Re: What Is Jewish Music?

[Alex J. Lubet <lubet001...>]

Responding to the message of <37759B97(dot)51217A87 (at) kamea(dot)com>
from jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org:
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> Klezcorner (at) aol(dot)com wrote:
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> > In a message dated 6/23/99 6:05:19 AM, media (at) kamea(dot)com writes:
> >
> > <<
> > > I would be interested in a justification
> > > of the CD "Great Jewish Music: Burt Bacharach" on Tzadik.
> > > >>
> >
> > THERE IS NO JUSTIFICATION FOR THIS CD!
> 
> Right on, Simon.  Thank you for your candor.
> 
> For decades in America,  Jewish entertainers went to great pains to hide
> their Jewish origins, changing names and noses in their quest for the
> "bitch goddess" Success.
> 
> With the ascendency of the Jewish upper middle class, it's now cool to be
> Jewish.  But not "too Jewish".  That would tend to make  audiences
> uncomfortable because it would demand an awareness and cultural literacy
> beyond the "bagels and lox" <yidishkayt>  being marketed by the
> multinational corporations that control the culture industry;  those that
> foist and strongly promote the "big sellers".
> 
> The grandchildren of those who abandoned their culture flock  to "Jewish
> Music" programs, hungry to fill the  bottomless void of having grown up
> in the plastic, shake 'n bake,  cultural and spiritual slums of monied,
> privileged suburban America.
> 
> What Sartre so elegantly called "nostalgie de la boue" (literally:
> nostalgia for mud).
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>  For  the  Bacharach CD to actually be presented in the marketplace as
> "Jewish Music" is an  insult to the intelligent.
> 
> Since the recently-departed Mel Torme, a Jew, wrote "The Christmas Song"
> ("Chestnuts roasting on the open fire...")
> this fact would make that song "Jewish Music", too, since the writer was
> Jewish and an "outsider".  Please.
> 
> Does the expression "reductio ad absurdum" come to mind?
> 
> 
> Wolf Krakowski
> www.kamea.com
> 
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> *****
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> "Only the violence and duration
> of your hardened dream can resist
> the hideous mechanical civilization
> that is your enemy."
> 
>             Salvador Dali
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> .  I recently gave a series of lectures (at a Polish university) entitled 
'Jewish Contributions to American Musical Culture.'  The criteria for who I 
included were that the artists--composers, lyricists, or performers who create 
their own material--had to be Jewish and they had to have had significant 
influence on at least some some part of American culture.  Beyond that, I would 
always discuss whether I thought there was anything Jewish about their work and,
if so, what.  (Dave Tarras and Wolf Krakowski were represented by more examples 
than anyone else).

Time constraints prevented me from giving the lectures I'd prepared on jazz and 
rock/pop.  Regarding the latter, I did include among others, in my undelivered 
text such songwriters as Lieber and Stoller and Bacharach.  No, I don't think 
there's much if anything Jewish in their work, no matter how hard one searches. 
Perhaps part of my rationale has the minority pride in those among us who have 
done, something noted in an earlier posting.

My sense is that more of us on this list would proudly claim Lieber and Stoller 
than Bacharach as members of the tribe.  I despised Bacharach when I was 
younger, because those songs struck me as the essence of everything supeficial 
and insincere:  he was the opposite of Dylan.  Now that I'm a lot older and I 
earn most of my living teaching college-level music theory, I'm able to 
appreciate his craft as a composer. Keep in mind that Bacharach isn't a lyricist
and that the lyrics were most of what bothered me and, I suspect, most of us, 
although I can appreciate the craft of his collaborators without buying into the
subject matter.  (I never liked the production values or singing styles of the 
artists who recorded him in the 60's-70's either.)  He is a Jew and there is 
something to appreciate about his craft, although it's not something Jewish.

On the other hand, Bacharach is part of (maybe the last of) a class of 
(non-performing) professional songwriters and producers in which Jews are 
extremely well represented.  It includes many contributors to Broadway, Tin Pan 
Alley, the Brill Building, and Hollywood.  I find that interesting.  The best 
work in these genres is literate, articulate, and urbane, qualities I associate 
(not exclusively) with Jews.

Perhaps though, this kind of songwriting, is more like diamond cutting, a 
business in which many Jews have succeeded and a lineage has thus been created, 
without the industry having any inherently Jewish characteristics.

Thoughts?

 

Perhaps, though 

Alex Lubet, Ph. D.
Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor of Music
Adjunct Professor of American Studies
University of Minnesota
2106 4th St. S
Minneapolis, MN 55455
612 624-7840 612 626-2200 (fax)

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