.... for those who love and wish to encourage traditional shul music
The following articles on shul music were written by Victor Tunkel for publication in the Daf Hashavua (first part in the 23rd Feb 2008 edition).
Victor is a barrister and law lecturer at London University but has a long standing involvement in Jewish music – starting with being a chorister in his synagogue choir from age of 7. Victor has one of the largest and finest collections of Jewish music and musicology in the world and is renowned as an amateur but eminent collector, researcher and historian of Jewish music.
How old is our synagogue music? Who wrote it? Is it what they sang in the Temple? Is it the same all over the Jewish world? Or the Ashkenazi world? Or is it just local Anglo-Jewish?
There are broadly 4 main types:
The public reading of the Torah with the division into weekly sidras was formally instituted about 2,400 years ago. That reading was, and still is, from the unpunctuated Sefer-Torah text of consonants. A thousand years later, the Masoretes, scholars in Tiberias, invented the vowel symbols and the 27 musical symbols as they appear in the humash; but only so as to define and perpetuate the ancient time-honoured way of reading and chanting.
Our way of singing the Torah and haftarah in England is the way it was in Central and Western Europe. Ashkenazim in Israel and America have mostly adopted the Eastern European ("Lithuanian") style. We can hear the differences when visiting their synagogues. The experts agree that our way is the more ancient, having evolved in the Rhineland by about the year 1000. It was first written down in modern musical notation (by non-Jews) in about 1500, and allowing for uncertainties in hearing and transcribing, it is practically the same as our present style.
Why is there this difference in the Askenazi world? With the destruction of the Rhineland communities in the first crusade, the survivors fled eastwards and eventually established communities in Eastern Europe. They took with them their Germanic language, Yiddish, and their ancient music. But in the centuries in the Slavic area their chants became influenced by the local music culture. Hence the difference between the styles of the German Jews and those from the Baltic, Poland and Russia. Today, faced with the combined Jewish strength of Israel and America, there is a danger of our older western style being eclipsed and lost. With the destruction of European Jewry we are its last custodians. We should treasure it and do our best to study it and preserve it.
One of the most striking things about our ancient prayer-chants is how specific and distinct each is: Shabbat or Yomtov, morning or evening. This is because of our use of "nusach", the traditional musical modes of Ashkenazic liturgy. There are a number of different nuscha'ot. Within each there are characteristic musical phrases. For example, the end-b'racha and 'amen' on festival mornings is quite different from the way we conclude prayers on Shabbat, or Rosh Hashanah. This gives an individual flavour to each occasion.
Similarly, the Shabbat service begins in the minor-sounding regular weekday nusach. But approaching the Shema, we change to the nusach known as "ahava rabba", taking its name from that prayer before the Shema. We then continue in that mode for the rest of the morning. Ahava rabba (in Yiddish, "freygish") is that characteristic oriental mode of, e.g. Hava Nagila, or the final Avinu Malkenu, and many other folk tunes. We may think of it as the most typical "Jewish" music, but the musicologists say that we picked it up somewhere in our dispersion.
Other principal nuscha'ot likewise take their names from associated prayers: "magen avot" used on Erev Shabbat and Shabbat minha; "adoshem malach" used in various prayers such as the Kedushah. Each nusach is so strong in its Jewish associations that stage and screen have borrowed them freely: adoshem malach for the opening phrase of "If I was a Rich Man" in Fiddler on the Roof; and magen avot for the "Exodus" theme.
Within each nusach there are characteristic musical phrases and cadences, and these vary according to the occasion. For example ahava rabba is the same framework used both on Shabbat morning and weekday evening services; but the musical motifs, the b'racha endings, etc., are quite different. Similarly no one entering the shul on a Friday evening should think it is Shabbat afternoon, even though the nusach is the same.
Does the concept of nusach seem restrictive? On the contrary, the prayer-leader, while staying within the appropriate nusach, is expected to improvise freely. Our prayer chants allow - indeed, require - spontaneity. The leader should never be totally predictable but, keeping always to the meaning of the prayers, should adorn the chant with every melodic twist and pattern that the nusach affords.
To maintain our nusach tradition it is important that those who lead services are well versed in it, and indeed congregants also. Tephilharmonic is hoping to put on nusach appreciation courses to help this.
Next in age are the set melodies we call "mi-sinai" (literally "from Mount Sinai") because of their antiquity. The missinai melodies include the special tunes for Aleinu on Rosh Hashanah, the Neila Kaddish, Tal and Geshem, Akdamut on Shavuot, Eli Tsion on Tisha b'Av, and of course Kol Nidrei. No one (I hope) in our community would think of singing these prayers to any other tune.
They are not all equally old. But some go back more than a thousand years to the Rhineland, the heartland of the Ashkenazi community. For one melody, tragically, we have a date: Aleinu with its opening descent and upward leap was old and well known in 1171. In the northern French town of Blois the terrible accusation of the blood-libel led to 33 of the town's Jews, men, women and children, being burned at the stake. The dying song of these martyrs, as reported by a Jewish eye-witness to Rabeinu Tam who lived in nearby Orleans, was Aleinu. The tune seems to have impressed the Christian bystanders. There is no trace of such a tune in contemporary Gregorian chant, yet it appears in the later-composed sanctus of the Mass; from where 400 years later Martin Luther adopted it for his German Mass: a missinai tune as the musical centrepiece of the Reformation!
But we may infer that the missinai melodies are much older than this. When the Rhineland communities were savaged in the first crusade in 1096, many Jews escaped and fled eastwards. We know that they took with them their vigorous Jewish and German culture, as we see from the use of Yiddish throughout Eastern Europe. Similarly, since we find the missinai melodies firmly established throughout that vast area of Jewish settlement, from the Baltic to the Balkans, and long before the days of mass communication or music written-down, this points to a truly venerable common origin.
Hence the inspiring missinai melodies, preserved through the devotion of generations of Jews, replay for us our community's history: its wanderings, troubles, torments, endurance and, through all, its loyalty. That music enables us to hear and share the experience of our Ashkenazi forebears with an immediacy which no other medium or text or study can produce. We do well to treasure them.
Later than the missinai melodies but no less ingrained are compositions which have become "traditional" and sung everywhere: They are not truly traditional because we know the composers: Sulzer's En Kamocha; Lewandowski's Uvenucho Yomar. Every Shabbat we hear Julius Mombach's Hodo al Eretz and Havu from Victorian London. Older than these are tunes which go back to Duke's Place of the later 1700s: the Yigdals for Shabbat, Rosh Hashanah and Succot; and the Kaddish before maftir on festivals. Older still we have Maoz Tsur and Adir Hu, of non-Jewish origin but now firmly rooted in our homes and also adapted to various shul texts.
In the English synagogue for a century or two we have had graceful and joyful tunes for the Hallel psalms: Odecha, Ma Oshiv, a Hodu and Anna for each festival. Lately these are being displaced by rather lumbering hassidic tunes which carelessly distort words to fit the tune, and show little feeling for poetry or meaning.
Another trend is to adapt recent Israeli songs to our prayers: Hanina Krachevsky's Al S'fat Yam Kineret, Joseph Hadar's Erev Shel Shoshanim, Naomi Shemer's Yerushalayim Shel Zahav, Shalom Postolski's Kuma Echa and others pop up in the kedusha and elsewhere. We also have Nurit Hirsch's Oseh Shalom, T. Portnoy's Etz Hayim, and everywhere bits of Shlomo Carlebach.
The hassidic tunes do at least show some religious feeling; and the popular songs can sometimes be adapted to sound appropriate to their text. But now we have an intrusion of camp-fire sing-alongs from American youth camps which have no musical worth, reducing the meaning of sublime poems such as Adon Olam to doggerel. Similarly the excessive restriction on repeating words, quite recently imposed on our community, means that we get fill-ins with meaningless childish "lye-lyes" and "oy-yoys" where the repetition of a word could give emphasis and feeling.
At one time our community was cohesive in its prayer melodies. One could go into any Anglo-Jewish synagogue and feel at home with its familiar, dignified service. Now, to adapt the words of Shofetim, "everyone sings what is right in his own ears". Tephilharmonic is set up to fight this trend - please register as a friend or member to show your support.
Some pieces of composed shul music have become so embedded and adopted everywhere that we regard these as the tune of the piece, for example, En Kamocha and Ki Mitzion. That music was in fact written by Salomon Sulzer (1804-1890), the great cantor-composer of Vienna. With his command of the old German synagogue tunes, his appreciation for the Hebrew and the meaning of the prayers, and his skilled musicianship, he restated our missinai melodies (e.g. Hamelech, the various kaddishes, Kol Nidre) adding parts for choir; and gave us new ones in keeping with Jewish feeling and a renewed dignity of worship. His was the first attempt to provide a musical compendium of all the prayers for the entire year.
But in addition Sulzer had a superb high baritone voice which attracted all the composers and singers of Vienna, then at the peak of European musical culture, to come to his synagogue to hear him. One of these, Schubert, composed for Sulzer's Friday evening service a Mizmor Shir Leyom Hashabbat. This was the first and only example of one of the geniuses of world music writing for the synagogue - that is until such as Leonard Bernstein, Arnold Schoenberg and Kurt Weil in our own day.
Sulzer's influence was felt everywhere among European synagogues. Chazanim were sent by their communities to study with him. Not only his compositions, but his vocal style and choral settings were imitated. Such is his lasting achievement that all our synagogue music can be viewed as either pre-Sulzer or post-Sulzer.
The shul music of our Anglo-Jewish Ashkenazi community is a rich hybrid: originally German, but with eastern European style later added. The first immigrants came mainly from northern Germany. They brought their traditional nusach, and their set tunes which we can still recognise: Maoz Tsur, Adir Hu, the festival Yigdals, the Hallel tunes; and of course our leyening style. Their melodies took firm root in the Great Synagogue, Duke's Place, in the 18th century. Successive chazzanim appointed there who came from Germany or Holland had no difficulty in attuning to the local minhag. Chazzanim from further east had to learn and adopt this dignified western style.
In 1828 the Great appointed a new chazzan, Hanoch Eliasson, chazzan of Darmstadt. He brought with him a youngster of 14, Julius Mombach, son of the chazzan of nearby Pfungstadt. Mombach, with a sweet voice and exceptional musicality, at first joined with chazzan and bass in the traditional trio, a form of synagogue music-making that had been practised for a century or two in Europe. But after a few years the synagogue decided to follow the example of the leading synagogues of Europe and establish a choir. Mombach, now in his twenties, was made Director. He held the post for nearly 40 years. In that time he composed many settings for the entire year, and became the leading influence on synagogue music and choirs not only in England but throughout the empire.
Exceptionally modest, Mombach published not a note of his music in his lifetime. It was left to Chazzan Keiser to collect Mombach's manuscripts and publish them in 1881. This is unfortunate because Keiser included tunes not by Mombach; and may have missed others which we now have to call "traditional". Among familiar and much-loved compositions undoubtedly by Mombach are his Hodo Al Eretz and Havu still sung everywhere every Shabbat; Ledavid Mizmor for festivals; his regular and sefirah Lecha Dodis and Ahavat Olam for Friday evening; Mechalkeil and Hayom Harat Olam on Rosh Hashanah; Ki Anu Amecha on Yom Kippur, and his Adon Olam now rightly reserved for concluding Rosh Hashanah morning and Kol Nidre.
Soon after his death, the United Synagogue resolved to collect and publish a compendium of Anglo-Jewish settings for choir and congregation for the entire year. This appeared as Kol Rinah: The Voice of Prayer and Praise, but far better known as the "blue book". It remains the core-collection of our choral pieces. The editors obtained the copyright of Mombach's compositions, and with some editing to improve their Hebrew stress, they are the backbone of the collection.
The music of the United Synagogue received a fresh new impetus with the arrival of Samuel Alman. Alman was born in Sobolevka, in the western Ukraine, in 1877. Between 1895 and 1903 he studied music at conservatories in Odessa and Kishinev. Conscripted into the Russian army, he served as a bandsman. Following the Kishinev pogrom he came to England in 1906 and continued his studies at the Guildhall School of Music. He gained the ARCM in 1910.
Already many Jews had arrived from Eastern Europe and, finding the established Anglo-Jewish davening and musical style not to their taste, had formed their own synagogues. Alman's achievement was to create a synthesis of the older Anglo-Jewish style with the musical expression of these relative newcomers. He became choirmaster first at Dalston synagogue and then at the Duke's Place. In 1911 he completed his biblical grand opera in Yiddish, King Ahaz, which was performed to much acclaim the following year.
In 1916 began his long career as choirmaster at Hampstead, working with the hazan, Wolf Stoloff. In 1921 there appeared his first group of Hebrew songs, and in 1925 his first large volume of synagogue music for the sabbath, followed in 1933 by the second volume for the high festivals. When Stoloff was succeeded in 1931 by Gershon Boyars, there began a musical partnership in which each inspired the other. Alman's style for hazan was in the South Russian tradition of recitative. But while his many choral compositions also reflect this eastern nusach, his musical training enabled him to introduce more 20th-century harmony. He added an important Supplement to the 'Blue Book', re-arranging much of our German-style shul music with correct Hebrew and phrasing. He founded the Halevi Choral Society for which he wrote many of his four-part mixed choir pieces, and also conducted the Hazanim Choir. His concert works include a string quartet 'Ebraica', and a set of organ preludes based on Jewish themes.
Among compositions for which we remember him are his Rosh Hodesh bensching, his Sefirat haOmer, and perhaps best-loved for its pathos, his Shomeir Yisroel. Outside the synagogue he set very many Yiddish and Hebrew songs, still favourites among choirs. But in synagogues today his compositions are not so often heard because of the lack of choirs capable of performing them.
Alman's influence, partly on account of the 'Blue Book', was felt throughout the Jewish world. When he was due to retire, the United Synagogue resolved to create a new post for him as the U.S. Director of Music. But he died only weeks later at the age of 69.
Shavuot shares with Pesach and Sukkot our general festive music: the stately German tune which introduces the Shochen Ad verses; often this is where a baal musaf will start. Similarly we hear the regular festival nusach chant in the repetition of the Amidahs. But added to these, Shavuot has its own u nique missinai melodies to accompany the special prayers unique to this festival: Akdamut, the 11th century poem inserted before the leyening, is sung like a psalm in alternate verses by the baal k'riah and the congregation. (Its tune has been adapted for the kiddush of all three festivals.) There is however a more elaborate old German tune for Akdamut and this can be heard in Hallel in combination with the traditional Anglo-Jewish Shavuot tune for Hodu, dating from at least the 19th century.
Yetsiv Pitgam, inserted in the haftarah, has an old tune. Mombach, the 19th century choirmaster at the Great Synagogue, reworked this in triple-time and three-line verses. This tune likewise may be used in Hallel for, e.g., Anna Hashem. Then there is the poem Az Shesh Me'ot in the repetition of the Musaf Amidah. This has its own ancient tune but regrettably few prayer-leaders nowadays seem to know it.
Finally we should enjoy the special Shavuot leyening of the Book of Ruth, the one Bible book about ordinary everyday life of ordinary people in ancient Israel. This megillah is leyened in the same warm summer trop as for Shir Hashirim and Kohelet on the other two festivals. But if read with understanding and expression, the trop itself enables this precious gem of the Bible, with the moving words of devotion of Ruth to Naomi, the midnight surprise of Boaz, the family and property matters, to come alive for us again each Shavuot.
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