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Eastern European Jewish musical traditions:
Lomir ale singen
by Rita Ottens
City University of London
Published first in: Shofar. Lincoln: Summer
2004. Vol. 22, Iss. 4, p. 173-176.
In present-day Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, the
discourse around the field of Yiddish music and Yiddish music research has
become one of ethnicity and race. At a time when the role of Jews in Germany
is marginalized—yet expected to be drawn upon whenever needed as part of the
constituting of the new German Self—it is "Jewish" music that fills the
space. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, especially the music of the main
targets of the German Endlösung, the Eastern European Jews, has been turned
into a ritualistic remedy, and is celebrated in festivals and concert series
throughout the country.
It is the milieu of this, the "Music of the Jews of
Eastern Europe," that François Lilienfeld has set out to "describe more
thoroughly." His "greatest intention," however, is "to show that synagogue
music, Yiddish folksong and klezmer music represent three facets of one
culture, three elements which are inseparably interconnected" (p. 7). The
book contains sections on these three musical genres as well as chapters on
hasidic music, the Yiddish language, Yiddish theater, and Yiddish film. In
addition, it includes an annotated bibliography and discography,
illustrations, and notated musical examples, as well as a compact disc.
The book does not, however, as it proclaims, deliver a
"more thorough" understanding of the colorful tapestry of Eastern European
Jewish musical traditions. That topic is broader than any one volume could
encompass thoroughly, as recent publications by Moshe Beregovski (2000,
2001), Philip V. Bohlman and Otto Holzapfel (2001), Ellen Koskoff (2000),
Rita Ottens and Joel Rubin (1999, 2001), Kay Kaufman Shelemay (2001) and
Mark Slobin (2000, 2002) have shown. Lilienfeld’s uncritical use of sources
of varying approaches, reliability, and quality, as well as his inability to
interpret and draw his own conclusions from these materials, leads to a
confused depiction of the musical cultures that he set out to describe. What
makes all of this even worse is the obvious attitude of the author that
anything goes, as long as it fits into his world view. Especially after
listening to the enclosed CD, one must come to the conclusion that the
production was mainly undertaken for the purpose of self-promotion. The
compact disc promises to give an "impression in sound of the described
music" (cover text), but fails to do just that. Instead, the author offers
the listener a cantillation in the German (not Eastern European) ritus—sung
by himself shortly after his bar mitzvah—following on the heels of the
voices of the famous early twentieth-century Eastern European cantors
Rosenblatt, Sirota, and Pinkasowicz.
Of the eighteen tracks on the CD, an additional five
comprise interpretations by Lilienfeld himself, including two compositions
in the German ritus by Louis Lewandowski, as well as a pseudo-hasidic piece
with "ecstatic" oy-oy-oys written by the author himself. These illustrate
acoustically Lilienfeld’s doubtful connection to Yiddish music, language,
and culture, an impression which is also given by the text itself. For
example, the complex, several-centuries-old modes of expression in Eastern
European Jewish music are reduced to three, seven-tone "Jewish" scales (p.
142). What it is that makes this music "Jewish" or, more specifically,
"Yiddish," Lilienfeld is not able to explain. He fails to mention that all
three scales are shared with surrounding ethnicities in Eastern Europe as
well as those of the Middle East, and are of unknown provenance. Such
reductionisms unfortunately don’t give the reader any information on the
typical melodic turns of phrase or ornamentation patterns associated with
those scales—precisely the modal aspects which could be interpreted as
"Yiddish."
In general, it can be said that Lilienfeld relies too
heavily on outdated and second-hand general sources such as Abraham Zvi
Idelsohn (1929/1992) and Aron Marko Rothmüller (1960), despite the relative
plethora of writings on Eastern European Jewish music published in the past
two decades. Even the book’s title calls Lilienfeld’s knowledge into
question: the verb zingen is mistakenly transliterated (in German
orthography) as singn, the author apparently confusing it with the
vowel-less endings of some Yiddish infinitives such as zogn (and not zogen),
‘to say.’ Such obvious errors also call into question the editorial work of
Petra Goldman and of the publisher, Chronos. Parallel to this is the use of
a writing style which no serious publisher would allow.
Rarely have I come across a text that has been invaded by
a virtual army of ellipses, exclamation points and inflated superlatives
(for example, "an unbelievable virtuosity," p. 16). These are in direct
contrast to the needs of the reader, who expects solid information,
analyses, and stimulating insights into the intellectual fruits of the
author’s own "more than thirty years of research" (p. 7). Without a doubt,
it belongs to the least-favored pleasures of a scholar to discover that the
book under review contains many of the fruits of his or her research and
thinly disguised paraphrases of passages, all without being properly cited.
All of which leads to the question as to what purpose it actually serves to
cull information from already available sources, paraphrase it, and then
glue it together in a haphazard manner for a general, mostly non-Jewish
audience.
The book’s superfluous chapter on Yiddish film (pp. 89-98)
as well as the digression "The Moderate Reform of the Ashkenazic Liturgy"
(pp. 30-40)—the latter amply illustrated with facsimiles of sheet
music—leave the reader with the impression that the author did not have
enough access to materials on Yiddish musical traditions to fill out the
book. The concept and centrality of music and melody in hasidic belief
—although fundamental to the understanding of the development of Eastern
European Jewish musical traditions of the past 250 years—is completely
missing from Lilienfeld’s account of hasidic music (pp. 47-52). Instead, the
reader is treated throughout the volume to an array of biographies of
cantors, singers, composers, and musicians of differing levels of historical
and contemporary significance, once again drawn together from a variety of
sources.
Particularly problematic is the last section, which deals
with the contemporary Yiddish music movements in the U.S. and Germany. Here
Lilienfeld twists history into what might be regarded as what is most
convenient for his own professional and political life as a disseminator of
Jewish music in Germany (he is himself musical director of the biannual
Fürth Yiddish Festival). In the chapter "Stars in the German Klezmer Sky,"
his use of the already problematic term "authentic" (pp. 136-37) in relation
to two of his favored non-Jewish German instrumentalists places their music
in a false light, making them appear to represent a bona fide continuation
of the pre-Holocaust heritage of Eastern European Jewish musical traditions.
For those singers and musicians, music was deeply embedded in their
socio-religious personae as Jews. Because of cultural, religious, historical
and political differences, I have argued elsewhere that the "Yiddish" music
created by the German postwar generations should not be considered to be
Jewish music at all, but rather regarded as part of German popular music.
With his use of problematic terminology such as the
ubiquitous "Schtetl," as well as the terms "host country" (p. 100),
"traveling lifestyle" (p. 100), and "wanderings" (p. 99), Lilienfeld
delivers old-new stereotypes of "the Jew" as a nomad who has no place in
German society. The jacket photograph of the author himself reveals a
self-ethnicization process indicating that he has voluntarily confined
himself to the role of Jewish minstrelsy, fitting right into the shtetl
caricatures which are creating "Yiddishkayt" (Jewishness) on German stages
and even bringing Jewish functionaries to publically laud this "blossoming"
of Jewish culture in Germany. Such a piece of pseudo-scholarship could only
be produced in the dubious milieu of philosemitism which is vigorously
growing in the German-speaking countries of today.
From this perspective, the book allows—although surely
unintended by Lilienfeld—a glimpse into the ideological and political
tensions of Germany that seep out from his narrative. In a broader sense,
the book sheds light on the precarious role of Jews in German-speaking
countries. That this state of mind is claiming above all the defenseless
Yiddish culture and music as a foil for self-promotion and projections of
all sorts should in itself be worthy of analysis. Apart from confirming the
position of the few random protagonists of the Yiddish music movement, whose
work is presented here in an overblown, decontextualized, and unprofessional
way, and their followers, the book will be of little use. For the average
reader, it will merely serve to confirm already existing clichés of Jews. It
is neither reliable nor thorough, at times even borderline dishonest through
its historical distortion, and puts Lilienfeld in a line with the "shredders
of history." As a fabrication belonging to the political myth of the
resurrection of Jewish culture in the German-speaking countries of today, it
gives insight into the particular ideology that surrounds this latest wave
of instrumentalization of Yiddish culture.
"Fassade des Stimmigen":
Jüdische Musik in Deutschland
Zunehmend begegnen uns Juden und Judentum unter den Klängen
des "Klezmer", nicht selten begleitet von Bildern religiöser Chassidim. Die
gesamte Vielfalt jüdischer Lebensformen und kultureller Ausdrucksweisen
scheint auf diese visuellen und akustischen Reduktionsformen jüdischer
Existenz zusammengeschrumpft...
Lesetipp zu einem In-Phänomen:
Klezmer-Musik
Die vorliegende Geschichte der Klezmer-Musik handelt nicht
vom Klezmer-Revival in Amerika und seinen Ausläufern in Europa, sondern von
der eigentlichen Klezmer-Musik und der Klezmer-Kultur, wie sie in Osteuropa
als Lebensform innerhalb einer vom jüdischen Religionsgesetz bestimmten
Gemeinschaft bestand...
Musik-Tipp:
Jewish Music Series
Die "Jewish Music Series" von Rita Ottens und Joel Rubin ist eine
einzigartige Reihe, die seltene zeitgenössische und historische Aufnahmen
traditioneller und populärer jüdischer Musik vorstellt...
François Lilienfeld,
Die Musik der
Juden
Osteuropas.
lomir ale singen
Chronos Verlag
2002
Euro 29,90
hagalil.com
21-12-04 |
