Temple Solel music director hitting right career notes
ANNE RACKHAM
Associate Editor
When Andrea Jill Higgins was young, she was offered a scholarship to the Juilliard School, but her parents turned it down. Higgins didn't push the issue, she says, because she didn't really want to be a concert pianist and because she "fell for the 'marry a nice Jewish boy' routine."
Many years later, Higgins, now on her second marriage to a nice Jewish man, is finally "making it" in her chosen career - as a composer. Higgins, music director at Temple Solel in Paradise Valley for almost 20 years and associate conductor, accompanist and resident composer for the Scottsdale-based Arizona Arts Chorale since 1994, is being commissioned to write pieces for conventions and concerts; and some of her liturgical pieces, settings of psalms published by Transcontinental Music Publications/New Jewish Music Press, are being marketed for sale to Christian choral groups.
Now if she could just find someone to produce the musical she's been working on for 10 years, about a couple going through a divorce. Her goal is to one day make a living solely by writing music.
"I'm headed there because I've gotten commissions," she says proudly, although she acknowledges that "there isn't enough demand for Jewish liturgical music" for anyone to work full-time doing only that.
"I'd just like to be known as an all-around musician. I'd like to be taken seriously as a composer," she says, playing an original "pop" tune on her piano in her living room, where she prefers to do most of her composing because, she says, "my music is just too complicated to just play into the computer."
Higgins' work runs the gamut of musical styles.
"Haporeis Sukat Shalom" (Whose Shelter of Peace), her most recent commissioned work, is very melodic and lends itself to congregational participation. Other works are based on themes and chord progressions that, rather than flowing gracefully, vary widely from measure to measure, depending on the text, in an almost operatic fashion.
"I have a strong background in opera," says Higgins. "I've always been a melody person; it's the melody I get first, and then I have to fit it with the language."
In "Light a Candle" - Higgins' setting of a poem by Israeli poet Zelda, translated into English by American poet Marcia Falk, which Higgins dedicated to the memory of Sylvia Plotkin (late wife of Rabbi Albert Plotkin of Temple Beth Israel) - sweet major chords under the words "How can the Sabbath plant a huge and shining flower" descend disturbingly into dark, dissonant chords for the lyric "in a blind and narrow heart" and "in a heart of raging flesh."
"Some words call for dissonance," Higgins offers.
Although she writes mostly for cantorial soloists, piano and choir, she notes that she also is "branching out instrumentally," writing music for flute, harp and even tuba.
When Higgins needs to get away to reflect, her personal prescription for sanity is riding her Polish Arabian horse, Gabriel, and "the melodies just come."
"With composing, there's a lot of solitude involved, and it's hard to get away," she notes.
Sometimes it's difficult to write at home, she says, where there is nevertheless no escaping the music and religion that color her life. People are greeted with it at the doorway - which is adorned with a door knocker made of brass eighth notes, a keyboard mezzuzah, and a doorbell that plays familiar tunes.
"Being a composer is different than being an executive or a doctor or a lawyer," Higgins says. "The music is always with you; you wake up with it in the middle of the night."
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