Don Harrán

Toward a Rhetorical Code of Early Music Performance

Music, by nature, is indefinite in its forms and contents, and the farther back one goes the more elusive they become. The question of which pitches were fixed and which subject to musica ficta is a baffling one, as is the question of how the notes correspond to their syllables. Tuning, dynamics, tempo, the relationship between different mensural signs, phrase articulation, the license to ornament and extemporize: all these pose questions that have no unilateral answers. In an effort to control uncertainty the theorists came to grips with some, though not all of them, mainly by defining the laws of composition. Performance, as the complement of composition, was, in essence, governed by the same laws, though now in a reverse process: in reconstructing works, the performer faced the problem of clarifying their content. As in composition, so in performance an,attempt was made, by the music theorists, to define a rational procedure, whereby the performer might more knowingly approach his task. Yet their remarks on performance were more sporadic, more fragmentary; the theorists tended to approach performance through composition, assuming that the musician, by identifying with the work as fabricated, would know how to perform it. Thus answers to the questions of

“ Dum Recordaremur Sion ”: Music in the Life and Thought of the Venetian Rabbi Leon Modena (1571–1648)

To gauge the breadth of the topic, it should be said at the outset that music occupied a central place in the thought of Leon Modena and that Modena was not just another rabbi in early seventeenth-century Venice, but, among Italian Jews, perhaps the most remarkable figure of his generation. His authority as a spokesman for his people rests on his vast learning, amassed from a multitude of sources, ancient, modern, Jewish, and Christian. He put his knowledge to use in an impressive series of over forty writings. They comprise often-encyclopedic disquisitions on subjects as diverse as Hebrew language and grammar, lexicography, Jewish rites and customs, Kabbalah, alchemy, and gambling, to which one might add various plays, prefaces, rabbinic authorizations, translations, editions, at least four hundred poems (among them epitaphs), a highly personal autobiography, and numerous rabbinical responsa. Of his responsa, two concern music, the earlier of the two amounting to an extended essay on its kinds and functions.

“Keḥi kinnor” by Samuel Archivolti (d. 1611): A Wedding Ode with Hidden Messages

Most research has a preliminary story embedded in earlier writings, which raise questions and spawn new inquiries conducive to new findings. The present study was born of other circumstances: I was asked by the directors of the early music group Ensemble Lucidarium if, for purposes of performance, I knew of a translation of Samuel Archivoltis Hebrew wedding ode “Keḥi kinnor” (Take a lyre). I had run across the ode in various listings, but was unfamiliar with any translation, so I suggested doing my own. That is where the problems began. To establish a clean reading for the poem, I consulted its manuscript and printed sources; to confront its verbal obscurities, and pinpoint its meanings, I traced its references to biblical and rabbinical literature; and to satisfy my own curiosity about how it was sung, I looked into the few recorded examples of its melodies. It follows that in this article, I shall be concerned mainly with semantics and music. Yet, to begin, I shall present some information about the author, sources, and prosody of the poem; and, to conclude, I shall compare it with other wedding odes of his and his contemporaries, and, in an epilogue, appraise its singularity.

In Search of the ‘Song Of Zion’: Abraham Portaleone on Music in the Ancient Temple

Abraham Portaleone’s massive disquisition on the Ancient Temple (Sefer shiltei ha-gibborim, 1612) stands alone among Hebrew writings of the early seventeenth century. Of its ninety chapters, ten along with comments in various appendices present his views on the so-called ‘Song of Zion’ (Psalms 137:3), or music sung and played by the Levites for worship in the Temple. Portaleone takes off from the premise that its components, thought to have gradually been forgotten by the Hebrews in their wanderings after 70 CE, were, from earliest times, imitated and preserved by Christians in their art music. He thus described it after the example, however historically incongruous, of late sixteenth-century Italian polyphony (music for two or more voices). But he also spoke of the cantillation of Scriptures in connection with Temple services, even though cantillation—as we know it—evolved mainly in the medieval synagogue. Realizing the contingency of his remarks, he predicted that both polyphony and cantillation will be eclipsed in future times by a return to the original ‘Song’ in its “intrinsic perfection.” By examining Portaleone’s treatise along with writings of his contemporaries, it is possible to unravel some of the difficulties in defining music as practiced or thought to have been practiced in the First and Second Temples.

America's Influence on Its Emigre Composers

IN THE wake of the political turmoil of the early 1930s composers began to emigrate from Europe to the United States. The wave of migration reached its peak when Germany, ruled by the National Socialist Party, set out to absorb neighboring territories; it reached its conclusion with the collapse of France. Even while these events were in process, an interest arose in their bearing on the creative work of the composers affected by them. The question was raised to what extent this work was influenced by their more or less forcible, unplanned departure from customary surroundings and by their new living conditions. It might be worthwhile to take up this question once again, for the answers to it today are likely to be different from those of some thirty or more years ago. The very composers in question have been inclined to consider the influence of these events as insignificant. One might explain this as revealing a defensive attitude on their part, a kind of psychological mechanism that comes into play to protect the self-confidence of the emigre. He seeks shelter, it would seem, in convincing himself that the shock of uprooting did not encroach upon his innermost life substance. Guided by this point of view, the emigrant is likely to maintain that he would have composed whatever he did compose after settling in his new milieu even without this change. He is likely to maintain that all deviations from his earlier modes of writing, in the event that such can be observed, are the result of an inner development that has nothing to do with outer circumstances. As a matter of fact, this view is hard to invalidate, for there is no way of setting up an experiment that would demonstrate what a man would have created had he not emigrated. Yet from the present vantage point, the matter seems to take on a somewhat different appearance. The emigration of a group of renowned composers, and a string of lesserknown men, hit America at a time when the appeal for an autonomous musical production became increasingly louder in its formulation. The generation of seventy-year-old composers of today had reached full maturity, coming forth with the demand to be acknowledged as creators of the first original

Three Early Modern Hebrew Scholars on the Mysteries of Song

Discoursing on music, three early modern Jewish scholars stand out as original: Judah Moscato presented music as a spiritual phenomenon; Leon Modena asked about the legitimacy of art music in the synagogue; Abraham Portaleone treated music in the Ancient Temple.

Diana Matut. Dichtung und Musik im frühneuzeitlichen Aschkenas . Studies in Jewish History and Culture 29/1–2. 2 vols. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2011. 1:xvii, 528 pp.; 2: viii, 462 pp.

The two volumes are a carefully prepared and beautifully published edition and commentary, by Diana Matut, of two collections of Yiddish poems assembled sometime in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: Ms. opp. add. 4 136 (the so-called Wallich manuscript) in the Bodleian Library, Oxford; and (the earlier portion of) Ms. hebr. oct. 219 in the Universitätsbibliothek, Frankfurt am Main. Why “poetry and music” (Dichtung und Musik)? Because the same poems appear to have been sung to well-known melodies preserved in German song books. The Wallich manuscript contains fifty-seven texts (not all of them complete) and the Frankfurt manuscript ten, of which only the first five belong to the early seventeenth century—the same five appear to have been copied by the same scribe, hence their inclusion in the present edition. They were compiled or possibly even copied by or for Isaac Wallich from Worms and, in the nineteenth century, belonged to the library of Eliakim Carmoly in Frankfurt only to make their way after his death to the Bodleian and the Universitätsbibliothek. Volume 1 of Dichtung und Musik is an edition of the texts of both manuscripts (1:50–507) with a transcription in Latin letters and the original Hebrew script for the Yiddish on facing pages. Preceding the edition are various sections on the history of the manuscripts, a description of their contents, and remarks on the edition; following it are indices of the persons, places, and specifically Hebrew and Aramaic lexical “components” in the two manuscripts. Volume 2 is a detailed commentary on both sets of texts (2:101–400), preceded by various sections on previous research on the manuscripts (notably, for the Wallich manuscript, a dissertation by Felix Rosenberg published, in 1888–1889, in the Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland); the collection and its genesis, in particular, Isaac Wallich, song books and their domestic use, concordances between the poems in the two manuscripts and printed works from 1480 to 1640, the choice of texts as a reflection of the personal taste of the owner, their performance for various Jewish festivities within the family (weddings, circumcisions) or for holidays (Simh.at Torah, Purim, Pesah. ), scattered evidence for Jewish “musicians” in German-speaking countries, and one major conclusion (2:59–61): the two collections testify to Jewish enthusiasm for music making and speak for Wallich as “a Book Reviews

Barucaba as an Emblem for Jewishness in Early Italian Art Music

The expression “barukh ha-ba,” with its various continuations, has a fixed place in Jewish prayer and everyday Hebrew. It will be argued that the frequency of its usage tends to mark it, for non-Jewish hearers, as a typological label for Judaism. The operability of this proposition can be tested upon Italian art music from the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, with an extension into the nineteenth, more specifically in works that not only integrate “barukh haba” alias the Italianate barucaba into their text and music but feature Jews in their subject matter, the so-called ebraiche (of which some ten or so survive). Three ebraiche in particular demonstrate how barucaba, along with, and reinforced by, a number of other Hebraisms (some of them genuine, others concocted as Hebrew mumbo-jumbo), was purposely employed as an indication of ethnic and cultural alterity in their poetico-musical composition and would vicariously have been heard as such in their performance. Barucaba joins the ranks of other labels drawn from Jewish social or behavioral customs and functioning similarly to designate the Jews as an alien subgroup within a Christian majority. The conceptual apparatus needed for its apperception as a signifier for Jewishness will be discussed, as will the gradual breakdown of the same apparatus in the nineteenth century under changing socio-economic conditions.

“Adonai Con Voi” (1569), A Simple Popular Song With A Complicated Semantic About (What Seems To Be) Circumcision

The portion symbols of mental experience leaves considerable room for interpretive maneuver. This chapter concerns with a modest Italian popular song, specifically a villotta, one of various lighter types of music in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Adonai con voithus it beginsradiates joviality and at first blush appears innocuous; one might easily pass it by. The chapter concentrates on the verses rather than the music, which, in the present case, is fragmentaryelude a facile explanation: they intimate more than they disclose. In its poetry and music Adonai con voi exemplifies what Alfred Einstein, with his fine-tuned sensibility to varying ethnic types in sixteenth-century Italian lyric poetry, called an ebraica, or song about Jews. The use of adonai should be related to that of barucaba , an even more potent expression of Jewishness. The chapter proposes an almost heterodox explanation for the climactic word barucaba . Keywords: Adonai con voi; barucaba ; Italian popular song; sixteenth-century Italian lyric poetry; villotta

on a Jewish musical Renaissance

Daedalus Winter 2008 The title of this essay is best framed as a question: Did the Jews have a musical ‘renascence’ in the Renaissance? It is impossible to answer it without asking a host of others: What is meant by Renaissance? How valid is the term as a chronological or conceptual marker in present-day humanist scholarship? How does it apply to music? Is it relevant to Jewish scholarship–was there in fact a ‘Jewish Renaissance’? Does it include music composed by Jews? And even more fundamentally, what is ‘Jewish music’ and how does it differ, if at all, from ‘music composed by Jews’? That the literature contains no de1⁄2nitive responses to these admittedly trying questions dispenses me–to my relief– from wrestling with them here. But not completely: in order to continue, I shall have to come up with as many if not clear-cut, at least quick-cut, responses as reveal the assumptions behind the discussion. They are as follows: yes, for the sake of argument, let us agree that there was a Renaissance; and that it denotes some sort of ‘renewal’; and that thus construed, it pertains, in certain ways, to Jewish culture in the later 1⁄2fteenth to early seventeenth centuries; and that one can detect it in sacred and secular ‘art music,’ by which I mean, in the present case, music for two or more voices composed by Jews in Italy from the later sixteenth century on for use in the synagogue and often private Jewish or non-Jewish settings. Here is where the semantic problems begin: when written in Hebrew and meant for the synagogue or speci1⁄2cally Jewish celebrations (within the community or separate households), such music might rightly be called ‘Jewish art music.’ But when written in Italian and meant for nonreligious festivities in the courts, in public, or in the residences of the more affluent Jews, it should probably be called ‘art music by Jews, though not necessarily for Jews.’ Either variety is to be distinguished from the traditional types of Jewish song heard in the synagogue for reciting prayers or reading Scriptures. Nothing about them was ‘Renaissance’ or ‘artistic’; rather they perpetuated a medieval oral practice. Nor were the works of art music meant to replace them: their performance in the synagogue was occasional. We can glean evidence for a Jewish Renaissance in art music from two sources: Hebrew writings on music and the music itself. Their locus–until the later sevenDon Harran is Artur Rubinstein Professor Emeritus of Musicology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of numerous books and has published widely in musicological and interdisciplinary journals on sixteenthand seventeenth-century Italian and Italo-Jewish musical topics. In 1999 he received the Michael Landau Prize for Scholarly Achievement in the Arts, and in 2006 was named Knight (Cavaliere) of the Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity. Don Harran