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Whither Jewish Music? Jewish Studies, Music Scholarship, and the Tilt Between Seminary and University

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 April 2008

Judah M. Cohen
Judah M. Cohen
Affiliation:
Indiana UniversityBloomington, Indiana
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Extract

In this essay, I explore the history of what has conventionally been described as “Jewish music” research in relation to parallel developments in both ethnomusicology and Jewish studies in the American academic world during the twentieth century. As a case study, I argue, the issues inherent in understanding Jewish music's historical trajectory offer a complex portrait of scholarship that spans the discourses of community, practice, identity, and ideology. Subject to the principles of Wissenschaft since the second half of the nineteenth century, Jewish music study has constantly negotiated the lines between the scholar and practitioner; between the seminary, the conservatory, and the university; between the good of science, the assertion of a coherent Jewish narrative in history, and the perceived need to reconnect an attenuating Jewish populace with its reinvented traditions; and between the core questions of musicology, comparative musicology, theology, and modern ethnomusicology.

Type
Research Article
Information
AJS Review , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , April 2008 , pp. 29 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Jewish Studies 2008

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References

1. This essay is an expanded version of a presentation given at New York's Center for Jewish History in March 2004 as part of a lecture series sponsored by the Jewish Music Forum. Shortened versions were given at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies and the 2005 World Congress of Jewish Studies. I am grateful to Mark Kligman and Kay Kaufman Shelemay, as well as two anonymous readers, for their thorough readings and thoughtful comments on drafts of this essay.

2. Philip V. Bohlman, “Ethnomusicology's Challenge to the Canon: The Canon's Challenge to Ethnomusicology,” in Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons, ed. Katherine Bergeron and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 116–36; and Paul Ritterband and Harold S. Wechsler, Jewish Learning in American Universities: The First Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

3. Ritterband and Wechsler, Jewish Learning, 1–19.

4. Geoffrey Goldberg, “Training of Hazzanim in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” in Yuval: Studies of the Jewish Music Research Centre, vol. VII, ed. Eliyahu Schleifer and Edwin Seroussi (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2002), 299–367.

5. Kay Shelemay's study Let Jasmine Rain Down: Song and Remembrance among Syrian Jews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) is one of several works to take this approach.

6. Philip V. Bohlman, “Music,” in The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, ed. Martin Goodman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 852–69.

7. Josef Singer, Die Tonarten des traditionellen Synagogalegesangs: Ihr Verhältnis zu den Kirchentonarten und den Tonarten der vorchristlichen Musikperiode (Vienna: Verlag von E. M. Wetzler, 1886).

8. Abraham Zvi Idelsohn, Jewish Music in Its Historical Development (New York: Henry Holt, 1929), 24–26, 478–91.

9. Isadore Freed, Harmonizing the Jewish Modes (New York: Sacred Music Press, 1958).

10. Eric Werner, “Jewish Music,” in The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 4th ed., ed. Eric Blom (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1954), 4:628; and idem, A Voice Still Heard: The Sacred Songs of the Ashkenazic Jews (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), 54–59.

11. Ritterband and Wechsler, Jewish Learning, 33–44.

12. Ibid., 128.

13. Ibid., 140.

14. Although several more general sources mention Idelsohn's employment at Hebrew Union College as starting in 1923, I use here an employment document from Hebrew Union College signed and countersigned by the president of the college's Board of Governors (Idelsohn Collection, Hebrew University, MUS 4, J-58), as well as Idelsohn's own recollections in “My Life,” in Yuval: Studies of the Jewish Music Research Centre, vol. V, The Abraham Zvi Idelsohn Memorial Volume, ed. Israel Adler, Bathja Bayer, and Eliyahu Schleifer (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1986), 23.

15. Idelsohn Collection, MUS 4, J-59; see also the letter from Idelsohn to Mordecai Kaplan, March 17, 1928, Mordecai Kaplan Collection, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, Wyncote, PA; and the minute books for the Society for the Advancement of Judaism (New York), entries for November 22, 1922; October 8, 1923; and October 22, 1923. (I am indebted to Ms. Ruth Baron for locating these references.)

16. Jewish Criterion (Pittsburgh), October 26, 1923, 36.

17. Much of the preceding biographical material can be found in the foreword to Adler et al., Yuval, vol. V, 11–14. Regarding Idelsohn's appointment, see the letter from Julian Morgenstern to Idelsohn, May 26, 1945 (Idelsohn Collection, MUS 4, E-613).

18. William Weber and Howard E. Smither, “Universities,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie (New York: Macmillan, 2001), parts 2–3, 4 (available online at http://www.grovemusic.com).

19. Fletcher, Densmore, and Roberts all conducted musical fieldwork in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with Native American populations. Their publications, like those of Idelsohn, focused largely on transcribing and contextualizing their own field recordings and observations, in part as a way to preserve the musical practices of endangered cultures. Like Idelsohn in relation to Jewish music, Fletcher, Densmore, and Roberts have been credited as important progenitors of the field of ethnomusicology. See, e.g., Walter Hough, “Alice Cunningham Fletcher,” American Anthropologist, n.s., 25, no. 2 (1923): 254–58; Charles Hofmann, “Frances Densmore and the Music of the American Indian,” Journal of American Folklore 59, no. 231 (1946): 45–50; and Charlotte J. Frisbie, “Helen Heffron Roberts (1888–1985): A Tribute,” Ethnomusicology 33, no. 1 (1989): 97–111.

20. Several of Idelsohn's scholarly works, for example, saw publication thanks to grants from academic institutions, such as the Vienna Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Council of Learned Societies. For the latter, see the Idelsohn Collection, MUS 4, E-643, E-802–811.

21. Stanley R. Brav, ed., Telling Tales Out of School: Seminary Memories of the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion (New York: Alumni Association of the HUC–JIR, 1965), 152–55.

22. The one significant exception was Baruch J. Cohon, the musically talented son of Idelsohn's colleague Samuel S. Cohon and as close to a disciple as Idelsohn would get. Cohon's 1950 article on Jewish chant patterns, published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, made him an heir apparent to Idelsohn's work, though Cohon had little subsequent scholarly output. See Baruch Joseph Cohon, “The Structure of the Synagogue Prayer-Chant,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 3, no. 1 (1950): 17–32.

23. One instructor was Jacob Singer, who also lectured at the University of Nebraska (Idelsohn Collection, MUS 4, E-367); the other was A. Irma Cohon, whose book An Introduction to Jewish Music in Eight Illustrated Lectures (New York: Bloch/Council for Jewish Women, 1923) is considered one of the first English-language works to address the topic.

24. The figure of the cantor or hazzan, which was largely associated with eastern European Jewish communities, had made only limited inroads into the predominantly German Jewish American Reform movement by this time, employed largely as a creative musical director and singer in a few prominent congregations (see Mark Slobin, Chosen Voices: The Story of the American Cantorate [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002], 45–49). Idelsohn's status as an eastern European–born cantor trained in Western musical skills and analysis methods thus allowed him to be a voice of both tradition and modernity at Hebrew Union College.

25. Edgar E. Siskin, “George Herzog: A Peerless Musicologist Remembered,” American Jewish Archives 41, no. 1 (1989): 83 n. 5.

26. See, e.g., New York Times, “Two Thousand Years of Jewish Music,” February 22, 1931, 102.

27. Idelsohn, Jewish Music, 171, 173, 220–21; Christian Science Monitor, “Hymnal Notes: No. 281,” December 9, 1932, 151; and Christian Science Monitor, “Hymnal Notes: No. 371,” February 20, 1933, 11. At least in the case of “Leoni,” Idelsohn seems to have refined knowledge already in circulation in Jewish circles, if not elsewhere. The history of the hymn had been culled from a relatively thorough review of nineteenth-century secondary sources by Francis L. Cohen in The Jewish Encyclopedia (see Joseph Jacobs, Goodman Lipkind, and Francis L. Cohen, “Lyon (Leoni) Myer,” in Jewish Encyclopedia [New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1901–6], 7:229; and Francis L. Cohen, “Yigdal,” Jewish Encyclopedia, 12:607, 610), and that account was later cited in a series of popular lectures on Jewish music by A. Irma Cohon, six years before Idelsohn published his Jewish Music in its Historical Development (Cohon, An Introduction to Jewish Music, 181–82). Idelsohn, however (who cites several of the same sources but does not credit Cohen), appears to have been recognized as the person who brought this information to a broader audience.

28. New York Times, “Jewish Pageant Music,” September 10, 1933, X5; and Atay Citron, “Pageantry and Theatre in the Service of Jewish Nationalism in the United States 1933–1946” (PhD diss., New York University, 1989), 55–59. Isaac Van Grove and Meyer Weisgal's pageant “The Romance of a People,” a massive work performed at the Chicago World's Fair, in New York City's Kingsbridge Armory, and in Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Detroit, employed a chorus of two thousand singers and thirty-two soloists (out of up to 6,200 total players) to offer a six-episode history of the Jewish people. The pageant accompanied its earliest scenes with orchestrated melodies selected from Idelsohn's Thesaurus (Citron, “Pageantry and Theatre,” chap. 2 and 3).

29. Lazare Saminsky, Music of the Ghetto and the Bible (New York: Bloch, 1934); and Israel Rabinovitch, Muzik bay yidin, un andere eseyin auf muzikalische temes (Montreal: Eagle Publishing, 1940), revised, expanded, and translated in 1952 as Of Jewish Music, Ancient and Modern (Montreal: Book Center). Philip V. Bohlman notes that Idelsohn's research received a similar (though not identical) treatment in Israel; see Bohlman, “Inventing Jewish Music,” in Schielfer and Seroussi, Yuval, vol. VII, 48–59.

30. Note that the field of Jewish folklore and ethnology was itself underdeveloped, particularly in the 1930s, when scholars saw ethnographic research mainly as a tool for examining “primitive” peoples. According to Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, one of the main proponents of ethnography in the United States, Franz Boas “tried to protect Jews from ethnography, because he saw cultural difference as a liability in the fight against anthropological theories of race” (see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Imagining Europe: The Popular Arts of American Jewish Ethnography,” in Divergent Jewish Cultures: Israel and America, ed. Deborah Dash Moore and S. Ilan Troen [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995], 155). Kirshenblatt-Gimblett goes on to say, however, that in the realm of cultural display, ethnography was a valuable tool for showing Jewish vibrancy (156), paralleling in some ways the artistic reaction to Idelsohn.

31. Neil Levin, “Music at JTS,” in Tradition Renewed: A History of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1997), 1:719–20. Levin, however, provides no sources to support his assertions in this instance.

32. Ibid., 723–27.

33. Irene Heskes, “Shapers of Jewish Music: Mailamm and the Jewish Music Forum, 1931–62,” American Music 15, no. 3 (1997): 305–20.

34. Mailamm minutes book, Mailamm Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (*MNY Amer, Mailamm), box 1.

35. This account is supported by records of Mailamm board meetings in ibid., esp. the board meeting of January 19, 1939. For more, see Kimberly Lewison Komrad, “The Mailamm Archives (1931–1943) at the New York Public Library, Special Music Collection, Lincoln Center: An Annotated Catalogue” (Master's thesis, Jewish Theological Seminary, 1994).

36. Ruth Katz, “The Lachmann Problem”: An Unsung Chapter in Comparative Musicology (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2003), 190–95.

37. Philip V. Bohlman, The World Centre for Jewish Music in Palestine, 1936–1940: Jewish Musical Life on the Eve of World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), esp. 6–10.

38. Although Lachmann's death marked a temporary end to hopes of institutionalizing Jewish music study in Palestine, it did not end Jewish music research there. German émigrés Hanoch Avenary and, in particular, Edith Gerson-Kiwi continued scholarly Jewish music activities throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Gerson-Kiwi, who received her doctorate from the University of Heidelberg in 1933 and subsequently worked with Lachmann in Palestine, took over Lachmann's collections and continued his work, both teaching on Jewish music and amassing additional field recordings with support from the Israeli Ministry of Education and Culture and the Hebrew University's School of Oriental Studies (see Gerson-Kiwi, “Musicology in Israel,” Acta Musicologica 30, fasc. 1/2 [1958]: 23; and Jehoash Hirshberg, Music in the Jewish Community of Palestine 1880–1948: A Social History [New York: Oxford University Press, 1995], 202–203).

Johanna Spector also spent two years in Israel in the early 1950s on a private grant and eventually approached the American Friends of the Hebrew University with a request to start an ethnomusicology department; according to Spector, the Friends turned her down due to more pressing needs in other areas (see Johanna Spector, transcript of oral history interview conducted by Janet S. Bookspan [New York: American Jewish Committee, Oral History Library, 1974/1977], Dorot Jewish Division, New York Public Library, 115–27).

In the mid-1960s, Gerson-Kiwi brought her scholarship to Hebrew University's Jewish Music Research Centre (1964) and Tel Aviv University's new Department of Musicology (1966; established, incidentally, by Eric Werner), having successfully negotiated the decades-long institutional lacuna in Jewish music study at the university level (see Katz, Lachmann, 228, 236–37; Edwin Seroussi, “In Memoriam: Hanoch Avenary (1908–1994),” Musica Judaica 13 [1991–92]: 93–97; and idem, “In Memoriam: Edith Gerson-Kiwi (1906–1992),” Musica Judaica 12 [1993–94]: 75–77; for more on this period, see Amnon Shiloah and Edith Gerson-Kiwi, “Musicology in Israel, 1960–1980,” Acta Musicologica 53, fasc. 2 [1981]: 200–16; and Amnon Shiloah, “Music Scholarship in Israel,” in The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol. 6, The Middle East, ed. Virginia Danielson, Scott Marcus, and Dwight Reynolds [New York: Routledge, 2002], 1057–68). Nearly all Lachmann's material, meanwhile, has survived and exists currently at the Hebrew University's Jewish Music Research Center (see Katz, Lachmann, 235–38).

39. Curt Sachs, The Rise of Music in the Ancient World: East and West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1943), 79, inter alia. Sachs, in fact, credited Idelsohn's work as a having “opened an indirect way into the old music of Israel” (79).

40. Israel J. Katz, “In Memorium: Eric Werner (1901–1988),” Ethnomusicology 33, no. 1 (1994): 113–14.

41. Joseph Yasser et al., “Round-Table Conference on ‘The Bases of Jewish Music,’” Jewish Music Forum Bulletin 4, no. 1 (1943): 15–19.

42. Isadore Freed, “Introductory Remarks,” part of proceedings of the symposium on “The Need for an Academy of Jewish Music,” Jewish Music Forum Bulletin 5, no. 1 (1944): 16–18.

43. Judah M. Cohen, “Becoming a Reform Jewish Cantor: A Study in Cultural Investment” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2002), 88.

44. This process is chronicled in detail in Cohen, “Becoming a Reform Jewish Cantor,” 62–117.

45. Ibid., 81–83, 90–93.

46. Ibid., 62ff.

47. One key exception to the lacuna of Jewish music doctorates is Johanna Spector, who came to study with Werner as a “visiting student” in the School of Sacred Music's opening class and submitted her thesis on cantillation (presumably under Werner's supervision) to the University of Cincinnati in 1950 (see Edith Gerson-Kiwi, “Musicology in Israel,” 24; and Johanna Spector, “A Comparative Study of Scriptural Cantillation and Accentuation” [PhD diss., University of Cincinnati, 1950]). Spector soon became the resident ethnomusicologist at the Jewish Theological Seminary's Cantors Institute, teaching classes she defined as ethnomusicology as early as 1955 (“Survey of Courses in Ethno-Musicology and Related Subjects,” Ethnomusicology 1, no. 6 [1956]: 10–11). Although recognized as an ethnomusicologist (see, e.g., Donald M. Winkelman and Barbara Winkelman, “Ethnomusicology in American Universities: A Curricular Survey,” Ethnomusicology 7, no. 2 [1963]: 119), she seemed to gain little attention within the field of Jewish studies—perhaps because of her gender, the timing of her degree, and her tendency to study ethnic groups rather than religious traditions. Spector was able to establish a doctoral degree program through a separate “Department of Ethnomusicology” at the Jewish Theological Seminary (Spector, transcript, 133–34; and Levin, “Music at JTS,” 767); yet the degree ultimately became a track in the seminary's existing doctor of sacred music degree, carrying significance within the Jewish world but holding a somewhat lower prestige in the academic world.

48. Eric Werner, “Jewish Music,” 4:615–36. Such historical divisions are also apparent in Werner's introduction to his edited 1976 volume Contributions to a Historical Study of Jewish Music, though they shifted somewhat to accommodate a more detailed narrative of Jewish musical history. Such a shift seems to reflect the development of Jewish studies and Jewish musical studies as a field by this time, as well as the more focused audience of the book. The introduction's maintenance of a predominantly Jewish historical narrative as a lens for creating an overview of “Jewish music,” however, remains significant.

49. Eric Werner, The Sacred Bridge: The Interdependence of Liturgy and Music in Synagogue and Church during the First Millennium (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959); idem, The Sacred Bridge, vol. 2, The Interdependence of Liturgy and Music in Synagogue and Church during the First Millennium (New York: Ktav, 1984); and idem, “Communications,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 3, no. 3 (1950): 293.

50. Kay Kaufman Shelemay, “Views from ‘The Bridge’: Monument, Model, Metaphor,” paper delivered at the conference “Dr. Eric Werner (1901–1988): Building Sacred Bridges,” New York City, Hebrew Union College, November 24, 2002; see also Werner, “Jewish Music,” 628–33.

51. Eric Werner, Mendelssohn: A New Image of the Composer and His Age (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1963); and idem, “The Music of Post-Biblical Judaism,” in Ancient and Oriental Music, ed. Egon Wellesz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957).

52. See, e.g., Boston Camerata's album The Sacred Bridge: Jews and Christians in Medieval Europe, dir. Joel Cohen (Germany: Erato, 1990).

53. Ritterband and Wechsler, Jewish Learning, 209–15, esp. 213.

54. B'nai B'rith Hillel Foundations, Jewish Studies in American Colleges and Universities: A Catalog (Washington, DC: B'nai Brith Hillel Foundations, 1972). Of these five courses, only two were offered through Jewish studies programs or departments: at the University of Southern California (which actually served as a cross-listing for a course offered by the Los Angeles campus of Hebrew Union College) and at the State University of New York at Buffalo (USB274: Chassidic Music as Literature). Music departments sponsored the other three: at the University of Miami, Coral Gables (Music 100: The Music of Hebrew Culture), at the City University of New York/Brooklyn College (Music 10.3: Jewish Folk Music), and at Hofstra University (Music 121: Jewish Music).

55. Levin, “Music,” 780.

56. The one exception, Judith Kaplan Eisenstein, received her doctorate under Werner from the Hebrew Union College in 1966 (see Eisenstein, “The Liturgical Chant of Provençal and West Sephardic Jews in Comparison to the Song of the Troubadours and to the Cantigas” [PhD diss., Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, 1966]). Eisenstein, however, had already built a considerable career as a teacher and promoter of Jewish music within Jewish communal life by the time she began her doctoral studies, particularly through her prominent roles at the Jewish Theological Seminary's Teachers College and at the New York–based National Jewish Music Council. After receiving her degree, moreover, Eisenstein went on to teach at Hebrew Union College and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and continued to publish and compose almost exclusively for Jewish communal audiences (see Peter Steinfels, “Judith Eisenstein, 86, Author and Composer,” New York Times, February 15, 1986).

57. See, e.g., Peter Jeffery's review essay of the second volume of Werner's The Sacred Bridge, Jewish Quarterly Review 58, no. 4 (1987): 283–98; and Jeffrey Sposato's critique of Werner's Mendelssohn scholarship, The Price of Assimilation: Felix Mendelssohn and the Nineteenth-Century Anti-Semitic Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 24–34. Both claim that Werner misread key sources that he argued supported his arguments. See also Helmut Hucke, “Toward a New Historical View of Gregorian Chant,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 33, no. 3 (1980): 438 n. 7.

58. Mark Slobin, Music in the Culture of Northern Afghanistan (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1976).

59. Parallel developments took place in other emerging realms of Jewish studies. Among other social sciences, for example, a move toward studying one's “own” culture began to take shape in the mid- to late 1970s, around the same time that Jewish studies programs began to proliferate in earnest (see, e.g., Victor Turner, foreword to Number Our Days: Culture and Community among Elderly Jews in an American Ghetto, by Barbara Myerhoff [New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979], ix–xiii). Anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff, for example, began as a scholar of Native American communities before researching and writing Number Our Days (see Myerhoff, Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974]). Likewise, scholars of Jewish folklore such as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett pursued Jewish topics with mentors who did not themselves specialize in Jewish realms.

60. Bohlman, “Music.” The placement of Bohlman's essay toward the back of the volume—between essays on art and theater—still speaks to the peripheral nature music (and, more generally, the arts and social sciences) holds within Jewish studies.

61. Kay Shelemay, for example, was recently elected to the American Academy for Jewish Research, and Philip Bohlman has served as the chair of the University of Chicago's Jewish studies program.

62. Bohlman, “Ethnomusicology's Challenge to the Canon.”

63. Schleifer, for example, earned his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1979 with a dissertation on a colonial Mexican manuscript and went on to advise graduate students at the Hebrew University, in addition to creating and directing the year-in-Jerusalem program for first-year Hebrew Union College cantorial students from the United States.

64. Spector, Eisenstein, and Jochsberger, notably, completed their doctorates in 1950, 1966, and 1972, respectively (see Marsha Bryan Edelman, “Jochsberger, Tziporah H. (b. 1920),” in Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Paula Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore [New York: Routledge, 1997], 1:701–702; and idem, “Spector, Johanna (b. 1915),” in Hyman and Moore, Jewish Women in America, 2:1297). Heskes pursued doctoral studies under Eric Werner but did not complete them (see Eliott Kahn, “Biographical Note,” in the online description of the Irene Heskes Collection at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, http://www.jtsa.edu/prebuilt/archives/music/heskes.shtml#bs).

65. Consider, for example, the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music (http://www.milkenarchive.org), a massive archiving and recording project founded in Los Angeles in 1990. Since 2003, the archive has published dozens of compact discs and sponsored a major Jewish music conference under the artistic directorship of Neil Levin (assistant professor of music at the Jewish Theological Seminary). It continues to fashion itself as a major force in American Jewish music research and performance.

66. Bathya Bayer, Hanoch Avenary, Gila Flam, Jehoash Hirshberg, et al., “Music,” in Encyclopedia Judaica, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan/Keter, 2007), 14:637.