Search Results

This epilogue draws the reader into the ethnographic present: the performance of Jewish music in a postmodern world. Starting with a concert performance of the New Budapest Orpheum Society, for which the author is the Artistic Director, the chapter asks questions about the possibility of revival after the end of Jewish music history. Jewish music, in popular and art genres, may thrive in revival in the twenty-first century, but as phenomena such as the popularity of klezmer in the nations that perpetrated the Holocaust signal a return to history or a release from history. The processes of cultural negotiation and historicism provide contexts for Jewish music in a postmodern world no less than in modernity.

This chapter navigates Erich Korngold's connections to Jewishness. It also examines the role played by external factors in the political context of his career and the impact of both on his music and musical activities. It highlights in particular a little-known correspondence with musicologist Anneliese Landau, who, in 1942, asked him directly: “How is your approach to the question of a Jewish style in music?” In so doing, the chapter seeks to convey an understanding of Korngold's relationship to Jewish music and his Jewish identity with the nuance that this complex and sometimes contentious issue deserves. It is guided by four pertinent questions, on the matter of Judaism and Jewish culture, on how others regard Korngold's work as Jewish, on how Korngold regards his work as Jewish, and finally, on how the investigator regards his work as Jewish.

This chapter explores the historical formation of the klezmer phenomenon in terms of changing structures of feeling. It begins by considering arguments over terminology—not only the term klezmer, but also the word revival—and how these debates situate klezmer music within a larger musical landscape. It then relates the klezmer phenomenon to what Haym Soloveitchik has called the end of self-evident Jewishness. While stringent orthodoxy is one outcome of the tension between tradition and ideology, the klezmer revival is another. There follows an analysis of the fault lines of sensibility in the period immediately preceding the klezmer revival. While the popularity of old-time Jewish wedding music declined and an incipient heritage orientation to it can be detected within the Jewish music world of the time, this music was notably absent from the folk song and music revivals of the fifties and sixties. To better understand this absence, the chapter contrasts the musical sensibilities of Theodore Bikel, an international folk singer who specialized in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian songs, and those of Mickey Katz, who performed English–Yiddish comedy and musical parodies for largely Jewish audiences. Seen not as a musical wasteland, but as a plenum of shifting sensibilities, the fifties and sixties hold clues to the emergence of the klezmer revival in the seventies, its efflorescence in the nineties, and its changing character in the United States and in the “Jewish space” of Europe today.

This chapter examines the history of the Society for Jewish Folk Music, an organization of composers, performers, scholars, and amateur enthusiasts committed to the mission of creating modern Jewish music, founded in 1908. It analyzes the organization's responses to the strange mixture of antisemitism and philosemitism in the Russian musical world, and suggests that their eloquent musical arguments constituted an affirmation of Jewish music as an integral yet distinct voice in modern European culture. The chapter also discusses their efforts to rehabilitate the image of the Jewish musician through a cosmopolitan notion of Jewish national music.

This chapter examines how Russian Jewish culture began to unravel from within as early as the first years of World War I, beginning with a now classic ideological debate over the very Jewishness of Jewish music. It analyzes how the complicated fate of Russian Jewish culture reflected the multiple legacies and divergent experiences of Jews in interwar Soviet Russia, Mandatory Palestine, and the United States. The chapter also suggests that the resurgence of Jewish politics coupled with the broader aesthetic challenge of European modernism that led to the decisive breakdown of the Jewish cultural movement.

Leonid Sabaneyev, like other historians of Jewish music, identified the origin of Jewish art music with the foundation of the Society for Jewish Folk Music—Obshchestvo Yevreyskoy Narodnoy Muzïki (OYNM) in St. Petersburg in 1908. The OYNM was an association of professional musicians and music lovers who sought to purvey Jewish music, both secular and sacred, to audiences both Jewish and non-Jewish. This chapter examines how the political vagaries within the Jewish national movement strongly affected the emergence and development of Jewish cultural organizations. The Russian nationalist model was crucial in turning the OYNM from an organization for the preservation and popularization of Jewish musical culture into a funnel for the creation of specifically Jewish art music. Ironically, the music written by composers whose ambition was to become the Mighty Band of Jewish music emulated their Russian models not only in technical details, but also in their willing embrace of stereotypes of Russian composers, exploited to depict the Oriental others, among them Jews.

In an essay entitled “Aladdin's Lamp” and published on the occasion of the edition of An-sky's The Jewish Artistic Heritage, Abram Markovich Efros, a leading Russian art critic, described a form of neonationalism. It was a creative combination of folk art and modernism in which the supposed authenticity of folk art lent stylistic credentials to modernist art. In the debates about the sources of Jewish art music, an opposition was similarly constructed between the near past and ancient times, between the Oriental-sounding Yiddish folk music and the less Orientally colored sacred music that, many believed, was historically traceable to Biblical times. In this new phase of Jewish art music, kuchkist preoccupation with folk music as an expression of national identity was replaced with a neonationalist orientation, in which national musical sources were abstracted.

This chapter examines the contribution of composer Joel Engel to Russian Jewish music at the turn of the century. It explains that Engel pioneered the scholarly study of Jewish music and the idea of Jewish national art music, and that his twin search for an art and science of Jewish music fused the German science of Judaism and Russian musical ethnography. The chapter also discusses Engel's discovery that the actual voices of the Jewish people threatened to collapse his whole folkloric model of Russian Jewish music.

For the members of the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music, founded in 1908, the rural miniature offered a crucial method of representing Jewish musical traditions including liturgy and klezmer for broad audiences. This chapter investigates early twentieth-century theories about the music of Russian Jewish communities, and considers the metaphorical association, invoked commonly in the writings of members of the Society and in literary and artistic depictions of Jewish culture, between the timbres of the violin and the nationalist concept of a “Jewish voice” expressed in music. The chapter focuses on a case study Joseph Achron’s “Hebrew Melody,” viewing the history of its composition, performance, and reception across the diaspora, following its adaptation in multiple new forms, including its use as a film score and recreation as a concert aria, popular song, and theremin solo.

This chapter provides a comprehensive account of Jewish musical organizations in interwar Galicia. It investigates the various types of Jewish musical organizations and how they implemented their cultural policies. It also shows the wealth and variety of the musical life of the Jewish communities from the four south-eastern provinces of the Second Polish Republic: Lwów, Kraków, Stanisławów, and Tarnopol. The chapter looks into the goal of the Jewish Music Society in Lwów in order to unite the local Jewish musical community and represent the Jewish community in the city's musical life. It analyzes different musical interests and visions of society's cultural role that explain the different activities of symphony orchestra, choir, mandolin orchestra, and chamber orchestra.

The organ was not officially admitted for use in the worship service of many Western European churches until the mid-fifteenth century, despite being an intrinsic part of the sacred architecture and the most important instrument of musical expression for most Western churches since the late Middle Ages. While a link exists between the organ and Jewish culture dating back to pre-Christian times, this book focuses on the period between the introduction of the first organ into a German synagogue in 1810 and the destruction of most synagogues and their organs in the Kristallnacht of 1938. It examines the role of the organ in the musical culture of Jewish communities in Western Europe, especially in Germany, and how this culture reflects the Jewish identity. Through selected and representative compositions, the book studies the different expressive means and characteristics of organ music using a new approach that overcomes the dichotomy between musicology and ethnomusicology through an integrated concept of music with pluralist methodology, research assumptions, and perspectives.

During the early nineteenth century, many reform-minded Jews in Germany began developing ideas about a modernized worship service in line with the Jewish Enlightenment movement, called the Haskalah. The reforms applied not only to the aesthetic but also to the musical aspects of the service to appeal more to a public that was increasingly educated in Western art music. These changes brought about a new branch of Jewish music and marked the beginning of a new era of Judaism that eventually would divide the community into Orthodox and Reform. Throughout the next decades, several debates within the Jewish community erupted over whether the organ should be allowed in synagogues. Among the most notable ones happened during the Second Rabbinical Conference in Frankfurt in 1845 and the First Jewish Synod in Leipzig in 1869, as well as during the proposed construction of an organ in Berlin's New Synagogue in Oranienburger Straβe in 1861. The debates ended after the Jewish community in Cologne allowed the introduction of an organ in Roonstraβe synagogue in 1906. However, almost all of central Europe's synagogue organs would be destroyed during Kristallnacht in 1938 and during the war. Many of the organs were built between 1848 and 1871 when Jewish congregations were enjoying the rewards of liberal German economic policies. This period saw much innovation in organ building as the organ transformed into a synagogue instrument. Later in the nineteenth century, instruments with larger dispositions and many more stops began to appear as the organ gradually took on a solo role in Jewish observances until it eventually became a concert instrument. The placement of the organ in synagogues varied from congregation to congregation, indicating that the instrument was not bound by tradition and had become an expression of the social, cultural, and religious assimilation of Germany's Jewish population.

This book is a study of Jewish identities in professional “art” music, with an emphasis on their complex, often conflicting, nature, something much ignored in essentialist studies of identity. This chapter argues against essentialist assumptions of Jewish identity and introduces the protagonists of this book, who also had multiple identities. Their Jewish ethnicity was certainly an important component of their identity, but what being a Jew meant, both in international modernism and in Jewish culture, varied a great deal. Examining these composers in the contexts of emerging Jewish nationalism, quickly spreading racial theories, and utopian tendencies in modernist art and twentieth-century politics reveals a trajectory that leads from paradigmatic nationalist techniques, such as the reliance on traditional Jewish music through assumptions about the unintended presence of racial essences, to an abstract notion of Judaism which ultimately leads to utopian visions of purity.

Chapter 1 discusses music by and about Jews in early twentieth-century Europe, and the ways that Jews have grappled with the musical stereotypes that spelled their “otherness.” While persistently engaged with a foreign view of Jewish culture, assimilated and estranged Jewish composers became more familiar with the exoticism attributed to Jews in Western art music than with the actual sounds coming from Jewish vernacular traditions or from the synagogue. Unfolding the continuum of Jewish composers haunted by the Wagnerian regime of representation and the noisy tropes associated with musical Judaism, the chapter includes a discussion on Ernest Bloch, Arnold Schoenberg, Erich W. Sternberg, and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and their perceptions of the “Jewish East” (either Eastern Europe and/or Palestine). As most Jewish and non-Jewish composers gravitated to the Eastern European soundscape, musicological historiography followed suit and focused mainly on composers who drew on this inventory. Decentering of the Eastern European soundscape through the above-mentioned case studies serves the double function of underscoring the various importations of Jewish musics silenced by musicological historiographies and the mapping of the emerging habitat in Palestine and later Israel.

This chapter illustrates some observations about author's experience during the past twenty-four years as one of the instigators of the music's revitalization and as a leader of academic klezmer and Yiddish music ensembles at the New England Conservatory of Music and several other colleges. In the last quarter of the twentieth century the Jewish wedding-music tradition known as klezmer reemerged in America and, later, internationally as a popular ethnic musical style and as a creative point of departure, especially for younger musicians. Until its revival in the late 1970s, klezmer music seemed an unlikely choice as a subject for academic inquiry, an orphan of a culture that affords its dance musicians a status only a small notch above that of beggars. For all of these reasons, klezmorim and their repertoire have been largely ignored by scholars of Jewish music, whose Weld has traditionally been confined to the study of more overtly religious musical traditions. This chapter later provides an overview of inventing a klezmer curriculum. Klezmer and Yiddish music became part of the official New England Conservatory curriculum in 1983, with the launching of a one-semester course entitled “Yiddish Music Performance Styles.”

This chapter details how Jewish folk music was presented as high art to concert audiences in early twentieth-century Germany and how that strategy was criticized. In January of 1901, the first issue of the journal Ost und West (East and West) appeared in Berlin. It served as the most important organ of cultural Zionism for the next two decades, and, as its title suggests, it attempted to bridge the cultural divide between east and west European Jews with the aim of creating an ethnic nationalist goal. The first issue contained, among other things, an article by the renowned Jewish philosopher Martin Buber entitled ‘Jewish Renaissance’ — a term that was to characterize this movement. Critical to this renaissance was the establishment of a common spirit binding a modern nation. Although based in Germany, the leaders of the movement envisioned that this spirit would be found in the ‘authentic folk’ of eastern Europe and the ethno-poetry of the folk song. The chapter then uncovers the often overlooked story of these leaders, particularly Leo Winz and Fritz Mordechai Kaufmann, and the significance of their renaissance movement for modern Jewish thought and culture.

The German Jewish merchant class had dominated the American Jewish community since the mid-nineteenth century, but after World War I its power began to erode. The Reform movement, with its Americanized liturgy and refusal to embrace Zionism, held little appeal for Yiddish-speaking newcomers and faced a dwindling membership. Moreover, East European Jews were finally entering politics. Yet in San Francisco and Oakland, the old guard seemed rock solid in the 1920s. German Jews remained in the majority (as almost nowhere else) and their synagogues thrived. While the congregation's innovative rabbi, Louis I. Newman, reached across denominational and class lines, its cantor, Reuben Rinder, established himself as a potent catalyst in the realm of Jewish music. Membership at Emanu-El, Sherith Israel, and Oakland's Sinai soared in the 1920s. Philanthropy abounded as well. After World War I one firm, Levi Strauss and Company, was on course to become the largest apparel maker in the world. Two disciplined and discerning corporate executives were largely responsible for the transformation: Walter Haas and Dan Koshland.