RE: Jewish Music Definition

[Leonard Koenick <lkoenick...>]

Robert seems to be agreeing here with my submission.  I certainly wasn't
suggesting that the examples I posed were good ideas.  My purpose was to
state and I still believe that all of this is a dead end unless the definer
fist specifies the purpose of the definition.

Leonard


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org
[mailto:owner-jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org]On Behalf Of Robert Cohen
Sent: Friday, May 04, 2001 6:32 PM
To: World music from a Jewish slant
Subject: RE: Jewish Music Definition

I suppose some might claim that it can't be Jewish music unless a Jew
composed it (without this presumption, inquiring into the Jewishness of a
putative Jewish music composer would be superfluous), but they would be on
very, very shaky ground--in fact, it's an untenable position.

So far as I know, no one in a scholarly or quasi-scholarly context has ever
claimed that the level of observance of a Jewish composer is relevant to
whether his or her music is Jewish.  The closest I can think of is that,
among many or most (or all?) Hassidim, today a potential new niggun might
not be accepted as such if the observance level of the composer were
suspect.  Yet Hassidim have also been the ultimate borrowers of melodies
that they knew (though they sometimes, I believe, pretended not to
acknowledge) were of non-Jewish origin but "converted" to niggunim.  So even
this stretchy case seems borderline.  In the end, I think, the ultimate
Hassidic criterion--and this was made explicity by some rebbes, and, for
that matter, by some non-Hassidic religious authorities--is to accept
whatever music brings one closer to G*d.

And, finally, it was Potter Stewart, not Justice Douglas, who said (of
something else) that he couldn't define it, but he knew it when he saw it.
The problem with analogizing that to Jewish music--i.e., I know it when I
hear it--is that that will restrict one's definition of Jewish music to that
with which one is familiar, or that sounds *like* something familiar.  (This
was the genius of Shlomo Carlebach's melodies,  which sounded, immediately,
like they'd always been here.)  But there is indisputably Jewish music--and
I try this out on audiences all the time--that is utterly unfamiliar and
sounds very "un-Jewish" (to some Jewish ears) cause it's exotic (from
far-away/insular/etc. communities), or very old--or very new.  It's not a
reliable standard at all--though it may, in practice, prove to be a
standard, sort of, some of the time, for whether a new melody (i.e., new to
a particular congregation) is accepted by that congregation.

--Robert Cohen

>       I am sure some will define it on whether the composer can be traced
to an
>appropriate matrilineal descendent; others to whether the composer was
>shomer shabbos and then according to which authority; and others will fall
>into the Mr. Justice Douglas (at least I think it was him) definition of "I
>know it when I [hear] it."
>
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