Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy

New Perspectives

Lynette Bowring,Rebecca Cypess,Liza Malamut

• Editorial: Indiana University Press
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780253060075
• Categoría: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoría: Music

Musical culture in Jewish communities in early modern Italy was much more diverse than researchers originally thought.

An interdisciplinary reassessment, Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy evaluates the social, cultural, political, economic, and religious circumstances that shaped this community, especially in light of the need to recognize individual experiences within minority populations. Contributors draw from rich materials, topics, and approaches as they explore the inherently diverse understandings of music in daily life, the many ways that Jewish communities conceived of music, and the reception of and responses to Jewish musical culture.

Highlighting the multifaceted experience of music within Jewish communities, Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy sheds new light on the place of music in complex, previously misunderstood environments.

1

WRITTEN IN ITALIAN, HEARD AS JEWISH

Reconsidering the Notated Sources of Italian Jewish Music

FRANCESCO SPAGNOLO

Notated musical sources documenting the development of Jewish liturgical music in Italy prior to the emancipation in the nineteenth century are rare, precious, and extremely fragmentary.¹ Past scholarship focused on these materials as uncontested testimonies of the penetration of art music, ideas, and practices within the culture of Italian Jews, highlighting through them the emergence of Jewish musicianship in Europe.² My suggestion is to look at these sources once again in a new light. In spite of their fragmentary nature, they provide unexpected perspectives on the ongoing and consolidated musical, cultural, and personal relations and interactions between Jewish and non-Jewish musicians and intellectuals. These interactions centered on synagogue life within the confines of the Italian ghettos since their formation in the sixteenth century and bloomed throughout the emancipation three centuries later, waning with the rise of the Fascist regime and the ensuing persecutions in the twentieth century. For centuries, musical exchanges revolving around synagogue life impacted musical education and the framework of music historiography, life in and outside the ghettos, and the production of musical materials in both print and manuscript form.³ While, for the most part, we can only speculate on the nature of these day-to-day exchanges among musicians of different faiths and social statuses, their nature and overall character emerge in stark contrast to previous interpretations of the materials under consideration. Such a new reading of these invaluable musical sources, written and oral, unveils their unique contribution to the study of Italian Jewish cultural history. In turn, this reconsideration can also enhance the complexity and uniqueness of the historical narratives that have engendered a variety of debates within the field of “Jewish musicology” for the last 150 years, thus enlightening the general field of Jewish studies tout court from an unsuspected angle.

As stated by Edwin Seroussi, “Within the modern scholarly discourses on Jewish culture, from the nineteenth century German ‘Science of Judaism,’ via the Israeli ‘mada‘ei ha-yahadut’ to the more recent North American ‘Jewish studies,’ music emerges as a relatively minor field of inquiry in comparison to other disciplines. Comprehensive textbooks on Jewish culture of recent publication do not include the word ‘music’ in their index.” Only in very recent decades have scholars from a variety of fields and disciplines “addressed music from very diverse angles, as a vital component of Jewish religious experience, reactions to social shifts, and constructions of memory, place, identity, and gender.”⁴ In spite of this rise in interest, it is safe to say that recent studies of Jewish music have neither touched on the liminal interactions between Jews and non-Jews that take place inside the synagogue nor explored the synagogue itself as an ever-challenging, and yet crucial, “shared sacred site.”⁵

The notated sources discussed here are all well known to scholars of Jewish music. Many of the sources have been published, and occasionally performed, since the mid-nineteenth century. While their common denominator is to include both musical notes and Hebrew texts, the sources vary in how (and by whom) they were produced, their scope, the audience or readership at whom they were directed, and their specific musical and cultural content.

Among the sources that I will discuss are notations of music generated by synagogue cantors, such as Avraham Segre of Casale Monferrato (before 1670), who deployed his acquired skill in writing musical notation to commit to paper an orally transmitted repertoire; by Christian scholars like Giulio Bartolocci in Rome (1693), who, in researching the “music of the Jews,” wished to notate what he had heard from the oral repertoires of Italian Jews he had encountered; and by Jewish and non-Jewish musicians, including Salamone Rossi (1622–1623) and Benedetto Marcello (1724–1727), who created new performance repertoires based on Hebrew texts.

In addition to their variety of origins, these materials also range in scope, as they served a host of diverse purposes. Their production aimed at documenting cantorial practice and passing it on to a new generation of synagogue musicians, at researching synagogue liturgy in order to identify the historical roots of Christian liturgical music, at creating a new corpus of polyphonic music based on Hebrew texts, or at regenerating the supposed musical “sacred bridge” between Jews and Christians in modern times.

These musical sources also vary in content and format. They include both manuscripts and printed music, created with different parameters aimed at balancing the graphic relationship between Hebrew texts—which, if not transliterated into Roman script, are written or printed from right to left—and musical notes, typically written or printed from left to right (unless set to match texts in Hebrew script). In these sources, the relationship between text and musical notes differs greatly and therefore ends up representing sounds (the sounds of both musical notes and Hebrew words) in radically different, and divergent, ways.

In spite of such substantive differences, all these sources stem from one basic experience: the encounter of Jewish and Christian musical cultures, and therefore of Jewish and Christian musicians, around the music of the synagogue and thus around their particular experiences of synagogue life.⁶ In this respect, these sources should be compared with others that offer a wider picture of the role that music had in Italian synagogue life. This other category includes the scores, librettos, and historical descriptions of the kabbalistic ceremonies for the day of Hoshana Rabbah (the last day of the holiday of Sukkot) in Venice (before 1682) and Casale Monferrato (1732, 1733, and 1735), as well as the inauguration of the Synagogue of Siena (1786).⁷ Past scholarship on Italian Jewish music, however, has more or less systematically avoided considering these musical testimonies as a place of Jewish-Christian interaction and has instead focused on creating a consistently Jewish historical narrative that surrounds their production.

For the sake of chronological consistency, I suggest excluding from this pool of sources a very important document in the history of Jewish music—one that could be otherwise used as a manifesto to demonstrate the cross-pollination between Jewish and Christian musical cultures in the documentation of Jewish music. I am referring to the musical notations produced in the twelfth century by Johannes, or Obadiah “the Norman Proselyte,” a native of Oppido Lucano. These notations in diastematic Beneventan neumes (Fragment Cambridge TS. K 5/41 and Fragment Cincinnati ENA 4096b) were studied by Norman Golb, Hanoch Avenary, Israel Adler, and others and transcribed in modern notation by the latter.⁸ Although they were created by a Christian native of Italy who had converted to Judaism, these sources do not seem to be linked to the musical cultures of the Jews of Italy.⁹ As noted by Reinhardt Flender, they may instead be connected with the practice of Hebrew psalmody in North Africa and the Middle East.¹⁰

Even with the exclusion of Obadiah’s manuscripts, we are looking at some of the earliest sources of Jewish musical culture produced in Italy, and we should therefore contextualize them within the musical cultures of Italian Jewry. As we know it through written and oral sources, Italian Jewish music comprises a vast corpus, consisting of numerous distinct liturgical and paraliturgical traditions of various origins, continuously in contact with a broad range of influences and in constant evolution over a long period of time. It developed in the many Jewish communities of the Italian peninsula and the areas in which Jews originating from the peninsula came to live. This complex and fascinating musical world remains one of the widest uncharted areas of Jewish music.

The study of Jewish musical cultures operates in a constant dialectic between oral and written sources, and it is based on the understanding that oral sources point to historical information that cannot be retrieved by relying on written sources alone—information that often sheds light on the cultural history of the Jews beyond the boundaries of “normative” Judaism. In other words, the orally transmitted musical repertoires of the present can offer an unprecedented view on Jewish life of the past beyond music, including daily life, intellectual and spiritual dimensions, economic and societal assets, family and gender roles, and Jewish-Christian relations. The study of Italian Jewish musical sources, past and present, written and oral, can best be conducted in conjunction with the reconstruction of Italy’s diverse synagogue life. This perspective, which intersects the disciplinary arenas of musicology, history, and ethnography, prompts us to define Italian Jewish liturgical music as a hybrid of Ashkenazic, Italian, and Sephardic traditions, in constant cross-pollination with one another and in continuous interaction with the musical culture of the “other”—namely, of the Italian Christian majority.

The nature of this interaction needs to be assessed in the specificity of each local and chronological context. But it first needs, to put it bluntly, to be acknowledged. In order for the musical sources mentioned thus far to be produced, the interaction had to occur not only between Jewish and Christian musical cultures but also between Jewish and Christian musicians. This very basic fact has not been considered by the scholars of Italian Jewish music, with the exception of Edwin Seroussi’s study of Benedetto Marcello’s Estro poetico-armonico (Venice, 1724–1726).¹¹

Israel Adler, the scholar to whom we owe the systematization and, in many cases, the gathering of almost all the sources of Italian Jewish music, in his seminal work devoted to the practice of art music among European Jews in the modern period, flatly denies the importance of the presence of non-Jewish musicians, as such, in the Jewish setting: “Under such conditions, one should not be at all surprised to see how some communities secured the collaboration of a non-Jewish composer for the celebration of their religious ceremonies. In terms of the value of these documents for the history of Jewish music, once their musical contents are not pulled from traditional Jewish song repertoires, whether their author is Jewish or not is of little importance. What matters is the intimately Jewish character of the ceremonies for which these works were conceived.”¹² Instead, Adler focuses on emphasizing the role that segregation played in eliciting an artistic (thus de facto and broadly cultural) response from Jewish intellectuals and musicians: “It is not by chance that it is especially since this period that musical activity in Jewish contexts is known to us: forbidden to pursue an official musical career on the outside, Jewish musicians could only express themselves inside the ghetto.”¹³

Don Harrán, whose portentous scholarly career was partly devoted to the study of the life and works of Salamone Rossi (ca. 1570–ca. 1630), focused greatly on Rossi’s status as a Jewish musician in a gentile world. In Harrán’s narrative (albeit not necessarily in his careful analysis of the materials themselves), Rossi appears less as a man of his time—someone whose professional and personal contacts were both outside and inside the ghetto and whose published works (including his Hebrew work, Ha-shirim ’asher li-Shlomo, published in Venice by the Bragadina press in 1622–1623) were the result of a Jewish-Christian partnership—and more like a timeless figure, a spiritual father to, or a prototype of, the stateless Jewish composers of postemancipation Europe:

No other Jewish musician of [Rossi’s] stature and accomplishments is known from ancient times to the early seventeenth century; he was described, in fact, as the first to have restored music to its splendor in the Ancient Temple and as having David the psalmist as his forebear. Nor can any later Jewish composer, of the same caliber, be found until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. True,...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Musical Examples
• List of Tables
• Editorial Principles
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Rebecca Cypess
• 1. Written in Italian, Heard as Jewish: Reconsidering the Notated Sources of Italian Jewish Music / Francesco Spagnolo
• 2. Miriam’s Timbrel: The Decameron as Exodus / Aaron Beck
• 3. Traces of Jewish Music and Culture at the Urbino Court of Federico da Montefeltro / J. Drew Stephen
• 4. The Peripatetic Career of a Converted Jew: The Music Theorist Pietro Aaron / Bonnie J. Blackburn
• 5. A Fire, a Fight, and a Knight: Elye Bokher in Verse and Song / Avery Gosfield
• 6. The Bassanos at the Court of Henry VIII: A Story of Cooperation and Protection / Dongmyung Ahn
• 7. Jewish and Converted Musicians and Musical Instrument Makers in Southern Italy in the Fifteenth through Early Seventeenth Centuries / Luigi Sisto
• 8. Salamone Rossi’s Songs of Solomon: The Pleasures and Pains of Marginality / Stefano Patuzzi
• 9. Orality and Literacy in the Worlds of Salamone Rossi / Rebecca Cypess and Lynette Bowring
• 10. L’Accademia degli Impediti: A Reevaluation / Liza Malamut
• Bibliography
• Index