Re: Eyn Keyloheynu and other drinking songs

[Alex J. Lubet <lubet001...>]

Responding to the message of <DMEKLGDEIEANMBMONEOMMEOKCJAA(dot)lkoenick (at) 
erols(dot)com>
from jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org:
> 
> It's been said before but bears saying again.  Thank you Cantor Weiss for
> your learned and valuable contributions to this list.
> 
> All of this beings to mind a choral song I sang when participating too long
> ago in a synagogue choir.  It was called "Moishe ganvet arbes."  Its message
> was that the stealing of others' music and passing them off as Jewish music
> was stealing something as worthless as chickpeas.  I'm not sure I now agree
> with that premise but it was fun to sing anyway.
> 
I find the terms upon which we regard music as borrowed most interesting.  Many 
have expressed relief that is almost palpable even in cyberspace that this or 
that beloved tune was, to the best of our knowledge (and the best seems to be 
Cantor Weiss's), composed by a Jew.  Why do we even have to ask about Eyn 
Keyloheynu, Maoz Tzur, or whatever is the German Jewish tune du jour?  Because, 
regardless of who composed it, it sounds so much like contemporaneous secular or
Christian music that we feel the matter requires investigation.  Even if the 
foreground melody was indeed composed by a Jew, the melodic contours, intonation
system, harmony, meter, form, scoring, vocal timbre (much of the time) and even 
our privileging of the individual composer, the autonomous composition, and 
historical musicology are all products of that Western (and usually Germanic) 
tradition.  Several methods of analysis, among them Schenker's, would surely 
reveal even great resemblance than is obvious in the foreground.  Don't get me 
wrong.  

I love those tunes myself, but I don't care where they came from so much as 
where they've been and where I met them; in shul.  In this I recall that, during
the time I lived in Poland (in 1999), I was struck by how familiar so much of 
the food was in Lublin, a town that tragically cannot even assemble a minyan 
these days.  I wasn't the least bit bothered that Gentile Poles ate so much 
pickled herring, lox, and (by some other name) gefilte fish, and I never stopped
thinking of them as Jewish food.



Alex Lubet, Ph. D.
Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor of Music
Adjunct Professor of American and Jewish Studies
University of Minnesota
2106 4th St. S
Minneapolis, MN 55455
612 624-7840 612 624-8001 (fax)

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