I Belong to Glazgoy

I Belong To Glazgoy

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BBC Radio 4 - I Belong to Glazgoy

Phil Alexander puts together the story of a composer through a newly found piece of music.

Musician and researcher Phil Alexander pieces together the story of Russian born Jewish synagogue cantor, Isaac Hirshow, who landed in Glasgow a century ago.

Klezmer musician and scholar of Jewish culture, Dr Phil Alexander is on the southside of Glasgow, looking for clues to a man whose music he’s spent five years piecing together. Isaac Hirshow, a virtuosic Russian Jewish synagogue cantor and composer, arrived in the Gorbals from Warsaw in 1922. He was one of thousands of Jewish immigrants who landed here, just south of the river Clyde, where Yiddish voices mingled with Gaelic and Irish airs, Lithuanian laments, and Italian arias.

A hundred years ago, it would have been easy to find Isaac - Phil could have gone to the Jewish Institute or to Chevra Kadisha Synagogue on Oxford Street where Isaac worked. Today, however, much of Hirshow’s Gorbals has been bulldozed, and although we can’t walk those streets any more, we can build a picture through the emotional traces that persist in memory, and the physical traces left in archives.

Music is how Phil met Isaac Hirshow. But it was music in limbo, held in an archive, unplayed - just black marks on the page. Phil has spent the last five years bringing it to life, ready to receive its very first performance. But he also wants to understand the man who wrote it and the hybrid Scottish / Jewish identity he built for himself in the city known to Jews of the time as Glazgoy.

As Phil excavates Hirshow’s story through archive, oral history, poetry, early recordings and specially performed music, he connects with musician, former refugee and migration scholar Aref Ghorbani and Chilean singer Valentina Montoya-Martinez. All three are well versed in using music to find common ground, and together they use the musical themes from The Hope of Israel to situate Hirshow’s music in a new age of community building and culture in transit. 

Presenter: Dr Phil Alexander
Contributors: Harvey Kaplan, Eddie Binnie, Natasha Lange

Musicians:
Valentina Montoya-Martinez (singer) Aref Ghorbani (singer and setar), Phil Alexander (piano and accordion)

University of Glasgow Chapel Choir, directed by Katy Lavinia Cooper

Special thanks to University of Glasgow Archive & Special Collection, Ellen Galford 

Produced by Freya Hellier

A Prospect Street production for BBC Radio 4

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