Kurt List here reports on the 1948-49 Jewish music season, and tries to assess the promise—for the sound future development of Jewish music in America—of the major trend he noted in the past twelve months: the predominance of the “folk music” of Israel.
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To the casual observer, the 1948-49 season of Jewish music seemed no doubt a remarkably prosperous one. Numerous concerts, recordings, first performances, new composers, publications, all gave the impression of a lively activity which, in proportion to the size of its audience, surpassed that in American music by far.
Among the concerts, the annual festival activities of the National Jewish Music Council, which is sponsored by the National Jewish Welfare Board, made the biggest splash. The highlights of this festival, which took place in February and March 1949, were: the opening “Salute to Israel Day”; a transcribed radio program, “The New Road,” broadcast by the major networks and also beamed abroad to Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America; a concert at Carnegie Hall of excerpts from the opera Hechalutz by Jacob Weinberg; and a New York YMHA presentation of A. W. Binder’s oratorio Israel Reborn.
Of these works, “The New Road” radio program made the least claim to the status of a musical composition. It is essentially a dramatic montage, written in English, Hebrew, and Yiddish, relating the experiences of DP’s on their way to Palestine. The action takes place against a musical background arranged by several composers, among them Leah M. Jaffa, and is occasionally interrupted by the singing of a folk tune. The background music was put together in a way reminiscent of Hollywood musical-montage technique, although with less skill. Most significant, however, was its lavish and quite indiscriminate use of a great variety of the folk tunes heard today among the Israeli. A similar, if somewhat more professional, use of folk music also characterized Mr. Weinberg’s opera and Mr. Binder’s oratorio. The tunes were arranged, in each case, in what amounted to a garland of single melodies, patching the composition together, with no structural coherence beyond that of the plot.
The folk tune style also marked numerous other works performed during the past season. Among these the oratorio Ruth, by Mordecai Sandberg, given in New York’s Town Hall, and the concert performance of David Tamkin’s opera The Dybbuk, by the Portland Symphony Orchestra, attracted the most attention—mainly, perhaps, because of the large performing apparatus involved.
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Obviously the current emphasis on folk music is due in great part to Jewish nationalist feeling. Oratorio and opera offer the easiest vehicles for expressing such sentiments in music, since plot and stagecraft will often disguise poverty of musical thought, and the folk tune can be counted on to rouse the audience’s political emotions. Significantly, though some of the compositions mentioned above had been written years ago (Tamkin’s slick mixture of Hasidic tunes and Hollywood orchestration was composed as early as 1933), they found their way to larger audiences and public approval only in the year in which the Jewish state became a reality; the composers had apparently anticipated their audiences by many years.
And so it went all season. A presentation of folk and liturgical songs given under the auspices of the B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation in Chicago; a song recital by Sidor Belarsky at Carnegie Hall; a string quartet by Yehudi Wyner, played in honor of Cantor Moshe Rudinow by the Society for the Advancement of Judaism; an orchestral-vocal concert by the Kinom Sinfonietta at the Brooklyn Museum; several chamber pieces by Moshe Rudinow, A. W. Binder, Lazar Weiner, Reuven Korsokoff, and the Israeli composer Ben Haim, all offered by the Jewish Music Forum; a number of folk songs presented by the school of Jewish Studies in New York’s Town Hall; the performance of the Israeli composer Mahler-Kalkstein’s Folk Symphony by the Columbus Symphony Orchestra; and a program of Hebrew concert music and folk dances given by students from Hunter College, Columbia University, and Brooklyn College—all these concerts were committed wholly to. “populist” sentimentality and the nationalistic use of folk music. The specific material itself may have varied from concert to concert, but the emphasis and application remained almost the same throughout.
Under these conditions the interfaith musical program, for which a variety of composers not connected with the Jewish community had previously been invited to write and which used to be a favorite project of such organizations as the Temple Emanu-El and the Park Avenue Synagogue, disappeared into the background, despite the publicity it has recently enjoyed. The Friday Eve Service of the Park Avenue Synagogue (which I discussed in COMMENTARY, February 1949) was repeated at the music festival of Columbia University; the B’nai B’rith Chorus of New York gave a concert in which selections ranged from Purcell, Lassus, and Bach, to Hindemith, Copland, and Gershwin; and a Brooklyn group of the Hadassah performed the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta H.M.S. Pinafore in Yiddish. This about sums up the extent to which Jewish groups tried to make contact with the music of the outside world.
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In Musical competitions and recordings, likewise, the folk theme was paramount. The Music Division of the Congress for Jewish Culture instituted a prize competition (results to be announced at the music festival in December of this year) for a four-part setting of the poem “Treist Mein Folk” by J. L. Peretz; a requirement is that the music be based on Jewish motifs. The recordings offered by the Congress consisted of such albums as “M’zimrai Haaretz” (Palestine Art Cooperation), a selection of songs of “worship, labor, youth and love for the land of Israel”; “Hagana Sings” (Zimra); and “Hebrew Spirituals” (Besa), popular arrangements of Hasidic melodies sung by Cantor Leib Glantz.
Most disappointing was the output of the much heralded Israel Music Foundation, which had originally announced ambitious plans for research, recordings, publication of music, the maintenance of a reference library of Hebrew music, and the granting of exchange scholarships for American and Israeli music students. The concrete results of its initial efforts were several record releases that featured mainly folk-music arrangements by the Israeli composer Marc Lavry, in settings usually labelled “semi-classical,” and an album of so-called folk tunes called “Songs of the Defenders of Israel.”
Obviously, one must make allowances for the current nationalist fever. One can even say that under certain critical political conditions abstract musical propositions may well have to take a back seat temporarily. But what is dangerous in the present situation is that nationalism seems already to have solidified into a full-fledged and permanent musical practice with a full battery of theoretical apologetics to back it up. Folk music has by now the weight of a twenty- to thirty-years’ “tradition” in Jewish music; and in its support we have been told over and over not only that the practice follows the precedent set by the great masters of Western music, but that folk tunes are the primal source of music.
Now even if the claim that folk music is closer to the origin of music itself were correct, that still would not make folk songs legitimate today. Since modern art has shifted its center to urban experience, rural themes have chiefly a reminiscent significance; and by the same token, folk art, confined in its creative aspects to the countryside and no longer able to draw fresh impulses from modern society, has ceased to develop. It has remained frozen into forms that belong to previous centuries, alien in its spirit to modem life and style, and quite exhausted as a source of inspiration. And the situation in Israel is further complicated because of the nature of the Israeli folk song, which, as I shall show later, is a hybrid reflecting the contributions of the various aliyahs, or waves of immigration, along with a local Oriental influence. Despite the closer identification of town and country in Israel, the gap between the art of the two is still not bridged, because the Israeli composer borrows his folk music from the experience of foreign countrysides, and this has little to do with Israel’s own effort toward unified national life.
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But arguments such as these have been heard before. And in their face, it will still be argued that folk music has been the chief inspirational source of the great masters of music.
It is true that folk material has been employed in a great deal of the art music of the past; but we know of no instance where this folk material itself was not already shaped stylistically by high urban art before its incorporation into art music. In using folk music the masters actually used something that was the product of their own styles. Essentially, the use of folk music in high art boils down to the use of themes, assimilated into high style. In general, the tendency of music from the early Middle Ages up to the 19th century is away from the national folk in the direction of the internationalization of musical language. This is not only true of a Europe that did not yet know national states: it becomes even more obvious when such states appear. The Lutheran chorale, which is interpreted by some as folk material, has its roots in Italian music. The Flemish composer Willaert’s influence on the Venetian school, Bach’s dependence on the Frenchman Couperin, Mozart’s working in both the German and Italian mediums (in musical style as well as text), are some of the most significant examples of the internationalizing tendency. And even folk music itself is in a sense not regionally or nationally limited, since it, too, is drawn from the universality of the human situation.
It was the excess of nationalism emerging together with the great revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries that brought about the regional division of folk music and its use for political purposes. Haydn was perhaps the last great master to use folk music out of the personal experience of his own background; he himself was the offspring of peasants and he spent many years in semirural Eisenstadt. Haydn stands at the crossroads. He uses folk material from his personal experience, but he does so for extraneous political purposes. The typical composer of the era of Enlightenment, he rejected the courtly style galante, and we perceive that with him the inclusion of peasant tunes and rhythms was a democratic gesture in defiance of the artificiality of the aristocrats. Here for the first time the regional and the rural become transformed into a political gesture.
The later romantics no longer have any personal contact with the folk experience. For them the use of folk music is partly an affectation, partly an expansion of their tonal means; in many cases, however, it is adopted merely as a way of paying respect to a foreign patron. Beethoven uses a Russian song in one of his Rasumovsky Quartets, which were dedicated to a Russian nobleman. Schubert, spending a summer in the Burgenland, becomes enthusiastic about native melodies. Schumann and Mendelssohn employ folk tunes as part of an essentially literary program. Liszt and Brahms devote a great deal of their work to the exploration of Hungarian and Gypsy tunes. Finally, Puccini goes further by trying to incorporate Oriental technical devices in his work.
All these examples have two things in common: (1) the material used is assimilated to the composer’s style to such a degree that its original form often becomes unrecognizable; (2) the exotic flavor introduced allows the composer to expand the traditional means of expression.1 Standing on the brink of a decisive break with tonality, these sensitive composers enriched their styles by a daring use of foreign elements: this was an experiment that pointed toward the dissolution of tonality, but did not risk a final conscious break with it.
It is important to note that in all the cases given here, folk material was introduced as an extraneous element for purposes of aesthetic enrichment. In the tonal style this was possible without much incongruity, for the time-span of the tonal tradition—almost five hundred years—and its aesthetic similarity with modality, which preceded it, made it possible to use any folk material that had been tonal or modal, regardless of its age, without destroying the tonal style itself.
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With the 20th century, however, there came one of the most sudden and revolutionary of all changes in musical development. Tonality finally breaks and expands into a completely new form of tonal relationships, in which modal or tonal melody, such as that of the folk-song, can no longer be integrated.2 The enjoyment of music is now a passive, highly involved psychological process wherein the most complex methods involve the listener’s interest. A necessary concomitant of this development is the heightened use of polyphonic means that exclude the preponderance of any single melody. In other words, any use of modal or tonal folk melodies is made impossible unless the material is integrated in such a manner that its melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic essence becomes subservient to the new style—which means that its original meaning is obscured. If a composer today uses a folk tune in its original meaning, as a straight homophonic melody that can count upon the active participation of the audience—whether in actual community singing, as in the chorale, or to exploit the fact that the listener immediately recognizes the theme because it is familiar—he puts a serious limitation upon the modem style.
While the use of folk music in the past tended to internationalize musical language and expand musical style, the use of it today tends only to sectionalize music and contract its means. It is of no avail to appeal to history here; the encouragement of folk music in art music has today a parochializing effect directly contrary to its effect in the past, and parochialization is the enemy of art.
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There remains one more important historical aspect of the use of folk music. In the 19th century, the Slavic countries of Europe, most notably Russia and what is today Czechoslovakia, were clamoring for national, and with it cultural, independence from the West. In the course of this agitation there arose a national school of composers which, though complying basically with the tenets of Western music, gave a new flavor to its own styles by making extensive use of ancient and largely modal native folk tunes. In some Marxist interpretations, these movements for national independence were considered progressive, and therefore their musical results came by analogy to be hailed as something in the forefront of the development of art. Today, however, in the light of historical events, it would seem advisable to revise the whole notion of the intrinsic “progressive” character of the national independence movements of semi-feudal states. And in the light of what has become of nationalist music in its further development, the whole “progressiveness” of nationalist music as musical art, too, has begun to seem questionable. In any case, the most important fact here is that the whole idea of an “advanced” aesthetic joined to a “progressive” political line sprang, even in the cases of Moussorgsky and Janacek—two unquestionably very fine composers—from a political and not a musical concept. What these composers did, they did for reasons outside music. At the same time they achieved essentially nothing more, whether they knew it or not, than what the romantics had already achieved: an expansion of their style by the introduction of exotic and folkloristic means. What was and remains important in the art of both Moussorgsky and Janacek is the personal accent.
The Slavic movement in music has proved, however, to be of the greatest importance for the Jewish composer. There are two reasons for this. First, since the idea of progressiveness was attached to this music, the Jewish composer could establish his claims to “modernity” by referring to it for his influences. Second, a great deal of Jewish folk music—part of the nusach, for instance, as well as the Hasidic tunes and dances—was created within the geographical orbit of Slavic culture and showed all the earmarks of Slavic style, and hence the Jewish composer was affected by it whenever he sought national sources close to home.
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While most of the Jewish music heard recently has been Slavic in color, a new influence has also begun to make itself felt lately—that of the specifically Israeli folk tune. The appearance of this kind of folk material has made the problem of the legitimacy of folk music in modem art even more complicated. The root of the complication lies within the very essence of the Israeli folk tune.
Palestinian music has developed so far according to sharply marked stages which parallel the different waves of immigration. Paramount is the Eastern Slavic tune of the early settlers, which later became merged with certain Oriental pattern-techniques; subsequent immigrations from Western Europe then forced this amalgam into the harmoniccadential scheme of 19th-century romantic music. To the new immigrants, the Oriental melisma was strange at first; but it seems that the latest immigrants, especially because of their decisive rejection of all things European, have accepted the Oriental flavor.
There is much that can be said about the Israeli folk song, but only three factors are essentially important to the present discussion: (1) the Israeli folk tune, stemming largely as it does from the experience of Eastern Europe, is stuck fast in the Slavic tradition of music; (2) it is closely connected with life in Palestine itself, its work, its struggles—thus it is of necessity composed in the simplest, most accessible fashion; (3) it tends definitely towards the incorporation of basic Oriental techniques.
The first two of these factors do not put the composer who uses Israeli melodies in any different position from that of other composers using folk melodies today: as we explained above, his work runs the danger of becoming anachronistic and of avoiding aesthetic solutions. Only the third factor changes the problem. For the Oriental pattern does not aim at a psychological absorption of the music by the listener, but rather at a narcotic effect that eliminates even his passive listening participation: the listener is engulfed. Aesthetic problems do not count here; neither do the laws of historical evolution; if Oriental music develops, it does so for social reasons alone, never because of its own momentum. In the Oriental chant, the evolution of music comes to a complete standstill.
This means that by using the Israeli folk tune, the modem composer not only abdicates his responsibility of seeking an individual style and a modem musical expression, but goes so far as to abandon entirely the psychological and aesthetic assumptions of Westem art. It is not surprising, therefore, to hear music—as I heard it in last season’s concerts—that follows no constructive principle in the traditional Western sense, but offers instead a string of individual melodies in medley fashion without apparent coherence. In Western terms this makes no sense; but in Oriental terms, as incantation, it is admissible. And even though the American Jewish composer does not dream of narcotic magic in his compositions, his original and prime thought, which is nationalistic fervor and, together with it, the hope of exercising a spell over the listener’s sympathy, has something akin to an incantational aim.
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Fortunately, the music of the synagogue has been affected to a lesser degree. Granted that a great deal of synagogue music is inferior and meaningless, there is still a fair amount that is musically respectable.
Indeed, the very same composers who write trite and cheap folksy music when working in the concert medium will try to turn out more ambitious and serious scores when commissioned by the synagogue. A case in point was the Sabbath Eve Service of New York’s Park Avenue Synagogue, for which a number of Israeli composers wrote solid, occasionally quite inspired, and, if not overly ambitious, at least substantial scores, among which those by Ben Haim, Peter Gradenwitz, and Karl Salomon stood out. A new Sacred Service by Darius Milhaud, performed at the Temple Emanu-El at San Francisco, Lazar Weiner’s Sabbath Eve Service, performed at New York’s Central Synagogue, and repeated performances of Ernest Bloch’s exquisite Sacred Service, revealed a more serious synagogue music. There were, of course, numerous works of lesser quality, such as those by A. W. Binder, Max Helfman, Isadore Freed, and Max Janowski, all to be heard over CBS on the “Church of the Air” program. But the fact remains that synagogue music proved at the very least to be more tolerable than Jewish concert music.
It could be pointed out, of course, that the above-mentioned events were special occasions and not necessarily indicative of the quality of music heard at ordinary services. Yet repeated visits to the Reform and semi-Reform synagogues of Baltimore, Philadelphia, Worcester, New York, Boston, and several communities on Long Island gave me a picture that essentially confirmed my impression of the greater solidity of synagogue music. As a rule, paradoxically enough, the smaller the community and the further away from New York, the more serious and substantial the musical quality. In New York itself, the attitudes of the synagogues vary, though by and large, the temples are rather too worldly to permit much serious concern with the problems of liturgical music.
In general, in this field there are the extremes of modernism and traditionalism, most ably represented by Herbert Fromm and Chemjo Vinaver respectively. In the area between, some fine work is being done by Heinrich Schalit and Gershon Ephros. These are essentially the composers who by their knowledge, talent, and insight will put the determining stamp on the future development of American synagogue music.
Evidence of the seriousness and responsibility with which the sacred side of Jewish music is handled can also be discerned in the founding of a new school in which prospective cantors are now being educated in music, liturgy, and general Jewish culture. This is the Hebrew Union School of Jewish Sacred Music, in New York, which came to life in the fall of 1948.
While it is obviously impossible to evaluate a school without having attended it, I can hazard the observation based on the roster of its teachers—which includes such well-established names in Jewish officialdom as A. W. Binder, Gershon Ephros, Jacob Weinberg, Eric Werner, and Lazare Saminsky—that while it will no doubt turn out a number of solid cantors, there is no one on its faculty to present a more modem or Western viewpoint or a more solid instruction in the craft of composition such as might lead to something beyond the folksy effusions of Mr. Binder and Mr. Weinberg. Perhaps the future growth of the school will make such additions necessary, however.
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There were a few other gratifying signs of a possible rejuvenation of Jewish music. Among these were the première of Arnold Schoenberg’s Survivor of Warsaw and the introduction of Erich Itor Kahn as a composer by the Jewish Music Forum and a performance of his Actus Tragicus in Tel Aviv.3
But these few seeds were still hardly enough to make the desert of Jewish music blossom. Not because these seeds are not important, but because there is so little fertile ground upon which they can fall. The situation as a whole is discouraging. Bad reasoning, incompetence, ambition, and, above all, political passions are about to destroy for Jews a field in which they, perhaps more than any other group of people, have excelled. And it is precisely by proclaiming their Jewishness so loudly that Jewish musicians and audiences have renounced their creative, inventive, and appreciative musical capacities. In doing so they have renounced almost the best part of their distinctive identity.
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1 Further evidence of what is here contended to be the meaning of folk material in the art of the romantics can Be found in the total disappearance of the folk tune in Wagner, a composer who discovered that the boundaries of tonality could be extended through the inherent tonal means of chromaticism without the introduction of any extraneous elements. Conversely, in Mahler we find a return to the folk tune as a means of bringing order into the vast expanses of tonality. Here the folk tune is introduced as an extraneous element, but in order to prevent a disruption of tonality.
2 Alban Berg still employs a chorale in his nontonal Violin Concerto, as a demonstration that his kind of music is as tradition-bound as any other. But in part the Violin Concerto reverts back to tonal means, in part it obliterates wholly the original meaning of the chorale. A similar tendency is also found in some of Schoenberg’s works; e.g., the quotation of “Ach, du lieber Augustin” in the Serenade, of a Beethoven motif in the Ode to Napoleon, and of the “Sh’ma Yisroel” in the Survivor from Warsaw.In these cases a new meaning is given to the melodies quoted, a meaning that derives from the process of incorporation itself, rather than from the specific quality of the folk melody.
3 I have already reported on the Schoenberg work in COMMENTARY, November 1948, and shall attempt a detailed evaluation of the highly important work of Mr. Kahn in one of the future issues.
