Eliott's comments

[Meydele <Meydele...>]

On 02/05/99 13:59:54 you wrote:
>Why is it we Jews must always "participate?" Couldn't congregations sit in
>silence for awhile and just "listen" to good music? You are as familiar as
>I with church services: Protestant congregations will sing sing three
>hymns and listen to the rest. Depending on the church, there will be two
>or three "special music" sections per service. This seems like a
>good balance to me.
>
>

Well, Ari and others are right - Jews MUST participate.  How paradoxical to 
point to the 
Protestant style as the model! I think we lose something quintessentially 
Jewish if the 
congregation sits there waiting to sing on cue, culturally and not just on a 
halakhic level 
(now, mind you, this an aggressively secular Jew speaking). 

In an ethnomusicology course on Sephardic Jewish Liturgy I am taking at UCLA 
with Edwin Seroussi 
of Bar Elan U., he has made the interesting distinction between "structured 
sound" and music.  
What I think of as "davening" in the Ashkenaz tradition - the mish-mash murmur 
of chanted 
individual prayer, at different individualized pace, pitch and ornamentation - 
is what Seroussi 
has in mind.  By the way, it is pretty much the same in the Sephardic 
tradition.  Seroussi poses 
the question as to whether this should be thought of as music at all, hence the 
term "structured 
sound".  It seems to be some variety of this "structured sound", albeit one 
which Eliott 
apparently sees as uninformed which he disdains.  I would argue that this 
desire and willingness 
to participate is to be encouraged.  

Let's face it folks - most average Americans won't sing in public at all, 
embarrassed about not 
sounding like Alanis Morisette or Garth Brooks or whomever (John Phillip Sousa 
was right in his 
dire predictions about the effect of the phonograph.). The fact that the 
participants feel 
comfortable enough to make an attempt to sing is, to me, a positive step.  To 
be told that they 
should lay off because they don't know the tunes is a sorry thought indeed. 

Susan (Shira) Lerner





---------------------- jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org ---------------------+