Joseph Rumshinsky

Joseph Rumshinsky (1881–1956), Jewish composer born near Vilna in Lithuania (then part of Russian Poland). Rumshinsky—with Sholom Secunda, Alexander Olshanetsky, and Abraham Ellstein—is considered one of the "big four" composers and conductors of American Yiddish theater.

His mother taught singing to local singers and badkhonim (wedding entertainers). Rumshinsky was sent as a child to study with a chazn. At the age of eight he was called "Yoshke der notn-freser" (a fresser is somebody who gobbles voraciously) at the music school where he studied piano. He traveled until 1894 with various Hazzans. It was in Grodno that he first saw Yiddish theater (Abraham Goldfaden's operetta Shulamis); he then joined the chorus of Kaminska's traveling troup until his voice changed in 1896, at which point he became choir director for a chazn named Rabinovitch. His first composition was a piano waltz which became very popular in Vilna, where it was published.

In 1897 he became choir director for Borisov's Russian opera/operetta; in 1888 he conducted a full production of Goldfaden's Bar Kokhba. In 1899, in Lódz, he was hired as conductor of the new Hazomir Choral Society, studying and arranging folksongs as well as Haydn, Handel, and Mendelsohn oratorios. He studied with the Polish musician Henryk Meltzer and at the Warsaw Conservatory. In 1903 he left for London to avoid conscription in the czar's army.

In London he met the New Yorker Charles Tsunzer (Charles Zunser, the son of the folk bard Eliakum Zunser), who convinced him to emigrate to the United States in 1904. Blocked by the union from working in the theater, he taught piano and wrote compositions including a funeral march commemorating the Kishinev pogrom. 1905-1906 he was director at Boston's Hope Theater.

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