Many American Jews look for strong and immediate enrichment of artistic endeavor here by Israeli culture; others are somewhat sceptical. In any case, the report published here indicates that the interrelation of the cultures—or at least of the culture promoters—of American Jewry and of Israel is already in the active process, with mixed results, to say the least.
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It was on my first morning in New York City last summer that I came upon Israeli music “Made in the USA.” Strolling on 57th Street, I observed among the colorful covers of a music-shop display the familiar blue and white flag. In the shop, I was offered a collection of military and folk songs from Palestine and an album entitled “Tel Aviv Hit Parade.”
Great was my amazement when I discovered that most of these marching songs and “folk tunes”—not to mention the Tel Aviv “hits”—were completely unknown to me, as a Tel Aviv citizen, and that such tunes as did sound familiar had been “arranged” in so elaborate a manner as to lose their original character almost completely. The “Tel Aviv Hit Parade” album contained inferior café songs composed and played by a bandleader and recorded by him on his own initiative; many of the songs in the “Haganah” album were of the same provenance; others were Tin Pan Alley arrangements of popular tunes.
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Commercial enterprise has been quick to exploit the present news value of everything connected with Palestine. Both Jews and non-Jews in America seem very interested in the cultural efforts of Israel—so why not satisfy their appetite and make a profit? With the quick dollar the ruling motivation, it is hardly surprising that the worst sentimentalism and cheapest nationalism prevail in the “Palestinian” music turned out for American consumption. It has become very difficult to make known in the United States the more serious efforts of the “genuine” Israeli composers.
Recently an American recording company sent a representative to Israel to make an album of records depicting life in a kibbutz: the writers and musicians on the spot in Palestine had to conform to the company’s requirements, and a play with music was produced on records that belongs among the worst examples of maudlin commercial sentiment that have ever been perpetrated. Buyers of the album—now on sale in this country—will be led to believe that Yiddish plays a big part in kibbutz life, that the settlers have plenty of time for weeping and sentimental reminiscences, that prayers are said at table in the socialist communal dining hall, and that memories rather than practical work and planning shape the “kibbutznik’s” life. The music itself is badly selected and badly recorded and was tampered with when the pressings were made here. There is no doubt that lovers of old-fashioned Kitsch will enjoy this outrageous fantasia (supported by prominent names who were aghast when they heard the results of their effort). But the album will spread a distorted picture of life in Israel among precisely those American Jews who ought to know the truth.
Last year the announcement of a concert of Palestinian music in New York struck my eye. The program turned out, however, to consist solely of music “made in the USA,” and the only “Palestinian composer” represented was a revered musician in his late sixties; the example of his work performed on this occasion was an insignificant piece in Hasidic style. (To American Jews, Hasidic songs have somehow become equated, quite wrongly, with Palestinian music.) This musician—whose merits lie in a quite different field—was described as one of the leaders of young Palestinian music.
I do not know whether any serious critic attended that particular concert; I can imagine, though, that the music played must have stifled all desire on the part of the audience to hear any more music from Palestine. A similar sort of thing must be going on all over the country. I have found that audiences in America commonly believe that all Palestinian music partakes of one variety or another of Ketelbey (of “Persian Market” and “Japanese Tea Garden” fame) or Ethelbert Nevin. There is nothing wrong with “light symphonic music” when the occasion is appropriate, but nobody would consider Ketelbey and Nevin representatives of serious British and American music.
It is equally unfortunate that the only symphonic work from Israel so far performed by a major orchestra in this country—and it was chosen from a list of some thirty works eligible—was an uncharacteristic and insignificant, if pleasant, composition of a light symphonic character that the composer himself said had been destined for amateur orchestras and popular taste. Meanwhile some Palestinian chamber music has been played in this country, but only in the choral field have important Israeli works been performed by local organizations.
To what lengths ignorance and misunderstanding can lead people may be judged from the reaction of American audiences when they hear genuine music from Israel. Some recordings made in Tel Aviv were presented to a group of music-lovers not long ago and they refused to accept them on the grounds that “this was definitely not Palestinian music”; and a prominent writer and composer in New York condemned Palestinian composers as following “German-radicalist” tendencies—which was his own unique interpretation of the serious efforts now being made by Israeli composers to get away from the ghetto mentality, Hasidic songs, and 19th-century Russian music.
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Prejudice and the absence of real understanding, on the one hand, and, on the other, fears that the genuine thing may break up a profitable monopoly, determine the Jewish reaction to genuine Israeli music.
Nobody doubts that Israel has already taken the place logically hers in modern Jewish life and now acts as a center that disseminates Hebrew culture throughout the world. To be sure, Israeli cultural life is still in constant flux and can in no way be said to have as yet so crystallized as to present a clearly definable standard. Nevertheless, the Yishuv has become enough of a cultural entity to be able to express itself in literature and art. And while in music no great composer has as yet arisen to create music as unmistakably expressive of the new Israel as Aaron Copland’s is of American life or Carlos Chavez’s of Mexican, a distinctive style is being definitely formed, and the musical trends prevailing in Israel certainly deserve the attention of musicians.
The popular song in Israel is abandoning the Slavic models that dominated the singing of the earliest pioneers and their children; Oriental-Hebrew influences shape the popular music of the youngest generation: it is a kind of song that has been handed down through the centuries and can by no means be harmonized in Western style. The music of the symphonic and chamber music composers also acknowledges this Oriental influence, while in vocal music the technique of Oriental singing leaves a certain imprint on the setting of the Hebrew words with their characteristic prosody. Instrumentation and performance are influenced by the sounds and improvisational techniques of Oriental instrumental ensembles. Thus the atmosphere of the country—hardly describable to one who has never experienced its unique charm—seems mirrored in almost all the works composed in Israel, just as our painters convey on their canvases the unique colors of the Palestinian landscape and sky.
The older generation of composers—now in their forties and fifties—continue writing very much in the way they did back in Europe. Prominent among them is Erich-Walter Sternberg, who is concerned mostly with Biblical and Jewish themes which he puts into moderate versions of the modernist style of the 20’s; while Paul Ben-Haim has become one of the protagonists of the “Mediterranean School,” which tries to transcribe the colors of the landscape and the sounds of Oriental music. The middle generation of composers is still struggling toward an adequate expression of the Land of Israel and the life of its inhabitants; but the youngest generation, most of them Palestinian-born or at least Palestinian-bred, are already able to disregard heritage and tradition and can till a soil completely their own. They have, one is happy to say, completely outgrown the folkloristic stage—that stage in which a young nation’s artists work as if nothing of importance and national distinction could possibly be created without completely renouncing independence of imagination and making copious use of folklore. The youngest generation assumes as a matter of course that their music will be just as naturally Palestinian as their own life and its ways are. Rightly, they feel that great art cannot be created by sectarianism or doctrine, but must grow out of a natural environment and a free and independent life.
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The role of Israel in contemporary music would seem to be fundamentally the same as it has been throughout the centuries. From time immemorial Israel has been a mediator between civilizations, more particularly between East and West. In the great Temple period Israel refashioned the high civilization and culture it had brought to Palestine from Egypt; in its Hebraized form this culture had a far-reaching influence on Greek and Byzantine art and formed a part of the foundation of Roman-Christian civilization. In the Middle Ages the Jews mediated between East and West in Spain and Italy and were the first to teach Western society the science and forms of music and dancing.
Since the 19th century the Orient has again proven to be attractive to composers in Western Europe. The Romantics tried to satisfy their love of the exotic by turning to “Turkish” music, Algerian melodies, Spanish exoticism, and—later—the Far East: the sublimest example of romantic “Far Eastern” music is the Jewish master Gustav Mahler’s Lied von der Erde, which set a precedent in modern music. Here the composer not only tried to introduce exotic colors and melodic types, but also managed to achieve a style completely different from the accepted romantic texture. His lucid orchestration, his fragmentary melodies and rhythms, his treatment of the individual instruments, and his stylization of Oriental character—all these made history. But was it really such an accident that a Jewish composer should have achieved this?
Musical history appears to be even more mysterious if we turn to Arnold Schoenberg and his twelve-tone row. The twelve-tone technique, which this greatest of living masters derived from a style he developed in the 20’s, makes use of a basic row of tones (not constructed but given by inspiration, just as a motif in C minor or a melody in G major was invented, but not constructed, by a “classical” composer) that serves the composer as key, scale, and material for his theme throughout the development of his piece. Is it strange that a Jewish composer should have developed this system of writing, in view of the fact—of which Schoenberg, I am sure, was unconscious—that the millennia-old technique of Oriental music is based on the same principle of composition? The Oriental maqam and the Hindu raga are—basically speaking—simple tone-rows that serve the singer or player as the key, scale, and theme of his piece.
Given the inherent tendencies in modern music toward Oriental inspiration—from the classics to Mahler and from Debussy to Bartok—it is little wonder that Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique is steadily winning new ground in the music of the world. After a short period in which twelve-tone music seemed just another cul-de-sac of modernism, it has now focussed the minds of some of the best composers in this country as well as in France, England, Italy, Scandinavia, and Austria. And it is only natural that Israeli composers should turn their attention to possibilities of the twelve-tone row, since this style offers so much in the way of linking East and West in music.
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Many of the composers in Israel today are conscious of their unique geographical position and of the advantages they enjoy vis-à-vis contemporary music—though few, perhaps, seem to realize the greatness of the historical mission they may be called on to fulfill. And, though the number of really and objectively important works created in the country in the last few years is relatively small, the interesting trends they contain warrant earnest and responsible attention from audiences and critics elsewhere. No one can blame the serious music-lover for disregarding Palestinian music on the basis of what he has heard of it in recent concerts in this country; but the time is not far off when authoritative representation of Palestinian music in America will enable the critic as well as the casual listener to judge for himself whether the “real thing” is as lamentable in style and as monstrously sentimental as the examples he now hears.
Though official Israeli circles have so far refrained from embarking on cultural propaganda and on the distribution of musical material, the last few months have seen great activity in the musical field by various bodies both in America and Israel. An Israel Music Foundation has been established in New York to distribute Israeli recordings and music in this country; and in Israel the Composers Association has founded Israeli Music Publications, which will publish, as well as record, representative works.
The New York organization has announced a production program for 1949, and has already published two of the six record albums planned. At this writing the program is confined to popular—vocal and symphonic—music, for which the producers can use the Israel Folk Symphony Orchestra (a forty-piece body sponsored by the Labor Federation for Workers’ Concerts and for tours of villages and camps) and the soloists and chorus of the National Opera. The first selections are well-recorded songs and dances, but suffer from one fault: all are either composed by the conductor himself or embody his arrangements. Though Marc Lavry counts among the popular musicians of Israel and is one of the two or three most clever arrangers in the Israeli folklore vein, his style is so much of one particular color that it tires the listener to hear too much of it at a time. Yet it remains to be seen how the American public will take to these first genuine offerings from Israel.
The Israeli organization is not really a competitor of the New York firm; though some of its aims may overlap those of the Foundation, the emphasis of Israeli Music Publications is on art music proper. Folkloristic music may appear in its catalogues to fill out the general picture, but it will not hold the foreground. The first publications—available now in the United States through Hargail Music Press in New York—are Alexander Uriah Boscovich’s Semitic Suite for piano—a suite of stylized pastorals and dances—and Oedoen Partos’s In Memoriam (Yiskor), originally written for solo viola and string orchestra, but published in a piano score. Most of the serious Israeli composers will soon be represented in the catalogue of the house, which also contains the first albums of the masterworks division of Zlil—Israeli Recordings. Of these, curiously enough, a Bach first-recording reached America first—played by Israel’s foremost pianist and harpsichordist, Frank Pelleg—followed by an album of contemporary music performed by members of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and then a light symphonic album by the Giv’ati Brigade Symphony.
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Between that summer morning last year when the album covers of Americanmade Israeli recordings startled my eyes on 57th Street and now, much development has taken place both at home in Israel and in Israel’s affairs abroad. Yet I am sure that those unauthorized “musical businessmen” who prefabricate Palestinian music for American consumption will not easily be driven from the field. Israeli government circles should be urged to do their utmost to discourage these people from pursuing their harmful activities, and all possible assistance should be given to our serious Israeli composers.
As can be seen, a few good Israeli works are already available from Israeli Music Publications for performance by American and European orchestras, but official help should be offered to Israeli composers to enable them to copy more of their symphonic and chamber music in score and parts so that they can be both studied and performed elsewhere in the world. Copies should also be made available to the larger American libraries, and a “Center for Israeli Music” might well be established. The Israeli visitor to these shores will then no longer have to face the shock, both auditory and visual, of faked “Israeli” music; he will then be able to take pride in the genuine accomplishments of his compatriots and not have the unhappy task of disclaiming travesties.
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