Medieval Jewish Music
Program Notes
Some people might argue that there is no such thing as Jewish Medieval Music. It is true that the only authentic medieval Jewish music exists as fragments in two manuscripts that were both prepared by a 12th century cantor named Obadiah. He was a convert, born a Christian in Italy, who after his conversion to Judaism went to Egypt where he lived and worked as a cantor and teacher.
You will not hear these Obadiah pieces in our concert. They are too fragmented and incomplete. The scarcity of available sources makes a reasonable reconstruction impossible.
The Jewish and Islamic cultures in the Middle Ages chose not to write down their music, for a variety of reasons:
-- Music was transmitted orally, from person to person, from teacher to student.
-- There were moral and ethical questions about the role music should play in worship. Music was considered sinful by some famous medieval philosophers (such as Maimonides) and their followers, and therefore most certainly not deemed worthy to be recorded.
-- In the communities that did not follow the banning of music from temple and home, the inventiveness of the cantor, or hazzan, was very much valued. It was a matter of artistry for each cantor to compose his own melodies, or make his own arrangements of pre-existing ones, so that each community took pride in its unique collection of songs.
-- There was the practical problem regarding the notation of Jewish medieval music: while the Hebrew language reads from right to left, the known musical notation at the time reads from left to right.
Any attempt at arriving at a conclusive version of a Medieval Jewish song therefore remains futile. We will never know how much a melody changed as it passed from one generation to the next.
This program of Jewish Medieval Music does not claim to be the definitive presentation of a static art, frozen in time, but is intended as a sharing of possibilities: similarities seem to present themselves when looking at one tradition from the perspective of another one. We make assumptions of shared experiences in times when people of different religions lived together peacefully. And we do know there were these times.
The most famous example of peaceful religious coexistence occurred in Spain in the centuries before the expulsion. The courts of the Muslim caliphates, especially those of Cordoba but also the Christian court of Alfonso X in Castilia, were places where Christians, Jews and Arabs all worked together. Jewish philosophers and writers were appreciated because of their knowledge of languages: Hebrew of course, but also Greek and Arabic. They became the mediators between Islamic and Christian cultures, both of which were interested in the culture of the Greek Antiquity. They were valued as poets and musicians. We have records of Jewish musicians, known for their skillful singing or playing of string instruments, being hired for all kinds of festivities; even to perform in Christian religious services! Medieval scholars went to their Jewish and Arab colleagues to learn about the music writings of the ancient world, preserved only in Arab and Hebrew translations.
The Jews in Spain, known as the Sephardi, enjoyed relative freedom under Islamic rule. They did not pose a direct threat to the regime and Jews and Muslims shared a love of learning and science. Sephardic Jews were able to hold high positions in government, and were respected scholars and artists. In contrast, the Ashkenazi from the Germanic countries were excluded from guilds and societies, and barred from public office.
Performing and studying medieval music, as I have been doing for nearly four decades, one grows accustomed to the challenges of reconstructing what once was essentially an orally transmitted art form. One learns to accept that the available source materials represent only a small part of medieval music making that included music for religion and devotion, for entertainment, to accompany and enlighten physical labor, to record history, and to spread everyday and important ënews.í As beautifully executed and richly illuminated as the manuscripts of the medieval world are, they are not and were never meant to be ëperformanceí editions; they were made as collections of art. Indeed books, and especially books of music, were extremely valuable, and not something a performing musician could ever dream of acquiring. Nor would he have felt a need to do so. His craft was learned at the side of his teacher, to whom he was in service. An important part of his training would have been committing to memory a vast repertoire of songs and dances for all occasions.
I have approached the scarce sources of Jewish medieval music, indeed of Jewish songs in general, the same way I approach other medieval sources: not as absolute works of art, but as a starting point. Not as a historical fact, but as a part of a tradition that was alive in the Middle Ages as much as it is in our 21st century. Themes of spirituality, love, and enjoyment of community through song and dance are no less relevant now than they were in earlier centuries.
In our program, I have tried to present several aspects of Jewish music that fit the goals and talents of our choir:
-- Cantillations of biblical texts, such as the Song of Songs.
-- Piyyutim, or liturgical poems: the strophic songs that became so popular during the 11th and 12th centuries.
-- Nigunim, or dance songs, instrumental and vocal, primarily of the Ashkenazi Jews.
-- Romanzas and Coplas in Judeo-Spanish or Ladino: secular songs of the Sephardic Jews, living in the Iberian Peninsula till their expulsion in 1492.
-- Instrumental arrangements of Cantigas de Maria, a collection of over 400 songs, devoted to the Virgin, compiled at the court of the 13thcentury Spanish King Alfonso X.
-- Not exactly medieval, but a challenging departure from our usual repertoire: Salamone Rossiís works. He set to music several Psalms and Prayers in Hebrew, that followed the style and fashions of the 'art music' prevalent in the 17th century Italy of his time.
Cantillations.
Biblical texts were sung from the earliest times on, often improvised. They are not metric, and can be quite florid. They were often sung by professional singers.
The Song of Songs is a book of the Old Testament - one of five megillot (scrolls). It is also known as the Song of Solomon, or as Canticles, from the title Canticum Canticorum, Song of Songs in Latin. It is an allegorical representation of the relationship of God and Israel as husband and wife. In the Sephardic tradition it is recited every Friday night, in the Ashkenazi tradition on the Sabbath during Passover. The poems are often quite erotical in nature, and seem to suggest courtship and love between a woman and man. It is said to be the most frequently interpreted book in Medieval Christianity.
Piyyutim (singular Piyyut).
In the 11th century Jewish poets started to experiment with the forms of the Arabic poetry that surrounded them. Differentiation of long and short syllables is foreign to the Hebrew language. One, two or three syllables can be fitted between accents. There is no fixed meter. Piyyutim follow the metric patterns of Arabic and Greek poetry, and similarly are organized in stanzas of regular length and syllable count. Rhythm becomes much more important.
In most cases, the cantor or the hazzan was both poet of the text and composer of the melody. It was not unusual, however, to adapt pre-existing melodies or popular tunes. There was a great desire to bring new tunes to an audience, and cantors did not hesitate to use non-Jewish melodies. Like bishops and prelates in the Christian world, the Rabbis protested the secularization of religion, and tried (with as little success as their Christian counterparts) to ban these popular genres from the worship!
Often Piyyutim follow some clever poetic scheme. Such is the case in D'ror Yikra, which spells out the name of the author, Dunash ben Labrat, in the first letters of each line. Many texts of Piyyutim still in use today stem from the Middle Ages: the 'Golden Age of Jewish Poetry.'
Many Piyyutim are also zemirot, songs sung around the table during Sabbath and Jewish holidays. Some are specific to certain times of the day. Melodies vary greatly from one community to the next, as local tunes and styles of music are adapted to the same liturgical texts. I have heard that when Jews of different backgrounds meet around the Sabbath table they share their various versions. The 12th century poet Moses ibn Ezra explains that while the Greeks composed one tune to go with one poem, for the Arabs and their followers, the Jewish poets, every poem had a tune, but not every tune had one exclusive poem. It is the same system as that of the English ballads, which often have a line at the beginning: 'to the tune of...'
Nigunim (singular Nigun).
The genre of Nigunim is particularly interesting to me as an instrumentalist who has spend most of her musical life trying to imitate singers: these are songs in which singers try to imitate instruments! A Nigun is sung on syllables such as bam bam bam, oi oi oi, or something similar. Literally, the name Nigun means 'humming tune.' Sometimes bible verses are interspersed with refrains. Our second Nigun uses part of Psalm 23.
Nigunim are often improvised, but sometimes non-Jewish songs and folk-tunes are adapted; the Marseillaise, even drinking songs, are known to have been used! The belief is that these songs in their secular form are in spiritual exile. By singing them in a spiritual setting, they are freed, and the soul of the hazzan or rabbi who created them will be present.
Sephardic Romanzas
The name Sepharad in its origin refers to an exiled people: the Israelites who left the land of their fathers. Later it was used to specifically describe the Iberian Jews expelled from Spain first in the pogroms of 1391, and later after the reconquista in 1492 when the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella forced over 160,000 Jews to leave the Iberian Peninsula. The Sepharad went north to Southern France, east to Italy, and south to North Africa, but the majority landed in territories of the Ottoman empire: Constantinople, Greece, Egypt, Syria, Palestine and the Balkan states. They preserved their language, Judeo-Spanish, Ladino or Spanyolit as it is sometimes called. It was written in Hebrew letters.
Ladino, strictly speaking, refers to translations from Hebrew into Spanish, but is now used as another name for the language used in many of the Romanzas (narrative ballads) and Coplas (strophic songs). As in the Cantigas de Amigo of Portugal, the songs often express the feelings and longings of women, waiting for their lovers or husbands, and incorporate images of nature: singing birds, blooming roses, crashing sea waves. Sometimes tambourines or small drums were used, sometimes other instruments. As is the case in the Cantigas de Santa Maria, the melodies used for these songs seem to blend traditional western European, Jewish and Arabic elements.
Instrumental Cantigas
Although it is impossible to point precisely to where these melodies come from, it is intriguing to think of the rich cross fertilization of culture at the courts in Spain, where Christians, Muslims and Jews worked and performed together. We see this mixture of different influences in the Cantigas de Santa Maria as well. We will perform several of them as instrumental pieces
Polyphonic Art Music.
We end our program with two works by the Italian composer Salamone or Shlomo Rossi, who lived from 1570 till about 1630. He worked at the Mantuan court and was well liked, evident from the fact that he did not have to wear the yellow badge required of other Jews in Mantua. He seems to have been connected mostly with the Jewish Theatre of Mantua, which played an important role in Mantuan life: not only in the ghetto, but also at the Christian community and at court. With his collection of 33 polyphonic settings of psalms, hymns and temple songs, he endeavored to bring the polyphonic art music of his days into the temple.
~Margriet Tindemans
