Assessing Abraham Zvi Idelsohn’s Legacy

(Openning session)

Assessing Abraham Zvi Idelsohn’s Legacy: Eighty Years after the Publication of Jewish Music in its Historical Development

The year 2009 marks the eightieth anniversary of the publication of Abraham Zvi Idelsohn’s foundational book Jewish Music in its Historical Development, which in many ways redefined the international study of music in Jewish life. Using that book as a centerpiece, the three presenters in this proposed panel will explore different aspects of Idelsohn’s methods, scholarship and impact. James Loeffler will discuss the development of Idelsohn’s aesthetic vision of Israeli musical culture during his years in the yishuv and afterward. Noah Gerber will investigate the central place Yemenite Jews held within Idelsohn’s philosophies of Hebrew culture and history. Finally, Judah Cohen will explore the conditions surrounding the writing and publication of Jewish Music itself as an assertion of a Jewish presence within the grand sweep of music history. These papers, when taken together, will aim to offer new insight into the motivations and intellectual underpinnings of the recognized “Father of Jewish Musicology.”


James Loeffler, University of Virginia
In Which Direction Do Hebrews Play Music?: Abraham Zvi Idelsohn and the Musical Aesthetics of Zionism

Where did Zionist aesthetics come from? For several decades now, this deceptively simple question has fueled academic inquiry and debate regarding the history of cultural Zionism and the formation of Israeli culture. Scholars of Hebrew literature have focused particular attention on the role of literary translation and European models in the aesthetic development of modern Hebrew culture. This paper proposes to explore what translation and language mean when applied to early models of “Hebrew music.” Specifically, I will examine the writings of Abraham Zvi Idelsohn in the yishuv and elsewhere between 1907 and 1929. Building on my previous work on music, aesthetics, and Jewish nationalism in fin-de-siecle Eastern Europe, I will explore how Idelsohn understood the relationship between European languages, Hebrew translation, and sound in his self-conscious search for an authentic national musical aesthetic. Put differently, how and why did Idelsohn translate German culture—and the German language (“safah kulturit”)—into Hebrew music? How did he decide in which direction Hebrew music should read on the musical stave—left to right or right to left? And what do these semantic choices reveal about Zionism’s relationship to European culture as a whole?


Noah Gerber, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The Father of Jewish Musicology and the Natives: Abraham Zvi Idelsohn and the Yemenites

Abraham Zvi Idelsohn arrived in Jerusalem some time in early 1907. He had been told that the true oriental source of his nation's music could be found in this multi ethnic enclave. My paper will address his work on 'the most Jewish and most Arab of all Jews', those hailing from the Yemen, and anchor it within some of the broader currents prevalent in Jewish cultural discourse at the time.
Naturally, Idelsohn's primary interest was Yemenite Jewish music, as the first volume of his Thesaurus of Hebrew Oriental Melodies will attest. However I will also examine his attempt to write a sort of Yemenite Jewish ethnography, capturing what he thought was the entirety of this exotic culture. This was no doubt a result of ardent national consciousness on his part, as well as sheer intellectual curiosity. The paper will conclude by addressing the question of Yemenite agency in his multi-faceted legacy.


Judah M. Cohen, Indiana University
A Crossroads of Jewish Music Scholarship: A. Z. Idelsohn and the Publication of Jewish Music in its Historical Development

In 1929, musicologist and composer Abraham Zvi Idelsohn published his major study Jewish Music in its Historical Development. Viewed today as a foundational work in its field, Idelsohn’s book attempted for the first time to bring together many fragments of Jewish musical knowledge into a single, grand English language narrative. Merging wide-ranging archival, textual and ethnographic research with analytical techniques acquired through his own education, Idelsohn attempted to give the Jewish people a clear sonic origin and epistemology, with its own consistent (if sometimes obscured) musical tradition. While Idelsohn’s treatise was in one sense a single voice among many, it nonetheless received wide coverage, succeeding at least metaphorically in giving Jewish sound a continuous, usable past for musical practice and thought in the present. In this paper, I will analyze the publication history of this work, from Idelsohn’s predecessor treatise Toldot HaNeginah HaIvrit, (1924) to his dealings with mainline publisher Henry Holt & Company, to the book’s reception in lay and scholarly Jewish music circles, and finally to its subsequent republications and canonization. In doing so, I will argue that Jewish Music in its Historical Development helped redefine the borders, and perhaps geographical center, of Jewish music scholarship.


Respondent: Prof. Edwin Seroussi, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

2.8.09