Re: Rossi

[Eliott Kahn <Elkahn...>]

Below please find an excerpt from the New Grove Encyclopedia, 2001 
(www.grovemusic.com) under "Jewish music." It's written by Don Harran, who has 
edited the new Haensler Verlag Rossi edition, which is soon to be released. 
This is an ongoing topic of research and certainly not the last word, but I 
look forward to reading more about in-depth when the new edition comes out.



Another element in the formation of an incipient polyphony was the meshorerim 
practice of the Ashkenazi rite from the 16th century (or perhaps even earlier) 
onwards. The hazzan was supported at times by two assistants, one a boy with a 
higher voice, the other an adult with a bass voice; they punctuated various 
portions of the hazzan's phrase, particularly its cadences, creating three-part 
harmony (see §III, 3(iii) above). Still other elements might have been 
influential: the use of music as an adjunct to joyous Holy Days (e.g. Simhat 
Torah, Purim) and to private and communal festivities (banquets, weddings, 
circumcisions, the consecration of a synagogue, the inauguration of a Torah 
scroll); the efforts deployed by rabbis of a more liberal tendency, in 
particular Leon Modena (d 1648), to introduce part singing into the synagogue; 
the service of Jewish musicians in the Italian courts (Mantua, Turin), where 
they became acquainted with, and eventually adopted, the latest styles of 
Christian art music. Jewish musicians also performed in the Mantuan Jewish 
theatre, which, from the mid-16th century to the early 17th, provided 
theatrical entertainment with musical interludes for Christian audiences, 
especially during the Carnival season. In justifying their interest in art 
music, Jews often cited the example of the glorious music practised in the 
ancient Temple, which Salamone Rossi, among others, was thought to have revived 
in his own day (according to Leon Modena's preface to Rossi's Hebrew 
collection).
         Art music by Jewish composers began in Italy, particularly Mantua, in 
the late 16th century, then spread to Amsterdam and southern France in the 17th 
and 18th centuries. Its practical remains are limited. Secular vocal music 
(madrigals, canzonettas etc.) is represented by collections of the Jewish 
composers David Sacerdote (1575), Salamone Rossi (eight books; 1600?28), Davit 
da Civita (1616) and Allegro Porto (three books; 1619?25), although with the 
exception of Rossi's the collections are all incomplete, lacking one or more 
voices. The only known instrumental works are the four collections by Rossi 
(1607?22; containing sinfonias, sonatas, gagliardas, correntes etc.). Sacred 
art music with Hebrew texts seems to have been introduced into the synagogue in 
the first decade of the 17th century, spreading from Ferrara to Mantua, Venice 
and other mainly northern Italian centres. Such music may have been largely 
improvised, for only two early Italian collections are extant: Rossi's 
Ha-shirim asher li-shelomo and the presumably eight-voice pieces, of which only 
one of the voices survives, in an anonymous manuscript (US-CIhc Birnbaum 4F 71; 
?Venice), which most likely dates from the late 1620s or the 1630s. 
........

The most important early Jewish composer was Salamone Rossi. In addition to his 
12 secular collections he may be credited with the first polyphonic set of 
Hebrew sacred songs (Ha-shirim asher li-shelomo). His activity as an art music 
composer was paralleled by utterances of contemporary writers, among them Judah 
Moscato, who, in a sermon on music (printed in 1588), expanded on the symbolism 
of the number eight (the octave, hence perfection; Simhat Torah, the joyous 
eighth day of Sukkot; the scientia divina, or eighth science that forms the 
culmination of the seven liberal arts); Leon Modena, who debated the legitimacy 
of using art music in the synagogue in a responsum published in 1605; and 
Abraham ben David Portaleone, who, in his voluminous treatise Shiltei 
ha-gibborim (?Shields of Heroes?, 1612), described the music in the ancient 
Temple after the example of the forms, practices and instruments of 16th- and 
17th-century Italian art music.




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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