RE: Jewish Music Definition

[Reyzl Kalifowicz-Waletzky <reyzl...>]

You have made some excellent points here.


Reyzl 


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From:  Robert Cohen [SMTP:rlcm17 (at) hotmail(dot)com]
Sent:  Friday, May 04, 2001 2:32 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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