The world is filled with rabbit holes. These are topics with which one eagerly engages in endless, open-ended learning. My own tried-and-true rabbit holes are the subjects of cantors, Torah, and Jewish music.
Don’t get me wrong. I am a generalist, and like learning about a very wide range of subjects. But these three are lifelong pursuits which never exhaust my interest. When I became a PhD student in Jewish Studies, I knew that I was allowing myself to fall backwards into them towards an unknown floor of knowledge, excited for the many wonderlands ahead.
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There are many rabbit holes into which I have fallen over the course of my life, all of which have left indelible impressions on the horizons of my mind. These include the worlds of Broadway, Classical Music, Shakespeare, and British Comedy. Still other rabbit holes, like video games and Comic Con-style nerddom, I have sampled yet avoided the fall, wary of being lost in the total abyss of their all-consuming cultures.
But now my own doctoral wonderland has given birth to two chasms of interest whose rabbit holes look like they will easily turn into black ones.
I. Yiddish
Yiddish is a cultural behemoth which gathers a broad coalition of fans: Hasidim, first- and second-generation immigrant Jews, nerdy academics, cultural conservatives, and social radicals. It comprises not only the lifeways of our old world ancestors, but nearly a millennium of music and literature which gave voice to popular creativity, nonconformity, and expression.
Almost anything can be baptized in the mikvah of Yiddish—from God Bless America to Rudolf the Rednosed Reindeer. Yet it is also no surprise that the recent Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish was such a big hit, reminding Ashkenazi Jews of the mysterious depth of their ethnic and cultural difference.
I’ll tell you the truth: I sing in Yiddish and read it decently, but it isn’t quite my mamaloshn. When people ask me if I speak Yiddish, I often say “I don’t speak Yiddish, but I play someone on television who does.”
But the more that I research, the more I discover that Yiddish sources contain some of the true gems of the Jewish soul. This realization was jump-started by my recent experience being a Great Books Fellow with the Yiddish Book Center, which convened a cohort of religious leaders and educators to dive deeply into Yiddish literature. Since then I have encountered many colorful sources across early modern Jewish history which have immeasurably enriched my understanding of the cantorial past.
Here’s one that’s a real kicker: Sefer Lev Tov (Prague 1620) is a book of mussar (religious ethics) written in Western Yiddish. This short excerpt exquisitely demonstrates how the printing press changed the world of cantors and Jewish prayer:
“In the past, there were not so many mahzorim before printing came along. There were not more than two or three mahzorim in the whole synagogue written on parchment, and no one spoke [from them] other than the cantor. And in past they had cantors who were heads of yeshivas and who understood well what they said. The others all listened to the cantor as he spoke, so that no one who did not understand said anything.
But now some have a large mahzor in front of them and shout louder than the cantor and speak and speak and do not know what they are saying. Like a bird that cries or a hound that barks and does not know what it is shouting. Thus is it a wondrous thing that our beautiful, lovely prayers are brought with ignorance and lack of understanding, [and] that we have to shout and not listen to a word the cantor says. Would it not be better that we should keep quiet and listen to the cantor, because generally every cantor understands what he says, and when we listen to the cantor word for word then we shall fulfill our obligation...”
In this potent source, we see how the printed prayerbook democratized praying out loud. Rabbi-cantors long had almost exclusive access to the handwritten prayerbooks of the medieval period. But by making prayerbooks available to all, the age of printing gave everyone the cantor’s tools. Common people could finally read the liturgy (which they could pronounce, but perhaps not understand), and this created a cacaphony above which the cantor simply could not be heard. This dramatic change subtly subverted the purpose of the cantor’s specialization, which was to express the prayers with understanding and devotion, and to relieve others of their obligation to do so. This vocal empowering of the congregation also potentially drove other musical innovations, including an observable increase in volume (particularly in early modern Eastern Europe) and specialized musical forms which could be heard above the din of these siddur-laden Semites.
I plan to write more about this source at another time, as it still carries significant implications for cantors and Jewish musicians today. But if I spill one further drop of digital ink on the matter, or on the many riches of Yiddish, I’m afraid I’ll get perilously lost a black hole of thought (Especially if you get me started about the many old Yiddish editions of King Arthur).
No, it’s time to face my real demons. Yes, I’m speaking of the unrelenting appeal of the world of Early Music.
II. Early Music
While I was in a writing group last summer, a colleague of mine pointed out to me that I was essentially studying the development of Ashkenazi cantors during the lifetime of Johann Sebastien Bach (1685-1750). It didn’t hit me until that moment that my research was actually taking me deep into the world of early music.
I had some exposure to EM before through my advisor, Dr. Diana Matut, who is the world’s expert on Old Yiddish Song (1500-1800). She headlines a Jewish early music ensemble, Simkhat HaNefesh, which re-animates these old songs in an improvisational Baroque style. And of course I loved the madrigals of Salamone Rossi as much as the next cantor.
But then I rediscovered this little wonder from cantorial history:
This is a partbook of Rossi’s madrigals in the Bodleian Library. And it has Yiddish solfege on it.
After rediscovering this in Israel Adler’s RISM guide to Jewish music manuscripts, I realized that there was a whole world emerging from this one Rossi partbook. The book had at least two Ashkenazi owners between 1623 and 1730, both of whom would have had to find a secular music treatise in order to interpret the notes. You can even see them doing its opening music theory exercises here on the extra staves.
But what were these exercises? I certainly didn’t know at the time. This sent me down the rabbit hole into the world of early music. My initial guide was the inimitable singer and educator, Elam Rotem, who answered many of my questions and fed my mind with his amazing web series, Earlymusicsources.com.
After binge watching a dozen of Elam’s amazingly humorous and educationally solid videos, I got a real good whiff of Socratic knowledge (i.e. how much I didn’t know). Seriously, how many YouTube videos have footnotes? But things like this make me want to go all in on the world of early music.
I wonder that more religious Jews aren’t curious about it. After all, this is the soundscape of the Acharonim, i.e. the major halachic minds of the 16th-18th centuries: R. Moshe Isserles, R. Yair Bachrach, R. Yoel Sirkis, R. Moshe Luzzato, R. Jacob Emden, the Vilna Gaon, and dozens more. Their rabbinic ears were most likely filled with the music of the European streets (as my recent research suggests), far from the high art of the church or court. And their Jewish flock was deeply involved in the whole music industry across Europe, including instrument-making, instruction, and performance.
So I can’t help but wonder about the musical world that surrounded the aforementioned poskim. I’ve even dreamt about putting on a concert connecting legal innovators with musical innovations. “Soundscape of the Sages” — or something like that.
This October, I am making my first attempt at bringing Jewish early music into the EM scene, as I’ve been selected to present at the upcoming Early Music America Summit in Cleveland. There I will tell the fuller story of this peculiar Rossi partbook, including one further cantor who worked with it and left us extensive evidence of Ashkenazic interactions with European street music.
If I don’t fall down another rabbit hole first.