Lecture as a part of the Jewish Music Days, Bar-Ilan University, Department of Music , 12/05/2026 

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Good afternoon.

Shlomo Gronich has been active for more than five decades in various spheres of Israeli music. I will not waste valuable lecture time listing his masterpiece albums, or discussing his contribution to the weekly national campfire that was Zehu Ze; film music, theater music… or hits such as “Shirim Pshutim” (“Simple Songs”), “Nuweiba,” or “Yesh Li Simpatia” (“I Have Sympathy”). Yet ultimately, the first two—and astonishingly creative—decades of his career received what might be called a “complex” reception. He earned the unreserved admiration of the professional milieu, but was often met with a cold shoulder from the broader public, and he felt alienated and misunderstood.

In the next few minutes, I would like to argue that the sense of estrangement Gronich experienced at the beginning of his career stemmed, among other things, from the fact that his music reflected elements of an Ashkenazi diasporic cultural world, and more specifically, a cultural world with a significant German component. The sophistication of his work and the eclectic nature of his style only intensified what I would describe as a cultural dissonance.

In the well-known song “Shirim Pshutim” (“Simple Songs”), from 1983, Gronich mocks the simplicity of public taste. The song was recorded for Family Album, which he created together with Shem-Tov Levy, shortly before he achieved widespread exposure through Zehu Ze. According to Gronich himself, even during the years in which he gained exposure through Zehu Ze, his work had still not attained consensual status; in fact, he identified a contradiction between the success of the television program and his ability, as a singer-songwriter, to attract audiences to his own artistic work during those years. In a 1994 interview, he claimed that the audience who saw him on television at four in the afternoon found no reason to go to Tzavta in the evening to hear his more personal creations.

According to Gronich, it was the project with Sheba Choir —which began as a collaboration for a television program—that finally brought him into the mainstream consensus. The ideas expressed in the songs on the joint album with the Sheba Choir, above all the idea behind the song “Shir Yisraeli” (“An Israeli Song”), indeed aligned with the consensus and celebrated the stylistic “melting pot” that characterizes Israeli music, portraying the meeting of styles as an analogy for harmony and love among the country’s different communities. The song was written to lyrics by Ehud Manor, himself a quintessentially consensual figure who had already authored several “anthems,” such as “Chai” and “Ein Li Eretz Acheret” (“I Have No Other Country”).

The verses of the song describe a dialogue of opposites, between a man and a woman (“your snow and my rain, your wadi and my river,” "my lamed and your ḥet"), which ultimately find common ground within the Israeli landscape, both geographical and musical. The reconciliation between dichotomous pairs also characterizes additional layers of the song: a minor key in the verse and a parallel-tonic major key in the chorus, as well as the juxtaposition of contrasting musical ideas in the arrangement. Thus, for example, above the opening bass line appear, in counterpoint to one another, the leading electric guitar and an accordion-like synthesizer, symbolizing the present and the past (as hinted at in the lyrics, “a new-old song that mends the tears”).

However, the most surprising dialogue appears between the two choruses that conclude the song: a responsorial exchange between the clarinet-like sound and the choir, which suddenly changes the vocal production that had characterized it throughout the song and begins to sing higher and in a “classical” style. What is the significance of the clarinet and the classical choir in a song whose other signifiers are drawn entirely from the world of Hebrew popular song?

Regarding the clarinet, I recommend that the especially dedicated listeners hear the concert work Mosaic from 2004, but for now I would argue that the clarinet is the instrument Gronich associates with his father. Among the songs and instrumental pieces on the concept album Family Album (mentioned earlier), one finds the portrait piece of Gronich’s father, “Abba Otto” (“Father Otto”). “Abba Otto” opens with a virtuoso klezmer passage played by Otto Gronich on the clarinet, accompanied by his son. Gronich’s recurring return to the clarinet throughout his career may be interpreted as a musical reflection of his repeated return—interview after interview—to his complex relationship with his father.

Over the years, Shlomo Gronich has been quite generous in sharing details of his life story: from his childhood in Hadera, through years of searching for direction in Tel Aviv, experiences of bereavement, and his artistic quest in New York. On the surface, Gronich’s childhood story appears entirely Israeli: he was born in Hadera and grew up in the veterans’ housing neighborhood; at the age of six he began piano studies with the admired local teacher Moshe Braverman; and he grew up in a secular household in harmony with the working-class environment of Hadera. He attended high school at Hadassim, later studied in pre-military studies at the Midrasha for Music, served in the army, and eventually joined a military ensemble.

Yet behind this thoroughly Israeli childhood (like that of many of his generation) stood a distinctly Ashkenazi diasporic family background. His mother’s family, the Skibin family from Dysna (today in Belarus), was among the well-known families of the Second Aliyah generation. His maternal grandfather, Ze’ev Skibin, whom he affectionately called “Grandpa Velvale,” was one of the veteran laborers of Hadera. Shlomo’s father, Otto Gronich, immigrated to Israel only in 1935, and came from Romanian-speaking Bukovinian Jewry. Even the Hadera environment of the 1950s was still saturated with diasporic traces, as reflected in the names mentioned in the song “Fire Brigade”: Weissman the drummer, “old Leibele who blows the trumpet,” and “Feitel who played the trombone.”

The diasporic foreignness embedded in his father’s name, Otto, also emerges in a story about a joke that circulated in Hadera. As a child, people would tease him and ask, “Have you ever seen a car [Otto] riding a bicycle?” Gronich recalled that, (quote) “it was terribly insulting to me, because how is it my fault that my father’s name is… Otto?” (end quote)

Ja! Herr Erich Kästner! Nicht Naomi Shemer!

Let us turn to another page in the booklet accompanying the album Neto. The short anecdote about Grandpa Voloole ends with a kind of foreshadowing hint: “Once he gave me, as a gift, a book by Erich Kästner.” Beneath the story in the album booklet appear the lyrics to the song “Rosa Marzipan,” written by Shulamit Lapid, based on Kästner’s book Der kleine Mann. This song—the first composition by Gronich to gain public attention—is probably the single most influential work in shaping how Gronich has been perceived throughout his entire career, and it appears not only on his first album but on every live album and compilation since. In Gronich’s own words, (quote) “I can’t free myself from ‘Rosa Marzipan,’ because that’s the drawer I belong to… the ‘ha-ha-ha-ha’—if somehow you could define Gronich in four notes, that’s it.” (end quote)

For Gronich, “Rosa Marzipan” signifies an almost mystical connection to German culture. Speaking about this song, about its resemblance to the music of Kurt Weill, and about the German words Gronich added to Shulamit Lapid’s lyrics, Gronich stated: (quote)

“I don’t know where it comes from […] [that is, the preoccupation with Germany] to such an extent that it makes me think about all kinds of mystical things, like reincarnations, things that are beyond us, that we don’t understand… circles, reincarnations, that I… where does it come from?” (end quote)

Indeed, in some performances Gronich adorns “Rosa Marzipan” with the phrase in German: (Ja! Herr Erich Kästner! Nicht Naomi Shemer, Erich Kästner!)—which sounds like a kind of “German” distancing, perhaps even a condescending one, from the all-Israeli consensus and from Naomi Shemer, the quintessential representative of that consensus.

A closer examination of Gronich’s childhood stories, and especially of his early works, suggests that the connection between Gronich and German culture is not mystical, as he claims, but rather a direct product of the environment in which he grew up and developed musically. Gronich’s first teacher, Moshe Braverman, was regarded as a legendary teacher in Hadera. Preserved in Braverman’s archive are eight programs from student concerts in which Gronich participated between the ages of seven and a half and thirteen and a half (when he left for Hadassim). Alongside pieces by Dmitry Kabalevsky, Jean-Philippe Rameau, and Dussek, his training was steeped in the “bread and butter” of the German repertory: Robert Schumann, Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart…

The name of Gronich’s father, Otto, is German rather than Romanian. Indeed, according to the records of the Jewish community in Vienna, Otto Gronich was born in Vienna on January 7, 1917. His father—after whom Shlomo was named—was Shloyme Benjamin Gronich (born 1879). The residence of the Gronich family, as recorded in the community archives, was not characteristic of the lower-class Ostjuden (“Eastern Jews”): they lived at Severingasse 8 in Vienna’s Ninth District, a district that also housed parts of the University of Vienna, the Volksoper (which specialized in light operettas), and the homes of many Jewish intellectuals, among them Sigmund Freud.

In fact, not only “Rosa Marzipan,” but Lama Lo Siparta Li!?—Shlomo Gronich’s entire first album—can be interpreted in light of the background from which he emerged. Of course, there is “Al Na Telekh” (“Please Don’t Go”), which presents a new melody as a counterpoint above the first prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier by Johann Sebastian Bach. Gronich composed the song while still a teenager and identified it as one of the first melodies he ever wrote.

At the end of the album Lama Lo Siparta Li!?, before the improvisatory and disintegrating passage that gave the album its title, Gronich tearfully sings “Avinu Malkeinu”. In his (retrospective) liner notes he wrote: “Once again, the pain stored inside bursts out in improvisation, without prior planning, into the memory of a Jewish melody (to which my soul had been connected from a young age). I sing in Ashkenazi pronunciation not as parody, but from a genuine connection to the roots of this melody.”

These two elements—the classical element reflected in the reliance on Bach, and the Ashkenazi element reflected in the lamenting liturgical chant in Ashkenazi pronunciation—are, of course, precisely the two elements that Gronich confronts with one another at the end of “Shir Yisraeli.” The clarinet is his father’s klezmer clarinet, and the choir is the classical music upon which he was educated. Together they represent two poles of influence whose tension characterized many of the “border Jews” (Grenzjuden) who sought to navigate their intellectual activity within the German cultural sphere, and which continued to resurface throughout Gronich’s career.

Already in 1972 he composed music for AmeriKa, based on Amerika (also known as The Man Who Disappeared) by Franz Kafka. Later, Gronich traveled to study at the Mannes School of Music in New York, where he adapted Amerika into a musical. In embarking on his own artistic search in New York, Gronich found himself, like Karl Rossmann in Amerika, in the role of Kafka’s lost protagonist wandering through the American metropolis.

The quintessential German Jew—and the one with whom Gronich engages most directly—is Theodor Herzl. So that I may move on to the more musical portions of this lecture, I will merely recommend listening to the song “Israel” from the album Tzemer Gefen Matok (“Sweet Cotton Candy”) as one link in a chain of songs highlighting unrealistic perceptions of Palestine and the attraction of audiences to Palestine through deceptive means—from Rivka Michaeli, through Dag Nachash, and ending with HaBiluyim. It is a quintessentially Herzlian song.

The clearest musical counterpart to Kafka and Herzl was Gustav Mahler (1860–1911). Let us therefore focus on him now and dedicate a slide to him...

Mahler, born in Kaliště (Kalischt, today in the Czech Republic), climbed to the summit of the musical world in Vienna, yet always felt alienated and persecuted. The darker aspects of Mahler’s musical language are often attributed to his childhood under the shadow of his difficult father, Bernhard Mahler, and to the suicide of his brother Otto in 1895. Mahler drew inspiration from the military marches that emanated from the barracks near the town of Iglau (Jihlava), where he grew up. He integrated these influences—which he himself, following his acquaintance with Freud, interpreted as possessing psychoanalytic significance—together with folk music and a host of other influences into a German Romantic symphonic texture rooted in the traditions of Beethoven and Wagner.

Thus, for example, in the third movement of his First Symphony one hears the sounds of a funeral march that quotes, with no small degree of irony, the children’s tune “Frère Jacques.” The march passes solemnly by, only to be overtaken by the sound of the clarinet in a wild folk-like melody.

“Fire Brigade,” from the album Neto, is probably Gronich’s most Mahlerian song. In unrhymed prose, Shlomo Gronich recalls the marches played by the Hadera fire brigade band under the direction of his father, Otto. He connects his innocent and happy childhood memories to the sounds of those marches, which, in his words, still “play inside his head.” Later in the song he recalls how his baby brother “stood up on his feet and managed to walk. He walked only a few steps and stopped,” and the melody transforms into a slow lament for his brother Yaron, who was killed during his military service. At that point comes a disillusionment with the march itself: “Back then I did not know that this rhythm marches people into battle,” he says. Yet, with profound irony, he returns to the fast major-mode march at the end of the song, in an act of cynical and bitter recollection.

So then: is Gronich’s work merely an almost inevitable product of the totality of influences acting upon him? And what of the compositional act itself, which processes those influences, filters them, and shapes them into a creative body possessing an independent identity? The intuitive mode of composition to which Gronich testified in his interviews suggests that certain harmonic patterns that “sit naturally under his fingers”—perhaps dating back to his childhood—guide the music, especially the bass and harmony, and exert a decisive influence over the final shaping of the work that gathers these stylistic influences together. Let us therefore attempt to characterize a handful of idiosyncratic traits in Gronich’s writing through an examination of a work that stood at the foundation of his musical education.

The first prelude by Johann Sebastian Bach—a work we know Gronich played, loved, and “internalized” to the point of producing an original creative response of his own—can serve as a model for defining Gronich’s “classical” pianism. This prelude is unusual in relation to Bach’s other preludes in that it is based entirely on a texture of broken chords.

[play]

Evidence of the pedagogical value of such a “melody-less” prelude may be found in the fact that Bach himself included the work in the Notebook for Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, which he began compiling as teaching material for his eldest son approximately one month after the boy turned nine years old. It is therefore unsurprising that this work “spoke” to gifted young musicians—one in Köthen, and the other in Hadera. What, then, could the small fingers of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach and Shlomo Gronich learn from this unusual composition?

Beyond the repetitiveness of the broken-chord texture, the continuity and interest of the prelude derive from the nature of the transitions between one chord and another, and from the voice-leading that shapes these transitions. Particularly striking is the fact that the bass line of the prelude moves in an extremely economical manner: the first half of the prelude is based on a stepwise descending bass line and concludes with a full cadence on the tonic. I will play it at double speed and sing the bass line so that you can follow it.

[demonstrate]

It is important to note that the melodic logic of the bass line dictates the inversions of the chords. The second part of the prelude destabilizes the sense of closure by breaking the scalar motion [C–F], and then reversing the direction of the bass upward (F–F♯–A♭).

[demonstrate]

Bach’s prelude, which stood at the foundation of Gronich’s musical training, demonstrates at least three characteristics that would later recur throughout Gronich’s creative corpus: a scalar logic governing the bass line (which dictates chord inversions); a distinction between sections characterized by descending scalar motion and those characterized by ascent or stasis; and a rigidly symmetrical division of phrases.

Alongside the principles that appear in Bach’s prelude, and alongside the creative processes he learned through his encounter with it, the young Shlomo Gronich seems to have adopted several additional formal ideas and devices early in his career. He tends to favor the minor mode, and at times borrows ideas from the modal world, although these are always adapted in some way into his own tonal language. Gronich’s harmonic language—Bachian in its essence—is expanded through several chromatic chords that became more common only after Bach, as part of the harmonic language of Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert, above all the so-called “geographical” chords. Most likely, Gronich’s intuitive familiarity with these geographical chords—for example through works he is known to have played as a student of משה ברוורמן—led to his use of these chords on a scale far greater than that of any other creator in Israeli popular music.

The only phenomenon within pop-rock style that resembles the sound of a geographical chord is the “minor major-seventh chord.” [play E minor-major seventh chord] And I will now give a random example: [“ha-ha-ha-ha—chi ktanot ba’olam”]

[demonstrate]

I remind you of what Gronich himself said: “If somehow you could define Gronich in four notes—that’s it.”

Almost all of the principles mentioned above appear in “Shir Ahava Tari” (“Fresh Love Song”) [sing: “Bo’i yalda, bo’i lechan”]. This song, written in a minor key, is built as a single symmetrical sixteen-bar phrase that repeats over and over again. In the first thirteen measures, the bass line descends stepwise consistently across the range of an octave plus a fourth, while the remaining three measures close the phrase with a cadence—an organizing principle identical to the one we demonstrated in Bach. Once again, I will sing the bass line.

[demonstrate]

As for the organic relationships within the work, an analysis adopting—even loosely—the theories of Heinrich Schenker (himself a Jew from Galicia who emigrated to Vienna) can illuminate these connections and reveal the intricate web of interactions between the chromatic alterations in the different voices. Schenker’s method, developed according to the dimensions of German music from Bach to Brahms, is exceptionally well suited to the analysis of Gronich’s music.

The diagram offers a harmonic and melodic reduction of “Fresh Love Song.” In the written article on which I am currently working, there is an entire half-hour lecture section devoted solely to this slide, full of insights into the greatness of the song. Within the limits of today’s short lecture, I will only note that the ascent to the high F-sharp, according to the Schenkerian analysis, functions as the Anstieg (“initial ascent”) from which the Urlinie (“fundamental line”) of the work’s structural melody begins.

Even the surprising blues sonority (“Come, let us build a life together”)

is anchored in the overarching melodic pattern F♯–E♯–E–D, which decorates melodically the motion from scale degree 5 to scale degree 3 of the fundamental line, which in turn also appears in the bass and even in the alto voice. In the article version I also discuss the song “The White River,” which is saturated with all the same hallmarks of Gronich’s expanded-Bachian language, and which are revealed in all their splendor when drawn out from the deeper structural level through a quasi-Schenkerian analysis.

* * *

Over the years, many explanations have been proposed regarding why Shlomo Gronich—whose musical talent as a pianist, songwriter, and singer few would dispute—did not achieve commercial success comparable to that of some of his contemporaries. Criticism of Gronich often revolved around his eclectic style or around his artistic pretentiousness.

Yet alongside the “all-Israeli” aspects of his biography, his childhood in the moshava was also surrounded by names, literature, and music whose origins certainly did not lie on the banks of the Alexander River. More specifically, Gronich grew up under the authority of his father Otto, a native of Vienna and the son of an Austro-Hungarian army officer. From the children’s books of Erich Kästner he continued on to engage with the works of Franz Kafka and Bertolt Brecht. And the musical education he received, however diverse its influences may have been, instilled in his fingers the organizing principles of the music of the great German Classical and Romantic masters—with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach at the foundation of his training.

Whether its outer shell was influenced by The Beatles, by Middle Eastern music, or by African music—the roots of Gronich’s music are planted in a Yekkish-Ashkenazi cultural world. One can understand how this cultural world may have felt foreign to parts of the Israeli public, especially during the 1970s and 1980s, and how it made no attempt to “crack the code of Israeliness” in the manner of Naomi Shemer or Shlomo Artzi.

Perhaps it was not Gronich who was the “alien transplant,” pretentious and eccentric within an all-Israeli culture. Rather, it may have been the all-Israeli culture itself that sinned through pretension, rejecting the most authentic fruits of the cultural richness created in Israel. In other words: it is precisely the Gronich of Kästner and Kafka, of Bach and Brecht, who is “more Israeli” than any idealization of the melting pot concocted for the sake of a television project. Perhaps, in paraphrasing the question posed by Ehud Manor—“Who are you, Israeli song?”—Gronich’s sharpest possible answer would be:

“Herr Erich Kästner! Nicht Naomi Shemer!”