About

🕊ALPHABET OF WRONGDOING 🕊

n e w / ancient music 

A few years ago Toronto songwriter Jennifer Castle wrote me an hour before her show at Night Gallery in LA inviting me to sing ‘a couple of a capella prayers to clear the space’ before her set. It was the first time I sang Jewish ceremonial prayers outside of a ritual context.  I chose the heavy liturgy from the holiest days on the Jewish calendar - the lunar New Year, Rosh Hashanah, and the day of atonement, Yom Kippur. 

Alphabet of Wrongdoing was set in motion that night — ceremonial Jewish prayers and blessings encircling themes of reckoning, forgiveness, mortality, striving, and atonement reimagined for secular audiences and secular spaces. The album, accompanying libretto, and performance investigate communal gestures of forgiveness — attempts to “Restore dignity to existence through music…” (poet Alan Felsenthal)

The title of the project comes from the prayer Ashamnu, or Alphabet of Wrongdoing. In a ritual context, a congregation would stand and recite, in alphabetical order, beating their chests with each admittance, all of the ways they may have missed the mark in the past year. And even if one has not committed the confessed acts, the person next to her may have — and so to hear these acts uttered aloud in community might help someone see how they may have harmed another. This communal act of forgiveness is a form of chesbon ha’nefesh - or spiritual accounting. We sing the words aloud because ‘Words that are written . . . may fold away and disappear. Only the spoken word is not sealed, folded, occult or undemocratic.’ (From Anne Carson’s Eros)

This music is for challenging junctures, when we have more questions than answers. I consult tradition when I am at such an impasse; It provides an antidote to the constant content update or disappointment of the news cycle. To make an album of reimagined Jewish liturgy is my way of saying we can re-work, but we cannot obliterate; matter just does not behave that way. We know what we have destroyed, but we don’t yet know what we will create. This is me hitting pause before we re-build -- consulting tradition, listening to my tradition, in case it carries any hints. 

Alphabet of Wrongdoing has been performed at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Human Resources and Night Gallery in Los Angeles, the Canadian Music Centre in Toronto, Ursa and Pop Montreal in Montreal, and the Jane Hotel and Ballroom in NYC. When possible I am accompanied on synthesizer by my collaborator Johnny Spence and other special guests.

🕊ALBUM DETAILS 🕊

Produced by Daniela Gesundheit and Dan Goldman of Snowblink. 

Performed by Daniela Gesundheit with Dan Goldman, Basia Bulat, Johnny Spence, Sarah Pagé, Evan Cartwright, Alex Lukashevsky, Sari Lightman, Romy Lightman, Jason Sharp, with string arrangements by Owen Pallett performed by the Macedonian Symphonic Orchestra (Oleg Kondratenko, conductor). 

Instrumentation: Voice, nylon string and electric guitars, synth, piano, bass and baritone saxophones, harp, percussion, autoharp, nineteen piece string orchestra.

Mixed by Steve Kaye at Sunking Studios in Los Angeles (Kol Nidre mixed by Dan Goldman). 

Recorded by Dan Goldman in Montréal, Leon Taheny at Boombox studio in Toronto, Nicolas Pétrowski at Mixart in Montréal, and Daniela Gesundheit in Los Angeles. 

Mastered by David Travers-Smith at found.sound

Recorded with the assistance of a Canada Council for the Arts Concept to Realization Grant. 

Alphabet of Wrongdoing was recorded on the traditional territories of Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat people, and on the unceded lands of The Kanien’kehá:ka Nation and the Gabrielino/Tongva people. 

🕊ABOUT DANIELA GESUNDHEIT 🕊

Daniela Gesundheit is a vocalist, composer, and cantor interested in long-surviving musical traditions that explore and foster group identity. She has collaborated with celebrated acoustic biologist Katy Payne (Songs of the Humpback Whale) for performances that feature choirs trained in the principles of Humpback whale 'composition,' and with the Institute for Art and Olfaction in Los Angeles creating immersive olfactory music events that have been staged throughout the US and Europe, including the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. She was a featured vocalist alongside Brian Eno on Owen Pallett’s In Conflict and on astronaut Chris Hadfield’s Songs From a Tin Can - the first record ever to be recorded in space. As Snowblink, Gesundheit writes non-denominational devotional pop music and has released three critically acclaimed records on Fire, Arts & Crafts, and Outside Music. She is also a member of the band Hydra, a collaboration between Feist, Snowblink, and Montreal’s LaForce. She sings traditional Jewish liturgy for Shir Libeynu, the first queer-inclusive synagogue in Toronto and officiates lifecycle rituals throughout the US and Canada. Gesundheit is the recipient of numerous grants, including the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council. She lives in Los Angeles and haunts Toronto with her husband and fraternal twin babies.