His first composition was a piano waltz which became very popular in Vilna. 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
Łódź, 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. At the time, many American Yiddish productions were deemed
shund (trash) "that encompassed a world of cheap pulp fiction, common periodicals, and other coarse diversions." Rumshinsky tried to steer Yiddish musical entertainment away from what he called "elevated vaudeville" toward his own vision of a new American genre of Yiddish light operetta. In 1916 he joined with
Boris Thomashefsky and worked as composer and conductor at the
National Theater, scoring comedies and melodramas. His
Tsubrokhene fidele ('Broken fiddle' or 'Broken violin') boasted a full-sized dance corps and a full pit orchestra with two dozen musicians (most productions had previously used a small dance band or wedding band). (When he first added harp, oboe, and bassoon to his orchestrations, actors called him "crazy Wagner.") In 1919 he moved to the Kessler Second Avenue Theater in the
Yiddish Theater District. In 1923 Rumshinsky introduced
Molly Picon to Second Avenue in a production of
Yankele. Molly Picon, her husband
Jacob (Yankl) Kalich, and Rumshinsky were called "the Three Musketeers of the East Side" in a 1931
New York Times article. Rumshinsky wrote dozens of shows over the course of four decades. Beginning in the 1930s, he also worked in radio, becoming music director of the only Yiddish program broadcast on a nationwide network, The
Jewish Hour, sponsored by the Yiddish daily newspaper
Der Tog. He worked from 1946 to 1949 at
Maurice Schwartz's Yiddish Art Theater, scoring
Hershele ostropoler,
Isaac Leib Peretz's
Dray matones, and
Sholem Aleichem's
Blondzhende shtern. In 1940 he collected his writings, published in
The Forward, adding new articles and memoirs, and published them in
Tog as
Epizodn fun mayn lebn (Episodes from My life). The collection was published in book form in 1944 under the title
Klangen fun mayn lebn. Rumshinsky also composed liturgical pieces. In 1926 he conducted the more than 100-voice chorus of the Hazzanim Farband Choir in his biblically-based cantata, Oz yashir. In the 1940s Rumshinsky completed an opera in Hebrew,
Ruth, which has not been performed or recorded to this day. His final show,
Wedding March, was in the midst of its run at the time of his death. ==Works==