Re: What Is Jewish Music? (revisited!)

[Robert Cohen <rlcm17...>]

"I know it when I hear it" is a good guide to the question (alluded to by 
Seth Austen recently) "What do I like?  What moves me/speaks to my heart (or 
head or whatever)?"  But it's a *terrible* guide to "What Is Jewish Music?" 
since, as I point out to classes and lecture audiences all the time, ancient 
or "exotic" Jewish music--ancient Sephardic that "sounds like" Gregorian 
chant; (ancient) Yemenite music, Moroccan or Tunisian Jewish music, etc., 
etc., don't "sound like" Jewish music to our (that is, most of my 
audiences') Western/American, 20th-century, Ashkenazic Jewish ears.  And 
there's the "newness" factor. Sulzer's 19th-century art-music settings of 
liturgy didn't "sound Jewish" to Eastern European Jews of his day--it 
sounded Christian, or "goyish."  Now it _defines_ a certain style of 
cathedral and not-so-cathedral (and even not cathedral at all) synagogue 
music. It _became_ "Jewish" by constant use over a period of time, until it 
(only eventually) "sounded Jewish" to everyone.  It really _isn't_ a Potter 
Stewart thing. -- Robert Cohen


>From: Susan Lerner <meydele (at) ix(dot)netcom(dot)com>
>Subject: Re: promiscuous fusionizers
>Date: Fri, 10 Dec 1999 18:48:17 -0800











>As to the discussion of the term klezmer and the way it has been
>"elasticized, "  I'm not too concerned.  We may not be able to agree on a
>definition, but I think there is a critical mass of people who can
>differentiate between "sounds real klezmer", "sorta klezmer"  to "not
>really klezmer", if my 'teen classes struggling to answer the question What
>Is Jewish Music? are any indication.  Yep, I'm actually (and here I blush)
>falling back on "I don't know what it is but I know it when I hear
>it."  ---------------------- jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org 
>---------------------+
>