Music, History, and Culture in Sephardi Jewish Prayer Chanting

This article presents the study of a Jewish liturgical genre that is performed in main sections of Jewish prayer services. This liturgical genre is called “prayer chanting”. The term refers to the musical performance by the cantor of the prose texts in Jewish prayer services. The genre of prayer chanting characterizes most Jewish liturgical traditions, and its central characteristic is a close attachment of the musical structure to the structure of the text. The article will examine musical, cultural, and historical characteristics of prayer chanting of two Sephardi Jewish traditions and will explain how this liturgical genre reflects historical and cultural features related to these liturgical traditions. The study presented here is based on field work that includes recordings of prayer and interviews of well-known cantors of the two traditions as well as observations in synagogue of the two liturgical traditions.

L’antisémitisme de Wagner et les différentes formes sémiotiques

In his essay “La judéité dans la musique,” Richard Wagner’s horrid portrayal of a Jew by way of physical, economical, linguistic and musical description exposed his anti-Semitic convictions. Much of this aspect has either been forgotten or softened, however, when evoking Wagner, it is in fact the relationship between his anti-Semitism and his work that is the most problematic. This paper proposes to consider three symbolic forms through which this reticence is expressed by looking at the the theoretical writings, opera booklets and their music. Using the Beckmesser character in Les Maîtres Chanteurs de Nuremberg, although Beckmesser is not introduced as a Jew but rather a good German bourgeois, one cannot deny the allegory positioning him as a Jew. First element of demonstration: the analogical resemblance between Beckmesser and the Viennese music critic Eduard Hanslick to whom Wagner accused of hiding his Jewishness. Second element: it has already been proven that Beckmesser’s serenade sung during the second act to the Master Singers was a mockery of a Jewish prayer. Third element: in Cosima’s, Wagner’s wife, diary she explains that this particular piece generated at that time a strong reaction by the Jewish community in Vienna, thus supporting the claim that his antisemitism was already known and problematic to his contemporaries.

Gestures of the Soul The Prayer Chant of the East-European Jews

The basic style of East-European Jewish (East-Ashkenazic) prayer chant (davenen), even when it might seem to be simple on paper, in transcription, has a complex and unique system of micro-structure. This micro-structure, which is evident in subtleties of rhythm and melody, voice quality, form, techniques of variation and ornamentation, is inventive and daring, and creates a compelling aesthetic and spiritual effect in the auditory experience. The present article discusses the question of how this creative compositional practice might have evolved. The article claims that the uniqueness of davenen results from the fact that children begin learning this “art” at a very early age, before they are able to speak and conceptualize the phenomena of the surrounding world. With davenen, a spontaneously felt language before language is learnt: a language in which words and melodies, rhythms and musical gestures and effects, emotions and fantasies and associations are merged into one whole. As a result, in the realization of prayer chant, even in the case of professional prayer leaders, originality and tradition, copying and fantasy occur together in a continual fusion of memory and forgetfulness. This article discusses Eastern European Jewish prayer chant and its learning process on the basis of its author’s decades of fieldwork and of literature and memoirs from before WWII.

From Aesthetics to Experience: How Changing Conceptions of Prayer Changed the Sound of Jewish Worship

ABSTRACTThis article tracks changes in conceptions of American Jewish congregational prayer music during the second half of the twentieth century, paying specific attention to the late 1960s and early 1970s. During those years, more than fifty albums of new American Jewish synagogue music were released. These drew on the sounds of folk and rock music, and they represented a shift from the sounds of classical cantorial synagogue music. These changes have largely been understood as a shift away from cantorial styles, which emphasized performance and virtuosity, and toward more accessible and more participatory forms of prayer. This article contributes to our understanding of the sounds of American Jewish prayer practices by attending to the larger discourses in which the musical changes were situated. By listening to the music, reading album liner notes, and contemporaneous writings about Jewish prayer music, we discover a shift in descriptions and expectations of how Jewish prayer ought to work, from one that emphasizes the aesthetics of the music to one that emphasizes the experience of the music. We argue that music is one element of a larger shift in how people who made music for congregational prayer understood prayer and how best to engage congregations in that practice.