Re: Musicals/Jewish content

[music <music...>]

  AND SPEAKING OF PORGY AND BESS...

   "It Ain't Necessarily So"  is uncannily similar to the tune and scan
   of your basic "borukh atoh adonoy".


Oh, it's more specific than that:  It is, essentially and
identically, "Bar'chu et Hashem Ham'vorach"--the so-called "call to prayer".

And it's surely not a coincidence, either.

I think Jack Gottlieb is often credited with first noticing this--though it
may well have been perceived by others before him.  I've shared it with
many students and audiences.

BTW, Sonny Bono-wise, I enjoy and appreciate Gershwin's borrowing from
Jewish music; but, at the same time, such musical appropriation makes the
Gershwin estate's jealous husbanding of its own copywrights--or such, at
least I gather, is the case--deeply compromised and problematic.  Just as
is (again speaking of Sonny Bono) Disney's fierce protection of _its_
copyrights, which in many cases were asserted over material Disney did not
create.

--Robert Cohen


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