the same time, there are rabbinical conventions out there as well. I mean, I think what a great program…an evening, several hundred rabbis and cantors who could experience your creativity in the backdrop of this piece.

Alicia Svigals [01:07:08] That would be awesome.

Ken Cohen [01:07:10] All right. Let me work on that.

Alicia Svigals [01:07:13] OK! We’d have great discussions afterwards because the film raises so many questions and people can’t wait to talk about it. So usually there’s a panel discussion afterward with some local scholar or whatever. And with all those rabbis there it would be an awesome conversation.

Ken Cohen [01:07:28] Listen, thank you. Thank you again. And if I can ever help you with anything. I hope to continue the conversation some time.

Alicia Svigals [01:07:36] Yeah me too. Good luck with all this, and keep me posted as it progresses and where to find the results and stuff.

Ken Cohen [01:07:44] Yeah. Well, let me just tell you, any of the quotes, whether it’s an audio quote or a video quote, I will run by you first just so you make sure that it feels right for you and so you won’t be surprised, as it were.

Alicia Svigals [01:07:59] OK, great. Thank you. I appreciate it.

Ken Cohen [01:08:01] And best to you and your family.

Alicia Svigals [01:08:04] Thanks. You too.

Ken Cohen [01:08:05] Thank you. Bye bye.

An interview with Alicia Svigals, one of the many Jewish leaders Cantor Ken Cohen has interviewed. This project aims to inspire a new conversation within the Jewish community—one that is driven by curiosity, love, and a commitment to listening to each person’s story.