One of the most fascinating lessons of my undergraduate “Intro to Western Music” class was analyzing the allegedly-Jewish third movement of Mahler’s First Symphony (“Titan”). The movement is a parody of a funeral march, opening with a comically-high double bass playing the familiar French children’s song “Frère Jacques” as a minor-key dirge. The already subverted solemnity is further interrupted by a jocular, klezmeresque duet and major dance which recurringly burst whatever bubbles of gravity the mock march was able to conjure.
It is hard not to get swept up in the comedic counterpoint of this otherwise somber musical scene. But what struck me most was that the music was inspired by a famous woodcut — “The Hunter’s Funeral Procession” (1850) by Moritz von Schwind. This picture was included in a popular German storybook for children, ironically depicting animals observing (or celebrating) the funeral of their human pursuer. Mahler’s musical illustration of this scene is a cutting one, as we hear the joy of the relieved animals break through in waves throughout the piece.
Whether this movement includes actual Jewish music, or just Czech folk tunes from Mahler’s Bohemian childhood, will forever be unclear. But it is the musically memorialized woodcut that sticks in my brain. After all, what does it mean for Gustav Mahler to write a piece about burying a hunter?
To discover the philosophical depth charges of this puissant piece, especially for Jews, we ought to consider the musical world of the hunter and his favorite instrument — the horn.
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I. The Shepherd & the Hunter
One of the original differences in human civilization is between hunter-gatherers and shepherds. The shepherd society largely employs the musical powers of woodwinds and strings, used in order to create peace and order among their animals. It’s hard to make sheep safely graze with a tuba or a timpani, but you could probably swing it, as Bach did, with a pair of flutes. The ancient hunter-gathering society, however, used the loud volume of the horn for calls between hunters tracking their prey. This form of communication over large distances translated well from the world of hunting to that of battle, as horns were used to signal military formations and to inspire fear in enemies.
To engage with the meaning and history of the horn is to therefore engage with the practices of these opposing types of societies. And it so happens that these societies are embodied in the Hebrew Bible by the two sons of Isaac — Jacob and Esau.
“When the boys grew up, Esau became a skillful hunter, a man of the outdoors; but Jacob became a mild man, raising livestock.” - Gen. 25:27
The Hebrew Bible is itself a history of shepherds — from Abraham to Moses to King David. The wisdom of a shepherd is that of people who must think of relationship before ownership, of tending one’s flock before tilling one’s property or soil. As I wrote previously, one can even see the entire Hebrew Bible as an attempt to apply shepherd ethics to the settled life of a farming nation.
The shepherd’s musical instruments, the flute and lyre, stand in contradistinction to the hunter’s horn, or the trumpet that marches the farmer’s army off to defend his land. If strings and woodwinds are the realm of Jacob, then the horn is the spiritual inheritance of Esau.
Esau is not an uncomplicated figure in the Torah. Unlike his father, he is a powerful hunter who “will live by the sword (Gen. 27:40).” He is very focused on the here-and-now, willing to sell his birthright for a bowl of stew. And he will be the ancestor of the Edomites, one of the great enemies of Israel.1 This is unlike his brother Jacob, the tent-dwelling trickster who will ultimately struggle with the Lord and prevail, going on to father the next generation of shepherds in God’s covenant.
Esau’s legacy is the hunter’s as well — fated to serve, as the horn itself, the shepherd ethics of the Israelite covenant. The Hebrew Bible’s use of horns — both metal and animal, reveals this unique spiritual outlook, and stands in constructive contrast to the use of horns among Israel’s imperial neighbors.
II. King Tut’s Trumpets
Israel’s neighbors knew well the use of trumpets in the marshaling of war, both in practical and surprising ways. King Tutakhamun (c. 1341 BCE- c. 1321 BCE) himself was buried with two trumpets; these were removed from his tomb and played on BBC radio in 1939—you can hear them in the recording above. Although the army trumpeter inserted a modern mouthpiece, you can get a sense of the sound of such trumpets that were contemporaneous with the ancient Israelites.
Yet these Egyptian trumpets were more than ceremonial. They were symbols of war, and have even been associated with giving rise to battles down to our present day. As music critic
recently observed:“Ancient Egyptians believed that these trumpets possessed magical properties. And even some modern Egyptians agree. When the bronze/copper trumpet was stolen during the Egyptian riots of 2011, museum curator Hala Hassan warned that “whenever someone blows into it a war occurs.” Just a week before the Arab Spring rioting, a member of the museum staff had allegedly done just that during a photographing session—and soon there was violence in the streets. According to popular lore, the same thing had happened before the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1991 Gulf War.
The magical and spiritual power of trumpets in ancient Egypt was demonstrated by their use in religious ceremonies. Of the two trumpets discovered in King Tut’s tomb, Gioia suggests that the copper trumpet may have been a military one, and the ornate silver one for resurrecting the King in the afterlife. As we turn to the Hebrews, we should understand that their Egyptian neighbors considered the trumpet as a potent symbol of life and death, bringing war and potential resurrection.
III. The Ram’s Horn
The Shofar is Judaism’s most familiar horn. Played daily during the Hebrew month of Elul and especially on the High Holidays, its sound is one that summons people to repentance.
The shofar is also a sound of polity — of group action. In biblical era, it was known to signal major events and festivals for the whole people, signifying each citizen’s duty to respond to its call. That the shofar relates to politics is contemporarily reflected in the Jewish prayer of the weekday amidah “T’ka B’shofar Gadol L’Cheiruteinu” — sound the great shofar of our freedom! “ Or in the Book of Samuel (2 Sam. 20:1), the scoundrel Sheba blows a shofar as a precursor to denouncing Davidic monarchy. The call of the shofar thus extends far and wide, able to gather and motivate large groups of people.
But beyond power and politics, the shofar is considered much more than a musical instrument. It is part of the soundtrack of God’s self-revelation:
“And it came to pass on the third day in the morning, that there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of the shofar exceeding loud; so that all the people that was in the camp trembled. And Moses brought forth the people out of the camp to meet with God; and they stood at the nether part of the mount. And mount Sinai was altogether on smoke, because the LORD descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly. And when the voice of the shofar sounded long, and waxed louder and louder, Moses spoke, and God answered him by a voice.”2 -Exodus 19:16-19
Here the shofar is a sound of power — in this case God’s awesome power and theophany. So it is not surprising that the shofar is also used on the High Holidays to recall the sound of God’s revealed presence, and thus our own need to respond to it with repentance and recommitment to His laws. If we compare with the Egyptian trumpet and its implications of resurrection, perhaps this suggests another layer of the High Holy Days — a a day of resurrection, in which we wear a white shroud, like the dead, and are reborn in repentance.
IV. Making God Remember: The Biblical Trumpet
The hatzotzrot — the biblical trumpets—have two principal functions, which can be found together in the Book of Numbers, Chapter Ten:
The Lord spoke to Moses, saying:
Have two silver trumpets made; make them of hammered work. They shall serve you to summon [military bodies of] the community and to set the divisions in motion.
When both are blown in long blasts, the whole company [of fighters] shall assemble before you at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting; and if only one is blown, the chieftains, heads of Israel’s contingents, shall assemble before you.
But when you sound short blasts, the divisions encamped on the east shall move forward; and when you sound short blasts a second time, those encamped on the south shall move forward. Thus short blasts shall be blown for setting them in motion, while to convoke [military bodies of] the congregation you shall blow long blasts, not short ones.
The trumpets shall be blown by Aaron’s sons, the priests; they shall be for you an institution for all time throughout the ages.
When you are at war in your land against an aggressor who attacks you, you shall sound short blasts on the trumpets, that you may be remembered before the Lord your God and be delivered from your enemies.
And on your joyous occasions—your fixed festivals and new moon days—you shall sound the trumpets over your burnt offerings and your sacrifices of well-being. They shall be a reminder of you before your God: I, the Lord, am your God.
—Numbers 10: 1-10
The biblical trumpet is here outlined as a tool of military organization and spiritual awakening. Whereas the shofar is used to make the Israelites wake up, the trumpets are used to make God wake up, a remembrance of the people’s dependence on their Creator in wartime. That awakening exists similarly in sacrifices, in which the Israelites called out to God to accept their offerings. To borrow a kabbalistic idea, if the shofar is the or yashar (God’s flow of light towards us), then the hatzotzera is the or chozer (our reflection of that light back towards God).
Reflecting on the shofar and trumpet in the Torah, we see both as making use of their loud volume to call people to action — whether to battle or to repentance. The special overlay of each is its ability to connect the people with God. These Jewish sources always recall that the use of power, as embodied in the horn, must always be one that points us back to the Source of all power, rather than to the might of the people itself.
It is here where one future master of the horn will profoundly neglect this lesson.
V. Lord of the Horns: A Reckoning with Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner was one of the nineteenth century’s most inventive composers —especially for the horn. His use of the horn in his operas is highly dramatic, yielding rich brass textures and harmonies that have long delighted audiences.
The high drama of the Wagnerian horn is also part of the composer’s blood and soil nationalism. There is no music that marches off to war to champion German land and language like Wagner. The power of his music to gather his German co-linguists has echoed down through the generations, as Wagner became the iconic sound of German culture. Yet Wagner’s own anti-Semitic brand of nationalism would help to conjure a new generation of genocidal war, and his descendants would be very close supporters of Germany’s most notorious nationalist and Wagner fan, Adolph Hitler. Thus the great German composer of the hunter’s horn became the inspiration for the devil who hunted down millions of Europe’s Jews.
The conflict between the beauty of Wagner’s music and its disturbing history was recently described by Israeli horn player, Bar Zemach, Principal Horn of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. In a recent interview on The Schrift podcast, Zemach described a feeling of guilty pleasure when performing Wagner’s music; notably, this prominent Wagner horn player believes that the composer’s music should not be performed in Israel. It is as if the horn may be used in the hunter’s land, but not in the land of those he hunted.
Zemach’s metaphysics extend beyond the French horn to the Jewish horn — the shofar. He himself is the grandson of a chassid, from whom he received a long Yemenite shofar with the blessing that he should one day play it with an orchestra and “spread Jewish spirituality.” Zemach is realizing this dream, premiering Amir Shpilman’s “Niggun David - Fantasy for Shofar and Orchestra” next March with the Berlin Philharmonic. He has practiced the shofar to the point of being able to play all the notes of the chromatic scale, creating a new vision of shofar as a spiritual instrument for both synagogue and concert hall.
As our march through horn history comes to a close, we return to Gustav Mahler —the Jew who buried the hunter, but who also championed Wagner’s music. Mahler himself continued the brass project of German nationalism, taking up the horn from “the old sorceror” and bringing it to new compositional and expressive heights in his own symphonic works. Yet his own nationalism was more cultural than racial, seeking to include and celebrate rather than to exclude and hunt. In this way, Mahler’s horn buries the worst of the hunter.
May it always be so. T’ka b’shofar gadol l’cheiruteinu — may the great horn call us not to battle, but to connection and to peace.
Edom will later been seen in rabbinic literature as a symbol for Christianity.
Cf. also Exodus 20:18, after giving of the Ten Commandments: “And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the shofar, and the mountain smoking: and when the people saw it, they removed, and stood afar off.”