Re: Orgin of Hatikvah

[Hope Ehn Dennis Ehn <ehn...>]

I don't think that I'm the one with the problem. It seems to me that other
people are having a problem with the possibility that the Hatikvah tune
could have a non-Jewish origin -- assuming that the tune was original for
the 1608 intermedio and that the composer was NOT Salamone Rossi. I don't
think that either assumption is necessarily true. If it makes people feel
better, they can think that Rossi overheard a ghetto fiddler playing the
tune, and used it for part of the intermedio -- it's not impossible.

The pieces I cited are the earliest KNOWN version of the tune. That does
not rule out the possibility that whoever composed the the setting in the
intermedio I mentioned used a tune he had heard somewhere. Nor does it
disprove the possibility that someone used a tune heard in a performance
of "serious" music for other purposes. 

Where do "folk songs" come from? They're not composed by a committee of
deliberately anonymous people. In many cases, tunes from "serious" 
compositions make their way into the "folk" repertory; sooner or later,
someone puts words to them. (In other cases, tunes heard in "folk" 
settings are used by composers of "serious" music; it's very much a
two-way street.)

I've never heard of the Mr. Cohen mentioned. I've seen various versions of
the meeting of tune and text, including a claim by someone that Imber
confessed, while not completely sober, to having taken the tune from "The
Moldau." I can't vouch for the truth of that story, of course; in fact, I
haven't been able to find the place where I saw it. But the story about
the farmer and the Rumanian folk tune strikes me as equally apocryphal. 

Hatikvah is a SECULAR song, no matter how strongly Zionist one is. It is
NOT blasphemy to offer information that counters some people's *beliefs*
about its origins.

I am not the only trained musicologist who is uncomfortable with the 
apparent hostility on this list to music scholarship. I could understand 
the hostility if someone were arguing against religious belief and/or 
practice -- but this is MUSIC, and SECULAR music at that. Contradicting 
someone's belief about it will neither harm the practice of religion, nor 
injure the state of Israel in any way.

Hope Ehn                 <ehn (at) world(dot)std(dot)com>
(M.M., music history, New England Conservatory;
 ABD musicology, Brandeis University)

******************************************************************************
Dennis and Hope Ehn are 2 different people sharing one account.
Hope is the author of "On-Line Resources for Classical & Academic Musicians."
Dennis does programming (mostly C++).
PLEASE don't get us confused!                                 :-)
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On Thu, 26 Feb 1998, Solidarity Foundation wrote:
> 
> This is all very, very interesting, but may I point out that she has left
> out the one crucial fact, which is that a Jewish farmer named Samuel Cohen
> set the words of Imber's Hatikvah to that tune. Now both Cohen AND Imber
> were from Moldavia. Moldavia is the eastern part of Romania. Therefore,
> doesn't it seem most likely that the immediate source was indeed the
> Romanian folk song "Carul co Boi"?
> 
> You know, I'm beginning to get the impression that people actually have
> some sort of problem with this -- namely, the same problem we've been
> talking about, they don't want the tune to have such humble origins.
> 
> For my part, I'd be willing to bet that Romanian, particularly Moldavian
> music has been a major source of a LOT of Israeli music. Did you know
> that "hora" is a Romanian word?
> 
> Itzik-Leyb
>