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Liturgie

LITURGIEK
Liturgiek TVG

Liturgiegeschiedenis

Joods

Vroeg Christelijk

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HYMNOLOGIE

Geschiedenis van de Hymnodie

Oud Joodse Hymnodie
Vroeg Christelijke Hymnodie
Griekse Hymnodie tot 900AD
Latijnse Hymnodie
Lutherse Hymnodie
Calvinistische (Franse) Psalmodie
Nederlandse Gemeentezang
na de Reformatie

Engelse Hymnodie

Muziekgeschiedenis




Joodse Liturgie: Zangontwikkeling


Joodse liturgische muziek deel III


  •  Developments In Ashkenaz (Northern and Eastern Europe)
  •  Ashkenazi Liturgical Chants
  •  The Introduction of Polyphony
  •  Mystical Traditions: Kabbalah and Hasidism
  •  The Influence of Kabbalah
  •  The Hasidic Niggun
  •  Tradition and Change

    Developments In Ashkenaz (Northern and Eastern Europe)

    During the early middle ages, the Jews of Ashkenaz [1] developed their own distinguishable culture. The most prominent group among them spoke the Middle High German that later developed into Yiddish. Wherever they migrated, they retained special dialects of the old German language mingled with Hebrew and local vernacular words; a distinctive pronunciation of Hebrew; and their own religious music and customs, often carried far afield by traveling rabbis who also served as cantors. The most venerated authority in this regard came to be R. Jacob Levi Moellin, known as the Maharil (c. 1356-1427), who served in the double capacity of rabbi and cantor in various German and Bohemian communities, and whose rulings are still considered obligatory for the Orthodox Ashkenazirn. [2]

    By the end of the fifteenth century, Ashkenazi Jewry can be subdivided into two cultural segments: western Europe (Minhag Ashkenaz proper, sometimes known also as Minhag Rinus, or the Rhineland rite) and eastern Europe (Minhag Polin, or the Polish rite). Both branches shared the main features of the liturgy and the old Ashkenazi piyyutim, and they retained similar basic prayer chants and cantillation motives. Gradually, each branch developed independent cultural and musical characteristics, but various melodies traveled from one branch to the other, thanks to migrating cantors and wandering rabbinical emissaries who crossed cultural borders.

    The mass immigration of European Jews from the second half of the nineteenth century and the destruction of the Jewish communities of Europe in the Holocaust transplanted the Ashkenazi tradition to Palestine, Australia, South Africa, and America. Though here and there the western tradition was retained or even prevailed (e.g., among nineteenth and early twentieth-century American Reform Jews, or in pockets where German subculture is still venerated, as in New York City's Washington Heights), [3] in most places, the eastern liturgical and musical tradition came eventually to dominate.

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    Ashkenazi Liturgical Chants

    The traditional synagogue chant of the Ashkenazi Jews, both east and west, consists of four interacting layers, each of which emerged in a different time: (1) cantillation of Scripture (2) nusach (3) misinai melodies, and (4) cantonal improvisation.

    The earliest layer is probably the musical motifs used for the cantillation of Scripture. When they are first heard, the eastern European cantillation motives seem very different from their older western European counterparts. But both stem from a common origin. We do not know when the proto-Ashkenazi motifs emerged and how they are related to the ninth-century Tiberian chants, since no early musical transcriptions of te'amim exist. [4] Nevertheless, they show some agreement with early verbal descriptions of the old motifs and therefore it seems plausible that they were already in use during the eleventh or twelfth centuries.

    The second layer, the simple prayer chants known as nusach, developed simultaneously with, or slightly later than, basic melodic patterns of the te'amim. Usually sung by lay precentors, these chants consist of simple psalmodic formulas for the opening morning prayers and psalms (pesukei dezimrah) and patchwork melodies for more complex texts, such as the week day benedictions of the Tefillah. Some of these chant patterns are related to cantillation Motifs. [5]

    A third layer, misinai tunes, are sung on solemn occasions, especially the High Holy Days. They are common to both eastern and western Ashkenazim who revere them highly. We do not know when the term misinai (literally, from Sinai) was first coined, but cantors of the past two or three centuries have believed that the tunes were very old, perhaps revealed like the Torah itself to Moses on Sinai and, therefore, equally unalterable. Even less naive people use the term to distinguish the old, obligatory tunes from the new, fashionable ones.

    In all probability, misinai melodies date back to Germany or northern France at various times between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries. In 1926, Idelsohn linked misinai tunes to the melodies of the medieval German minnesinger and concluded that the tunes combine oriental Jewish and German elements. Continuing Idelsohn's line of thought, Eric Werner compared the great Alenu, one of the most sacred misinai tunes, to the Gregorian Sanctus and Agnus Dei of the ninth Mass. [6]

    The most famous misinai tune is the one used for Yom Kippur eve's Kol Nidre and is considered by many to be the crown of Jewish liturgical chant. In a brilliant article, Idelsohn concluded that the tune was compounded from melodic patterns of various sources; that some important patterns were derived from the western Ashkenazi cantillation of the Prophets; and that the tune showed clear influence of German minnesinger melodies. The tune was probably composed in southern Germany in "the later part of the Period of the Minnesong," namely the end of the fifteenth or the beginning of the sixteenth century. [7] Unfortunately, no extant transcriptions of the Kol Nidre tune predate the eighteenth century, by which time it was already outfitted with many late cantorial embellishments. [8]

    Two misinai tunes became famous in non-Jewish circles after they were arranged by great gentile composers. The Kaddish by Maurice Ravel is an imaginative arrangement of a faithful transcription of the misinai Kaddish melody that introduces the High Holy Day period's Selichot and Musaf services. [9] One of the many versions of the Kol Nidre tune has become famous in Max Bruch's setting for cello and orchestra. [10]

    The fourth layer of Ashkenazi liturgical music consists of cantorial improvisations. These are built on tunes and motifs of the previous layers with the addition of musical elements that are borrowed from vocal and instrument music of the day. [11] During the eighteenth century, musical idioms were borrowed from European baroque and early classic styles; during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the idioms of Italian opera penetrated cantorial improvisations.

    The traditional improvisations are based on special modes called (in Yiddish) shtaygers (German: Steiger). [12] A shtayger is a musical corpus of melodic patterns that are related to a scale and are associated with particular prayers, functions, and services. Unlike the European scales, shtayger modes contain different sequences of tone and sermitone in different octaves. The shtaygers are said to be connected to certain notions of ethos or emotional contexts, but how much so is disputed among scholars. Cantors recognize three main shtaygers and a few auxiliary ones, and name them by the prayers with which they are most often sung. The three main shtaygers are these: Adonay malakh (whose scale, in the main octave only, resembles the Mixolydian mode), Magen avot (similar to natural minor mode but with many additional features), and Ahavah rabbah (with a tone-and-a-half step between the second and the third degrees of the scale). The last shtayger, which is common to many eastern European, Jewish and non-Jewish folk tunes (e.g., the famous Havah Nagillah), has become the symbol of Jewish music, although it is by no means the characteristic mode of all, or even a majority, of the Jewish tunes. [13]

    The scales of the shtayger need not contain the same accidentals in all octaves; on the contrary, one of the salient characteristics of some shtaygers is the variety of tone and semitone series in the different octaves. The melodic patterns of some shtaygers help cantors modulate from one shtayger to another and back again. All have clear formulas for the beginning of a piece or a section and for cadencing at the end of a piece, and other melodic gestures for various musical functions. However, all of the patterns are flexible enough to allow for regional and personal stylistic differences. In this respect they resemble jazz patterns which good musicians play with as if they were musical toys.

    At its best, cantorial improvisation seeks to highlight the text of the prayers by means of musical interpretation. The cantor tries to convey the emotional contents of the prayer or to depict in sound some of its visual images. At its worst, it deteriorates into a vain display of vocal tirade. The art of cantorial improvisation developed into virtuoso style in eastern Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of the improvisations by cantors such as Ephraim Zalman Razunini, Pinchas Segal " Pinchik, " Joseph Rosenblatt, and Leib Glantz were of sublime beauty. After long developmental and incubational periods, some of these great improvisations were finally transcribed into musical notation or recorded by their creators. Once published, they became part of the common stock of cantorial art that many cantors sang as classical pieces.

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    The Introduction of Polyphony

    Folk polyphony is common to many non-European cultures. Jews, too, have practiced such unlearned polyphonic devices as drones, simple two-part singing, and the like. [14] Simple drones may even have been used in the Second Temple. A particularly interesting form of polyphony, practiced by Yemenite Jews, consists of the congregation forming parallel lines of heterophonic singing at the intervals of perfect fourths and fifths. This remarkable phenomenon is redolent of medieval European organum as described in theoretical treatises of the tenth and eleventh centuries, and it can be called heterophonic organum. [15] However, it seems that European polyphonic art music was introduced into the synagogue only at the end of the sixteenth or the beginning of the seventeenth century.

    Simple European polyphony seems to have been sung by a small group of singers in some Ashkenazi (Tedeschi) synagogues in northern Italy around the year 1600. It is possible that this kind of polyphony was related to the practice of the vocal trio of cantor, bass, and boy singer that was common in Ashkenazi synagogues until the nineteenth century. Most of the singing by this trio was done from memory or by extemporization, and melodic accompaniment followed well-known conventions of droning and responding to solos with a word or two in simple chords. Some of these conventions are still heard in choirs of Orthodox synagogues. [16]

    The first musician to introduce composed polyphony into the synagogue music was Salomone di Rossi of Mantua (c. 1565? - after 1628). In 1622, he published his compositions in a set of part books printed in Venice under the title Hashirim asher Lishlomoh (The Songs of Solomon). The books were intended to provide polyphonic substitutes for the cantor's part in some services, as well as choral settings of some psalms and piyyutim. [17] Although the publication of Rossi's compositions was warmly supported by one of the greatest rabbinical figures of the time, Yehudah Arieh (Leone) di Modena, it found no immediate followers. Nevertheless, during the second half of the seventeenth century, the Jews of Italy introduced baroque cantatas into some ceremonies of the synagogue. The favored ceremonies were connected with the inauguration of new synagogues and celebrations of pious societies, especially on the last intermediary day of Sukkot (Hoshanah Rabbah). Frequently, non-Jewish composers were commissioned to set ancient and newly invented Hebrew texts. [18]

    During the eighteenth century, cantatas were composed and sung in various communities of Europe, such as Comtat Venaisin in southern France and the Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam. When rabbinic law permitted it, instrumental music, too, was used in a few synagogues. In some towns, welcoming the Sabbath (Kabbalat Shabbat) was celebrated on Friday afternoons with instrumental music, and some synagogues even introduced the organ. In Prague, for instance, the three main synagogues — namely, the Pinkas-Schul, Altneuschul, and Meisel-Schul — all possessed portable organs and celebrated Kabbalat Shabbat with organ and other instrumental accompaniment until the end of the eighteenth century. [19] New trends of polyphonic music were introduced into the European synagogues during the nineteenth century, and these are treated elsewhere in this volume. [20]

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    Mystical Traditions: Kabbalah and Hasidism

    The Influence of Kabbalah

    As we saw above, rabbinic Judaism deemphasized the role of music, seeing in it a potential source of disrespect for the memory of Jerusalem and even a cause of what they considered promiscuity. Thus even though all Jewish communities sang, danced, and played musical instruments whenever possible, no theoretical support for such activities was offered by rabbinical texts. This changed in the sixteenth century, with the popularization of several forms of mysticism generally subsumed in the title, Kabbalah. Convinced that music possessed the power to lift the human soul to the Eternal, [21] or even to attain prophecy, [22] early Kabbalistic literature explored music's magical and theurgical powers. But Kabbalistic literature was originally the province of the elite. Only with the rise of Kabbalistic adepts in sixteenth-century Safed (in Israel's eastern Galilee) did its mystical doctrines penetrate every aspect of Jewish life to the point where unlearned Jews practiced Kabbalism without even knowing that they did so.

    The Kabbalah of Isaac Luria (1534-1572), the central figure in Safed Kabbalism, and his disciples revolved around the central idea of tikkun, i.e., mending the catastrophic break within the divine emanation. The Kabbalistic myth of creation held that in the process of divine emanation whence the universe came into being, the divine light had become embroiled with kelipot (shards of evil), such that the created cosmos abounds with evil too. Tikkun, "reparation," will return the sparks to their pristine state, redeeming both Creator and created simultaneously. Performing mitzvot (acts commanded by God) accomplishes tikkun olam, "the reparation of the cosmos."

    The Kabbalists viewed music, too, as having fallen into the realm of evil, on account of human sin. It was therefore necessary to find a tikkun for music, so as to lift it up towards its divine source. The tikkun for music was to sing it in sacred circumstances, such as during the Sabbath meal or with the holy words of prayer. For centuries, Jews had been borrowing secular and non-Jewish tunes for their worship, but without theoretical support for what was merely an instance of a universal pattern known to all cultures. Now, however, the practice was outfitted with a theological rationale. A direct and immediate result of the new freedom to recast secular melodies as sacred entities were the piyyutim of Israel Najara, which were based on Arabic and Turkish sounds. Najara used to sit in Arabic coffee houses in order to learn new tunes (and was severely criticized for this, even in Kabbalistic circles). The idea of tikkun also inspired European Jews to introduce baroque music into the synagogue, and the same idea inspired eastern European Hasidim to adopt foreign tunes and "Judaize" them.

    Kabbalistic theology postulated also that the various stages of emanation could be conceptualized as Sefirot, or spheres of light, that came into being at intervals of time different from the moment when the light was set loose from its source until it eventuated in the final act of bringing an actual world into being. In the idealized state of divine wholeness, nothing had separated one Sefirah from another, but now, the Godhead itself was in disarray. This was particularly so because one Sefirah contains the feminine principle, while another holds the masculine principle, such that masculine and feminine exist in disharmonious separation from each other, a condition mirrored by earthly travail as well — the exile of Israel from the Holy Land, for instance, which is an earthly reflection of the exile of the divine feminine power from its masculine counterpart. Tikkun olam leads to the Messianic era when God's male and female powers will be reunited for good and Israel will return to its country.

    To foster this reunion, the Kabbalists established private devotions known as tikkun chatsot, a midnight vigil of penitential prayers to be chanted on weekdays, when the exile of the feminine principle is particularly evident. By contrast, temporary union occurs every Sabbath, which is known as a "taste of the world to come." Kabbalist liturgy thus fostered rituals designed to celebrate the divine reunion of male and female, most notably, the Kabbalat Shabbat service that actually welcomes the Sabbath queen and bride as the sun sets on Friday evening. By the seventeenth century, this service had become an integral part of the liturgy in every community, even non-Kabbalistic ones which accepted the new ritual for its beauty, without perhaps even knowing its Kabbalistic rationale. The central piyyut of this service is Lekhah Dodi by Solomon Halevi Alkabetz, who embedded in its lyrics many allusions to the divine reunion. The poem attracted hundreds of tunes all over the Diaspora.

    The same Kabbalistic ideas led to the establishment of other Friday night ceremonies too: a Sabbath Eve meal with after-dinner singing (as if one is attending the divine marriage); and Bakkashot services in Syrian and Moroccan communities on Friday nights in winter after midnight (see above), where to this day, the best Middle Eastern cantorial singing can still be heard.

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    The Hasidic Niggun

    Eighteenth-century European pietism led to eastern European Hasidism, which borrowed directly the motifs of Lurianic Kabbalah. Its founders, Israel Baal Shem Tov and his disciples, were convinced that God was best worshiped out of a sense of great joy. Music and dance were the most important means for releasing the soul from the influence of the shards of evil. [23]

    The Hasidic theory of the niggun — a melody without lyrics — maintained that melodies, too, contain divine sparks, so that defiled melodies can be redeemed by being sung in sanctity. Further, melodies, like souls, are of divine origin, yet not all are equal. There therefore exists a hierarchy among the various kinds of niggun. The lowest melodic form is simply an expression of joy. Higher up are liturgical songs that express the inward meaning of the prayers. But the highest melodies are those created by the tzaddikim, Hasidic leaders and saints; the musical patterns of their songs were believed to express secret Kabbalistic ideas.

    A melody's place in the musical hierarchy varied also with its relationship to a text, in that melodies with texts are like souls with bodies, whereas melodies without texts are like pure souls. Therefore the Hasidim composed many melodies with any text and sang them with nonsense syllables such as ya-ba-bam or doy-doy-doy and the like.

    At times, such wordless niggunim served as substitute prayers: a long wordless melody would be followed by a hasty recitation of the corresponding prayer.

    Hasidic leaders, some of whom were themselves gifted musicians, encouraged the creation of new niggunim. They or their followers composed melodies for statutory worship and for distinctive Hasidic rituals like the ceremonial meal known as a Tisch. Other leaders employed court composers, whose musical output was carefully scrutinized. It was not uncommon in the middle of the nineteenth century for Hasidic masters to employ their own chazzan, along with choirs of meshorerim charged with the task of disseminating new melodies by teaching them to the pilgrims who flocked to the tzaddik's court during the Holy Day seasons. Thus different melodies and different performance practices developed under the various Hasidic dynasties. Until recently, all the melodies were considered torah shebe'al peh (oral law) not to be written, but in the last four decades some Hasidic authorities have begun permitting, and even encouraging, the notation of their niggunim as a means of preservation and proliferation.

    Among the many genres of niggunim, the most important are short dance melodies; melodies used in services, either as introductions to prayers or as substitutes for them; and long meditative melodies called dveikes and used in important gatherings at the tzaddik's table. Most melodies contain two to four sections, but some may have as many as thirty-six! The sections are said to represent stages of ecstasy or cleavage to God.

    Nowadays, Hasidic music is well and thriving. New melodies for many occasions are composed by the various courts, and these regularly replace old ones. The influence of Hasidic music is felt even in the liturgical music of non-Hasidic Jews. Genuine Hasidic melodies have penetrated Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform services alike. Furthermore, imitations of Hasidic music are quite fashionable in wide circles, even among pop composers, whose work is highlighted in an annual Israeli "Festival of Hasidic Music," whence it travels to non-Hasidic services worldwide. Even the Reform movement, which arose as a bastion of anti-Hasidic sentiment, now features services that claim to have been composed in Hasidic style, though most of the imitations are much-simplified versions of the real thing.

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    Tradition and Change

    At the beginning of this century, scholars of Jewish music, including Idelsohn, believed that some Jewish communities, such as the Yemenite or Babylonian Jews, preserved their ancient musical traditions in pristine purity. Proof of the antiquity of their chants was to a great measure the simplicity of the melodies. This innocent belief became a major factor in the rebuilding of Jewish musical culture, especially in its old-new homeland. But the more we study Jewish musical traditions, the more we are aware of the changes that took place in each tradition throughout the ages. Recent studies, especially those by Amnon Shiloah, [24] have tried to understand the dynamics of change that influenced the traditional oriental chants during their encounter with the new cultural milieu of modem Israel. Similar changes, though not at as fast a pace, must have been the norm all along and need now to be documented.

    We no longer can believe that some Jewish communities were so secluded that they never were influenced by others. The essence of the Jewish experience with history has been that Jews have moved like peddlers from community to community, carrying their musical merchandise with them. Some rabbis and cantors traveled to distant places expressly intending to transplant their liturgical chants to the cultural soil of foreign Jewish communities. Thus, for instance, modern studies should inquire whether the resemblance of the Amsterdam Portuguese chants to their Moroccan counterparts is related to the fact that both communities are descendents of the Sephardim of Spain, or whether other factors were involved. Perhaps the Moroccan chant was imported to Holland by Moroccan rabbis and cantors such as Isaac Uziel of Fez, an authoritative rabbi and excellent musician who was invited by the Dutch community in around 1610 to lead the congregation there. [25] Neither can we subscribe to the idea that the simpler the melody, the more ancient. Liturgical melodies may have developed from the simplest patterns to the most complex ones; or they may have shrunk from highly developed forms into simple patterns. Indeed, melodies have a tendency to undergo various changes through the ages, especially if they are transmitted orally. [26]

    The study of change in Jewish liturgical music must take into account the major historical factors that were presented in this survey: the destruction of the Temple and rise of the synagogue; the development of the cantillation of Scripture; the ascent of the piyyut; the influence of Arabic culture; the infiltration of non-Jewish melodies during the Middle Ages and later; the changing nature of the cantorate in different places and times; the introduction of polyphony into the services; and finally, the influence of Kabbalah and Hasidism.

    Credits

    This page is reproduced, in three parts, by permission of the author and publisher in three parts from "Jewish Liturgical Music from the Bible to Hasidims" by Eliyahu Schleifer, in Sacred Sound and Social Change: Liturgical Music in Jewish and Christian Experience published by University of Notre Dame Press. This book is available in our liturgical web store (learn more here).

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    [1] The Lotharingian part of the Carolingian Empire, including the Rhineland, some northern parts of France, and Flanders.

    [2] His dicta on liturgical customs and chants were collected by his disciple, Zalman of St. Goar, and were published in 1556 as Sefer Minhagei Maharil.

    [3] For synagogue music in the United States, see Mark Slobin, Chosen Voices: Yhe Story of the American Cantorate (Urbana and Chicago, 1989).

    [4] The western Ashkenazi motifs were first transcribed into European renaissance notation by non-Jewish humanist scholars of the sixteenth century. The earliest published transcription, by Johannes Boeschenstein, was printed in Johannes Reuchlin's Hebrew grammar, De Accentibus et orthographia linguae Hebraicae (Hagenau, 1518). To suit the taste of the time, the melodic patterns were set in four parts (SATB), the tenor part containing the original melody. Needless to say, the reading of Scripture was never chanted in polyphony. On other early transcriptions, see Avenary, Biblical Chant, pp. 10-16.

    [5] An excellent nusach collection (mostly west European) is Abraham Baer, Ba'al T'fillah oder "Der practische Vorbeter" (Ghenburg, 1877). The second edition (1883) was reprinted as vol. 1 of the series, Out of Print Classics of Synagogue Music (New York, 1953). For a recent scholarly exposition of simple weekday nusach patterns, see Brian J. Mayer, "The Origins and Identification of the Nusach lechol of Frankfurt am Main," Journal of Synagogue Music 19/1 (July, 1989): 6-55.

    [6] ldelsohn's original article, "Der Missinai-Gesang in der deutschen Synagog," appeared in Zeitschrift f Musikwissenschaft 8/8 (May, 1926): 449-72, and was revised for his Thesaurus of Hebrew Oriental Melodies, vol. 7 (1932), ch. 5 of the introductory section. Eric Werner treats misinai tunes in A Voice Still Heard, pp. 27-45.

    [7] "The Kol Nidre Tune," Hebrew Union College Annual 8/9 (1931-1932): 493-509.

    [8] The earliest extant transcription is a manuscript (Mus. 102a) notated between 1765 and 1783 by Aron Beer (1738-1821), in the Birnbaum Collection, Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati. Beer's version was published by Idelsohn in his Thesaurus, vol. 6 (1932), no. 1. For this and other early transcriptions, see Israel Adler, Hebrew Notated Manuscript Sources up to Circa 1840, (Munich, 1989). See also Werner, A Voice Still Heard, pp. 35-38, who tries, in an over - simplified way, however-especially on p. 36-to reconstruct the original.

    [9] Ravel includes only the cantor's part, not the congregational response.

    [10] Only the beginning and the end of the composition come from the original Kol Nidre tune; the rest is borrowed from an unrelated nineteenth-century source.

    [11] See, for instance, improvisations that embellished the misinai tune of Alenu and similar chants, in Hanoch Avenary, "The Cantorial Fantasia of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," Yuval 1 (1968): 65-88.

    [12] For a survey of the literature on the modes, see Max Wohlberg, "The History of the Musical Modes of the Ashkenazic Synagogue and Their Usage," Journal of Synagogue Music 4/1-2 (April, 1972): 46-61. Baruch S. Cohon maps out all the Ashkenazi shtaygers in "The Structure of the Synagogue Prayer-Chant," Journal of the American Musicological Society 2 (1950): 17-31. See also Hanoch Avenary, "The Concept of Mode in European Synagogue Chant," Yuval 2 (1971): 11-21; his "Second Thoughts about the Configuration of a Synagogue Mode," Orbis Musicae 9 (1986): 11-16; and Joseph A. Levine, "Toward Defining the Jewish Prayer Modes with Particular Emphasis on the Adonay Malakh Mode, " Musica Judaica 3/1 (1980-1981): 13-41.

    [13] Idelsohn (Jewish Music, pp. 84-89) traced this mode to Mongolian or Tartarian music.

    [14] See Edith Gerson-Kiwi, "Vocal Folk-Polyphonies of the Western Orient in Jewish Tradition," Yuval 1 (1968): 169-193.

    [15] For European organum, see Richard H. Hoppin, Medieval Music (New York, 1978), pp. 178-98. Simha Arom and Uri Sharvit, who are now studying the Yemenite phenomenon, call it "Yemenite Plurivocality." For their findings, see forthcoming in Yuval 6.

    [16] Indications for the bass and boy singers occur already in some eighteenth-century manuscripts. See Adler, Hebrew Notated Manuscript Sources, Index 14a, pp. 799-802.

    [17] A "modernized" version of Rossi's Hashirim was published by Samuel Naumbourg as Cantiques de Salomon Rossi hebreo (Paris, 1877) reprint ed. (New York, 1954). A better, scholarly edition in three volumes was published by Fritz Rikko (New York, 1967-1973). A new critical edition by Don Harran of Jerusalem is planned as part of the publication of Rossi's collected works. On Rossi's innovation and its background, see Israel Adler, "The Rise of Art Music in the Italian Ghetto," in A. Altmann, ed., Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies, (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp. 321-64; and Don Harran, "Tradition and Innovation in Jewish Music of the Later Renaissance," Journal of Musicology 7/1 (Winter 1989): 107-30.

    [18] Various cantatas of this sort were discovered and published by Israel Adler through the Israel Music Publications, Jerusalem.

    [19] See Alfred Sendrey, The Music of the Jews in the Diaspora (New York, 1970), pp. 348-56.

    [20] See below, Geoffrey Goldberg, "Jewish Liturgical Music in the Wake of Nineteenth-Century Reform."

    [21] See Amnon Shiloah, "The Symbolism of Music in the Kabbalistic Tradition," The World of Music 20 (1978): 56-69.

    [22] See Moshe Idel, "Music and Prophetic Kabbalah," Yuval 4 (1971): 150-78; and his Hebrew article in the Hebrew section of the same volume.

    [23] See Idelsohn, Jewish Music, ch. 19. The best early collection of Hasidic melodies is Idelsohn's Thesaurus, vol. 10 (1932). A rich collection of melodies is Velvel Pasternak's Songs of the Chassidim (Cedarhurst, N.Y., 1971). For explanations of Hasidic melodies, see Chemjo Vinaver, Anthology of Chasidic Music, Eliyahu Schleifer, ed. (Jerusalem, 1985). See also Andre Hajdu and Yaacov Mazor, "The Musical Traditions of Hasidism," Encyclopedia Judaica (Jerusalem, 1971), vol. 7, cols. 1421-32; and the extensive Mazor-Hajdu article, "The Hasidic Dance-Niggun: A Study Collection and Its Classificatory Analysis," Yuval 3 (1974): 136-265. Some of Hajdu-Mazor's authentic recordings were included in Hasidic Tunes of Dancing and Rejoicing: Anthology of Musical Traditions in Israel (Jerusalem, 1976), RCA (n.n.)

    [24] See for instance, Amnon Shiloah and Eric Cohen, "The Dynamics of Change in Jewish Oriental Ethnic Music in Israel," Ethnomusicology 27 (1983): 227-51.

    [25] See Edith Gerson-Kiwi's preface to David Ricardo, ed., Selected Tunes from the Portuguese Jews' Congregation, Rishon LeZion [Private publication, 1975]; and Israel Adler, Musical Life and Traditions of the Portuguese Jewish Community of Amsterdam in the XVIIIth Century, Yuval Monograph Series, o. 1 (Jerusalem, 1974), pp. 11,93.

    [26] See Hanoch Avenary, "the Aspect of Time and Environment in Jewish Traditional Music," Israel Studies in Musicology 4 (1987): 93-112.

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