Rabbi Bob Gluck Bends and Shapes Traditional Sounds

At Mobius this Weekend

By Susie Davidson

Advocate Correspondent

BOSTON - Bob Gluck, a spiritual mixmaster of sorts, melds old and new into a sensory melange of auditory awakening. As a rabbi, and experimental musician since childhood, he himself is representative of this elemental merging of sound and vision.

“Sounds You Can Touch: Live Electronic Jewish Music,” with Rabbi Gluck and percussionist Benjamin Chadabe, will be presented this weekend on Nov. 9 and 10 at Mobius, 354 Congress St. near South Station, Boston. Shows are Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m.

Gluck, a composer and performer, takes traditional Jewish musical motifs from many cultures and augments them with electronica. These are woven into Chadabe’s creative improvisational percussion, in a tapestry of the familiar and the expansive. Solos and duets will comprise the presentation.

In adapting acoustic instruments like the ram’s horn and the Turkish Saz to his framework, he fits them with varied sensors which shape digital sound processing. He sees, and attempts to portray, deep connections between the two realms he inhabits.

"I seek to create music that engages technology as a humanizing influence,” explained Gluck from Albany, New York, where he teaches Judaic Studies at the University at Albany and directs its Electronic Music Studio. For the past several years, he has also served as a visiting rabbi in Canada at the Ottawa Reconstructionist Havurah, and as a Hillel professional on Albany-area campuses.

“In attempting to point to the musical qualities of our world and engage the imagination,” he continued, “I seek to encourage people to cross boundaries between conventional and new musical aesthetics, traditional cultures and modern life, and religious and secular sensibilities."

A Queens and Chappaqua native, Gluck, who was ordained at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, served as the first Outreach Director for the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation as well as Executive Director of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association. For five years, he was a pulpit rabbi in the Berkshires.

At Mobius, he will hold a shofar with an electronic sensor globe connected to a computer which transforms sounds made while moving his fingers and blowing. “The goal is to listen inside the sounds of the shofar,” he said. Outfitted with electronic sensors, his saz uses an interface he designed with music programming software to create multilayered soundscapes interspersed with Jewish and Turkish traditional musical sounds. “I seek to focus and cultivate our awareness of the inherent musicality of the world we live in," he noted.

"Bob Gluck's interpretations of traditional Jewish musical and liturgical traditions,” said Rabbi Dan Ornstein of Albany, “are bold, innovative, and fun. Who else can turn the haunting and spiritually uplifting sound of the traditional shofar of the Jewish New Year into a soul journey that takes the listener to so many different places?"

Gluck studied piano at Julliard and electronic music at the Crane School of Music and the University at Albany. “I had a fascination for the sounds of my own Jewish culture,” he recalled. “I imagined, and crafted, soundscape compositions that captured my sense of that world." In 1996, he became interested in new technologies that expanded the capabilities of acoustical instruments. "The immediacy and excitement of spontaneous invention sparked my interest in an unexpected way. I became captivated by the relationship between physical gesture and the shaping of sound. I began to work on a more embodied approach to performance than characterized the field in the past."

His 1998 CD was described by noted Klezmer musician Seth Rogovoy as "a thought-provoking combination of musique concrete techniques, found-sounds, ambient recordings and Gluck's own compositions and electronic manipulations. The album,” he said, “functions as a kind of soundscape of Jewish life -- the aural equivalent, say, of a painting by Marc Chagall or Chaim Gross."

Chadabe’s 2000 CD, 'The Metaphysician's Hammer', is a collection of his percussion solos and duets with a poet. A graduate of Bennington College (where he studied with master percussionist Milford Graves), he adapts to coperformers thorugh listening and responding. His percussive sounds will be processed by Gluck's sensor-saz at Mobius.

Admission is $10 / $7 students, seniors and Friends of Mobius. For information, or if you cannot pay full admission, call Mobius at 617-542-7416. For more information about Bob Gluck and his work, please visit http://www.albany.edu/~gluckr