Singing Nonsense
An Ashkenazic Baroque history featuring Jewish a cappella, the Swingle Singers, and Jacques Offenbach’s dad.
I wonder....who wrote the Book of Love? Also — who invented singing nonsense syllables?
Contemporary Jewish a cappella groups are known for their creation of instrumental textures through the human voice, yet this phenomenon is far from new in Jewish history. Hasidic Jews developed iconic instrumental vocables like “biddy bim-bom” and “ay-day-day” used to evoke complex melodies and spiritual journeys. But they didn’t invent it either. Jews of various traditions—minimally Turkish, Moroccan, and Ashkenazic — have long used nonsense syllables to imitate instruments in their sacred repertoires. The practice among Yiddish-speaking Jews predates the Hasidim by many decades, and lies at the foundation of today’s subject - the Ashkenazic Baroque.
Over the 17th and 18th centuries, music became more important in the synagogue. Whether for mystical, emotional, or artistic reasons, a practice of extended liturgical singing spread throughout Ashkenazic Jewry, including long melismas on “ah” vowels and melodies on repeated syllables like “ra ra ra” and “da da da.1” (Note: this was centuries before the German band Trio made the latter cool again in 1982).
As the generations passed, Western Ashkenazic cantors acquired enough Baroque street smarts and ability with music notation to write down their compositions. These are heavily documented in the cantorial manuscripts held in the Birnbaum Archive at HUC in Cincinnati (and which, G-d be praised, is now largely digitized). And some of them are simply wild.
The polyvocal practice observable in these manuscripts featured the cantor accompanied by musical assistants known as meshorerim. These meshorerim (Heb. “singers”) eventually developed specific designations based on their musical range and function, including bass (low voice), zinger or discant (high voice, often a youth), and tenor. While these names may sound like choral voice parts, this may be deceiving; two of them (bass and discant) also double as names for instrumentalists.2 Charles Burney, an English traveler visiting the Ashkenazic synagogue in Amsterdam in 1775, captured (with some disdain) the musical affect of this ensemble:
…three of the sweet singers of Israel, which, it seems, are famous here, and much attended by Christians as well as Jews, began singing a kind of jolly modern melody, sometimes in unison, and sometimes in parts, to a kind of tol de rol, instead of words, which seemed to me very farcical. One of the voices was a falset, more like the upper part of a bad vox humana stop in an organ than a natural voice… this singer might equally boast of having the art, not of singing like a human creature, but of making his voice like a very bad imitation of one. Of much the same kind is the merit of such singers, who, in execution, degrade the voice into a flute or fiddle, forgetting that they should not receive law from instruments, but give instruments law. The second of these voices was a very vulgar tenor, and the third a baritono. This last imitated, in his accompaniment of the falset, a bad bassoon—sometimes continued one note as a drone bass; at others, divided it into triplets and semiquavers iterated on the same tone. But though the tone of the falset was very disagreeable, and he forced his voice very frequently in an outrageous manner, yet this man had certainly heard good music and good singing…It is impossible for me to divine what ideas the Jews themselves annex to this vociferation; I shall, therefore, neither pronounce it to be good nor bad in itself; I shall only say that it is very unlike what we Christians are used to in Divine service.3
You could say that these ensembles were a sort of 18th century sacred Jewish version of the Swingle Singers.
The peculiar vocalism of the meshorerim is visible in the early nineteenth century manuscript pictured above, likely from either Amsterdam or London. The music is characteristic of this style, which predominantly featured the meshorerim alternating solo lines with the cantor. A musical game of hot potato between bass, discant, tenor, and cantor emerges through the manuscript, punctuated by a rare cadential chord.
While looking odd as a four-headed piece of synagogue music, it (perhaps unsurprisingly) would go over well as a violin solo. Indeed, the notated meshorerim repertoire and cantorial manuscripts of the 18th and 19th centuries may be one of the single-most unstudied treasure troves of Western musicology, reflecting European Baroque and Rococo street music from which Ashkenazic Jews learned and which most Christians would likely not have deigned to write down.
Our understanding of the meshorerim style has been largely expanded by the work of my Germany-based colleague, Rabbi Daniel S. Katz (He’s also a cantor with a doctorate in musicology, which makes saying his full name and titles in German take a very long time). Rabbi Katz’s research has taken him deep into the mysteries of popular cantorial style at the turn of the 19th century. He has created insightful analyses of a number of cantorial manuscripts4 — including those of a cantor whose last name you might have heard before.
Isaac Offenbach was in the vanguard of “modern” traditional cantors of the early 19th century. A multi-instrumentalist, he made his living as a prayer leader, a violinist in dance saloons and taverns, and as a music teacher of violin, guitar, flute, and voice. His diverse compositional output has fortunately come down to us in manuscripts held at HUC and the National Library of Israel, and includes many liturgical compositions, a Purim spiel, and a set of guitar sonatas. It’s no strange matter that his sons went on to be musicians, including the famous master of French operetta, Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880). Jacques himself was later commissioned to write music for the synagogue, such as this confessional prayer, “Ashamnu” (The first piece in the following video):5
Isaac Offenbach’s training was as a meshorer, and he wrote in this style. And with special permission of Rabbi Katz, I want to share a very unique recording of one of them - Isaac’s composition for Akdamut, a well-known piyyut (liturgical poem) for the Jewish holiday of Shavuot. This experimental performance was based on Rabbi Katz’s published edition of the piece. In addition to the singer/cantor’s part, the piano represents the vocal lines of the meshorerim (the zinger in the right hand, the bass in the left). The interpretation errs on the conservative side: no improv, no notes added that aren’t in the the autograph manuscript (not even at cadences, or for harmonic purposes). Offenbach’s music is particularly interesting as the only one for which we have musical notation for every couplet of this piyyut.
This recording was made at the 2018 convention of the European Cantors Association. Other than those cantors, you’re probably among the few people to hear this composition in two centuries.
Sadly (or understandably), this style fell out of favor with the choral reforms of the nineteenth century synagogue. By that century’s end, prominent figures in Jewish music like Rabbi Francis Cohen would look back on this era of synagogue artistry with scorn:
“Where the darkness was deepest, like that which presages the dawn, the dignity of the song of the sanctuary was brought lowest. It was an age which summed up all the faults of the past, of pilpul in the melody of the sanctuary, of intricacy, astounding ingenuity, and ad captandum virtuosity: the manner, not the matter, being ever considered. Emotionalism and novel effects, often of a ludicrous character, interested and even fascinated congregations whose synagogue was their only club, and whose manners at worship were almost those of schoolboys in the playground.”
So what is there to learn from the Ashkenazic Baroque? With respect to Rabbi Cohen, I think there’s an awful lot. Whether as a hidden treasury of Western musicological knowledge, a gateway to understanding changes in Jewish theology & culture, or as raw material for inspiration, this era was a dynamic time when Jewish artistry in sacred music was distinctive and alive.
In fact, when I teach chazonus (Ashkenazic cantorial style - I currently teach for two European schools), I often harken back to the Baroque era for help. Though their genesis is not yet fully understood, both the Western and Eastern branches of the Ashkenazic cantorial tradition developed their iconic and essential elements during this time. When teaching how to express a cantorial piece, I often have students listen to Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach cello suites. Ma expertly gives more movement to shorter note values and melismas, and ritards ever so slightly on longer notes to give a sense of repose. Though I may be biased as a cellist myself, I find this sort of musical flow is consistent with the authentic expression of chazonus. Perhaps there is much more in this Baroque era that holds the secrets of our Jewish musical traditions.
For seven weeks, we have marched through the question of Jewish harmony. Having surveyed the obstacles and early Jewish experiments, we’ll dig deeper in upcoming weeks into the history of musical harmony in Jewish thought. Through this journey, we’ll reckon with how Jews moved from the music-free sacra the priestly Tabernacle to the music-filled universe of the medieval cosmos and attempts at the sacralization of Western music theory. As the Sabbath hymn, Lecha Dodi, poignantly says: “sof ma’aseh, b’machshava t’chila” — what is at last deed is first in thought.
I’d also like to invite you to join me tomorrow for some online learning about personal ethics and prayer from Sefer Teudat Shlomo (1718), written by the great cantorial ethicist, Rabbi Shlomo Lipschitz (1675-1758). You can register for free at https://huc.edu/libraries/library-events/library-event-registration/
Cf. Hanoch ben Avraham, Reishit Bikkurim (Frankfurt-am-Main: Andrae, 1708): 29a-b. The factors leading to this innovation in Ashkenazic musicality are among the subjects of my dissertation.
A 1651 listing of Jewish instrumentalists active in Prague lists all violinists as tiscant. See Walter Salmen, "...denn die Fiedel macht das Fest:” Jüdische Musikanten und Tänzer vom 13. bis 20. Jahrhundert (Innsbruck: Edition Helbling, 1991): 156.
For the full quote, see Charles Burney, The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and United Provinces (London: T. Becket and Co., J. Robson, G. Robinson, 1775): 299-303.
Rabbi Katz’s essential musicological works on the early meshorerim are (1)“A Prolegomenon to the Study of the Performance Practice of Synagogue Music Involving M’shor’rim,” Journal of Synagogue Music vol. 24, no.2 (Akron, OH: Cantors Assembly, 1995): 40-51, 75; (2) “Music That Escaped: Transcriptions of Two Songs of Praise From a Surviving, but Still Hidden, Synagogue Repertory.” Fiori Musicali: Liber amicorum Alexander Silbiger, ed. Claire Fontijn with Susan Parisi. Sterling Heights, Michigan: Harmonie Park Press. (Detroit Monographs in Musicology / Studies in Music, no. 55), pp. 525-573; and (3) “From Mount Sinai to the Year 6000: a Study of the Interaction of Oral Tradition and Written Sources in the Transmission of an Ashkenazi Liturgical Chant (Akdamut),” Rivista Internazionale di Musica Sacra, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Libreria Musical Italiana, 1999): 170-206. Rabbi Katz has also written significant articles on early 19th century cantors and is currently a researcher at the Martin Buber Institute for Jewish Studies at the University of Cologne.
Those who know the typical Ashkenazic, major key niggun for this prayer will note the similarities in major tonality in a strikingly penitent liturgy.
fascinating - thank you! Listening to the Akdamut recording makes me wonder: have any recordings been made with 3 vocalists to approximate what the meshorer/zinger/bass style would have sounded like at its best (or at its most typical)?