Orality as Religious Ideal: The Music of East-European Jewish Prayer

Since the nineteenth century, largely as a consequence of German Romantic aesthetics, the study of art has looked upon the process of copying with an unsympathetic eye. For the German Romantics, the use of any pre-existent element in an artwork precluded the presence of genius; in a sense, copying was diametrically opposed to art. According to this notion, artistic creation was the property of genius and the artwork was born of necessity, by the force of nature.  This concept negated the temporal nature of art. Once completed, an artwork was frozen in time, so to speak; every subsequent variant of it was necessarily viewed as an imitation, that is, as being corrupt. As a consequence of this attitude, great compositions of music - such as those of Beethoven - were often imagined as an abstract idea in the mind of the artist and that idea was believed to be inexpressible in any real form. To this thinking, performance, and even notation, were only pale approximations of the original idea.