Re: Influence of Jewish on Christian chant

[Judah Cohen <jcohen...>]

Dear Eliott,

Thank you for *your* thoughtful responses.  I should state at the very first
that after several major disappointments, I generally have taken the
academic approach of requiring more than a similarity to assert connection.
During the 1900-1960s phase of Jewish music research, much was done
regarding "motives"--i.e., snippets of pieces that seemed to exist in
multiple places throughout Jewish and Christian history and literature.  The
way I see it, this kind of analysis came from parallel patterns of"Western
Music analysis.  Difference was, Western music expressed itself in a
specific written form, and composers actually spoke about "motives."  The
Jewish music scholars, all of whom were schooled in this kind of analysis
(if my memory serves me right), tried to adapt it onto the primarily oral
system of Jewish chant.  This is what caused many of the problems.

There are generally two reactions to such Jewish "motives" theories, and
they seem to me similar to reactions to the recent publication "The Bible
Code":  either they are dismissed because they're too random, or hailed
wholesale as the harbinger of truth.  I fall into the former camp, partially
because after looking at scads and scads of music from all over the world,
I've seen the "motives" people mention with abandon and completely out of
context.  More below:

> He cites the limits, but also infers some relationship. On p.78 of
> "Encounters of East and West in Music" (1979), he refers to a Credo,
> "generally assigned to the older layer of Gregorian chant ... [which]
> resembles a  psalmodic tune enriched by three prolific motives. 'Developed
> Psalmodies' of this kind are frequent in the Eastern styles, Syrian, as
> well as the Jewish."  Edith Gerson-Kiwi in "Migrations and Mutations of the
> Music in East and West" (1980) gives a musical example on p.55 with
> enormous similarities between a Gregorian "Dixit Dominus" (Ps.109) and a
> Yemenite version of  Psalm 122. As Idelsohn had, Gerson-Kiwi finds
> similarities in the modal and narrow melodic contours of Eastern Jewish
> melodies and Gregorian chant. The Yemenite tradition was supposed to
> be  particular free of foreign influences, because the Jewish people
> remained in Southern Arabia for 2,000 years before emigrating to Israel.
>
What impresses me about Avenary is how well he handles the "motives"
discourse quite prominent in the literature at the time, and how careful he
is *not* to go ahead and claim direct connections, but rather simply to
notice simiarities.  Similarities is one thing; direct connections are quite
another to me.

As to Gerson-Kiwi:  when written out side by side, there may be great
similarities in the two samples.  However, when *played* back to back, there
is a great likelihood that such similarities could dissipate.  I do not have
the sample in front of me, so I'll need to check it out and then get back on
this;  however, the persons who taught me transcription have both taught me
and shown me through example how treacherous the translation of a melody
from a verbal system into a Western system is.

As to the Yemenite tradition's constancy:  there is to the best of my
knowledge not a shred of *musical* evidence that this is true.  It is all
taken from the assumption that the Yemenite community was isolated for many
hundreds of years from the influences of outside cultures (which both
Idelsohn and Werner seem to imply are the *only* ways Jewish music can
change or "dissipate").  Here are problems I see with this:  1) It
completely ignores the possibility of innovation *within* the community.  2)
It is speculation in and of itself, equally based on the observed
"primitive" style of the Yemenites, and 3) Nearly all Yemenite chant
recorded or heard at the time was done in the early 20th century in
Jerusalem--*not* in Yemen.  Considering how dearly such comparisons as
Gerson-Kiwi's cling to the concept of non-exposure, this time of particular
openness in the Yishuv seems almost antithetical to me.
>
> I was under the impression that the Ta'amim (Biblical accents) were derived
> from cheironomic (hand) signals that came from the Egyptians and were taken
> out of Egypt to the First Temple by the Israelites. (This is from Peter
> Gradenwitz--no great scholar--paraphrasing the work of Curt Sachs, who was
> the great expert on music of the ancient world.) If this is a "bubbameise,"
> please be so kind as to tell me. If it is grounded in truth, then the
> Jewish cantillation synbols should not resemble their own melodic contours.
>
>From everything I've read, this is pure speculation based on the "trajectory
of society" idea that pervaded much research in the late 19th and early 20th
century.  This idea, badly paraphrased by me as a non-expert apparently had
a "great societies" approach to history; in other words, the rise and fall
of great Egyptian society led to the rise and fall of Jerusalem, which led
to the rise and fall of various other societies such as Greek and Roman,
etc.  As such there was a great deal of speculation of how one society led
to the next.  I think that's where such an idea came in.  Nowadays, when
even the Exodus idea and the connection to Egypt is in wild debate among
archaeologists, it doesn't work so well.

> Avenary addresses this in "Encounters."  First, he credits Eric Werner as
> being "the first to produce such a formula model as a demonstration of the
> "shtejger" (p.87),  then he makes a clear distinction between the Christian
> concept of "mode" and the Jewish concept of "shteyger." The Jewish steyger
> (I paraphrase) possesses not just a modal scalar character, but the more
> Eastern "stock of standard motives," not unlike the Arabic maquam or the
> Indian raga: "Thus shtejger tunes may be compared to a mosaic work
> tesselated from the given material. They reveal by their intrinsic
> character a strong similarity with the combination of 'migrating motives,'
> the 'Cento structure,' the 'mosaic style' observed in certain archaic
> portions of plainsong" (p.92).
>
The problem with this kind of statement is that it's so general it could
apply to almost anything.  "Migrating motives," if I'm not mistaken, means
changing pitch level if not a couple notes here and there.  "Mosaic style"
and "Cento structure" are purely conceptual contructs which seem to change
based on what the author wants them to do.  Moreover "certain archaic
portions of plainsong" doesn't really convince me of a connection to the
Gregorian chant tradition.  Again, though, I don't have the luxury of having
the book in front of me, only my notes.  Doesn't sound like Avenary at his
best, though. . .
>
>>The big kicker for me, though, is that *we actually don't know what Jewish
>>Biblical chant sounded like.*  At the absolute earliest, manuscripts with
>>any Western notation of Jewish chant whatsoever appear in the 15th century
>>(and I may be erring on the early side).  The vast majority of what we know
>>in terms of melodic "motifs" of the trop markings comes from observations
>>made in Israel in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (as spearheaded by
>>the research of Abraham Z. Idelsohn).  And as I mentioned before, any
>>definitive source of organization of melodic motifs dates from the 10th
>>century with the Masoretic codex.  How, then, is it even possible to create
>>a source for comparison without assuming that oral traditions remained
>>absolutely static for over two thousand and one thousand years respectively?
>
> This is a good point. But, conversely, how do you account for the enormous
> similarities between melodies from completely different cultures, locales,
> and time periods.

A lot of the comparisons made are very similar to some of the more sinister
sales techniques, in that the authors only show what they want to show.
Think of the thousands and thousands of melodies for which this comparison
*doesn't* work.  Don't you find it strange that with few exceptions the most
compelling comparisons between Jewish and Christian chant have different,
often completely unrelated (or marginally related) texts?  Moreover, if
chants go on for pages and pages, why are the examples cited so short and so
scattershot?  To me, this suggests that the authors are trying to fit data
to a pre-established agenda; leading to an elegant theory but rather shoddy
research.

There's another very interesting technique that takes place as well:  the
simple assurance that two relatively unrelated looking melodies are in fact
similar because the "expert" tells you so.  I could mention the similarities
between the opening measures of Bach's Double Concerto in D minor and the
opening phrase of "Hatikvah," or one of the more popular contemporary
melodies of "BaYom HaHu" and "The Farmer in the Dell."  I could even
speculate as to how the two came together through historical and social
happenstance.  Would you believe me, and call it an incredible coincidence?
Please let me know if I'm wrong, but I don't believe many of Werner's
comparisons come much closer than this.

> I was under the impression that Idelsohn saw enough similarities between
> Eastern and WEstern cantillation motives--cut off since the fall of the
> SEcond Temple--to believe they had a common ancestry. I'm a little rusty;
> please correct me if I'm wrong.
>
Idelsohn *did* say he saw this--in fact it one of the major assumptions he
tried so hard to prove.  Unfortunately, that doesn't mean he was *right*;
and work by Avenary and others shows the difficulty with this.  Thankfully,
Idelsohn was one an incredibly thorough scholar, and thanks to his research,
he helped map out for the first time a great number of Jewish traditions not
previously examined--providing invaluable resources for future generations
of scholars.

>Yes, I'd like to look at this article. Werner made an enormous mistake if
>he falsified some material. Still, I must tell you I'm very familiar with
>his "A Voice Still Heard" and find it a brilliant, thorough work on
>Ashkenazy synagogue music. Although he did not use primary recorded
>sources, he did extensive work with the Birnbaum Collection at HUC in
>Cincinnatti, and these are the oldest ms. sources for Ashkenazi Jewry.

Werner also accused Idelsohn of doing the same thing (I believe he did this
in "The Sacred Bridge") in order to prove his own agenda.  Yet he was in a
very powerful position, occupying Idelsohn's former professorship at HUC
(one of the only, if not *the* only, Jewish Music professorships in America
at the time).  As many of his former students have told me, he was a very
opinionated man and not particularly amenable to the ideas of others.

I would agree with you that "A Voice Still Heard" is on more solid ground
than "The Sacred Bridge."  However, he still has methodological problems.
For example: he insists at the start of the book that Ashkenazic
cantillation is an oral tradition, and then quotes almost exclusively from
written sources (in the Birnbaum Coll, presumably) without explaining why;
he also seems to ignore the enormous world of Sephardic chant traditions in
favor of championing the Ashkenazic world's dominance and "development."
This said, however, sections of "A Voice Still Heard" rank among the only
works of his I've seen on college syllabi for courses on Jewish music--this
must indeed say something.

Thanks for keeping up this stimulating discussion.
Be well.
Judah.

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