Progetto Martha Argerich

italiano

Works

Jorge Bosso

The Sounds of Shabbath: Humanity and Spirituality in Jewish Music

 

The music that resounded with regal splendour in the temple of David in Jerusalem is silent forever. It is possible that traces of the synagogue music that survived the diaspora of 70 A.D. managed to become part of Ambrosian and Gregorian Chant, in the form of melismatically ornate modal chant. This was stated by Isidoro of Seville as early as the seventh century, but regarding a hypothetical Jewish Ur-Melos transmitted via the oral tradition we cannot proceed beyond the optimistic speculations of Benedetto Marcello, who based his version of the Psalms on what he heard the Ashkenazi and Sephardic cantors sing in Venice’s ghetto – the oldest one in Europe. As Israel Adler recently admitted, “Any attempt to go in that direction seems doomed to failure and lacking in scientific rigour.” The rabbinical doctrine that flourished throughout the Middle Ages sometimes encouraged the use of beautiful voices kept under proper control for services, but mourning for the destruction of the Temple held absolute sway in the Babylonian Talmud’s harsh declaration: “May the ear that listens to music be cut off.” Even the great Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) condemned secular texts, musical instruments, making music “while one drinks wine” and female singing. In reality, there was much ambiguity in this distinction between the sacred and the secular. For instance, banquets, songs and praise in God’s honour were not only authorised but actually prescribed for occasions such as weddings, fulfilment of vows, circumcisions of newborn boys, the holiday of Purim and others as well. And the Jewish people’s capacity to assimilate in the most varied geographical and cultural contexts did the rest. Jewish musicians and dancers were present as far back as the late Middle Ages in the della Scala and Gonzaga courts and in Constantinople; and in the Contado Venosino around Avignon the wealthiest among the “Pope’s Jews” provided funds for Christian composers until well into the eighteenth century. Even in the ghettos of Central Europe, epochal philosophical movements opposed, in the end, the narrow Orthodox rabbis’ branding the practise of music as a negative force. First came the Cabbala, which flourished in the sixteenth century through the teachings of Yitzhak Luria. The Cabbalists believed that the gates of heaven would open for those who had sung psalms, hymns and prayers well: they would be set alongside the angels and the winds that shake the fronds of paradise. They described the oneg shabbath – the “delight of the Sabbath” – as a miniature paradise symbolised by a queen who is imprisoned in heaven (the word shabbat is feminine in Hebrew) but who descends to earth once a week. Not only prayer and the study of the Holy Scriptures but also meals taken together, songs and dances and sexual relations between husband and wife were all part of the harmonious integration of the human with the spiritual; the philosophical basis for this is full of occult Gnostic themes that aroused much interest in contemporaneous Renaissance thinking, and it conflated into Chassidism two centuries later. The Chassidim were less elitist, closer to the humble piety of the common people; although they held onto both classical Biblical Hebrew and the Aramaic of liturgical prayers such as the Kol Nidrei, with their corresponding solemn presentations, refined over the centuries by the chazzanim (synagogue cantors), they also absorbed Slavic, Hungarian and Danubian musical traditions. They translated the songs of their Christian neighbours into Yiddish, and they translated profane love into sacred love, or even into an inextricable blending of the two, in accordance with the teachings of the Song of Songs. From the gypsies, who were present everywhere, they borrowed wildly rhythmic percussion instruments and languorous clarinets and violins. Above all, they created an ecstatic vocal expression called niggun (melody), a wordless chant that held sway during the freewheeling gatherings at which the devequt – total adherence to God – was taught. A Chassidic master said: “Silence is better than speech, but song is better than silence.” Once, when Rabbi Uri of Strelisk – who died in 1826 – heard some musicians playing, he observed: “Among the halls of heaven, the hall of music is the lowest and narrowest, but for those who wish to approach God, it is sufficient to enter this one.”

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