Jewish music

Changes in European Jewish communities, including increasing political emancipation and some elements of religious reform, had their effects on music of the synagogue. By the late eighteenth century, music in European synagogues had sunk to a low standard. The Jewish scholar Eric Werner notes that among the European Ashkenazi communities of Europe "between 1660 and 1720 the musical tradition was waning, and the second half of the eighteenth century witnessed its worst decay".[11] The historian of Jewish music Abraham Zevi Idelsohn considers that "Eighteenth century manuscripts of Synagogue song display a striking monotony of style and texts".^[12] In this context the English music historian Charles Burney visiting the Ashkenazi synagogue of Amsterdam in 1772, gave the opinion of one who was clearly ignorant of synagogue music (but did not regard that as a disqualification for comment) that the service resembled "a kind of tol- de rol, instead of words, which to me, seemed very farcical".^{[13][n 1]}

Others in England were more sympathetic to the synagogue service. The singing of the chazan Myer Lyon inspired the Methodist minister Thomas Olivers in 1770 to adapt the melody of the hymn Yigdal for a Christian hymn, The God of Abraham Praise.^[16] Many synagogue melodies were used by Isaac Nathan in his 1815 settings of Lord Byron's Hebrew Melodies, and the popularity of this work drew the attention of Gentiles for the first time to this music (although in fact many of Nathan's melodies were not Jewish in origin, but contrafacta adapted from European folk melodies).^[17]

Franz Schubert around 1828 made a choral setting of Psalm 92 in Hebrew for the Vienna chazan Salomon Sulzer.^[18] German congregations commissioned works from other Gentile composers, including Albert Methfessel (1785–1869).^[19]

Later in the century, as synagogues began to utilize choirs singing in Western

Secular Jewish music

Secular Jewish music (and dances) have been influenced both by surrounding Gentile traditions and Jewish sources preserved over time.

Klezmer

Around the 15th century, a tradition of secular (non-liturgical) Jewish music was developed by musicians called kleyzmorim or kleyzmerim by Ashkenazi Jews in Eastern Europe. The repertoire is largely dance songs for weddings and other celebrations. They are typically in Yiddish.

Sephardic/Ladino

These song traditions spread from Spain to Morocco (the Western Tradition) and several parts of the

Jewish art music

Preclassical, classical, romantic and 20th-century composers

Salamone Rossi (1570 – c. 1630) of Mantua composed a series of choral settings called "The Songs of Solomon", based on Jewish liturgical and biblical texts.

Most art musicians of Jewish origin in the 19th century composed music that cannot be considered Jewish in any sense. In the words of Peter Gradenwitz, from this period onwards, the issue is "no longer the story of Jewish music, but the story of music by Jewish masters."

The Jewish national revival in art music

At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries many Jewish composers sought to create a distinctly Jewish national sound in their music. Notable among these were the composers of the

The Jewish national revival in music was not only in Russia. A number of Western European composers took an interest in their Jewish musical roots, and tried to create a unique Jewish art style. Ernest Bloch (1880–1959), a Swiss composer who emigrated to the United States, composed Schelomo for cello and orchestra, Suite Hebraique for viola and piano, and Sacred Service, which is the first attempt to set the Jewish service in a form similar to the Requiem, for full orchestra, choir and soloists. Bloch described his connection to Jewish music as intensely personal:

It is not my purpose, nor my desire, to attempt a 'reconstitution' of Jewish music, or to base my work on melodies more or less authentic. I am not an archeologist.... It is the Jewish soul that interests me ... the freshness and naiveté of the Patriarchs; the violence of the Prophetic books; the Jewish savage love of justice...^[25]

As a child in Aix-en-Provence, Darius Milhaud (1892–1974) was exposed to the music of the Provençal Jewish community. "I have been greatly influenced by the character" of this music, he wrote.^[26] His opera Esther de Carpentras draws on this rich musical heritage. Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895–1968), an Italian composer who immigrated to America on the eve of World War II, was strongly influenced by his Sephardic Jewish upbringing. His second violin concerto draws on Jewish themes, as do many of his songs and choral works: these include a number of songs in Ladino, the language of Sephardic Jews.

Israeli music

Art music in Mandatory Palestine and Israel

The 1930s saw an influx of Jewish composers to British Mandatory Palestine, later Israel, among them musicians of stature in Europe. These composers included Paul Ben-Haim, Erich Walter Sternberg, Marc Lavry, Ödön Pártos, and Alexander Uriah Boskovich. These composers were all concerned with forging a new Jewish identity in music, an identity which would suit the new, emerging identity of Israel. While the response of each of these composers to this challenge was intensely personal, there was one distinct trend to which many of them adhered: many of these and other composers sought to distance themselves from the musical style of the Klezmer, which they viewed as weak and unsuitable for the new national ethos. Many of the stylistic features of Klezmer were abhorrent to them. "Its character is depressing and sentimental", wrote music critic and composer Menashe Ravina in 1943. "The healthy desire to free ourselves of this sentimentalism causes many to avoid this...".^[27]

From these early experiments a large corpus of original Israeli art music has been developed. Modern Israeli composers include Betty Olivero, Tsippi Fleischer, Mark Kopytman and Yitzhak Yedid.

Israeli folk

From the earliest days of Zionist settlement, Jewish immigrants wrote popular folk music. At first, songs were based on borrowed melodies from German, Russian, or traditional Jewish folk music with new lyrics written in Hebrew. Starting in the early 1920s, however, Jewish immigrants made a conscious effort to create a new Hebrew style of music, a style that would tie them to their earliest Hebrew origins and that would differentiate them from the style of the Jewish diaspora of Eastern Europe, which they viewed as weak.^[28] This new style borrowed elements from Arabic and, to a lesser extent, traditional Yemenite and eastern Jewish styles: the songs were often homophonic (that is, without clear harmonic character), modal, and limited in range. "The huge change in our lives demands new modes of expression", wrote composer and music critic Menashe Ravina in 1943. "... and, just as in our language we returned to our historical past, so has our ear turned to the music of the east ... as an expression of our innermost feelings."^[29]

The youth, labor and kibbutz movements played a major role in musical development before and after the establishment of Israeli statehood in 1948, and in the popularization of these songs. The Zionist establishment saw music as a way of establishing a new national identity, and, on a purely pragmatic level, of teaching Hebrew to new immigrants. The national labor organization, the Histadrut, set up a music publishing house that disseminated songbooks and encouraged public sing-alongs (שירה בציבור). This tradition of public sing-alongs continues to the present day, and is a characteristic of modern Israeli culture.

Mizrahi

Main article:

percussion elements. Mizrahi music is usually high pitched. Zohar Argov

is a popular singer whose music typifies the Mizrahi music style.

Non-Jewish composers using Jewish music

Sergei Prokofiev: Overture on Hebrew Themes

Performed by members of the Advent Chamber Orchestra

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Problems playing this file? See media help.

A number of non-Jewish composers have adapted Jewish music to their compositions. They include:

• Maurice Ravel wrote Mélodies hébraïques for violin and piano.
• Max Bruch, a German Protestant, (but a student of the German Jewish composer Ferdinand Hiller) made an arrangement, Kol Nidrei, of the Jewish Yom Kippur prayer Kol Nidre for cello and orchestra.^[30]
• Sergei Prokofiev wrote Overture on Hebrew Themes, an arrangement of traditional Jewish folksongs for clarinet, string quartet, and piano.
• Dmitri Shostakovich incorporated elements of Jewish music in some of his compositions. Most notable are the song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry, and the 13th symphony, titled Babi Yar.

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Jewish music.

• Biblical music
• List of Jewish musicians
• Klezmer

Notes

1. canto fermo, and responses were made by the congregation, in a manner which resembled the hum of bees. After this three of the sweet singers of Israel [...] began singing a kind of jolly modern melody, sometimes in unison and sometimes in parts, to a kind of tol de rol, instead of words, which to me, seemed very farcical ... At the end of each strain, the whole congregation set up such a kind of cry, as a pack of hounds when a fox breaks cover ... It is impossible for me to divine what idea the Jews themselves annex to this vociferation."^[14] The historian David Conway notes: " We have in the account of the ‘trio’ a description of the "keleichomos", literally [in Hebrew] "instruments of robbery", an acronym of 'chazan, meshorrer, singer' and a sort of pun on klezmer (= klei zmir, "instruments of song"); this denoted the accompaniment of the chazan by bass and descant ( meshorrer ), which became a common practice in European synagogues in the early eighteenth century and had been introduced to Amsterdam [...] between 1700 and 1712. The epithet "sweet singer of Israel", by the way, derived from the description of King David in 2 Samuel 23.1, was to be used ad nauseam by writers about Jewish musicians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, both in praise and, by their detractors, sarcastically."^[15]

References

1. ^ Seroussi et al., (n.d.)
2. ^ See, e.g. Mishnah Sukkot, chapter 5 Archived 2020-10-05 at the Wayback Machine, on website of Oceanside Jewish Centre, accessed 8 June 2014.
3. ^ Jonathan L. Friedmann, "The Choir in Jewish History", Jewish Magazine, accessed 8 June 2014.
4. ^ Idelsohn (1992), 9–13.
5. ^ Idelsohn (1992), 15.
6. ^ Idelsohn (1992), 14.
7. ^ Idelsohn (1992), 18.
8. ^ Nulman, Macy. "Concise Encyclopedia of Jewish Music s.v. Kol Nidre, page 144". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
9. ^ Idelsohn (1992), 19–21.
10. ^ Conway (2012), 21.
11. ^ Werner (1976), p. 169
12. ^ Idelsohn (1992), p. 213
13. ^ Conway (2012), p. 21
14. ^ Burney (1959), II, 229.
15. ^ Conway (2012), p. 21
16. ^ Conway (2012), 76.
17. ^ Conway (2012), 93–97.
18. ^ Conway (2012), 135. A score is available at IMSLP
19. ^ Conway (2012), 156–7.
20. ^ Conway (2012), 133–6
21. ^ Conway (2012), 219–20
22. ^ Conway (2012), 158
23. ^ Conway (2012), 103–4
24. ^ Gradenwitz (1996), pp. 174–5.
25. ^ Quoted in Mary Tibaldi Chiesa, "Ernest Bloch - The Jewish Composer" in Musica Hebraica, Volume 1–2 (Jerusalem, 1938)
26. ^ Darius Milhaud, La Musique Juive au Comtat-Venaissin in Musica Hebraica, Volume 1–2 (Jerusalem, 1938)
27. ^ Menashe Ravina, The Songs of the Land of Israel, monograph published by the Institute for Music, Ltd., Jerusalem, 1943
28. ^ Edel, Itzhak (1946) "HaShir HaEretz-Yisraeli" ("The Songs of the Land of Israel") (Tel Aviv: Monograph published by Merkaz HaTarbut, Histadrut).
29. ^ Menashe Ravina, "The Songs of the People of Israel", published by Hamossad Lemusika Ba'am, 1943
30. ^ Conway (2012), 193.

Bibliography

• Burney, Charles, ed. Percy A. Scholes (1959). An Eighteenth Century Musical Tour in Central Europe and the Netherlands. " vols. London: Oxford University Press.
• Conway, David (2012). Jewry in Music: Entry to the Profession from the Enlightenment to Richard Wagner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  ISBN 978-1-107-01538-8
• Gradenwitz, Peter (1996). The Music of Israel from the Biblical Era to Modern Times. 2nd. edition. Portland: Amadeus Press.
• Idelsohn, A. Z., Thesaurus of Hebrew Oriental song (10 vols.)
• Idelsohn, A. Z., int. A. Orenstein (1992). Jewish Music: Its Historical Development. New York: Dover.
• Seroussi, Edwin et al. (n.d.), "Jewish Music" in
  Oxford Music Online
  (subscription required)
• Walden, Joshua S. (2015). The Cambridge Companion to Jewish Music. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Werner, Eric (1976). A Voice Still Heard: The Sacred Songs of the Ashkenazic Jews. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press

Further reading

• Rabinovitch, Israel, Of Jewish Music, Ancient and Modern, trans. from the Yiddish by A. M. Klein

External links

• London Jewish Male Choir - Perform wide range of Jewish music
• Jewish Sheet Music Archive Archived 2017-09-07 at the Wayback Machine
• Milken Archive of Jewish Music
• The Dartmouth Jewish Sound Archive
• Jewish Music Research Center
• Judaica Sound Archives at Florida Atlantic University Libraries Archived 2020-09-29 at the Wayback Machine
• The Jewish Music WebCenter
• Music and the Holocaust Articles, images and recordings of music of 1933–1945.
• A list of Jewish composers with sheet music published by IMSLP.com.
• Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World: "Music", excerpt, p 18 sqq, print: Brill, Leiden 2010