Binyumen Schaechter (born 1963) is a conductor, music director, composer, arranger, solo performer, and piano accompanist in the world of Yiddish music. He also lectures on topics related to Yiddish music, language, and culture. Many of his songs, choral arrangements, and performances are recorded on video (see YouTube), DVD, and CD. He is a composer (known as Ben Schaechter) in the world of American musical theater and cabaret, and his songs are performed in venues worldwide. He has been music director of The Yiddish Philharmonic Chorus since 1995.
Early Years
The youngest of four children, Schaechter was born in the East New York section of Brooklyn, NY. His father, Mordkhe Schaechter, was born in Czernowitz, Romania. (The city became part of Ukraine after World War II). His mother, Charlotte (née Saffian), was born in Brooklyn and grew up in the Bronx. Her parents came from the towns of Holoskove and Orynyn, both in Ukraine.
In 1966, the Schaechter family moved to the Norwood Heights section of the Bronx. There, they formed a Yiddish-speaking enclave with several other families that spoke only Yiddish at home. Most of the families lived on Bainbridge Avenue, so the group named itself Di Beynbridzhivke.
Schaechter attended the High School of Music and Art (now LaGuardia High School), Columbia University, and the Manhattan School of Music. Trained as a classical composer and pianist, he studied piano at the Hebrew Arts School for Music and Dance (now the Lucy Moses School) with Natan Brand and composition privately with Dr. Miriam Gideon and John Corigliano. In drama critic Martin Gottfried’s course on American musical theater at Columbia University, Schaechter heard the score to Pippin and was inspired to pursue a career as a theater composer.
He was accepted into the acclaimed BMI Musical Theater Workshop, where he formed his first collaborations with librettists and lyricists. His work, with Stephen Schwartz as one of his mentors, was selected for development by ASCAP, the Dramatists’s Guild, and the prestigious Eugene O’Neill National Musical Theater Conference (1992).
Musical Work
His Off-Broadway music includes songs in Naked Boys Singing! (the fourth-longest-running show in Off-Broadway history, with a subsequent film release), Pets! (Dramatic Publishing), That’s Life! (Outer Critics Circle nominee), Too Jewish? (Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle nominee) and Double Identity. In its review of Double Identity, The New York Times wrote, “Among [the show's] assets...is the ear-catching score by Ben Schaechter, whose wide-ranging gifts have buoyed recent hit revues like That’s Life! and Too Jewish?” His revue It Helps to Sing About It: Songs of Ben Schaechter and Dan Kael won the 2018 ASCAP-Bistro Outstanding Revue Award. Their song “I Can Tell Time” won the 2018 MAC Award for Best Song.
Schaechter has created and performed several Yiddish musical shows, some featuring him as a solo performer and others featuring his actor-singer daughters, Reyna and Temma (known together as Di Shekhter-tekhter). As their music director and piano accompanist, he traveled with the duo to Canada, Brazil, France, Israel, and Australia. A documentary concert video, When Our Bubbas and Zeydas Were Young: The Schaechter Sisters on Stage, was released on DVD in 2012 by Ergo Media. The video, directed by Academy Award-nominated documentary film director Josh Waletzky, was a featured selection in film, theater, and music festivals. More recent videos of Di Shekhter-tekhter are available on YouTube.
Currently, Schaechter is music director and conductor of the acclaimed Yiddish Philharmonic Chorus (formerly the Jewish People's Philharmonic Chorus), a 40-voice SATB intergenerational ensemble with an exclusively Yiddish repertoire. They perform contemporary choral arrangements of classics, art songs, folk songs, holiday songs, and other genres, as well as Yiddish translations of popular songs and arias. Schaechter created most of the arrangements and popular song translations in the chorus’s repertoire. The chorus regularly performs in Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center and at the annual North American Jewish Choral Festival. They have performed in Symphony Space, Alice Tully Hall, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, West Point Military Academy, and Shea Stadium. The chorus’s live concert recordings are available on YouTube, including the virtual choir video of “Vaserl” they created during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is the first and the only Yiddish virtual choir video in existence.