Between Israeli and Jewish in Music

Between Israeli and Jewish in Music

Chair: Jehoash Hirshberg


Olivier Tourny, CNRS, Paris-Jerusalem
The Beta Israel Liturgical Music in Israel Today: Between Tradition, Norm and Creativity

Over the past two decades, the Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jewish) Community has immigrated massively to Israel. It is paradoxically in Israel that its religious traditions have not been officially welcomed due to their specificity. The traditional status of the Jewish Ethiopian priests has not been recognized by the Israeli Religious Authorities, whereas the younger generation receives a normative Jewish education in religious schools.
This singular situation has deeply divided the Ethiopian community. Part of it chose to abandon its traditions in favour of Israeli ones, attending religious services in neighbourhood synagogues. Another part chose to remain faithful to the ritual practices of its ancestors. That is why, contrary to all expectations, the Jewish Ethiopian liturgy is still alive in modern-day Israel, as expressed in the construction of large prayer houses in different parts of the country. More recently, a new trend, led by a new generation of Jewish Ethiopian Israeli priests, has tried to introduce an alternative between the Ancients and the Moderns, by maintaining some old practices – such as traditional songs – while instituting new ones; in other words, by creating a purely Ethiopian Israeli liturgy.

Ronit Seter, Jewish Music Research Centre, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Is Israeli Art Music Jewish?

While the commonsensical answer should be “of course,” based on the impossibility, or more significantly, futility of defining Jewish music itself—many of the founders of Israeli art music stayed away from what they considered as Jewish signifiers in their music. Their aim was to design contemporary Israeli music as a national project, not as a branch of Jewish music which was traditionally written in exiled communities. They failed in creating a desired, unequivocal “national style,” though a general ideology had been established. Thus, through prescriptive definitions of Israeli music, Boskovich, Partos, Seter, and Tal succeeded in convincing musicologists that their music is Israeli—a new entity, essentially and qualitatively different from its Jewish roots. Only few scholars (Philip Bohlman has been among the firsts) incorporated the study of Israeli art music as a part of Jewish music, and only recently the understanding of Israeli music as a part of Jewish music is apparent in scholarship. Indeed, Stutschewsky of the 1950s, at the peak of the opposition to the mentality of the Diaspora (shlilat ha-galut) was marginalized among his peers because of his unfashionable affinity with his predecessors in the Society for Jewish Folk Music; even in the 1980s, major works like Noam Sheriff’s Mechaye hametim (1985) were nearly sidelined as Jewish kitsch.
Based on recent theories of Jewish identities in art music such as Klara Moricz’s (2008), this paper will analyze writings by Stutschewsky, Boskovich, and Tal against ideologies of explicit Jewishness expressed in works of the early 2000s by leading composers such as Betty Olivero, Shulamit Ran, and Chaya Czernowin.

Yulia Kreinin, Hebrew University
“Beyond All This Hides a Great Happiness”: Israeliness and Jewishness in the work of Mark Kopitman

Two cantatas by Mark Kopytman, October Sun and Scattered Rhymes (both based on texts by Yehuda Amichai) express ambivalence so typical of the Israeli state of mind. A comment on the Yom Kippur War, the text of October Sun is marked by its aphoristic dryness, while expressing the author’s utter despair and sorrow. Kopytman’s music, on the contrary, helps to give vent to agonizing and bitter feelings; it also connects the Jewish and Israeli worlds through the inclusion of shofar-like sounds, as a symbol of the continuity of the Jewish tradition in our time.
In its own way, Scattered Rhymes is no less paradoxical than October Sun. For instance, Amichai’s key phrase – “Beyond all this hides a great happiness” – is treated by Kopytman as a kind of open intermediate cadence. This last phrase of the work makes the listener inevitably wonder: is it a question or an affirmation? The music leaves the question open. At this point, when the composition culminates in a question, an unexpected but nonetheless quite natural link between Israeliness and Jewishness arises, since the approach of constant questioning is an integral part of the Jewish spiritual tradition. I believe it is not accidental that Kopytman adheres – perhaps unintentionally – to a similar approach.

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