In May, KSC Music Lecturer Elaine Broad Ginsberg’s choral arrangement of Nurit Hirsh’s “Oseh Shalom” was performed in New York’s Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine by the Cathedral Choir and the instrumental ensemble Rose of the Compass, as part of the Great Music in a Great Space series. The rich program also included Coptic and Armenian chant, Sephardic songs, Sufi melodies, and Thomas Tallis’s “Lamentations of Jeremiah” on the historic destruction of Jerusalem.

The story behind Dr. Ginsberg’s choral arrangement? It began back in 1985, when she was a student at Oberlin Conservatory of Music. “I wrote a four-part choral arrangement of a popular Jewish melody, ‘Oseh Shalom’ (the Israeli composer Nurit Hirsh had written the melody in 1969),” Dr. Ginsberg explained. “I was inspired, and sat down and wrote the piece in one day.”

The arrangement was published and has sold over 5000 copies of sheet music. “Choirs all across the USA have sung it, much to my delight!” Dr. Ginsberg continued. “It was recorded by the ensemble Chicago A Cappella and released on CD in 2011. In addition to this original arrangement for four-part harmony, I re-composed the piece for six-part harmony in 2007 for the Five College Choral Festival in Northampton, MA, and that version was premiered by a chorus of 600 voices at the Festival. Our own KSC Chamber Singers, under my direction, also sang that arrangement on WGBY (the regional PBS station) as part of a television competition for choral performances. The six-part version of “Oseh Shalom” was also published, and it is that version that the Cathedral Choir of St. John the Divine in NYC decided to perform last month (they bought the music from the publisher—I knew nothing about it!).”

Read the New York Time’s review of the program.