Daniel Asia is an award-winning and critically celebrated classical composer whose opera, The Tin Angel premiered on Saturday, June 28th, 2025, at La MaMa in downtown Manhattan. Asia is also the President and Founder of Polyhymnia (previously, The Center for American Culture and Ideas), and a widely published author who believes in the transformative power of high art. Asia’s essay, “A Classical Composer Reads Stomping the Blues,” appeared in the inaugural issue of TOAR.
One of the most thoughtful commentators on music in contemporary letters, Asia recently sat down with TOAR editor, Aryeh Tepper, to explore connections between classical music and Judaism, the soundscape of Mt. Sinai, developments within modern music, Ellison’s “Little Man at Chehaw Station” and the Talmud, King David, Asia’s new opera, Moses as the greatest listener in history, and more.
The Omni-American Review:
Thank you for being with us, Maestro. Part of what makes your perspective as a composer unique is the way in which you connect classical music and Judaism. Please say a few words about the connection.
Dan Asia:
Sure! I believe that both classical music and Judaism aim at connecting us to a transcendent dimension. Life is not only the physical or material.
I learn from the writings of Rabbi Abraham Heschel. He loved the term “the ineffable.” At peak moments, we encounter a reality that is radically “other.” There is something ineffable, through which we are touched by something Divine. How do we remain open to this transcendent dimension? Through awe and wonder, through awareness of the mystery. In this context, check out the following passage from Heschel’s The Insecurity of Freedom:
The only language that seems to be compatible with the wonder and mystery of being is the language of music. Music is more than just expressiveness. It is rather a reaching out toward a realm that lies beyond the reach of verbal propositions. Verbal expression is in danger of being taken literally and of serving as a substitute for insight. Words become slogans, slogans become idols. But music is a refutation of human finality. Music is an antidote to higher idolatry.
I love that, “Music is a refutation of human finality.” Words circumscribe. The range of expression is finite, and there is a danger of getting lost in the words, in language, and closing ourselves to reality that is beyond language. But instrumental music is open-ended, and through it, we remain open and receptive.
Words circumscribe. The range of expression is finite, and there is a danger of getting lost in the words, in language, and closing ourselves to reality that is beyond language. But instrumental music is open-ended, and through it, we remain open and receptive.
In this way, it’s like prayer. There are words on a page that we read, but there are also songs that lift the words that we sing off the page, that elevate the experience to communion with the ineffable.
TOAR:
That’s beautiful. But there is another dimension. In your essay, “Breath in a Ram’s Horn: Why Classical Music is Like Jewish Prayer,” you write that classical music and Judaism both facilitate religious experience through a thoughtful shaping of time.
DA:
Yes. Again, Heschel points the way:
Judaism is a religion of time, aiming at the sanctification of time. Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time. The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments. Jewish ritual may be characterized as the art of significant forms of time, an architecture of time.1
I extend and elaborate Heschel’s insight in the context of art music. So too, classical music thoughtfully sculpts time into grand architectural structures.
Now, there are two elemental building blocks: sound and silence. The high art of classical music, in my opinion, exists to create sacred moments, hints of the Other, in an otherwise profane existence. You see, like prayer, like the Sabbath, music provides sacred moments in time.
TOAR:
So let’s bring this down to earth, a bit. When we talk about both Judaism and the journey of classical music, these are not fixed essences; there is room for human interpretation. Doesn’t this complicate matters?
DA:
Yes, but here too, there is an interesting parallel. In the experience of classical music, one has the text, or score, which is understood to be incomplete, no matter how detailed the composer has written it. It must have, it demands, human interpretation. This is precisely what the performer provides. For performers, the score is parallel to the sacred text. Is this not similar to the Written Law demanding Oral Law that interprets it, and, by the way, that is never settled completely, and thus it offers an avenue for new interpretation in every generation?
TOAR:
True. So let’s do that and focus on our time, our generation. Access to the experience that you describe, this grand architecture of time in which sacred moments organically emerge from a journey through the mundane and the profane, access to this experience seems to be blocked in two ways.
First, there is an obsessive emphasis on the now. You have written about this, too: we want fast food, peace now, information now, so on and so forth. In musical terms, this emphasis on the now manifests itself in the demand for an immediate hook, an easy, immediate unearned high, that you find in much pop music.
First, there is an obsessive emphasis on the now. You have written about this, too: we want fast food, peace now, information now, so on and so forth. In musical terms, this emphasis on the now manifests itself in the demand for an immediate hook, an easy, immediate unearned high, that you find in much pop music.
In addition, the present, our “now,” is sonically cluttered; it is full of sounds. Much of the time, there are various sounds coming at us from multiple directions. The peaks that you describe along the extended journey of classical music are like still small voices in a cluttered soundscape.
DA:
Yes, and some thoughtful composers have responded to that problem. What you described, the sonic clutter, was wonderfully stylized in Luciano Berio’s piece, “Sinfonia.” Berio portrayed a cluttered soundscape; he stylized an overloaded sonic environment. Some of your readers might want to check it out.
As to the substance of your points, I agree, it’s a real challenge. Living in a cluttered sonic space, with its emphasis on the present that is constantly bombarded with sounds, how do you hear the still, small voice? Especially if it requires a journey, a pilgrimage, to arrive at the place of listening. Remember, it took fifty days for the Children of Israel to arrive at Mt. Sinai.
TOAR:
This is interesting, because it takes us back to our previous point regarding the soundscape: when you return to the most primal level of Jewish experience, the exodus from Egypt and the revelation at Sinai, and you read the text in Exodus 19 slowly and closely, you see that God consciously took the nation of Israel to a visually sparse environment, the Sinai desert, and there, in preparing the revelation, God very thoughtfully and artfully prepared the soundscape.
DA:
Yes, absolutely, but the soundscape was anything but still and small. The shofar blast grew louder and stronger for days—it physically overpowered the people.
TOAR:
And then, to speak in terms from the jazz vocabulary, Moses and God traded fours, “The shofar’s voice grew increasingly stronger. Moses spoke, and God answered… “ (Exodus 19:19)
DA:
I wonder what Moses was saying…
TOAR:
God knows…
To return to the here and now, there was an attempt to cultivate a more thoughtful relationship to the idea of the “soundscape” in American music by composers like Pauline Oliveros and John Cage. What are your thoughts about their efforts?
DA:
Oliveros and Cage were part of a mid-20th century movement with French roots that tried to develop a vocabulary that relates to music as “organized sound.” Cage also argued that the environment and its soundscape could in fact be thought of as music.
I have little sympathy for their position. We have moved from an understanding of music sharing some of the characteristics of a language, and being intelligible, with a sacred relationship between the nature of sound itself and human life, to a view of music that grew out of electro-acoustic music, and the electronic creation of sounds.
Can I get technical for a moment?
TOAR:
Just go slow, please.
DA:
I’ll try. When you listen to music from an electro-acoustic perspective, the electronic recording of sounds on magnetic tape enables you to manipulate sounds. In the process, sound is stripped down to its fundamental components, these being sound waves that are basic in nature and that form more complex sounds. Ultimately, a sine tone is a sound with a single frequency, it has no overtone structure. This is the simplest element, the basic building block in the electronic creation of sound.
But when you play an actual musical instrument, not in the abstract, an actual instrument, a whole host of overtones are present. For me, this sonically rich reality sets in relief the thinness of the electro-acoustic understanding. Having said this, there are still a few examples of wonderful works in this genre that essentially transcend (that word again!) it.
TOAR:
So from the electro-acoustic perspective, or angle, music is not a language, but organized sound, a cultural construction? And organized means organized both by the human being creating the sound, and then the listener who perceives the organization?
DA:
Yes. And if you accept these premises, but then react against them, you know, you react against the social organization, or “colonialization,” of sound, you get John Cage’s notion of relinquishing any notion of control over the music. And, you think of music as being any sound that occurs in time. That’s why his piece 4:33 was so revolutionary.
TOAR:
Please explain.
DA:
The performer sits at the piano for 4’33, and doesn’t play a note. He wanted to say that whatever you hear, that is music, anything that you hear in a particular time is music. The soundscape is music.
TOAR:
Well, at least there’s an attempt to be aware of the soundscape.
DA:
Perhaps. And perhaps he was responding to the problem of human beings being unable to listen in a deep way. That also bothered Pauline Oliveros, to which she responded with the idea of deep listening. But we naturally distinguish between the categories of sound and noise. We can argue whether a particular piece should be considered sound or noise, but when we go to hear music, we go to hear something that, for us, is coherent.
TOAR:
But you have to listen. There’s an interesting passage from the Talmud in this context: “A flute played for noblemen is music, but when played for weavers, they receive no pleasure from it” (Yoma 20b). That might sound rough to modern ears, and you can argue like Ralph Ellison that sometimes “the little man behind the stove at Chehaw station” knows the standards better than the so-called sophisticate, but Ellison would be the first to agree that the Talmud’s point stands: there are those who know and love to listen, and there are those who don’t.
DA:
Yes, to listen to high art, the audience needs to be active listeners. This is not something that simply flows over you. Listening takes energy. When it’s over, after you engage a true artistic experience, you should be tired in an uplifting way.
Yes, to listen to high art, the audience needs to be active listeners. This is not something that simply flows over you. Listening takes energy. When it’s over, after you engage a true artistic experience, you should be tired in an uplifting way.
Listen, we recently went to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra, and there was a guy in the audience listening – listening! – to a basketball game, which, by the way, goes back to Berio and his awareness and stylization of this multi-layered soundscape.
My wonderful, late friend, Paul Pines, who was one of my favorite poets, didn’t have any formal music education, but he loved to listen deeply, and I really loved this about him.
TOAR:
That’s a good segue to your opera The Tin Angel, which premiered on Saturday, June 28, 2025, at La MaMa. It’s set in a jazz club that Pines actually ran on the Lower East Side in the 1970s, where he could do that, listen and experience music. So please tell us about the opera.
DA:
Well, the basic story is about finding redemption in a broken world. Paul’s poems bring together very disparate realms, from Ecclesiastes to the Blues. Paul was like a curious bystander to his inner world, and living in a physical world he hardly understands. The enigma at the center of his poems is how these interior and exterior worlds meet and interact.
Paul also wrote numerous novels and a memoir with these same qualities, and I’ve written musical works based upon his poems: Pines Songs, Songs from the Page of Swords, Breath In a Ram’s Horn, and others, but my new opera is based upon The Tin Angel, Paul’s acclaimed novel. Sometime around 2008, we both agreed that an opera based upon his novel could combine operatic tradition with a contemporary dimension and make something relevant to our time, and timeless: how do we make music out of love and loss? The opera marries high drama with the cutting-edge of a Bowery jazz club, with a cast of characters playing out a dark story that becomes a call for redemption.
And, connected to our discussion of designing the soundscape and the imperative of deep listening— in the opera, the audience is forced by the setting to be immersed in the music and drama of the opera, because they’re sitting as if they were sitting in the club where much of the unfolding of the journey of the opera takes place.
TOAR:
Right, one of the virtues of a jazz club, as opposed to a large hall, not to mention a stadium, is the close physical proximity of the musicians and the audience.
DA:
Yes, in an intimate setting, people can musically communicate on the level of souls. I remember your class on R Uziel’s understanding of the human soul, which I enjoyed very much. I am sympathetic to the idea that all human beings share a deep, soulful connection that is linked to our connection to Divinity. I would have loved to discuss music with him. In terms of the close, intimate musical connection in which souls connect with souls, I am reminded of David trying to musically soothe Shaul, one-on-one (1 Samuel 16:14-23).
Most music, until the Romantic period, was like this. It was played in an intimate setting. Then, in the Romantic period, large orchestras emerged, with Steinway grand pianos that, as part of the industrial revolution, have steel construction that enables the strings to contain more tension and sound, so the sound projects. Until we get to electric amplification. We’ve been on a trajectory to bigger and louder, an expansion of color and dynamics so that the emotional range becomes even wider.
TOAR:
But doesn’t that, taken as a whole, sound a little bit like the intensification of sound that God prepared at Sinai?
DA:
Right, the shofar is always increasing in intensity. Sinai was the biggest musical climax in history, it led to a contradiction between a vast amount of sound and then – the break. The biggest climax is the cessation of sound.
You know, we don’t usually think of him as a great listener, but Moses was a great listener. His listening capacity appears to have been greater than others. The Israelites were so deafened that their ears were still ringing, and they said to Moses, “If we listen anymore, we’re gonna die, you listen for us!”
TOAR:
And I always thought Duke Ellington was the world’s greatest listener. Thank you, Maestro.
DA:
Thank you
An earlier version of this interview previously appeared in Sephardi Ideas Monthly.
- Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath ↩︎