The Cambridge Companion to Jewish Music. Edited by Joshua S. Walden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2015.
Reviewed by Simone Salmon
By creating and editing The Cambridge Companion to Jewish Music, Joshua Walden addresses the question, “What is Jewish Music?” This volume includes Biblical Music, Liturgical Music, Music in Judeo-Spanish, Klezmer, Yiddish Theater, Haskalahic Synagogue Music, European Art Music, and Israeli Art Music. The topics covered are ontology, diaspora, hybridity, separation from source, musical reform, identity negotiations, and bi-directionality. The works included span the ancient, modern, and contemporary periods. The book contains three main sections: conceptions of Jewish music; Jewish music in religious, folk, and popular contexts; and periods, places, and genres of Jewish music composition.
The first section provides an excellent introduction for the following two sections regarding the bigger picture, both philosophically and institutionally. Philip Bohlman addresses the paradox of defining Jewish music and ontological moments of musical translation, diaspora, community, recordings, film, hybridity, and nationalism. Edwin Seroussi highlights the controversiality of the term “diaspora” (as written by Slobin in 2003 [1]), the history behind the term, its usage in the context of Jewish topics, and the different ways in which the term can be used when applied to Jewish topics. This topic is critical to ethnomusicology, where fields of study are primarily organized by area, and Jewish music remains stuck in a liminal space because of its transnational nature. Judah Cohen pays attention to the institutions behind Jewish music, their creation of historical markers, education, philanthropy, Jewish music proliferation, and the normalizing effect these institutions have on Jewish music. Walden then takes us into the hybridities of Jewish musical identity in the recording music industry.
Due to its size and scope, Part II falls short in addressing Jewish religious, folk, and popular music. Theodore Burgh’s article on music from Iron Age Israel is valuable and impressive, as little source material exists. However, an issue can be taken with its placement within the volume because Mark Kligman’s article (which directly follows it) covers too much of Burgh’s material. Chapter 6, by Kligman, utilizes a wide range of sources to trace a comprehensive history of Jewish liturgy and the controversy arising from the Haskalah era. Susana Weich-Shahak’s article on the loss of song contexts and functions in stage performances includes a comprehensive introduction to categories of Judeo-Spanish songs and a structural analysis of the music. Joel Rubin’s chapter includes an extensive history of klezmer in Eastern Europe, America, and Israel. The length of the second section of this volume brings to the reader a feeling that, along with what constitutes Jewish music, there is an implicit judgment on what constitutes Jewish musicology. Additionally, although popular music studies is relatively new in the field and art and folk music from non-European areas are taught under the same umbrella as musicology in universities, these fields deserve more attention in this volume.
Part III explores Jewish composition in Europe from the Renaissance to today. Joshua Jacobson discusses the bi-directionality in Salamone Rossi’s negotiation of identity as he simultaneously worked in the Italian synagogal and secular music realms. David Conway writes on Jewish participation in European classical music in the mid-eighteenth century, when Ferdinand David, Joseph Joachim, Giacomo Meyerbeer, and Fromental Halévy were on the rise in post-revolutionary France and Germany. The Jewish Enlightenment influenced Jewish participation in European art and music. As a result, composers faced prejudice because the patronage of European art music was an exclusive domain controlled by the church and the aristocracy, earning Wagner’s definition of Jewish music as independent of Jewish musical traditions. James Loeffler writes on how different conceptions of Jewish music informed the composition of Jewish European classical music during its advances in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tina Frühauf covers the controversial music of the Jewish Reform movement and Sulzer’s redefinition of the ḥazzan as European art music (along with its Christian influences) made its way into the synagogue. Lily E. Hirsch discusses how the art music of German Jewish composers was affected by the Weimar era and the Holocaust, particularly by those who did not practice or strongly identify with the religion. Mark Slobin writes on Yiddish theater music to express the Jewish immigrant experience in America. Jehoash Hirshberg writes on the “founding” of Israeli music, the infrastructure for Jewish art music, and composers and compositions for Western classical instruments in Palestine between 1918 and 1948. Lastly, Amy Lynn Wlodarski discusses three composers who reflect postmodern postwar responses to the Holocaust in music, ultimately demonstrating that there is no one way to represent the Holocaust in music.
Overall, this book operates under a narrower definition of Jewish music than is appropriate, as it is primarily a companion to Ashkenazi music. While one article focuses on Judeo-Spanish songs, the volume is nearly absent of Mizrahi music. As its contributors already work with non-Ashkenazic music, more effort is required to include non-Ashkenazic material. This issue could be addressed with contributions from Kay Shelemey, Oded Erez, Essica Marks, Dwight Reynolds, Ruth Davis, Amy Horowitz, Amnon Netzer, Houman Sarshar, Johnathan Shannon, Avner and Naomi Bahat, Sara Manasseh, Evan Rapport, or Uri Sharvit in the next reprint. Yemenite, Persian, Iraqi, Andalusian, Musica Mizrahit, Bakkashot, and other para-liturgical genres come to mind. Moreover, the music of Bukharian Jews and others that do not neatly fit into the Ashkenazic/Sephardic/Mizrahi trifecta deserve attention. Including more non-Ashkenazic material would better fill out Part II, which holds half as many articles as Part III.
Nonetheless, The Cambridge Companion to Jewish Music is a valuable addition to the field for those looking to introduce the subject, especially those looking for a textbook for an introductory Jewish Western Art Music class. The chapters are careful not to include complex theory, making them suitable for those outside of and within academia. While there seems to have been confusion amongst the contributors over whether their articles would only provide historical context/overviews or if they were to include arguments (along with confusion about a standardized way to notate “ḥ”), the articles provided a good deal of crucial information that is needed understand theory in today’s Jewish musicology. However, the lack of focus on popular and non-Ashkenazic studies situates the volume within the canon that precedes it, focused on the superiority of European art forms and culture. It is time that the field of Jewish Studies gives an inclusive answer to the question, “what is Jewish music?” and for musicologists to broaden future understandings of how the term “Jewish music” is to be defined.
Simone Salmon, UCLA