Kurt List’s outspoken and scholarly music criticism is considered among the most stimulating being written in this country today, even by those who sometimes challenge his judgments. He has long been interested in the question of how Jewish cultural tradition and Jewish background find expression in music, and particularly in the problems of relating this tradition and background to a contemporary music. His articles in Commentary on Leonard Bernstein, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, opera, and Jewish music on records have reflected this interest.
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The recent concern with creating Jewish culture in America has finally led to a long overdue interest in Jewish music. The time lag is entirely understandable. If there are enormous difficulties in producing an independent literature or painting, music presents even more complex problems.
At the moment, we are witnessing what some herald as a renaissance of Jewish music. In the course of this article I shall attempt an appraisal of the movement, taking the past year’s rather full calendar of activities as a fair sampling. But first it may be useful to sketch in some recent history, as a background.
Jewish music in our time has been an unsteady amalgam of Eastern and Western traditions. As a result the Jewish musician in America still wavers between accepting what is called Jewish tradition, chiefly Eastern, or integrating his work within the American cultural pattern. And over and beyond strictly musical factors, there have been conflicts and sectarian jealousies arising from the discords of Jewish politics, the unpleasant competitive practices prevailing among musicians, and the disinclination of Orthodox institutions to support anything like a cultural revival.
On the plus side, there has been no lack of encouragement or financial backing. On the contrary, earnest and often very competent music directors, cantors, and organists have had ample means to carry out programs that included annual festivals, the commissioning of new works, regular concerts, and publication of scores.
If the result of all this sincere effort is, by and large, sprawling and uneven presentations, the reason can be found, in my opinion, in the absence of any sense of direction. Valid music can hardly be evolved without a cohesive aesthetic attitude at its core. And it is just here that the movement has shown itself most vulnerable.
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Jewish music has this advantage over other branches of Jewish culture in our days. It has a locus and a need around which a living tradition can be crystallized—the synagogue. In his religion, the Western Jew is identifiable and distinctive, and the synagogue provides the kind of recognized, secure base for creative endeavor not available in literature, for example, or pictorial art.
However, the musical tradition of the synagogue itself has faced a crisis since the early 19th century, when the Eastern hazanim (cantors) and the reforms of the Vienna school (utilizing the ancient traditional melodies and supplying them with harmonies in the Western European manner) clashed. The moot question was how far traditional Jewish melos and treatment could be used with a music openly derived from non-Jewish sacred sources.1 Sulzer’s reform of the synagogue chant, although not as sweeping as its advocates wished, was a genuine attempt at cultural integration. Yet since the chant was created for Jewish religious services, which are the very heart of Jewish uniqueness and separateness, the necessity of preserving the identity of Jewish music resulted in an unhappy compromise. Synagogue music became a debilitated Eastern chant swaddled in Western textures.
Unsatisfactory at the time it was made, this half-way solution has grown more so with the passage of time. The reform, carried through with the romantic technical means of the Central European composers of the day, came to a sudden halt. Today, Western synagogue music still sounds like Schubert or the salon composers of the 19th century, with only sparse relationships to Jewish musical tradition. And since modern musical textures of our day are also absent, it satisfies neither Jewish nor contemporary tastes or standards.
The Jewish musical renaissance could not help being directed toward audiences already acquainted with Western music. Undoubtedly, many supported the renaissance out of political feeling rather than musical interest, but that did not serve to make their ears any happier with the music produced. It became quickly obvious to composers and sponsors alike that the clichès of the Sulzer reform had been outgrown.
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In their despair, consciously Jewish composers in America turned away from past synagogue music and looked toward Palestine. They found there a new music, which had developed from the only segments of Jewish tradition that still remained strong and alive—the Eastern songs and dances of the Hasidim, the cantillations of Slavic hazanim, and the poor, shaggy corruptions of the Yiddish cabaret. The temples were puzzled by this new music. It sounded—omitting the influence of Arabic or Yemenite tunes—like Russian folk music. However, Western Jewish composers, grateful for any concrete inspiration at all, gave the new influence a real welcome and began to develop their styles according to Palestinian folklore. They forgot that this music was just as hybrid as the Reform temple chants, and even more alien to Western culture because of its Slavic nature. Yet the result was that the synagogues finally did get some new music—albeit a wild mixture that emerged half Schubert, half Rimsky-Korsakoff.
Unquestionably, Jewish music has pointed toward higher standards during the last decade in the material it has been reviving—largely because of the improvement in Jewish musicological scholarship. Yet the music directors who fathered this revival have not changed—or have not changed enough. Their closest ties have been generally with Russia, and most of them consider the “socialist realism” of Shostakovitch, Prokofieff, and Khatchaturian completely successful. The “achievement” of these music directors of the synagogues has been music commissioned without any solid or mature view as to style or content.
Once music began to be commissioned, the interest of several Jewish secular organizations was aroused, and finally that of the Zionists. With that, the musical renaissance was in full cry. Jewish composers everywhere found themselves in a wave of commissions to write music for synagogue services or special concerts. It was inevitable that most composers would be selected on the basis of some fortuitous contact with Jewish affairs or functionaries, rather than on any considerations related to art. Actually, the knowledge of authentic Jewish musical tradition of these “established” Jewish composers seemed to be in inverse proportion to their prominence as Jewish patriots. Scores were produced that were merely adaptations of Palestinian or—in more successful cases—19th-century hazanic melodies. The final deflection of the revival came when the synagogues began to commission Gentile composers, completely ignorant of all Jewish musical tradition, to write sacred music on an inter-faith basis.
Many composers have looked to the current Jewish national political revival for their musical inspiration. Political interest unquestionably provides much of the motor force in Jewish music at the moment—but this influence is unexpectedly pernicious. Primarily, political groups desire that music serve propagandistic aims. It has not mattered too much whether these aims were to add a specifically nationalist Jewish music to American culture, or to sound a trumpet peal for the Jewish state. What has mattered is that in order to make their propaganda effective, the political groups have insisted that the cultural undertakings they sponsor be phrased in language popularly attractive to the West. This has ruled out the purest Jewish tradition or even its residue. Since Orthodox Jewry has not paralleled the revival of Jewish political activity with a religious revival of its own, the one greatest possible source of a genuine renaissance has been sealed off. As a result, Jewish music today has its habitation almost entirely in Zionist concerts or Reform temple festivals. Thus it is that the hopes of a valid renaissance in Jewish music start with the heavy, dual handicap of the absence of both Jewish historical knowledge and aesthetic direction.
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With a singular obtuseness, the whole revival movement has consistently avoided one road that might have provided it with a functional musical aesthetic. In recent years a universal musical language has been created by certain modern composers of Jewish descent in which Jewish music might not only have found a sound raison d’être for itself, but might have decisively helped push the world’s confused musical styles toward crystallization. Four generations ago, Jewish composers helped to bring opera to fruition. Today, again, the work of Jewish artists—of Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg—is in the musical vanguard. Had the leaders of the Jewish revival adopted the values of such artists, that revival might well have progressed much further by now. To be sure, relinquishing of ghetto tradition would have meant a loss in historical Jewish identity, but certainly it would have been a cultural gain.
Unable to make the crucial transition from the culture of the ghetto to a valid contemporary art, the music revivalists in their confusion have failed to recognize their greatest artists. Their tacit rejection of this Jewish-created vanguard art has had the most serious consequences.
For the problems that torment 20th-century music are just as inescapable as those that confound a world part Jew and part Gentile. As a matter of fact, the Jewish nationalist composer faces difficulties not greatly different from those confronting the nationalist American composer. And his incapacity to face them has been equally disastrous.
Consider, for a moment, the present state of music in general. In its advanced stages modern music breaks from tradition. Its end is a unification of styles, but its means beget diversity. Through sensitive and prophetic thinking the radical atonalism of Schoenberg emerges. But beside it stands neo-classicism, retrogressive, swaddled in specious tradition—and cherished for its confectionary texture. In Jewish music the same situation prevails, if in a different context. There is a valid independent expression emerging, although it is still uncertain, still unable to take the Schoenberg route. But choking it off is the pseudo-ghetto tradition, debased by Slavic salon tunes and characterized by vulgar succulence.
Twentieth-century music has a notorious penchant for national idioms. This is a special disaster in America, where neo-Americanism is populist in texture, shady in theory, and opportunist in its search for success. Unfortunately, the Jewish national idiom is characterized by analogous qualities. Like the neo-American, the nationalist Jew must choose between viewing his birth as a biological incident or an aesthetic principle. Actually this dilemma is not so difficult as it appears to be. The cowboy melody is no more native to a composer hailing from Brooklyn—either by experience or tradition—than the Yemenite tune or the Hasidic dance. He can work with equal effectiveness, or lack of it, with both materials. But his salvation as an artist lies elsewhere.
The fact is that neither neo-Americanism nor neo-Judaism has faced up to the real problems of modern music.
The central problem of modern music is the contrast between concrete (program) and abstract (absolute) music. Although program music is the more popular, it seems untenable as a permanent solution. The most valuable compositions of the past four decades have all pointed to a return to the abstract principles of the classical and baroque masters, whose points of departure were never non-musical.
A comparable dualism is at work in Jewish music too—possibly in even more naked terms. For Jewish sacred music is essentially abstract in spite of its non-musical aim. There are two reasons for this: first, the Hebrew text is not widely understood by its audience; and second, even when the Hebrew words are understood they lose their program (literary content) value through repetition and familiarity. Thus Jewish music is at once concrete and abstract. It is concrete in that it is expressive of and shapes Jewish separateness. It is abstract because it does not depart from an original fictionalized idea. In other words it owes its genesis to the extra-musical roots of religious nationalism and politics. But as a work of music it does not follow a definitive, detailed plot such as operas, songs, or ballets do. It is socially as concrete as it is aesthetically abstract.
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But the major immediate reason for the failure of the Jewish revival is that too much of the work by Jewish nationalists, honest but incompetent, has been commissioned and played. Just how telling a blow this has been is revealed if we look more closely at the last year’s concerts featuring Jewish music.
All season New York rings with Jewish-sponsored music; indeed, there is so much that even to catalogue it is a sizeable job. But a carefully selected cross-section sufficiently indicates the trends.
There is the regular festival of the Temple Emanu-El with three concerts a year. There is the festival of the Park Avenue Synagogue, for which Jewish and Gentile composers are commissioned to compose parts of the Friday evening service. Once a year the Festival of Jewish Arts sponsors a concert at Carnegie Hall, generally made up of compositions of Jewish national content and Eastern-Slavic flavor. In Town Hall the admirable “Music of the Faiths” concert program presents sacred works of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews in historical context. But these are only a few of the many concerts of Jewish music that reach New York auditoriums. The quality of presentation ranges from the very high to the absurd cabaret level of organizations like the Synagogue Light. In addition to the concerts—and possibly even more important—there is the publication of hundreds of scores of Jewish music.
The most ambitious undertaking of the temples is the commissioning and performance of art music either as separate festival music or as part of their services. At Temple Emanu-El music is commissioned for a yearly festival that runs from a Friday afternoon concert through the Friday evening and Sabbath morning services. The afternoon concert is generally related to Judaism through melodic material or titles. The services offer less, musically, than do the concerts. Bits of new music are integrated in the services—but since so many composers are represented (many prominent non-Jewish Americans among them) they frequently become disjointed. Moreover, at Temple Emanu-El the music forms only a background to the elaborate ceremonial, so that it is difficult to judge it fairly.
The Friday afternoon concerts reveal more about the new trend in Jewish music. Here old music, folk music (mostly Americana), and little-known new works are presented together with music by standard composers. The tastes of Emanu-El’s music director, Lazare Saminsky, are catholic, and he is honestly concerned to encourage younger composers. But, wide as Mr. Saminsky’s tastes are, they do not extend to the advances of modern music. At his concerts one hears little that is very good and nothing that is very new.
And it is only rarely that the Emanu-El’s programs have much to do with a specific enlivening of Jewish music as such. Precisely because the Temple does not lay down too narrow a prescription for his programs, Mr. Saminsky’s opportunity becomes unusual, almost limitless. Indeed, the temples are today almost the only organizations sponsoring music on a non-commercial basis; they alone are free to back experimental music. But, alas, Mr. Saminsky does not avail himself of his chance. It is sad to find a temple program such as his presenting replicas of tired “modern” programs. From a Jewish standpoint this is extremely unfortunate, especially since these programs ignore the greatest of all Jewish achievements in the field of art music—the achievement of Schoenberg. While Mr. Saminsky goes to admirable lengths to present international art music that underscores the bonds between Jewish and Gentile culture, he also refuses to tap his richest and most suitable Jewish source.
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Although Temple Emanu-El fails to fulfill the logical musical mission of a noncommercial institution, it does present serious music in good taste. Less can be said of the festivals of other synagogues. The Lag b’omer celebration of the Synagogue Light at Town Hall is in fact a frightful travesty. This festival has no interfaith objectives; it is planned to establish a Jewish musical tradition. Unfortunately, its music director has been seduced by the worst feature of the work of the Jewish nationalist composers—that passion for salon music which culminates in cheap, teary dramatizations of the Jewish fate. Even composers of the dimensions of Bloch and Achron are not free from this weakness, which was characteristic of the 19th century. Jewish composers today usually manage to avoid bathos except when writing nationalist songs and dances. But it is exactly these songs and dances that are relentlessly performed by the Synagogue Light Festival—sandwiched between the most embarrassingly unskilled dance sequences and the recitation of verse like this:
Where is the peace divine?
Is it in Burma, China, Palestine?
Once Jewish composers are rescued from the art song and directed to compositions of larger scope, their music improves. Recent publications of scores bear this out. The trend is toward choral works with sacred texts. The melodic material is frequently based upon traditional cantillation. Harmonies are half modal, half in the traditional minor key. A. .W. Binder’s V’shomru (Carl Fischer), Lazar Weiner’s Avodim-Hoyinu (Transcontinental), Lazar Saminsky’s Four Anthems (Carl Fischer),2 and Leonard Bernstein’s Lamentation from the Jeremiah symphony (Harms) all use original cantorial material. But all of these pieces fail to add anything to or even integrate themselves into contemporary musical expression, preferring to follow dog-eared tradition in an antiquarian manner.
More valid work comes from Heinrich Schalit with the publication of his cantata The Messiah (Bloch). .Schalit carefully keeps his music within simple, traditional confines and manages to achieve some measure of authenticity. But no such restraint intervened with Eric Zeisl when he composed his inflated and pretentious Requiem Ebraica (Transcontinental).
Something of Schalit’s simplicity is to be found in many arrangements of Jewish songs. Judith Kaplan Eisenstein has produced a fine group in her Festival Songs (Bloch). .By leaving the original melodies untouched, Mrs. Eisenstein has hit upon the most valid solution of all—that of letting tradition speak for itself. What she contributes is designed only to make the performance of the songs—in this case communal singing—more practicable.
Then there is the special case of Herbert Fromm. He alone seems to have found a bridge between contemporary and Jewish music, and is the most important and gifted of specifically Jewish composers in our day. His works range from music for synagogue services to full-dress art music. In both fields he follows a method that resuscitates Jewish tradition in modern terms, combining the harmonic findings of Hindemith with his own polyphonic style. He works with melodic material that simulates Jewish tradition yet sets up no incongruity between its point of exposition and the musical development. Though the formula is simple, it takes enormous talent to apply it successfully; Fromm’s skill is almost unique among nationalist composers. If Jewish music is to co-exist with other national music as a legitimate expression, more compositions must be produced on the level of Fromm’s choral piece Song of Miriam (Fischer) and his sacred art songs Five Songs of Worship (Transcontinental).
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The difficulties facing Jewish art music dwindle to insignificance beside those that today confront Jewish sacred music. Tradition, in religious music, goes back farther and at the same time holds on more tenaciously. Here musical styles fan out in a thousand directions, encompassing all shades of difference between Ashkenazim and Sephardim and between one town or locality and the next. Jewish sacred music thus reaches America as an indiscriminate mixture of German, Slavic, Spanish, and Central European influences.
Jewish composers of sacred music have shown a commendable sense of responsibility, bred perhaps by their great difficulties, but even they are blocked by useless and unworkable theories. We see Jacob Weinberg writing in the introduction to his Sabbath Eve Service (Bloch): “This composition is based chiefly on a series of five tones, known as the Pentatonic Scale. .. ... .Research in Hebrew music gradually leads to the conclusion that Biblical chant originated on that basis. . . .Modern conception of pentatonic music involves serious hardships in harmonization. Progressions of perfect consonances alone, evidently, cannot satisfy a twentieth century ear. . . .Rhythmometrical structure of Hebrew speech and free improvised Oriental swing of Psalms could hardly be comprised within the limits of square symmetry. Irregular time-signature seems, therefore, appropriate at times. . . .A Semitic treatment of the organ has its word to say in the effort of Jewish composers to revive the art of David and Solomon.” Dr. Weinberg clearly understands that his problem is to reconcile tradition and modern expression. But even granting that his interpretations of the origin of Biblical chants is correct, is its literal resurrection (which Dr. Weinberg himself concedes “involves serious hardships in harmonization”) an acceptable solution? Surely it would be more fruitful to reject two-thousand-year-old limitations.
Dr. Weinberg himself has not come very close to the art of David and Solomon. His Sabbath Eve Service is little more than a recapitulation of the exoticism of Puccini. The Three Responses of Julius Chajes reflect the same theories and achieve the same unsound results. But progressiveness, even in theory, is rare among Jewish composers of sacred music, and certainly Dr. Weinberg deserves credit for this. Yet it is Herbert Fromm again who creates a genuinely new sacred expression that is legitimately modern in his Adath Israel (Transcontinental).
Most composers repeat what they have experienced in their early temple days. Since experiences differ, the results are divergent. There have been the skillful Four Sabbath Responses (Bloch) by A. W. .Binder, which are entirely in the tradition of the temple that is uninfluenced by the Sulzer reform; the Sabbath Eve Service (Bloch) by Herbert Koch, which is in the 19th century manner derived from the Sulzer reform; and the Sim Sholom (Bloch) by Zavel Zilberts, influenced by the Eastern Jewish folk dance. And evoking César Franck’s style and the 19th century grand opera touches once so fashionable among wealthy Central European congregations, there is the Service for the Sabbath Morning (Bloch) by N. Lindsay Norden.
This kind of musical recherche du temps perdu is harmless enough, but contemporary Jewish sacred music reveals an even more superficial side—namely, those incoherent services produced by farming out separate bits of the music to both Jewish and Gentile composers. This practice has been going on for one hundred and thirty-seven years without so much as a hint of real progress. The last two festivals at the Park Avenue Synagogue demonstrated anew the reasons for this recurrent failure. Smuggled in under a few Jewish themes, what one heard was a slightly below average cross-section of modern American music. There was a folksy Roy Harris, a brash Leonard Bernstein, and a Broadwayese Kurt Weill. Even as an approach to an intelligent interfaith gesture, they failed.
While Herbert Fromm represents the extreme pole of Jewish integration in Western music, the opposed possibility—the product of rigid traditional practice—is richly articulated by Chemjo Vinaver. 3 Vinaver, who bases his work on traditional Hasidic and Nusah figures (Bibical cantillation, Ashkenazic form) is able to weld his music into a huge monument to Jewish traditional art. But to produce it, Vinaver has had to abdicate his own identity and allow tradition to speak—yet the results seem to provide justification.
As I have said, Fromm and Vinaver point in opposed directions. Fromm’s purpose is to revivify synagogue music through modern means, Vinaver’s is to reinforce it by adherence to the static block of genuine tradition. Each solution is a workable one; only the twilight compromises between them are, in my opinion, inadmissible and sterile.
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Palestine’s musical offerings to American Jewish composers have been thin and of unequal value. The Yemenite, Arabic, and Slavic strains inherent in Palestinian music are unrelated to the Western musical line, and when utilized here have led to the same salon exoticism that produced superficiality in Debussy, Puccini, and Ibert. Most composers are able to preserve any sort of Palestinian authenticity only by accepting Palestinian material in its original form, without Western modification. Jacob Weinberg achieved this kind of success in his opera Hechalutz, excerpts of which were presented last year at the Jewish Arts Festival at Carnegie Hall. In spite of a performance by amateurs, the work impressed me as simple, deeply felt music meriting a place in the contemporary Jewish world, if only because of its acceptance of Palestinian material. Mr. Weinberg’s sensivity is further demonstrated in his Ten Palestinian Songs (Bloch).
Other composers besides Mr. Weinberg have turned to Palestine in this direct manner. The highly musical Children’s Suite (Bloch) by Gershon Ephros and much of the ambitious Builders of Zion cantata by Heinrich Schlit reflect the same attitude.
One composer who has been an exception to the rule and shown himself able to weld Palestinian folk material into a Western musical framework is the skilled Jacques de Menasce. His Hebrew Melodies (Schirmer’s) for violin and piano are not Jewish in the strict sense, but they prove that Jewish folk material need not be alien to contemporary textures nor depend upon the clichés of Dvorak and Moussorgsky. Of course, Mr. de Menasce has already made his reputation as a Western composer, and he chose Palestinian themes for aesthetic rather than political reasons. But his success suggests that this is perhaps the best way to utilize Jewish folk material.
On the whole, however, Palestinian influence has been deleterious. The sentimental vulgarity of Julius Chajes’ songs Where The Tigris Flows and Song of Love (Transcontinental) are not surprising in a composer whose gifts are limited. But to find the same thing in the Three Palestine Poems (Transcontinental) of Herbert Fromm is shocking. And Palestine-influenced concerts have proved even worse. Most of them have been too bad, and too monotonously so, even to justify discussion. This past year’s Festival of Jewish Arts was such a musical disgrace that it deserves explicit repudiation. The central presentation was a choral poem by A. W. .Binder, entitled Amos On Times Square, in which the prophet Amos is transplanted to New York to admonish Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito!
It is useless to deny the general uninspired bleakness of the Jewish musical scene. Obviously, almost everything still remains to be done. But it would also be irresponsible to discount the assets in hand. The desire for a valid Jewish music is great and the program of education in progress should bear fruit in time. A. .W. Binder’s work in the Jewish Institute of Religion is a case in point. Research in Jewish music is now more intelligent than it has ever been, and should make a healthier approach inevitable. Moreover, there is a growing understanding of the possible choices before Jewish music, and the necessity for higher standards.
It seems to me that Jewish music has available three feasible and hopeful solutions: (1) it can re-create genuine tradition as Vinaver has done, with a minimum of modernization; (2) it can give up all traditional material as Fromm has done, and evolve a contemporary expression based upon freely invented emulation of the modal tradition; (3) it can give up its historical identity by accepting the greatest achievements of 20th century Western music. By approaching the style of Schoenberg, it can play a legitimate role in Western music—which would certainly be the highest form of cultural contribution.
But whichever choice Jewish music makes—and it could conceivably make all three simultaneously—it can make no progress without a considerable raising of standards; standards in performance, in composition—and, very important, in the audiences themselves. For the audiences that have paid the bill for the Jewish “musical renaissance” have as a rule indicated all too little interest in the results. Their very behavior at the concerts they themselves sponsor has been disorderly and contemptuous, and their intellectual attitude toward their own composers—again, Mahler and Schoenberg—stupid beyond belief. Unless audience response is changed, and the best cultural elements of Jewry support the Jewish musical rebirth, it runs the risk of being a still-birth.
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1 To incorporate into the synagogue works by Handel, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and others did not serve to raise standards, as had been hoped. It simply sapped the independence of synagogue music. Of course, this encroachment actually began earlier with the work of synagogue composers under Catholic influence such as Salomone Rossi, but by and large synagogue music remained basically authentic until Cantor Sulzer’s Vienna reforms.
2 Significantly, two of these are original compositions based on texts from the Psalms, the third is an arrangement of a Jewish folk chant, and the fourth is an arrangement of a Moussorgsky work. The bond between Russian and Jewish music, in the minds of nationalist composers, is quite strong.
3 Though I had no opportunity to hear Mr. Vinaver’s chorus at its Town Hall concert, I did hear a recorded transcription of his work The Seventh Day (Rabbinical Assembly of America and United Synagogue of America), performed by Mr. Vinaver’s own chorus, whose excellence is the best possible proof of his integrity as an artist. Such standards of performance should be set before all Jewish organizations, for they are as crucial as the quality of the music itself.
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