Re: Champions of Hazzanut (was: Shevach/Salonika)

[Eliott Kahn <Elkahn...>]

>
>Architectural and devotional aesthetics are yet another factor to consider.  A
>grand synagogue interior, a highly structured service, extensive Hebrew 
>liturgy,
>a formal sermon -- all of these demand, aesthetically, one kind of music.  A
>Khavura or Shtiebel setting demands another.  That today's mainstream
>congregations usually do not appreciate the incongruity between simplistic
>musical tastes and elaborate worship settings is an aesthetic joke or an 
>aesthetic
>crime, depending on your outlook.

This is profound--and beautifully stated.


>Tradition:  Hazzanut is one of the ingredients that makes "us" who we are
>ethnically and culturally as Ashkenazic Jews, whether we are aware of it or 
>not. (The current renewed interest in Hazzanut in the wake of the Klezmer 
>revival is
>an example of how awareness can be raised.)  

Curiously, the St. Petersburg Folk Music Society came to just such a juncture 
in 1915. Lazare Saminsky quoted an earlier article in his Music of the Ghetto 
and the Bible (p.228-229):

"The Hebrew Folksong Society in Petrograd has now ended a five years' work of 
research and cultivation of true specimens of Hebrew music. One notices an 
important shift in the work's direction. I mean a shifting of interest from the 
domestic folksong, which engaged the initial labors of the Society's composers, 
to the religious folksong, to its pure and ancient elements....Those first 
works of the Hebrew Folksong Society do not even touch the rich mine of our 
religious melody of the ancient type, with its creative potentialities and 
value to musical science."

Not everyone agreed with Saminsky, particularly Joel Engel, with whom a running 
argument devloped re: the value of folk vs. religious song. Nevertheless, 
Saminsky points out one can certainly hear more elements of sacred song in 
several of the Society's publications after this time, e.g. Milner's "In 
Cheder," Achron's "Hebrew Melody,"  and "Eli Zion" by Leo Zeitlin, among others.

A fairly comprehensive listing of the Society's 81 publications (1908-1918) may 
be found in Albert Weisser's Modern Renaissance of Jewish Music.


Eliott Kahn


Dr. Eliott Kahn
Music Archivist
Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America
3080 Broadway
New York, NY 10027
WK: (212) 678-8076
FAX (212) 678-8998
elkahn (at) jtsa(dot)edu

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