Beyond the Hora

By AARON BISMAN

DISCOVERING JEWISH MUSIC
By Marsha Bryan Edelman
396 pages. Jewish Publication Society. $40.
With audio CD.

I live Jewish music.  I am not a cantor or a rabbi, but a young adult with a past of youth chorale performances and Shabbat services, presently engaged in researching, listening, creating, and playing Jewish music.  Walking down the street, if I am not listening to Hasidic New Wave in my headphones, I find myself humming the traditional Friday night tune to L’cha Dodi.  I have great respect for the music of the synagogue, and even greater expectations for Jewish music outside of it.  Understanding the history of Jewish music, part of our people’s rich legacy, is crucial in order to create new music for the Jewish future.  

Marsha Bryan Edelman’s new book, Discovering Jewish Music, seeks to outline the major points in the development of Jewish music. Edelman’s underlying assumption is that Jews, a minority culture throughout their history, appropriated their music from the host cultures in which they lived.  This is a logical theory.  We can easily identify the influences of American folk traditions on Debbie Friedman’s music, and the appropriation of church hymns in Western European synagogues in the nineteenth century is well documented.   But Edelman assumes that there is no original Jewish music—that even the Biblical Song of the Sea, sung by the Israelites after crossing a miraculously split sea, used an Egyptian tune. 

Edelman notes that her book focuses on what musicologist Curt Sachs’ called music “by Jews, for Jews, as Jews.”  Edelman attempts to identify the necessary characteristics that define music as Jewish in any time or place.  Lyrics should come from a Jewish text or be in a Jewish language (such as Ladino, a hybrid of Castilian Spanish and Hebrew), she argues, or the melody should be historically Jewish—but herein lies an interesting paradox.  No music, according to the author, is uniquely Jewish, and yet after a certain amount of time being sung or played “by Jews for Jews,” music becomes uniquely Jewish.  How else could we have a “Jewish melody"?  The author implies two possible ways a song can become Jewish: either a melody is appropriated from a host culture and set to Jewish lyrics (whether liturgical or cultural) or it is written for an intentionally Jewish audience in a currently vogue style or a style previously identified as Jewish (such as Klezmer). 

Edelman spends a great deal of time discussing “art music,” which she defines as music “consciously created by one composer trained in sophisticated musical practice and normally involving one melody presented with harmonic accompaniment.”  But is art music truly the music of a people? Art music is bound to the definition of art in the host culture, and, more specifically, Western musical traditions.  Thus, Jewish art music, from Edelman’s perspective, did not arise until Jews were more or less settled in Western society. The adoption of art music and art music standards by Jewish communities, especially for synagogue services (which quickly became performances), required a particular level of assimilation into and comfort with the host culture.  One wonders if a focus on art music obscures the role of Jews as synthesizers of cultural and musical input from all over the world.

Edelman valiantly attempts the overwhelming task of showing the reader how Jewish music developed over 4,000 years.  Because Jews spread all across the world after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem (in approximately 72 CE), preexisting Jewish music was affected by the large number of host cultures Jews found themselves in.  At the same time, new Jewish music was inspired by the new instruments, modes of harmony, and styles that became available.  Edelman isn't quite able to capture the entirety of this musical history—though she makes a noble effort to do so—nor perhaps the subtle ways that Jewish connectedness throughout the Diaspora allowed musicians to draw inspiration from beyond their host cultures.  The preclusion of a discussion of Eastern Jewish music in particular left me wanting. A further exploration of the music of the Jews of India, Tunisia, and Iraq—which have become more and more influential in Israel and throughout the world of Jewish music—would have been preferable to so many pages of biographies of similar Western Jewish composers.

Still, Edelman’s writing is accessible and the accompanying CD is interesting (although it would have been more helpful for the songs analyzed and illustrated throughout the book to have matched the songs on the CD).

Discovering Jewish Music introduces the reader to the many worlds of Jewish music—from folk songs unearthed at the beginning of the twentieth century by the Society for Jewish Folk Music in Russia, to Ladino ballads of Spanish warrior maidens, to American Jewish pop. 

Jews have been making music for almost 4,000 years, but only in the twentieth century did we begin to see our varied musical traditions as a united corpus.  Jewish musicians now have the opportunity to learn not just from their forefathers, but from a complete musical tradition of Klal Yisrael.  As a musician, I am excited to have such an expansive, unique musical heritage at my fingertips.