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Between Tradition and Modernity: The High Holy Days Melodies of Minhag Ashkenaz According to Ḥazzan Maier Levi of Esslingen. Geoffrey Goldberg. Jerusalem: Jewish Music Research Centre – Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 2019.
Reviewed by Marsha Bryan Edelman
Ethnomusicologist Abraham Zvi Idelsohn (1882-1938) put the study of Jewish music on the scholarly map with the publication of his 10-volume Thesaurus of Hebrew Oriental Melodies (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel et al., 1914–32). Long considered an authoritative resource, Idelsohn’s work has come under some scrutiny by more recent research and by the discovery of additional materials that complement, and occasionally contradict, Idelsohn’s conclusions. The Yuval Music Series, launched by the Jewish Music Research Centre at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1989, has endeavored to provide a sequel to Idelsohn’s research. Geoffrey Goldberg’s Between Tradition and Modernity: The High Holy Day Melodies of Minhag Ashkenaz according to Hazzan Maier Levi of Esslingen is Volume 12 in the Yuval Series, and a most worthy contribution.
Maier Levi (1813 – 1874) is not a well-known name in the history of cantorial music, nor was Esslingen a major center of Jewish life. What makes the present work so valuable is that Levi served as a teacher of hazzanut and prepared his compendium as a study tool for his students at the Esslingen Teachers Seminary from which Levi had also graduated, although at the time, training in hazzanut was very limited; Levi enhanced his own cantorial knowledge through private study with other local hazzanim. In addition to providing details about Levi’s life and career, Goldberg also recounts the history of the types of training available to nineteenth-century hazzanim in Germany (only some of which Levi himself experienced). The key takeaway from this historical background is that Levi lived and taught at a pivotal moment brought about through the Emancipation of German Jewry (1848) and the aesthetic revisionism of the emerging Reform movement (1819). His compendium, completed over the course of many years (1845-late 1860s) thus reflects the changing musical styles Levi and his students would have experienced, and his notations reflect the evolution from “old-world,” often highly embellished tunes, to the more “modern” and unadorned chants in vogue during his later years.
Read the rest of this entry »Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music across Twentieth-Century North Africa. Christopher Silver. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 2022.
Reviewed by Hugo Hadji
In Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music across Twentieth-Century North Africa, Christopher Silver provides the first in-depth and comprehensive history of the North African music recording industry and scene from the dawn of the twentieth century to the early post-independence era. Guided by the premise that music and history are mutually constitutive, Silver offers to listen to the sounds and artists that shaped and reflected the identities of Jews and Muslims living in the Maghreb region during that period. Such work, Silver convincingly argues, “provides twentieth-century North Africa with a soundscape that dramatically alters its historiographical landscape” (13) and allows us to use music to explore Jewish-Muslim relationships, coexistence, and subjectivities outside of and challenging the typical frameworks of “majority-minority” power relations and the mass departure of Jews in the 1950s and 1960s dominant in the literature. It further allows us to acknowledge and recount the central place Jews held in the construction and development of the recording industry and popular musical scene in North Africa, as artists and as intermediaries.
Read the rest of this entry »Jerusalem: Blake, Parry, and the Fight for Englishness. Jason Whittaker. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 2022.
Reviewed by Benjamin Wolf
This is a book about a single poem and a single song: William Blake’s poem, Jerusalem (“And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England’s mountains green”), and Hubert Parry’s famous setting of it. This combination of words and music has been central to British (perhaps it is better to say English) cultural life since Parry’s composition was first performed in 1916. Although originally composed for “Fight for Right,” an organization that supported Britain’s war efforts, it was subsequently adopted by the women’s suffrage movement, the Women’s Institute, and by figures on both the left and right of the political spectrum. Jason Whittaker traces this history, and the possible cultural meanings of both Blake’s poem and Parry’s setting of it, over a two-hundred-year period, ending in the Britain of the 2011 royal wedding, the 2012 Olympic Games and the 2016 Brexit referendum. Where British musical history is concerned, this book takes a valuable place alongside others such as Andrew Blake’s The Land without Music or Hughes and Stradling’s more cynical The English Musical Renaissance 1840 – 1940. [1]
Read the rest of this entry »Let Our Music Be Played: Italian Jewish Musicians and Composers under Fascism. Edited by Alessandro Carrieri and Annalisa Capristo. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. 2021.
Reviewed by Jesse Rosenberg
The last twenty years have witnessed significant developments in scholarship concerning antisemitism in Italy during the ventennio, the twenty-year period of Fascist rule (1923-1943). Thanks to historians such as Michele Sarfatti and Giorgio Fabre, the benign view which had hitherto prevailed with regard to the antisemitic laws promulgated by the Fascist government in 1938 — that these were adapted without conviction, in adherence to the dictates of a new alliance with Germany, and represented an unexpected about-face in the treatment of Italian Jews — have been definitively rebutted. The editors of this superlative collection of essays are aware of these newly-acquired insights (one of them, Annalisa Capristo, has co-authored an important book with Fabre), but also, to judge by the variety of approaches taken by the contributors to the book, equally cognizant of the complexities involved in applying these lessons to the field of music.
Read the rest of this entry »Sonic Ruins of Modernity: Judeo-Spanish Folksongs Today. Edwin Seroussi. London: Routledge. 2023.
Reviewed by Lori Sen
A minority within the Jewish people, Sephardim are a triple diasporic population, who carried with them their culture, traditions, language (Judeo-Spanish), and oral literature. Judeo-Spanish folksongs are among the Sephardim’s oral literature and reflect the diverse influences of the many cultures they encountered throughout their five-hundred-year-long journey from medieval Iberia to all over the modern world. With Sonic Ruins of Modernity, musicologist Edwin Seroussi introduces the contemporary concept of folksong (in the post-tradition era) as a sonic ruin, regularly visited by tourists interested in exploring the history of other cultures.
Read the rest of this entry »Sounding Jewish in Berlin: Klezmer Music and the Contemporary City. Phil Alexander. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2021.
Reviewed by Zeke Levine
For the past two centuries, Berlin has maintained its role as a central crossroads of global politics, culture, and geography. The German capital is the focus of Phil Alexander’s Sounding Jewish in Berlin. Alexander probes the lively, yet complex contemporary Berlin klezmer scene, delving deeply into the ideological and aesthetic issues that shape it. While the klezmer revival has its roots in the United States, Alexander effectively and engagingly transports the reader to Berlin, an important locus for klezmer performance since the 1980s. Berlin, notes Alexander, is a complex setting for klezmer, given the city’s conflicted relationship with Jewish, particularly Eastern European Jewish, communities and folkways. Throughout the text, Alexander highlights thirty musicians and other creatives on the Berlin scene, framing the book around their experiences as well as his own extensive ethnographic experience as both a performer in, and keen observer of, the scene.
Read the rest of this entry »Jewishness, Jewish Identity and Music Culture in 19th-Century Europe. Ed. by Luca Lévi Sala. Bologna: Ut Orpheus. 2020.
Reviewed by Martha Stellmacher
The Enlightenment and the granting of civil rights to Jews in nineteenth-century Europe opened up new opportunities in society, and also in cultural and musical life. These processes were accompanied and reflected in the ongoing discussion of the so-called “Jewish question,” a debate in Jewish and non-Jewish circles concerning the understanding of Judaism and the status of Jews in the European societies. Though from the second half of the 19th century this term was increasingly used in antisemitic circles and finally taken up by the Nazis, it originally referred to a broad discussion on the political, national and legal position of a Jewish minority in a non-Jewish majority society. It partly touches in its nature upon aspects that we would call today “identity” —a term frequently used in the past decades to examine questions of belonging and self-understanding. Sala’s book assembles eleven studies touching upon many different aspects and layers of Jewish identity in the 19th century. These studies include the individual Jewish identity of certain composers and the expression of Jewish identity through music works up to the perception of Jews and Judaism by the gentile world.
Read the rest of this entry »Musical Exodus: Al-Andalus and its Jewish Diasporas. Ruth Davis. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 2015.
Reviewed by Samuel Torjman Thomas
The Iberian Peninsula has served as a focal point for enhancing our understanding of early modern racism, the age of nautical exploration, migration, memory, the advent of European colonialism, and perhaps most intensely as the site of interreligious intersectionality between Muslims, Jews, and Christians and its consequences. The notion of diaspora has informed the work of many scholars in the modern academy. A topic of great interest in fields such as cultural anthropology and ethnomusicology, and even its own field, Diaspora Studies, diaspora has also long been a bedrock topic for Jewish studies. In this edited volume, Musical Exodus: Al-Andalus and its Jewish Diasporas, we find valuable contributions to discourses about Iberian history, Jewish culture, diaspora, and musical development.
Within this edited volume, we find a close analysis of the dynamics involved in several animating factors of the Sephardi diaspora, including schism, exile, mass emigration, resettlement, intraethnic synthesis, postmodernist imaginaries, and transnationalism. The title suggests a pluralization of the Sephardi diaspora, as an experience that perhaps informs an array of diasporas. We are encouraged to consider this community’s experience of collective identity development as multitudinal, touching several disparate geographical centers and moments on a timeline that stretches over five centuries. Through the included chapters and their focus on a field of expressive culture (music), we can better appreciate how the Jewish experience of diaspora involves much more than the reinforcement of some overarching and monolithic transnational community. We learn how the dynamics of the Jewish diaspora experience provide the necessary context for new transnational layers to emerge. While fraught on so many levels and in so many ways, these dynamics are reconceived in this book and represented as the location of the endurance of expressive culture. Music serves as the vehicle of choice here, as a means of navigating the emergence and realization of these new diasporic Jewish identities rooted in reproducing vibrant and vital connections to a Sephardi (Andalusian) homeland. [1]
Read the rest of this entry »Transcending Dystopia: Music, Mobility, and the Jewish Community in Germany, 1945-1989. Tina Frühauf. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2021.
Reviewed by Martha Sprigge
Transcending Dystopia examines how Jewish communities throughout postwar Germany reconstructed their musical identities in the aftermath of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. Author Tina Frühauf focuses on the individuals who helped to restore musical life in different urban locales. This is a welcome expansion of previous scholarship on Jewish music making in post-World War II Europe, which has been focused largely on individual composers, philosophers, and their works.[1] Though the book’s title uses community in the singular, Frühauf draws attention to the heterogeneity of Germany’s postwar Jewish communities by consistently attending to vectors of difference such as class, generation, regional identity, and religious tradition. Transcending Dystopia paints a complex portrait of Jewish musical life in the postwar period, and demonstrates the importance of attending to local dynamics when crafting historical narratives.
The concept of “cultural mobility” serves as a frame for this extensive study, which Frühauf views as “intrinsic to Jewish music in the postwar Germanys” (p. 7). She adapts the term mobility liberally to explore many angles of Jewish culture in Germany after 1945, from the lives of Jewish musicians forcibly displaced by the Nazi genocide, to the itinerant cantors and musicians who traveled throughout German cities to perform services for congregations lacking key personnel, to the mobility of musical objects, such as scores and performances broadcast on the radio. The result is a capacious volume that traverses the immediate aftermath of World War II to the earliest years of German Reunification, and takes the reader to cities across Germany East and West.
Read the rest of this entry »Anthology of Jewish Art Songs Volume IV, The Lazar Weiner Collection, Book 1: Yiddish Art Songs, 1918-1970. Yehudi Wyner, ed. Philadelphia: Transcontinental Music Publications. 2011.
Reviewed by Judith Tischler
The Emergence of the Yiddish Art Song is a fairly recent phenomenon. The full flowering took place in the United States in the twentieth century although the seeds were generously planted in Europe toward the end of the nineteenth century. One of the most prolific composers of Yiddish Art Songs in the United States was Lazar Weiner (1897-1982). He wrote one hundred and fifteen Art Songs for voice with piano accompaniment or with instrumental accompaniment other than keyboard.
A study of his songs will reveal a tension between his need to experiment with twentieth century idioms and his wish to reflect the folk heritage of his own past. The results are a number of “folk-like” songs which, because of their simplicity and tunefulness, were sung in almost every Yiddish speaking household in the Eastern United States and later in Israel. There is a much larger number of songs that are through-composed and that use a variety of compositional devices that could be adapted to any language. There are some outstanding examples, however, where the past and present meet; where “traditional” melodic patterns, modal scales, and cantillation-like phrases combine with complex harmonic structure and advanced piano techniques.
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Musica Judaica Online Reviews 