Philip Bohlman
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195178326
- eISBN:
- 9780199869992
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195178326.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music
Is there really such a thing as Jewish music? And does it survive as an expressive practice of worship and identity against modernity? This book poses such questions in new and critical ways by ...
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Is there really such a thing as Jewish music? And does it survive as an expressive practice of worship and identity against modernity? This book poses such questions in new and critical ways by surveying a vast diasporic landscape, taking into consideration the many ways music historically witnessed the confrontation between modern Jews and the world around them, from the waning of the Middle Ages until the Holocaust. The book examines the confluence of many styles and repertories as Jewish music: the sacred and the secular; folk and popular music; songs in which Jewish languages — Yiddish, Ladino, Hebrew — survived in isolation and songs that transformed the nations in which they lived. When Jewish music entered modernity, authenticity became an ideal supplanted by composite traditions. Klezmer music emerged in communities cohabited by Jews and Roma; Jewish cabaret resulted from the collaborations of migrant Jews and non-Jews in nineteenth-century Berlin, Budapest, and Vienna; cantors and composers experimented with new sounds. Modern Jewish music was and is varied, and this book is notable for the ways in which the borders between repertories are crossed and modernity is enriched by the shift of Jewish music from cultural peripheries to the center. Understanding the crisis of modernity — the Holocaust and its aftermath — is crucial to the challenge this book poses for understanding music in our own day.Less
Is there really such a thing as Jewish music? And does it survive as an expressive practice of worship and identity against modernity? This book poses such questions in new and critical ways by surveying a vast diasporic landscape, taking into consideration the many ways music historically witnessed the confrontation between modern Jews and the world around them, from the waning of the Middle Ages until the Holocaust. The book examines the confluence of many styles and repertories as Jewish music: the sacred and the secular; folk and popular music; songs in which Jewish languages — Yiddish, Ladino, Hebrew — survived in isolation and songs that transformed the nations in which they lived. When Jewish music entered modernity, authenticity became an ideal supplanted by composite traditions. Klezmer music emerged in communities cohabited by Jews and Roma; Jewish cabaret resulted from the collaborations of migrant Jews and non-Jews in nineteenth-century Berlin, Budapest, and Vienna; cantors and composers experimented with new sounds. Modern Jewish music was and is varied, and this book is notable for the ways in which the borders between repertories are crossed and modernity is enriched by the shift of Jewish music from cultural peripheries to the center. Understanding the crisis of modernity — the Holocaust and its aftermath — is crucial to the challenge this book poses for understanding music in our own day.
Philip V. Bohlman
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195178326
- eISBN:
- 9780199869992
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195178326.003.0011
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
James Loeffler
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300137132
- eISBN:
- 9780300162943
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300137132.003.0004
- Subject:
- Music, Psychology of Music
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
James Loeffler
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300137132
- eISBN:
- 9780300162943
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300137132.003.0006
- Subject:
- Music, Psychology of 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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Mark Solbin
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520227170
- eISBN:
- 9780520935655
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520227170.003.0008
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Kálra Móricz
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520250888
- eISBN:
- 9780520933682
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520250888.003.0002
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Kálra Móricz
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520250888
- eISBN:
- 9780520933682
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520250888.003.0003
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
James Loeffler
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300137132
- eISBN:
- 9780300162943
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300137132.003.0003
- Subject:
- Music, Psychology of Music
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Joshua S. Walden
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199334667
- eISBN:
- 9780199369409
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199334667.003.0005
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Klara Moricz
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520250888
- eISBN:
- 9780520933682
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520250888.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
This book mounts a challenge to prevailing essentialist assumptions about “Jewish music,” which maintain that ethnic groups, nations, or religious communities possess an essence which must manifest ...
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This book mounts a challenge to prevailing essentialist assumptions about “Jewish music,” which maintain that ethnic groups, nations, or religious communities possess an essence which must manifest itself in art created by members of that group. It scrutinizes concepts of Jewish identity and reorders ideas about twentieth-century “Jewish music” in three case studies: Russian-Jewish composers of the first two decades of the twentieth century; the Swiss-American Ernest Bloch; and Arnold Schoenberg. Examining these composers in the context of emerging Jewish nationalism, widespread racial theories, and utopian tendencies in modernist art and twentieth-century politics, the author describes a trajectory from paradigmatic nationalist techniques, through assumptions about the unintended presence of racial essences, to an abstract notion of Judaism.Less
This book mounts a challenge to prevailing essentialist assumptions about “Jewish music,” which maintain that ethnic groups, nations, or religious communities possess an essence which must manifest itself in art created by members of that group. It scrutinizes concepts of Jewish identity and reorders ideas about twentieth-century “Jewish music” in three case studies: Russian-Jewish composers of the first two decades of the twentieth century; the Swiss-American Ernest Bloch; and Arnold Schoenberg. Examining these composers in the context of emerging Jewish nationalism, widespread racial theories, and utopian tendencies in modernist art and twentieth-century politics, the author describes a trajectory from paradigmatic nationalist techniques, through assumptions about the unintended presence of racial essences, to an abstract notion of Judaism.
Tina Frühauf
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195337068
- eISBN:
- 9780199852260
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195337068.003.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Tina Frühauf
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195337068
- eISBN:
- 9780199852260
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195337068.003.0003
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
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. ...
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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.Less
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.
Kálra Móricz
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520250888
- eISBN:
- 9780520933682
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520250888.003.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Assaf Shelleg
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- November 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199354948
- eISBN:
- 9780199354962
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199354948.003.0002
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music, History, Western
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Hankus Netsky
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520238749
- eISBN:
- 9780520937178
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520238749.003.0011
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music
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 ...
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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.”Less
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.”
Fred Rosenbaum
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520259133
- eISBN:
- 9780520945029
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520259133.003.0008
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Howard Pollack
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520248649
- eISBN:
- 9780520933149
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520248649.003.0003
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
This chapter claims that many recollections suggest Gershwin's early absorption of British popular music, an inheritance displayed in various scores. Gershwin rarely dwelled on his Jewish-Russian ...
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This chapter claims that many recollections suggest Gershwin's early absorption of British popular music, an inheritance displayed in various scores. Gershwin rarely dwelled on his Jewish-Russian background, but remained interested in the Yiddish theater. Although Jewish Americans clearly contributed significantly to the development of popular music in the early twentieth century, this phenomenon remains subject to widely varying interpretations. In drawing on the nexus of Irving Berlin's popular songs, James Reese Europe's ragtime-jazz, and W. C. Handy's blues, the Castles looked ahead to Gershwin's own career. When Gershwin took a job plugging songs in 1914, he arrived not so much as a trailblazer but as someone eager to join in the excitement.Less
This chapter claims that many recollections suggest Gershwin's early absorption of British popular music, an inheritance displayed in various scores. Gershwin rarely dwelled on his Jewish-Russian background, but remained interested in the Yiddish theater. Although Jewish Americans clearly contributed significantly to the development of popular music in the early twentieth century, this phenomenon remains subject to widely varying interpretations. In drawing on the nexus of Irving Berlin's popular songs, James Reese Europe's ragtime-jazz, and W. C. Handy's blues, the Castles looked ahead to Gershwin's own career. When Gershwin took a job plugging songs in 1914, he arrived not so much as a trailblazer but as someone eager to join in the excitement.
Tina Frühauf
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195337068
- eISBN:
- 9780199852260
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195337068.003.0002
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
Based on ancient written sources, the history of the organ in Judaism can be traced to several possible predecessors, including the ugav and the magrepah, which date back to before the Middle Ages. ...
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Based on ancient written sources, the history of the organ in Judaism can be traced to several possible predecessors, including the ugav and the magrepah, which date back to before the Middle Ages. Iconographic evidence also provides information on the relationship between the organ and Judaism and may even confirm the existence of the instrument during the second and third centuries C.E. in ancient Israel/Palestine. However, the first iconographic document depicting the organ being played in the synagogue is the siddur of the Bohemian family Lobkowicz (1494), although the occasion appears to be of a secular nature rather than a formal synagogue service. When the Jews were expelled from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s, many settled in central Europe, where their musical history transformed, establishing the organ as a significant theme in Jewish art and literature and its placement in the synagogue. In the sixteenth century, a number of European communities began introducing instruments into Jewish worship service and, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, attempts were made to legitimize the organ as a synagogue instrument in Italy amid rabbinical prohibition. By the end of the century, anti-Jewish agitation had begun and new regulations limited the performance of Jewish musicians to a predominantly liturgical framework.Less
Based on ancient written sources, the history of the organ in Judaism can be traced to several possible predecessors, including the ugav and the magrepah, which date back to before the Middle Ages. Iconographic evidence also provides information on the relationship between the organ and Judaism and may even confirm the existence of the instrument during the second and third centuries C.E. in ancient Israel/Palestine. However, the first iconographic document depicting the organ being played in the synagogue is the siddur of the Bohemian family Lobkowicz (1494), although the occasion appears to be of a secular nature rather than a formal synagogue service. When the Jews were expelled from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s, many settled in central Europe, where their musical history transformed, establishing the organ as a significant theme in Jewish art and literature and its placement in the synagogue. In the sixteenth century, a number of European communities began introducing instruments into Jewish worship service and, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, attempts were made to legitimize the organ as a synagogue instrument in Italy amid rabbinical prohibition. By the end of the century, anti-Jewish agitation had begun and new regulations limited the performance of Jewish musicians to a predominantly liturgical framework.
David Brackett
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780520248717
- eISBN:
- 9780520965317
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520248717.003.0002
- Subject:
- Music, Popular
Chapter two begins around 1900 with a discussion of the United States music industry in the early days of sound recording, which is examined for its impact on the categorization of popular music, and ...
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Chapter two begins around 1900 with a discussion of the United States music industry in the early days of sound recording, which is examined for its impact on the categorization of popular music, and the new possibilities afforded for the circulation of genre-identity relations. The category of “foreign music” emerges in response first to an interest in music of faraway places facilitated by sound recording, and then to the discovery of marketing possibilities to recent European immigrants. The subcategories of Hawaiian and Jewish music are analyzed in more detail to show how foreign music moved from an emphasis on imaginary to homologous music-identity relations by the 1920s. The category of foreign music established a model for how the music industry could be structured around the concept of homological relations (that is, a direct one-to-one correspondence) between categories of music and categories of people.Less
Chapter two begins around 1900 with a discussion of the United States music industry in the early days of sound recording, which is examined for its impact on the categorization of popular music, and the new possibilities afforded for the circulation of genre-identity relations. The category of “foreign music” emerges in response first to an interest in music of faraway places facilitated by sound recording, and then to the discovery of marketing possibilities to recent European immigrants. The subcategories of Hawaiian and Jewish music are analyzed in more detail to show how foreign music moved from an emphasis on imaginary to homologous music-identity relations by the 1920s. The category of foreign music established a model for how the music industry could be structured around the concept of homological relations (that is, a direct one-to-one correspondence) between categories of music and categories of people.
Assaf Shelleg
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- November 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199354948
- eISBN:
- 9780199354962
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199354948.003.0004
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music, History, Western
After the linear properties of non-Western Jewish musical traditions had destabilized Zionist Eurocentric formulations, the theological undercurrents nationalized by the Hebrewist discourse grew more ...
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After the linear properties of non-Western Jewish musical traditions had destabilized Zionist Eurocentric formulations, the theological undercurrents nationalized by the Hebrewist discourse grew more visible. Art music of the 1960s and ’70s saw a dialectical return to the Jewish worlds from which Hebrew culture sought to be “healed.” Hasidic stories enacted in modernist musical syntaxes now avoided both the otherness embedded in post-romantic and auto-exoticist constructions in the spirit of the Yishuv while the properties of both the Eastern European soundscape and non-Western Jewish oral musical traditions gave birth to new modes of cultural memory. Paradoxically, the aftermath of the 1967 War accelerated the dialectical return to Jewish culture outside of the land, underscoring the subterranean presence of linguistic and theological strata that manifested themselves both culturally and politically. The collapse of national rhetoric that formerly distinguished between diasporic and Hebrewist cultures now enabled the reemergence of repressed exilic pasts that defined Jewishness through its symbiotic qualities, rather than the translation of theology into politics that gave rise to territorial maximalism in the 1970s.Less
After the linear properties of non-Western Jewish musical traditions had destabilized Zionist Eurocentric formulations, the theological undercurrents nationalized by the Hebrewist discourse grew more visible. Art music of the 1960s and ’70s saw a dialectical return to the Jewish worlds from which Hebrew culture sought to be “healed.” Hasidic stories enacted in modernist musical syntaxes now avoided both the otherness embedded in post-romantic and auto-exoticist constructions in the spirit of the Yishuv while the properties of both the Eastern European soundscape and non-Western Jewish oral musical traditions gave birth to new modes of cultural memory. Paradoxically, the aftermath of the 1967 War accelerated the dialectical return to Jewish culture outside of the land, underscoring the subterranean presence of linguistic and theological strata that manifested themselves both culturally and politically. The collapse of national rhetoric that formerly distinguished between diasporic and Hebrewist cultures now enabled the reemergence of repressed exilic pasts that defined Jewishness through its symbiotic qualities, rather than the translation of theology into politics that gave rise to territorial maximalism in the 1970s.
