Welcome to the first post of Beyond the Music, a new commentary on Jewish musicology, arts, and culture! I’ll be posting every 1-2 weeks; you can subscribe below to receive this regularly in your mailbox.
Is harmony Jewish?
Listen to the video above - the Israeli ensemble Profeti Della Quinta singing the Hebrew madrigals of the Jewish court composer Salamone Rossi (1570-1630). Who could say that harmony is not Jewish?
Yet try to translate the musical term “harmony” into Hebrew. No ready biblical or rabbinic term exists; the 19th & 20th century creators of modern Hebrew had to borrow the Greek original - harmonia (הרמוניה). Despite this lack of innate vocabulary for aesthetic harmony, Hebrew does have a rich tradition of words describing interpersonal harmony. The best example of this is shalom (שלום), whose use transcends simple greetings and which is employed across Jewish literature to indicate harmony, peace, welfare, prosperity, and/or wholeness.
What then of shalom in music?
Last week, I participated in a great gathering of Jewish harmonizers, singing choral music for 4-5 hours every day and teaching several classes, including one on this question. From dawn till dark for three long days we prayed, performed, rehearsed, studied, and feasted at the smorgasbord of Jewish harmony. It was glorious.
Yet as I prepared my class, I recognized that this choral Brigadoon was far from the full picture. Jewish choral singing in the forms we lovingly sang and celebrated was a maximum of four centuries years old, and really just over two centuries old as a normative practice among certain groups of Ashkenazic & Sephardic Jews.
There is a longer history of Jewish harmony — one that spans two thousand years of Greek, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic cultural exchange. Over the next weeks I will follow this long view to demonstrate that (1) musical harmony is a present but not inherent part of Judaism and Jewish experience, and that (2) its rise parallels not just access to European culture but the development of Jewish images of harmony in other realms — including ethics, politics, and theology.
The Music Libel: Christian Harmony & Jewish Noise
From its early formation, the Church had a very clear answer to the question of “is harmony Jewish?”. The answer was: No.
The long development of this Christian sonic theology and anti-Judaism is masterfully captured by Ruth HaCohen’s 2013 book The Music Libel Against the Jews, “a study of the historical categorization of the Jew as a producer of noise in a Christian universe conceived of as dominated by harmonious sounds.”
HaCohen writes: “As a classical heritage adopted and adapted by the church fathers from Greek and Latin sources, harmony invited the immediate association of a select sensory order with theological and political entities. It highlighted certain euphonious sonorities as the graceful emblem of the Lord’s celestial true and charitable dominion and its embodiment on earth by the unified, ruling church.”1
Under the dominion of Christian harmony, Jewish sound was instead regarded as “noise” — dangerous to Christians and reflecting the Jews’ disordered appearance and theological rejection by God. HaCohen takes the reader through countless examples of this “music libel” — more than can be tastefully recounted. But here’s just one example of a piece of anti-Jewish music carrying its stain.
This is a scene featuring Jews from Orazio Vecchi’s 1597 madrigal comedy, L’Amfiparnaso. You can hear the protagonists knocking on the door (“Tich Tach Toch”) of a Jewish home to do business, only to find that they are praying on the Sabbath (and are thus forbidden from using money). The scene features nasality, disordered part writing, and even bowdlerized Hebrew to express the otherness of these “noisy” Jewish neighbors.
The Value of Jewish Heterophony
Anti-Jewish caricatures like these should make us feel uncomfortable for many reasons. But before adding their libel and theological judgment, these early modern Christians were observing a valuable truth about Jewish prayer — its heterophony. This is partly because the Jewish religion created the obligation for prayer at the individual level.2 The soundscape of the synagogue (particularly in Ashkenazic settings) developed liturgical traditions in which individuals could each chant the liturgy for themselves (a sort of “parallel pray”). 3 Sarit Shalev-Eyni describes this contrast between the medieval church and synagogue:
"The voices did not speak in unison as in a church, but emerged from all around the inner space in a heterophonic manner, depending on the rhythm of each individual. Sometimes the individual voice within the public frame also included music. Such an option is reflected in the Pietist treatise Sefer Hasidim, compiled in the Rhineland during the thirteenth century. Here it is recommended that in order to concentrate on the individual recitation during the public service, one may use well-loved tunes, and adjust them to the content of the prayer: a sad tune for pleading, and a joyful one for praising. Although we do not know how common this practice was, one can imagine the cacophonic result if worshippers were whispering different tunes at the same time."4
While the past 5000 years have witnessed a wide variety of Jewish liturgical and musical forms, this norm of heterophony still exists today among traditionaal Ashkenazic Jews, even as it is hybridized with choral music or chasidic nigunim (wordless melodies). The contemporary scholar Judit Frigyesi argues that the disharmony or ‘ugliness’ of Jewish prayer is even an aesthetic marker of its Jewishness: “In the East European Jewish milieu, the prayer was relegated—or perhaps raised—to the domain of the everyday and the everyman. As such, it behaved much like a spoken language that emerges from a basic sense of grammar and pronunciation, which, however, manifests itself in real life in an array of seemingly arbitrary and haphazard characteristics.5” Like the Talmud itself, the Ashkenazic prayer tradition encourages many simultaneous voices — sometimes disorderly or cacophonous, but built on the faithful outpourings of theologically empowered individuals.
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So how did some Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews arrive at the gates of Western harmony? Stay tuned for more of the story in the weeks ahead.
Ruth HaCohen, The Music Libel Against the Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013): 2.
Traditionally, only men of the age of majority (older than 13 and one day) were obligated in traditional Hebrew prayer and its three daily services. The modern era has seen a pivoting of this norm towards gender egalitarianism in all non-orthodox streams of Judaism.
Sarit Shalev-Eyni, “The Aural-Visual Experience in the Ashkenazi Ritual Domain of the Middle Ages,” Resounding Images: Medieval Intersections of Art, Music, and Sound. Ed. Susan Boynton and Diane J. Reilley (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015): 192.
Judity Frigyesi, “The Ugliness of Jewish Prayer: Voice Quality as the Expression of Identity” Muzikologija Vol. 7 (2007): 117.