Music to our ears and over the garden fence
With the founder of The Zemel Choir for a neighbour, music is all around
Brigit Grant is the Jewish News Supplements Editor
You can hear the music before you ring the bell. Sometimes it’s the mixed texture of Chamber music, as played in the homes of nobility in the 18th century. On other days the sound of Jazz comes from an open window or the notes of a familiar piano concerto bounces into the garden.
The joy of living next door to the Cohen family is the musical smorgasbord they provide, but it wasn’t until Dudley, the maestro at the helm turned 90, that we realised the founder of the Zemel choir was our neighbour. Modesty and the fact that Dudley assumes everyone has access to a cornucopia of music they can play, stops him from bragging about his choral success. But when the choir honoured him with a 90th birthday celebration after Covid he invited us to the event at Hampstead synagogue. Suddenly the man we normally see wielding a hedge trimmer was brandishing a baton and conducting the Zemel choir as they sang his arrangements of Ein Keloheinu, Dayenu and Shiru Ladonai.
These arrangements have been part of the Zemel Choir’s repertoire of Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Yiddish and Israeli classics since it was established in 1955. Always adding new music by contemporary composers, the mixed-voice Jewish choir has sustained its’ international reputation as one of the world’s finest choirs and still regularly performs in major venues throughout the U.K. and overseas.
That Dudley Cohen doesn’t shout or at least sing about his achievement is more of a mystery, but as he only lives next door, it was an easy journey to the answers.
“Around 1954, I was a music teacher at a secondary modern school in Willesden and as I’d always been interested in music, I went to a study group summer school and was invited to look after the Jewish choral singing group.” Dudley was clearly a hit in the role as the young people he met that summer suggested he start a choir, “And I’d done an arrangement of the Hatikva for SATB(soprano, alto, tenor bass) which I wanted to try and this coincinced with the Bnei Akiva choir coming to an end, so when their choir master suggested I take it over, I took it over, but as an independent as I didn’t want the choir attached to a youth movement.”
“Five years later we were the first choir to do a concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall which had just opened and had rave reviews in The Times and The Guardian,” recalls Dudley with clear pride.
“The name Zemel was my father’s idea and I had formed a successful youth choir by that name in north west London in 1948.”
Zemel is actually ZML which stands for Tsaphon(North) Ma’arav(West) andthe choir took that name officially in December 1961with Dudley now having to audition new members, such was its popularity and arranging the programmes which expanded from Jewish music to Renaissance music –“after I saw a French choir singing it at a festival in Israel and loved it.”
Love also bloomed within the choir and in Dudley’s reign as choir master about 70 couples met and married with Dudley among them as he fell in love with Joan, then a Cambridge Classics student who joined Zemel within the first year and they married in 1960.
“She was a very good alto and a super musician, so I was thrilled when she arrived,” said Dudley.
We can testify to that, as it is Joan’s delightful chamber orchestra we hear rehearsing on Friday mornings..
“I don’t know how many people have been in the choir all these years, but it must run into thousands and it is generational with children and then grandchildren joining.”
Dudley and Joan’s own children are the definitive example of cross-generational talent as all three went to Oxford and the eldest Susanna who lives in Israel played first bassoon in the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Ruth was the Philharmonia Orchestra and son Jacques Cohen who is known equally as a conductor and composer also teaches composition of the Purcell school of music. “Until recently he also conducted the Ukraine Symphony Orchestra,” adds Dudley who moves on to talk about grandchildren Sam Scheer,21 who is conductor of his own orchestra, Campanella and 17-year-old Isaac Scheer who plays viola at the Royal College of Music, took up the trombone and euphonium and is, as Dudley says a “super jazz pianist”. With such musical prowess in the Cohen family, it’s not easy to stand out, but Dudley does with his stories, notably the one about the Zemel Choir recording music for Laurence Olivier’s album of bible stories.
“This is very funny,” warns Dudley who adapted chants and arranged them into the traditional Jewish music required for the HMV record. “I was told I would be paid four shillings a bar, so I immediately changed it from the four/four I’d written to a two/four which doubled the price.”
You have to be a musician to appreciate the humour, but Dudley’s giggle is as joyful as the music coming from next door. Not that Dudley was impressed with Olivier’s narrative over the Zemel singing. “All that ‘praise you the Lord, Hallelujah.” I think it was a little bit over the top.” Dudley, as you’ll recall, is very low key.
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