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for the Conference
"The Art of Synagogue Music"
November 12-14, 2006
New York City
Biography of Gershon Kingsley
Composer Contact:
Email:gkingsli@earthlink.net
Gershon Kingsley was born Goetz Gustav Ksinski in Bochum, Germany, in 1922. "Chaos versus organization" is how Gershon Kingsley has achieved
extraordinary success in the commercial field as a composer for radio, television, and motion pictures, earning an Emmy for New Voices in the Wilderness as well as two Clio awards -- the advertising industry's highest mark of recognition.
Indeed, despite numerous major works to his credit, Kingsley is probably still best known to many as the composer of the international hit song "Popcorn," first released in 1969 as part of a Kingsley solo LP album entitled Music to Moog By.
"I have always been sitting between two chairs in my music," the composer has reflected. "I try to bring classical and pop together." Kingsley spent most of his childhood in Berlin, where, when he was sixteen, he joined the Zionist youth movement. Following Kristallnacht (Reichskristallnacht), he went with a group of fifty young veterans chosen from the Hamburg Zionist youth camp to begin a new life in Palestine.
In a Labor Zionist kibbutz, he taught himself to play piano and began studying orchestral scores he had brought from Germany. As his musical interests solidified and he sought more formal instruction with a view toward professional goals, he decided to abandon the kibbutz, and he left on his own for Jerusalem. There, he studied at a conservatory. He also played jazz in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and in 1946 he emigrated to the United States and, after a short stay in New York, went to Los Angeles, where his first employment was as an organist in a Reform synagogue.
"They asked me to write a small liturgical setting for bar'khu or sh'ma," he recalled more than fifty years later, "so I became a 'Jewish composer' by default!" That was the first of his many liturgical compositions. Meanwhile, he earned a degree from the Los Angeles conservatory (now the California Institute of Arts), performed in supper clubs, and began conducting for summer stock theater productions. He went on to establish himself as a theatrical conductor, eventually directing music for the Joffrey Ballet, for Josephine Baker, for the highly acclaimed television special The World of Kurt Weill starring Lotte Lenya, and for a number of Broadway shows.
As a staff arranger for Vanguard Records, he arranged and orchestrated for major artists, including Jan Peerce, who engaged him as his accompanist for American and European concert tours. In the late 1960s, Kingsley began to devote serious attention to expanding the boundaries of synagogue music.
Kingsley was attracted to electronic music not only for the uncharted and potentially infinite territory of its new sonic world, nor merely for its newness or its place in the avant-garde, to which he nonetheless aspired. Equally important for him was the control it promised a composer, at least in theory, over the final product heard by an audience.
For more information:
Gershon Kingsley writings:
Frere-Jones, Sasha. "HAGGADAH DA-VIDA. (The Talk of the Town),"The New Yorker, April 17, 2006 v82 i9 p29.
(Gershon Kingsley Interview)
About Gerhson Kingsley:
Henahan, Donal. "An Ecumenical Concert," The New York Times. March 30, 1971, p23.
Hume, Paul. "A Weekend of Music: Electronic, Vocal Symphonic, Competitive," The Washington Post, Times Herald. June 18, 1973, pB7.
Milstein, Frederic. "Debut Orchestra Performs; Jewish Opera and Jazz Service Presented," Los Angeles Times. April 20, 1970, pE19.
"Passover Oratorio a Salute to Israel," The New York Times. April 7, 1974, p81.
Rensberger, Boyce. "Whhrr, Vroom, It's Music a la Moog," The New York Times. July 22, 1972, p29.
(Go Back to "American Judaism's Lost Legacy" Ten Composers Page)
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November 5, 2006
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