Re: Re[2]: Itsy Bitsy Spider and other Liturgucal Themes

[Solidarity Foundation <svzandt...>]

>They say nothing positive to me, and they do not deserve the words they
>convey - instead, they trivialize the meaning of the prayers.
Dear Wendy
Does the Star Spangled Banner become trivialized when you are informed that
it originates with a British drinking song?  In other words, is it the
intrinsic meoldy that's the problem or the handicap that you and I share in
that we know the origin of some of our favorite tunes and they are indeed
quite humble!

Rich Wolpoe
>They do not enhance my davening experience, rather they impede it,
>Wendy
__________________

Some people , whether by nature, training, or both, are more sensitive to
musical _ethos_. It has nothing to do with associations of the tune's
origins, which few people know anyway. Surely no one was more aware of
the fact that Anacreon in Heaven is a drinking song than those who began
singing the national anthem to it in the first place!

Tastes differe in different places and they change over time. That is not
to say that there is no rhyme or reason to it. I'd be very interested to
know the social and theological orientations of the German Jews who first
adopted these tunes, i.e., who found them appropriate. Were they people
perhaps who wanted to see themselves as "Germans of Israelite faith"? 
Then a second question is, why did some of these tunes become popular
throughout Eastern Europe? and when?

Perhaps these tunes sounded, to our great-grandparents' ears, kind of like
Western classical music did to our grandparents, who first got the chance to
hear it -- exalted, dignified, vaguely prestigious. Yet to us, now 
thoroughly familiar with Western classical music, it comes off in
comparison as trivial (which it is) and beside the point anyway (becauese
classical music beongs to everybody, and notably, to Christian church
services -- for davening, we want our own music.)

In other words, these tunes are trivial and inappropriate to the texts,
but even if they were really good as Western style melofdies, all they
would accomplish would be to make the ethos of a synagogue service more
like that of a good church service.

Incidentally, there is a whole history of struggle against tasteless
liturgical music in Christian worship, especially in n the 19th and 20th
centuries. Of course the parameters were different -- in the 19th century
many felt it was getting to sound too much like Italian opera tunes, and
there was a campaign to bring back plain chant as the basis of the
liturgy. In the Eastern Orthodox, the issue has often been -- as with us --
too much westernization.

But as I said at the outset, to many people the whole thing is a non-issue.

Itzik-Leyb