home

short extract from the 4th chapter of the lectures-concerts from Marseilles to Tunis, from Tangier to Limassol

FOUR - Jewish Music: from the synagogue to the Klezmer.

...Judaism is one of the three monotheistic religions that, since their birth, have affected populations around the Mediterranean Sea. So far, we have been looking at Christianity and Islam observing how they influenced the musical culture of Europe and beyond. Now we must analyse the music produced by the Jewish culture...

...The first destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem took place in 586 BC, when Nebuchadnezzar, having conquered Jerusalem, took a large part of the population to Babylon as slaves. The kingdom of Babylon fell in 538 BC, when the city was captured by Cyrus, king of the Medes and Persians. In 537 BC Cyrus promulgated an edict allowing the Jews to return to Palestine and, when they settled back in their land, they brought back a great variety of chants...

...The Bible has considerably helped ethnomusicologists to extensively reconstruct the musical history of the Jews, providing information on the music of ancient times, and clarifying differences and similarities. Music was always seen in a positive, joyful perspective, intensifying religious experience in a controlled but vivid manner and exalting the love of God, nature and the pleasures of life, sometimes marking prophetic experience...

...Maybe owing to the prohibition of sacred images, music developed a prominent role in Jewish culture. Based on ample evidence in the Bible, we know that music played a very important role in the ritual of the Temple, which was home to a large orchestra.

...Kings David and Salomon organized choirs with up to twenty thousand singers for the ceremonies in the Temple normally backed by 12 piece orchestras. Synagogue music has a very specific character and is connected to the chanted reading of biblical text. However, after the second destruction of the Temple, which was the only place where practising Jews gathered in prayer, all music stopped (...). After the destruction, musical silence was to represent the tangible expression of mourning for all generations to come (...). It could be said that, with the destruction of the Temple, a whole civilization ended and the Diaspora erased the Temple culture, creating a new Jewish civilisation, different from the previous one, which would only manage to return to Palestine after two thousand years...

...The mystical element in Hasidic music was of a fundamental importance to its diffusion. It was a decisive motivating force for a class of itinerant musicians wandering from country to country, from town to town, to entertain at local celebrations. Because of the strong religious connection, they were always well received. All this is important in appreciating how different our Christian approach is when it comes to certain aspects of music.

...At the time of the institutionalization of the Hasidic movement, a great variety of races inhabited small villages and bigger towns in the great planes of Eastern Europe. Arabs, people from the Balkans, Byzantines, Turks and Georgians, Ukrainians, all lived side by side (the Muslims had only lifted the siege of Vienna after 1500) including the Gypsies, coming from India, who had spread all over continental Europe...

...A natural predisposition of Jewish popular music to incorporate external influences did not prevent it from maintaining certain peculiar features, like the vocal timbre, generally marked by a strong vibrato, often in a very high pitch and like the clarinet, the main instrument in the Klezmer. Moreover Klezmer musicians were always ready to break the rules of orthodox Western musical grammar. Onomatopoeic sounds, noises, sound alterations, pitch manipulations, reed whistles, tongue clicks, distortions, parody sounds and rhythm irregularities, have never been missing in Jewish music, itself the result of a colossal millennial melting pot...

...This attitude was so akin to Jazz that, when Klezmer made its first appearance in the States, it was simply called Jewish or Yiddish Jazz. Orchestras, groups, and small bands were born, sometimes including non-Jewish musicians, and it became common practice to create new Klezmer versions of well known pieces. All in all, the arrival of Klezmer music to the New World turned out to be simple, painless and full of interesting, if not revolutionary, innovations...

for further informations e-mail your request to info@habanera.it

index up chapters next chapter