For the last several weeks, we have explored the barriers to the Jewish embrace of musical harmony in concept and practice. These included limited access to musical notation, social and theological othering of (and by) Christians, a norm of oral transmission of music in Jewish culture, and heterophony in Jewish worship based in the individual’s religious obligation to pray. In weeks to come we’ll go deeper into Jewish experiments with musical harmony and notation prior to 1800 — most of which you will never hear in a concert or synagogue service. As a prelude, this week I’ll share a short thought about why that is.
If you go to a concert of Jewish music, you will often hear a familiar narrative of Jewish music history. I call this story “Temple ‘Till Today (TTT).” Here’s a summary of how it goes:
In biblical times, Jews were very musical people, singing psalms and playing musical instruments in praise of God. The height of Jewish musical achievement was (of course) the Jerusalem Temple, which featured glorious music performed by the orchestras and choral ensembles of the Levites. Then, lamentably, all of this music was lost with the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, after which the rabbis stringently outlawed musical instruments in the synagogue to mourn and atone for the its loss.
The story then skips, at best, a full 1 ½ millenia (!) to 1623 and the Italian-Jewish composer, Salamone Rossi, the first Jew to thoroughly and successfully attempt to use Western choral music in the synagogue. Then we time-travel another two centuries forward to the musical reforms of Salomon Sulzer in Vienna, who, together with Louis Lewandowksi in Berlin and Samuel Naumbourg in Paris, brought choirs and vocal sophistication streaming back into the synagogue, all while preserving the essence of tradition. Then came the Jewish art song composers, who adorned our folksongs and sought to create a beautified, nationalistic Jewish sound. They were followed by the great cantors of the Golden Age of Hazzanut. This group achieved new virtuosic heights, and gained worldwide fame as recording artists and cultural icons among Jews and in Western culture.
Finally, following the horrifying depths of the Shoah & the immense uplift of Israel’s founding, we come to our own era and the dawn of the fully professional cantor. Humbly integrated into synagogue life as an all-round clergyman, the modern cantor is honored as the curator and celebrant of our sacred music, balancing popular trends and genres with necessary musical excellence, fealty to tradition, and high art -- a balance which we must conserve and protect.
This is a sort of cantorial heilsgeschichte, as Will Herberg might have called it, a salvation history on how we began with musical sophistication in the Temple and how we have now regained it in a modern way. And it’s the backdrop for many concerts of Jewish music. You can understand then why cantors love singing the song sheyiboneh beis hamikdosh (“Let the Temple Speedily be Rebuilt”). It’s the telos, the goal, of the whole TTT narrative: the Jewish return to (musical) sovereignty.1
This is an evocative story, yet also very limited way to look at Jewish music.2 Forgiving its Ashkenazic focus (which is understandable among majority-Ashkenazic North American Jews), TTT almost exclusively privileges musical notation and the Jewish institutions based on its mastery, like choirs, orchestras, schools, and the cantorate (to some extent). While this makes filling a concert program easier, it misrepresents the fact that for most Jews across history, as we learned, music literacy was the rare exception, not the norm.
I shouldn’t complain. After all, I’m partial to such music, and it’s certainly not as much in the mainstream as in previous generations. But I think that even these genres can (and do) exist outside this more institution-bound story.
(Speaking of which, here’s a recent bit of early Jewish music from beyond the TTT narrative. It includes two of my favorite European Jewish artists, Avery Gosfield and Cantor Svetlana Kundish.)
Beyond the limits in repertoire and narrative, there’s a final aspect of Temple Till Today that I find misleading: it is too “nice.” So often this respectable story of beautiful music lost and found ignores the messy, powerful, and complex relationship between music and society, most often one marked by music as an agent of both transgressive behavior and social change. Many people want their Jewish concerts (of whatever style) to be fairly pious affairs. That’s good for our ethics - but we also so often we miss the real story and power of the music by glossing over its subversive or controversial history.3 I don’t know about you, but Solomon Sulzer is way less interesting as an idealized synagogue music innovator than as a underground art song performer and equestrian daredevil:
“Despite his clerical profession chosen for an internal calling, his way of life was not ascetic. He was a rather frolicsome person and did thousands of fantastic tricks. For example, his passion was riding horses. Once he rode to Lustenau at the Rhein and when he arrived, he remembered suddenly that he had to perform Yom Kippur Katan. At full gallop he rode his horse toward Hohenems and from the saddle he went straight into Yom Kippur Katan. During another excursion to the moutains time was close to mincha [afternoon prayers] time and, in order to arrive on time to the synagogue, he endangered his life by riding straight down from the Alps.” 4
This tale of two Sulzers reminds me of the how the Hebrew Bible looks at its own iconic musical artist, King David. If you read about him in the priestly Book of Chronicles, you get an image of David that is familiar from the Jewish prayerbook and which is largely positive (and also especially effusive when it comes to music and prayer). But if you read about him in the prophetic Book of Samuel, you see the unvarnished David - heroic but also transgressive, emotional, and flawed. Why has the Hebrew Bible included both versions? We need idealized visions for our shared stories and communal aspirations; but we also need to be able to look at life based in its real imperfections and difficult truths. This is perhaps why Jews conjure the Chronicler’s pristine image of David in their prayers, but read the prophetic, complex image of David in synagogue.5
Temple Till Today provides a triumphant narrative for Jewish music within certain stylistic parameters, and like the Book of Chronicles, I accept it on its merits. But it misses the mark on two counts. Without engagement with our oral traditions, we miss the long-running lifeblood of music in the Jewish experience. And TTT also misses the comic, tragic, and most importantly honest annals of our musical past. These include not only countless characters who don’t make the concert marquee, but tales of colorful, brilliant, and unruly musicians wrestling, like King David, with their humanity.
Next week we’ll return (as long promised) introduction to the pre-1800 Jewish experiments in art music, followed by the evolution of Jewish thought concerning musical harmony.
For a clip of some of Sulzer’s lesser known art song, and a collection of thoughts on “What is Jewish Music? (including my own)” check out the newest episode of Dr. Samantha Freedman’s podcast, Sounding Jewish.
On another level, songs like these (and chazonus in general) also act as a catharsis for Jewish suffering and as modes of grieving the loss of the shtetl. Dr. Jeremiah Lockwood has written extensively and insightfully about this and other aspects of the cantorial “Golden Age.” See https://schoolofmusic.ucla.edu/conversations-the-kwartin-project/.
TTT is not the only limited narrative operating in Jewish concerts today. Concerts of nigunim (wordless melodies) can make the same 1500+ year jump from the Temple’s destruction, except this time skipping to the dawn of the Hasidic movement. More on this another time.
My teacher in re-discovering this aspect of music history has been
, whose book Music: A Subversive History and writings at I highly recomend.M. Rosenhaupt, “Salomon Sulzer,” Austro-Hungarian Cantors Journal [German], Vol. 3, No. 12, (April 3, 1884): 2 ; Translated in Melanie Fine, “The Oesterreichisch-Ungarische Cantoren Zeitung : a journal chronicling the European cantorate (1881-1898) : a summary and index,” MSM Thesis (Jewish Theological Seminary, 1997): 53.
For example, the story of David’s mishandling of the Ark of the Covenant and lewd dancing (Samuel 6: 1-19) is the haftarah (prophetic reading) for Parashat Shemini (Lev. 9-11). This selection in the Torah fittingly describes the deaths of Aaron’s sons, Nadav & Avihu in offering “alien fire” before God, a potential story of warning for liturgical and musical innovators, like David himself.