Jewish Religious Music in Nineteenth-Century America

Judah M. Cohen

Description

In Jewish Religious Music in Nineteenth-Century America: Restoring the Synagogue Soundtrack, Judah M. Cohen demonstrates that Jews constructed a robust religious musical conversation in the United States during the mid- to late-19th century. While previous studies of American Jewish music history have looked to Europe as a source of innovation during this time, Cohen's careful analysis of primary archival sources tells a different story. Far from seeing a fallow musical landscape, Cohen finds that Central European Jews in the United States spearheaded a major revision of the sounds and traditions of synagogue music during this period of rapid liturgical change.

Focusing on the influences of both individuals and texts, Cohen demonstrates how American Jewish musicians sought to balance artistry and group singing, rather than "progressing" from solo chant to choir and organ. Congregations shifted between musical genres and practices during this period in response to such factors as finances, personnel, and communal cohesiveness. Cohen concludes that the "soundtrack" of 19th-century Jewish American music heavily shapes how we look at Jewish American music and life in the first part of the 21st-century, arguing that how we see, and especially hear, history plays a key role in our understanding of the contemporary world around us. Supplemented with an interactive website that includes the primary source materials, recordings of the music discussed, and a map that highlights the movement of key individuals, Cohen's research defines more clearly the sound of 19th-century American Jewry.

Acknowledgements

Accessing Supplemental Materials

Introduction

1. Early Strata: Of Choirs and Reform through the Mid-Nineteenth Century

2. The Sound of German Jewry: Hymnals and Singing Societies in Wilhelm Fischer's Zemirot Yisrael

3. Bildungsmusik: G. M. Cohen, B'nai B'rith, and the Voices of American Jewish Cultivation

4. Musical Populists: G. S. Ensel, Simon Hecht, and the Quest for the Singing Congregation

5. The 1866 Sulzerfeier: the Viennese Model and the Grandeur of the Urban Worship

6. A New Cantor, A New Repertoire: Zimrath Yah

7. The Path to The Union Hymnal

Conclusion: Restoring the Soundtrack of Jewish Life in Nineteenth Century America

Works Cited

Index

Sujets

• HISTORY
• Religión
• Nueva York
• MUSIC
• Cleveland (Ohio)
• Cantante
• 19th century
• Jews
• Transnational
• Alois Kaiser
• Jewish music
• Practice (learning method)
• Multiple signal classification
• Strata
• Indiana University Press
• Samuel Naumbourg
• Salomon Sulzer
• Jewish studies
• IUP
• Jewish history
• Religious music
• Liturgy
• Ethnomusicology
• Choir
• Musicology
• Central Europe
• Mélodéon
• United States
• Germany
• Ohio
• Hazzan
• Cincinnati
• B'nai B'rith
• Cleveland
• Institut universitaire professionnalisé
• Cohen
• Synagogue
• Baltimore
• Cantor
• London
• Folklore
• Prague
• Kentucky
• Indiana
• Illinois
• 1848
• New York
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 14 février 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253040237
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

JEWISH RELIGIOUS MUSIC IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA
JEWISH RELIGIOUS MUSIC IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA
Restoring the Synagogue Soundtrack
Judah M. Cohen
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2019 by Judah M. Cohen
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-04020-6 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-04021-3 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-04024-4 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 24 23 22 21 20 19
The [new] Minhag America [prayer book] will be introduced in the Synagogue, as soon as the choir and the pupils of the Talmid Yelodim Institute will be sufficiently prepared, which we hope will be the case Sabbath next.

- THE ISRAELITE ( NOTICE, LIKELY ADDED BY ISAAC MAYER WISE ), OCTOBER 2, 1857.

Minhag America premiered two weeks later.
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Accessing Supplemental Materials

Introduction

1 Early Strata: Of Choirs and Reform through the Mid-Nineteenth Century

2 The Sound of German Jewry: Hymnals and Singing Societies in Wilhelm Fischer s Zemirot Yisrael

3 Bildungsmusik : G. M. Cohen, B nai B rith, and the Voices of American Jewish Cultivation

4 Musical Populists: G. S. Ensel, Simon Hecht, and the Quest for the Singing Congregation

5 The 1866 Sulzerfeier : The Viennese Model and the Grandeur of the Urban Worship

6 A New Cantor, a New Repertoire: Zimrath Yah

7 The Path to the Union Hymnal

Conclusion: Restoring the Soundtrack of Jewish Life in Nineteenth-Century America

Works Cited

Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
O N D ECEMBER 8, 1999, AS PART OF MY dissertation fieldwork, I attended a weekly cantorial practicum at New York s Hebrew Union College School of Sacred Music. 1 That day, the program comprised excerpts from cantor Gershon Ephros s six-volume Cantorial Anthology (published 1929-69), a classic foundational work for cantorial education. 2 The students meticulously prepared presentations received public plaudits. In the private discussion that followed, however, Ephros s material became the subject of vigorous debate. Cantorial faculty described the Cantorial Anthology as Ephros s attempt to link choral music traditions from the nineteenth century with Eastern European chant styles that emerged in the twentieth-century synagogue. One senior student cut to the quick, though, by describing the day s presented compositions as second rate and recommending that they be thrown out. Students and faculty alike responded by defending the Anthology s place as part of the cantorial legacy, while quietly avoiding discussions of quality. 3 Their subsequent comments characterized musical practice in the nineteenth-century synagogue as a formative era that paved the way for a superior understanding of Jewish music in the twentieth century.
That view of the time period, I found, extended beyond the practicum discussion to the classroom. Except for a few canonical composers such as Salomon Sulzer, Samuel Naumbourg, and Louis Lewandowski, the era held a largely transitional character, focusing on Jewish musical authorities who shifted Jewish music from reliance on oral tradition to a score-based written tradition. Assuming that tradition to lie mainly with Eastern European Jewish populations, moreover, instructors gave American synagogue composers from this time especially harsh treatment: often excluding them from the repertoire, and regularly dismissing them as uninformed, overly commercial, or (for non-Jewish composers) unconnected to Judaism.
As a graduate student in ethnomusicology who interpreted critiques of musical quality as revealing commentaries on the boundaries of identity, I marked such discussions for further consideration. During spare moments, I explored the open music shelves of the Hebrew Union College library for overlooked works that pushed back through layers of history. A few years later, via an invitation to write the musical history of Manhattan s Central Synagogue, I took my first opportunity to research the 1800s in detail. I am grateful to the students and faculty of the (now) Debbie Friedman School of Sacred Music, as well as Ann Mininberg, Cantor Elizabeth Sacks, and the clergy and staff at Central Synagogue for showing me how much more I needed to learn.
By the time I could dive into the nineteenth century in earnest, a broad swath of out-of-print and out-of-copyright works had appeared on both curated and noncurated internet sites, including Google Books, Hathi Trust, the Goethe University Library s Compact Memory site, Ancestry.com , and ProQuest online newspapers. These digitized versions of obscure works made the era suddenly and easily accessible, benefiting my research immensely. But as with most archives, they also left many holes that only archival research could fill. Fortunately, most of the archives I approached had deeply knowledgeable staff who fulfilled requests with extraordinary speed, while providing their own helpful ideas. A Bernard and Audre Rapoport Fellowship allowed me to dive deeply into the immense offerings of Cincinnati s American Jewish Archives in summer 2014, with constant generous support from Kevin Proffitt, Elisa Ho, Dana Herman, Joe Weber, the fantastic staff, and director Gary Zola. Warren Klein, curator of the Herbert and Eileen Bernard Museum of Judaica at Congregation Emanu-El of the City of New York, provided me access to early congregational minutes of its affiliated synagogues. Curtis Mann of the Sangamon Historical Society generously provided materials pertaining to Springfield, Illinois; Jay Hyland of the Jewish Museum Milwaukee and Diane Everman of the St. Louis Jewish Community Archives did similarly with materials from their respective cities. Outside of the United States, Noam Silberberg at the Jewish Genealogy and Family Heritage Center of Warsaw s Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute parsed key Polish records with me; and Gila Flam, curator of the immense music collection at the National Library of Israel, speedily provided digital copies of materials not available anywhere else. A spring 2016 sabbatical semester as a fellow of Indiana University s Institute for Advanced Study allowed me the space and encouragement to put the balance of my manuscript together, along with the enthusiastic support of Suzanne Ingalsbe and Eileen Julien. A year devoting three hours per week with Indiana University s Faculty Writing Group, led by Laura Plummer and facilitated by Alisha Jones and Tessa Bent, allowed me to finish it up.
The current form of this narrative has benefited from a number of opportunities to present work in progress. In addition to papers at meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Association for Jewish Studies, and World Congress of Jewish Studies, I am grateful for invitations to try out my ideas at Cincinnati s Hebrew Union College and American Jewish Archives, the Indiana University Musicology Colloquium Series, and a conference convened by Jascha Nemtsov in the German-Polish border town of G rlitz/Zgorzelec. A shorter version of my chapter on G. S. Ensel appears in the American Jewish Archives Journal ; I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their deeply thoughtful comments and to editors Dana Herman and Gary Zola for their permission to include a substantial portion of that essay here. 4
Profound thanks also go to a community of colleagues who encouraged me and offered valuable critique, giving of their time amid often crushing administrative and teaching loads. Mark Kligman s generous close reading of the entire manuscript helped my ideas immensely, as did insights from Francesco Spagnolo, Mark Slobin, and Diana Matut. My Indiana University colleagues in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology and Jacobs School of Music s Department of Musicology have been a constant source of support, especially nineteenth-century specialists Halina Goldberg and Kristina Muxfeldt. My dear colleagues in the Borns Jewish Studies Program provided stability and confidence throughout, and I particularly thank Steve Weitzman, Jeff Veidlinger, and Mark Roseman for their calming stewardship of the program, Sarah Imhoff for her thoughts, and all of the program s faculty and staff for maintaining a warm and productive environment. Adah Hetko, Jaime Carini, and Meredith Rigby, my graduate assistants during the manuscript s final steps, provided crucial help with research, proofreading, and bibliography. Thank you also to Dana Herman, Michael R. Cohen, Sharon Mintz, Laurel Wolfson, and Chana Wolfson for their help in obtaining images. Writing can only happen once most other needs are met, a rare and coveted condition in today s academic scene; I am grateful for everyone s efforts to grant me the professional support and space to make such conditions possible.
At Indiana University Press, I am grateful for the professional, devoted, and efficient stewardship of Janice Frisch, Rachel Rosolina, and Kate Schramm, who transformed the normally glacial slog of academic publishing into a swift process while maintaining its academic vigor. Thank you also to Mary Jo Rhodes fo