"An Essential Expression of the People": Interpretations of Hasidic Song in the Composition and...

“An Essential Expression of the People”: Interpretations of Hasidic Song in the Compositionand Performance History of Ernest Bloch's Baal ShemAuthor(s): Joshua S. WaldenReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Fall 2012), pp. 777-820Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jams.2012.65.3.777 .

Accessed: 18/12/2012 09:29

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

University of California Press and American Musicological Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to Journal of the American Musicological Society.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded on Tue, 18 Dec 2012 09:29:42 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucal

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=amusoc

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jams.2012.65.3.777?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 65, Number 3, pp. 777–820 ISSN 0003-0139, electronic ISSN1547-3848. © 2012 by the American Musicological Society. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permissionto photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website,www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/jams.2012.65.3.777.

“An Essential Expression of the People”:Interpretations of Hasidic Song in theComposition and Performance History of Ernest Bloch’s Baal Shem

JOSHUA S. WALDEN

Recalling his youthful encounters with Ernest Bloch, the violinist YehudiMenuhin characterized the composer and teacher as “the incarnation

of a patriarch,” and “the musician as Old Testament prophet, whosespeech was thunder and whose glance lightning, whose very presence pro-claimed the divine fire by which, on occasion, a bystander might feel himselfscorched.”1 Elsewhere, expressing his conviction that Bloch’s Jewish identitywas integral to the formation of the compositional style in which he wrotemany of his most enduring works, Menuhin concluded, “Bloch is essentially aJewish composer, in his deep and guttural feeling for the Jewish cry of de-spair.”2 Menuhin considered that Bloch’s compositions based on themes fromJewish religion and culture conveyed an expression of a Jewish “soul” thattranscended time and distance. In these comments, the violinist responded tomarkers of a Jewish identity that the composer had incorporated in some of hismusic. Indeed, during the 1910s and 1920s, Bloch had deliberately set aboutto compose music that could be characterized in this way, motivated by his be-lief that a richer understanding of Jewish culture could provide him with botha more meaningful sense of his own identity and an inspirational force for hiscompositions. Pieces that emerged from this project included, among other

I wish to thank Walter Frisch, Mark Kligman, Alexander Knapp, James Loeffler, and MarkSlobin for their invaluable advice and feedback on this project. I would also like to acknowledgethe help of the archivists at the Music Library of the University of California, Berkeley, the Libraryof Congress Music Division, and the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at BostonUniversity, as well as the support of Jonathan Summers and the Edison Fellowship at theBritish Library Sound Archive. I delivered earlier versions of this paper at the University ofHong Kong, the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, and the meeting of theAssociation for Jewish Studies in Boston, and I am grateful for the comments I received at theseevents. Finally, I am thankful to the anonymous readers of the Journal for their thorough andthoughtful suggestions.

1. Menuhin, Unfinished Journey, 48.2. Dubal, Conversations with Menuhin, 40.



778 Journal of the American Musicological Society

3. Bloch planned to use melodies from the Jewish Encyclopedia in the opera he was workingon, Jézabel (the project was never completed). See his letter to Edmond Fleg of 11 August 1918,in Lewinski and Dijon, Ernest Bloch, 2:155.

4. See Radano and Bohlman, Music and the Racial Imagination, 28–30; and Stokes,Ethnicity, 6–7.

works, his “Jewish Cycle” (a set of works inspired by Jewish subjects that hecomposed between 1912 and 1918); his 1923 Baal Shem: Three Pictures ofChassidic Life for violin and piano, in which he aimed to evoke Eastern Euro -pean Hasidic prayer rituals; and his 1924 From Jewish Life and Méditationhébraïque. He also conducted library research into Jewish music traditions, for example in 1917 when he began extensively combing the 1906 Jewish En -cyclo pedia and other sources for transcribed melodies from which he hoped tointuit and distill the essence of Jewish traditional music.3

Focusing on Baal Shem, I explore in this article how Bloch and the per-formers who interpreted his music collaborated in constructing his reputationas a Jewish composer. During the first half of the twentieth century, journalistsoften described Bloch’s work and Menuhin’s performances as expressing whatwas commonly characterized during the early twentieth century as authenticand self-affirming racial feeling. The notion of authenticity was generally in-voked in this period in discussions of musical expression in Jewish culture toindicate the commentator’s sense of the accuracy with which a musical workor performance was considered to represent characteristics he held to be es-sential and fundamental to Jewish identity. Authenticity is of course a discur-sively defined concept, rather than a property inherent in music, and itsmeanings are subjective and mutable; thus, the term was often used in con-trasting ways by different musicians, critics, and listeners. It has neverthelessplayed a powerful and important role in the construction and expression ofshared identities across social groups.4 With Baal Shem, Bloch and many of hisperformers and listeners participated in a self-conscious effort to construct acontemporary Jewish identity that they believed could be conveyed in thesounds and structures of art music through the evocation of Hasidic song, agenre that was associated with the notion of authenticity because of theHasidic belief that melody could initiate a direct communion between theworshipper and God. The multiple recordings and live renditions of “Nigun”during the first half of the twentieth century offered listeners highly variedreadings of the score that through their demonstrations of virtuosity and in-terpretive creativity appeared to provide evidence of their performers’ pro-found experiences of the score’s meaning. Many listeners interpreted this workand its individualized performances as bridging the distance between dis-persed Ashkenazi communities and bringing them in touch with EasternEuropean Hasidic culture, as well as with what some conceived of as the an-cient biblical origins of modern Jewish identity.



Interpretations of Hasidic Song in Ernest Bloch’s Baal Shem 779

5. As the essays in the colloquy in the Summer 2012 issue of the Journal clearly show, de-bates over the meaning of the term “Jewish music” persist to this day, and contemporary scholarsgenerally acknowledge that this category cannot be characterized in any single definitive way. Seeespecially the introduction by Klára Móricz and Ronit Seter and the essay by Alexander Knapp;this Journal 65 (2012): 557–59 and 565–70.

6. Buber, “Address on Jewish Art,” 53.7. Ibid., 60.8. On the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music, see Loeffler, Most Musical Nation,

chap. 3; Nemtsov, Die Neue Jüdische Schule; and Walden, “Music of the ‘folks-neshome,’ ” 155–60.9. Idelsohn, Jewish Music, 466.10. For Bloch’s family history, see Knapp, “Bloch.”

Bloch and the Notion of “Jewish Music”

At the start of the twentieth century, the term “Jewish music” was in commonuse, but the concept of what precisely constituted this category was frequentlythe subject of debate among musicians and critics.5 In his address at the FifthZionist Congress in Munich in 1901, the philosopher Martin Buber articu-lated one characteristic understanding when he argued for the inherent musi-cality of Jewish culture—“We are a singing and music-loving people,” hestated—and promoted the work of ethnographers who collected Jewish litur-gical and folk music, and composers who adopted elements of EasternEuropean Jewish traditional music.6 This music, he stated, provided “docu-mentation of our soul’s history with which [artists] can begin and on whichthey can build.”7 For many commentators, the use of Jewish liturgicalmelodies or Yiddish and Hasidic song was a crucial element in the creation ofthe new genre of Jewish art music that was taken up with fervor by a numberof Jewish composers in Europe in the early twentieth century, especially bymembers of the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music, an organizationfounded by ethnographers, composers, and performers in 1908 to promotethe study of traditional music and the creation of a new style of “Jewish” artmusic.8 But direct quotation of a traditional melody was often considered to be insufficient alone to make a work of music an authentic representation of Jewish identity. Thus, the ethnographer and musicologist Abraham ZviIdelsohn wrote of composers of Jewish music: “Saturated with Jewish senti-ments, they feel the emotions which gave birth to these tunes with the intenseand profound sense of artists; and they try to pour these sentiments into artis-tic moulds.”9 To be a work of Jewish music, then, it was argued that a compo-sition must embody the fundamental soul invoked by Buber.

Bloch was born in 1880 to a family that had long been involved in Jewishreligious and cultural activities in Switzerland. His grandfather was a lay-cantorin Lengnau, where the family can be traced back at least to the eighteenth cen-tury, and his father, who moved to Geneva in 1856, had studied to become arabbi before choosing a career in business.10 Yet in the years after his Bar




Mitzvah, Bloch generally avoided religious practice.11 During this time hededicated himself to music, studying composition with Émile Jaques-Dalcrozeand Iwan Knorr, and violin with, among others, the Belgian virtuoso violinist-composer Eugène Ysaÿe. Although Bloch largely moved away from Jewish re-ligious practice during these years, he would later recall that he became“conscious” in his midtwenties of the possible importance to his identity of hisJewish background, when he read an unsigned review of his music by theFrench journalist Robert Godet that contained anti-Semitic comments in itscritique.12 In 1904, he first began to develop the concept of an opera on thebiblical theme of Jezebel. A letter from two years later to Edmond Fleg, anobservant Jew and the librettist with whom he collaborated on this project,demonstrates the start of a more substantial awakening of his sense of Jewishidentity; Bloch wrote, “I read the Bible. I read the fragments about Moses.And an immense pride has been surging within me! My entire being reverber-ated. It is a revelation. I found myself there.” He expressed fear of “standingerect as a Jew, proudly Jewish,” but concluded, “What must be will be!”13

It was around 1910 that Bloch became deeply interested in exploringJewish culture more formally and developed the conviction that a composer’srace stood at the core of the process of creation. Fleg became an influentialcorrespondent in this search for identity; it was at his prompting that Blochbegan his “Jewish Cycle.”14 Another inspiration to Bloch’s growing interest inhis Jewish culture was Godet who, without Bloch’s knowledge, was translat-ing into French H. S. Chamberlain’s overtly anti-Semitic The Foundations ofthe Nineteenth Century during their long epistolary correspondence. WhenGodet sent the finished translation to Bloch in 1913, Bloch’s dismayed re-sponse provoked Godet to break off contact.15 Bloch was conscious of the sadirony of the fact that, as he wrote later in a letter to Downes, it was “Godet,the friend of Debussy, and the one who had an extraordinary influence on

11. Among reasons he later provided for leaving the synagogue during his youth, Bloch de-cried the mistreatment he perceived being committed by Swiss middle-class Jewish communitiesagainst poorer Jews who arrived from Russia. He also recalled being disillusioned when seeingworshippers reading the Tribune during the Yom Kippur high holy day services in the synagogue.See his letter to Edmond Fleg of 24 January 1912, in Lewinski and Dijon, Ernest Bloch, 1:561.

12. Móricz, Jewish Identities, 105.13. “J’ai lu la Bible. J’ai lu les fragments sur Moïse. Et un immense orgueil m’a fait palpiter!

Tout mon être a vibré. C’est une révélation. Je me retrouverai là.” “J’ai eu peur . . . de me dresserjuif, orgueilleusement juif. . . . Mais ce qui doit être sera!” Quoted and reprinted in facsimile inLewinski and Dijon, Ernest Bloch, 1:368–69. This translation of the letter is based mostly on thework of Alexander Knapp in his article “Bloch.”

14. For discussions of the correspondence between Bloch and Fleg and its influence on hisconception of race, see Móricz, Jewish Identities, chap. 3; idem, “Sensuous Pagans”; and Schiller,Bloch, Schoenberg, and Bernstein, 12–30.

15. In later years Bloch and Godet resumed minimal and sporadic contact.




him, and the creator of Hitler in some way, who is responsible for my Jewishmusic. . . . It’s the absolute truth, but who could understand it?”16

Bloch’s letters and writings show that he sometimes labored under con-flicted and even inconsistent feelings about his own identity in relation toEuropean and American Jewish cultures, and he hoped that his researchwould offer him a way not only of resolving any ambivalence about his ownsecular Jewish identity, but also of forging a stronger connection to theWestern musical tradition. Bloch sometimes felt the limiting effect of beingidentified as a Jewish composer on the basis of his use of Jewish themes insome of his compositions, because his goal in his Jewish introspection was un-doubtedly to find inspiration for music that would be widely appreciated. Onthe other hand, it was these works that inspired Menuhin to regard the com-poser as a musical prophet who could guide him in connecting to a broad anddiverse audience, and, as will be shown later in this article, Bloch himself andmany of his contemporary critics during the 1910s and 1920s felt this part ofhis compositional repertoire to be emotionally authentic and a profound con-tribution to the canon of Western music.

Bloch expanded his knowledge of Jewish musical heritage through exten-sive library research, especially in 1917 during a series of visits to the New YorkPublic Library to study materials about Jewish traditional music by consultingthe multivolume Jewish Encyclopedia. Work on this compendium had been initiated in 1891 by Isidor Singer, who aimed to fight rising anti-Semitism, aswell as immigrant Jews’ ignorance of their heritage, through the collectionand publication of knowledge about Jewish history and culture.17 The JewishEncyclopedia was inspired by the nineteenth-century scholarly tradition of theGerman-Jewish Wissenschaft des Judentums and intended as a continuationand adaptation of the work of participants of this movement, a number ofwhose essays were translated and included in the Encyclopedia.18 It containsnumerous detailed articles on music, many written by Francis L. Cohen, a

16. “Ainsi c’est Godet, l’ami de Debussy, et celui qui a eu une extraordinaire influence sur lui,et le fabricant de Hitler en quelque sorte, qui est responsable de ma musique juive. . . . C’est l’ab-solue vérité, mais qui pourrait la comprendre?” Letter of 19 July 1954, in Lewinski and Dijon,Ernest Bloch, 1:513. In Jewish Identities, Móricz concludes from Bloch’s exchanges with Fleg and,especially, Godet that their influence led him to a narrowly and racially focused aesthetics of music.She writes, “Like many other Jewish intellectuals who came to accept their Jewish identity as thebasis of their character and creative output, Bloch also subscribed to a wide variety of anti-Semiticbeliefs” (97). But Bloch’s awakening sense of his Jewish selfhood, his study of Hebrew and theBible, and his persistent effort to develop a compositional style that represented what he viewed ashis own Jewish soul point not to anti-Semitism or self-hatred, but to a more complex, multivalent,and gradually changing sense of his own Jewish identity and his relation to other Jews across theDiaspora.

17. Schwartz, Emergence of Jewish Scholarship, 2 and 15.18. On the role of the Wissenschaft des Judentums in the early conception of the Jewish

Encyclopedia, see ibid., 5.




British Jewish Minister of Religion working in Australia; in writing some entries, Cohen collaborated with Cyrus Adler, the President of the AmericanJewish Historical Society. These articles address musical topics including can-tillation, mode, ornamentation, individual folk songs and prayers, music forJewish holidays and festivals, and rules for the chanting of the Torah. They dis-cuss the performance techniques and theoretical attributes of these musicaltraditions, and they present observations and hypotheses about their originsand points of comparison and contrast with both Christian and Eastern reli-gious and secular traditions. The extensive description of musical ritual andtranscriptions of melodies in this collection were the results of the editors’aims both to record Jewish history and to produce a guide for modern-dayJews who, in the words of editor Joseph Jacobs, “may at times desire to con-sult it for guidance in the hallowing of the Jewish home.”19 Bloch transcribedmost of the Jewish Encyclopedia’s numerous musical examples—which appearin eleven of its twelve volumes—into a lengthy manuscript score he called theChants juifs.20 He incorporated a number of these melodies into his later compositions, such as Abodah for violin and piano, which he dedicated toMenuhin.

The Encyclopedia’s treatment of the question of Jewish “race” demon-strated ambivalence among its authors and editors. While they generally op-posed any scientific definition of race on the basis that it necessitated a notionof Jewish difference and thus conflicted with their ideal of Jewish integrationinto modern society, they also recognized a value in the concept of race whenunderstood as an explanation of the bonds many Jews felt across the Diasporaand of their sense of the existence of an innate Jewish identity.21 Jacobs ad-dresses the topic of race in the Preface he coauthored with Adler and the othereditors, as well as in several of his entries in the Encyclopedia, using the term todescribe the connection among Jews in the Diaspora: he explains that “thepresent work deals with the Jews as a race.”22 In his entry on “Purity of Race,”however, Jacobs is hesitant to confirm the assertion, common at the time, thatcontemporary Jews are biological descendents of the Jews of the Bible. Hediscusses “anthropological” studies of Jewish appearance, including craniome-try and examinations of eye and hair color, and points to arguments both in favor of and against their conclusions. In the end, he equivocates on thematter of racial purity: “Altogether, the question is a very complex one, on

19. Jacobs, Jewish Encyclopedia, 77.20. Knapp, “Bloch.”21. Schwartz, Emergence of Jewish Scholarship, 108–9. The scientific approach to the study of

race gained footing and became systematic in the late nineteenth century, as a field that was con-sidered to provide empirical evidence of the inherent traits of differentiated groups of people. Inthe field of music, new scientific studies of the art form followed, with a racial turn in folk musiccollection and taxonomy, and the search for authentic examples of the music of different popula-tions and national identities. See Bohlman, “Erasure,” 11–12.

22. Adler et al., “Preface,” xii.




which no decisive answer can at present be returned. All history points to thepurity of race; some anthropological facts are against it.”23

Jacobs’s entry on “Anthropology” likewise considers the nature of theJewish race as an open question; he presents what he views as the main argu-ments for and against the hypothesis of racial purity, and goes into detail aboutresearch that supports both sides.24 In the end, he hedges, arguing that thereis uniformity in the Jewish race but also remarking on the possibility that this isdue to nurture rather than nature:

Anthropologically considered, the Jews are a race of markedly uniform type,due either to unity of race or to similarity of environment. Their physical condi-tion is mainly determined by their dwelling in towns. Their social position is theleast fortunate, owing to the fact that they are crowded together, as in the Paleof Settlement in Russia, or are forced to immigrate to other countries, wherethey have to compete as foreigners. . . . Jewish anthropological characteristicswill therefore be likely to become more similar to that of the general populationin the future. But the peculiarities due to race will still remain.25

It is therefore a more abstract notion of race, perhaps, but not one necessarilydependent on the notion of biological purity, that links contemporary Jewswith those in the past who, “owing to their long history and their wide disper-sion . . . have been connected with most of the important movements in thehistory of the human race.” Thus race was considered sufficiently importantand tangible a phenomenon to justify the years of work spent creating theJewish Encyclopedia.26

Bloch wrote and spoke about the concept of Jewish race in letters and in-terviews, and it seems likely that his understanding of the term, as it developedafter 1917, was influenced in part by the hours he spent studying the JewishEncyclopedia. He frequently used the word “race” to describe his Jewish iden-tity and his connection to other Jewish peoples, both historic and contempo-rary, but in his letters and interviews he did not profess interest in any notionof biological purity.27 Indeed, Bloch formed his conception of Jewish identityin an intellectual climate in which race was a generally accepted category,though exactly what the category entailed was often the subject of dispute andambivalence. The changing and often emotional ways Bloch characterized his

23. Jacobs, “Purity of Race,” 284.24. Jacobs, “Anthropology,” 619.25. Ibid., 621.26. Adler et al., “Preface,” vii.27. Jann Pasler has shown that the concept of race in nineteenth-century France developed in

complex ways and accommodated multiple meanings, and when used by French theorists to de-scribe the French nation, the term “la race” often signified the cultural ties between members of adiverse French identity, rather than any notional purity of blood or biology. See “TheorizingRace,” 460–63. This use of the term among French writers appears to have inspired Bloch; Blochacknowledged the influence of the French sociologist Gustave Le Bon (see below), and he mightalso have been aware of the work of other French writers on race and identity.




connection to the Jewish race over the years indicate that for him the notionof race primarily provided a way of feeling rooted in a collective history and ofexplaining what it meant for him to be Jewish even when he largely eschewedreligious practice. Faith in a Jewish racial identity also helped Bloch feelbonded to others across the transnational Diaspora during a lifetime of re-peated emigration and displacement.

Bloch expressed mixed feelings about conducting research into Jewish traditional musics, an activity he sometimes confessed to and at other times disavowed. A 1917 letter to his lifelong friend Alfred Pochon, founder of theFlonzaley Quartet, an ensemble that later toured with Bloch’s string quartets,explains the role research sometimes played in Bloch’s compositional plans: “Ijust returned from the library. I am studying up there on books about Hebrewchant. I dug up one on Yemenite Jews . . . which contains astonishing things.Here is another source that could furnish a ‘Poème’ of a truly special color, for quartet.”28 Bloch felt it was not sufficient to quote preexisting melodies,however, and insisted that his compositions were most successful when theyreflected a process of self-discovery. Thus, that same year Olin Downes pub-lished an article in The Musical Observer, in which he quoted Bloch’s state-ment that the use of folk themes “may on some occasions limit and constrain acomposer instead of inspiring him to write more freely and personally. . . . Ibelieve that those pages of my own in which I am at my best are those inwhich I am most unmistakably racial, but the racial quality is not only in folk-themes: it is in myself !”29 In May of that year, Bloch again characterized whathe considered his best work as a discovery of Jewish identity, more than simplyan adaptation of traditional melodies: “It is not my purpose, not my desire, toattempt a reconstruction of Jewish music, or to base my work on melodiesmore or less authentic. I am not an archeologist. I hold it of first importanceto write good, genuine music, my music. It is the Jewish soul that interests me,the complex, glowing, agitated soul, that I feel vibrating throughout theBible.”30 It appears that Bloch wished to deflect attention from his use of preexisting melodies—a technique found in Abodah, Baal Shem, Israel, Suitehébraïque, and others—in order to emphasize instead what he viewed as thecultural and racial justification for his task.31 In these statements he is eager toindicate that, far from being a scientific researcher into Jewish tradition (“I am

28. “Je reviens de la Bibliothèque. J’y potasse des bouquins sur la mélopée hébraïque. J’en aidéniché un sur les juifs du Yémen [. . .] qui contient des choses étonnantes. Voilà encore unesource qui pourrait fournir un ‘Poème’ d’une couleur bien spéciale, pour quatuor.” Ernest BlochCollection, ARCHIVES BLOCH 1, Music Library, University of California, Berkeley, Box 15,Folder 2, Item 32.

29. Downes, “Ernest Bloch, the Swiss Composer,” 11.30. Hale, “First Musical Spokesman,” 327. See also Knapp, “Life and Music of Ernest

Bloch,” 296.31. On preexisting sources in Bloch’s works, see Knapp, “Jewishness of Bloch”; on those in

Israel, see Kushner, “ ‘Jewish’ Works of Ernest Bloch,” 262–63.




no archaeologist”), he is a living example of that tradition, and his “Jewish”melodies flow not from study but from intuition.

In a series of lectures he gave in Geneva in 1914, Bloch summarized that inaddressing the “first essential factor” of the art of composing, he had spoken“about race, about the slow accumulation of the generations.”32 Bloch de-scribed race as the strongest of latent forces operating subconsciously in thesoul of the composer, along with affect and instinct. These forces, he asserted,are essential to the production of art: they are not added to a work, but are infact “its very substance . . . its soul.”33 Bloch’s conception of the importanceof race to the production of art—propounded in his Geneva talks and later in his 1940 lecture “Tower of Babel” at the San Francisco Conservatory, andexpressed in interviews with prominent American journalists includingDownes—was influenced by the work of Gustave Le Bon, the French sociolo-gist who wrote around the turn of the twentieth century on such topics asrace, group behavior, and the unconscious.34 In his 1896 book The Crowd: AStudy of the Popular Mind, Le Bon argues that in the crowd, which he definesas “a gathering of individuals of whatever nationality, profession, or sex. . . .The sentiments and ideas of all the persons . . . take one and the same direc-tion, and their conscious personality vanishes. . . . It forms a single being, andis subjected to the law of the mental unity of crowds.”35 According to Le Bon,race is passed hereditarily across generations in the forms of culture, social in-stitutions, and belief systems, and thereby influences the behavior, psychology,and morality of crowds.36 Bloch referred to Le Bon’s writings in lectures andinterviews to support his own sociological, racial, and psychoanalytical claimsabout art. The notion of the crowd was important to Bloch’s conception ofthe relationship between personal and group identities, supporting his under-standing of links that connected members of nations and of the JewishDiaspora. It also seems likely that Le Bon’s theory of the crowd helped to in-spire the persona that Bloch cultivated as a kind of prophetic leader.37

32. “Nous avons parlé du 1er facteur essentiel: de la Race, de la lente accumulation des géné-rations . . .” Ernest Bloch Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Box 23, Folder 1.

33. “Elles sont sa substance même, . . . son âme.” Ernest Bloch Collection, Music Division,Library of Congress, Box 23, Folder 1.

34. Le Bon’s theories of crowd psychology were widely read by the early twentieth centuryand were influential for prominent figures in the field of psychiatry including Carl Jung andSigmund Freud. Freud both borrowed from and in some cases refuted Le Bon’s writings in hisGroup Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.

35. Le Bon, Crowd, 1–2. Emphasis in the original.36. Ibid., 70.37. On Bloch’s sense of his own prophetic role, see Móricz, Jewish Identities, 107. Bloch ar-

ticulated his conception of the crowd’s relation to national identity in his description of the anthem in the Epilogue of his 1900–1929 “Symphonic Fresco,” Helvetia: “The motif of theMountain resounds in the distance. But it is the mountain liberated, reassured as after a storm.This motif expands, enlarges, in a lyricism more and more intense, then it mixes with that of Peaceand, through an ardent progression, brings about the final Hymn, where I hear clearly the crowd




In his 1917 profile of Bloch in The Musical Observer, Downes quotesBloch’s explanation of his musical ideology and its relation to race.

I . . . am a Jew, and I aspire to write Jewish music, not for the sake of self-advertisement, but because I am sure that this is the only way in which I canproduce music of vitality and significance. . . . Racial feeling is certainly a qual-ity of all great music, which must be an essential expression of the people aswell as the individual. . . . [A man] is thousands of his ancestors. If he writes ashe feels . . . his expression will be basically that of his forefathers.38

Bloch described the “Jewish” qualities of his music in dramatic terms in pri-vate letters, program notes, and the press. The program of the FlonzaleyQuartet’s international tour with his first string quartet, for example, quotes aletter he wrote to Alfred Pochon describing the first movement as “of a trulyHebrew inspiration,” representing “that ancient Jewish race, bruised but un-daunted, which, through centuries and centuries, has suffered so cruelly, andstill keeps on and hopes.”39 Bloch was not alone in publicly defining his musi-cal identity as “Jewish”: the musical press in the United States during the1910s and 1920s repeatedly characterized him as a composer of authenticallyJewish music.40 In a review of Bloch’s Schelomo for cello and orchestra,Downes calls the piece “racial, ancestral, it is the voice of sages and prophets,which never dies, resounding in the souls of the peoples for unnumberedages.”41 Elsewhere he writes, “The music is Hebraic in all that the word mostprofoundly and superbly implies. Now it is mournful, now wildly exultant,and now it shakes with a tribal fury.”42 Bloch himself believed that he stood ata crossroads that confronted composers with the choice of the path of “true”and “organic” evolution, or “faked, forced creation.”43 In order for music tobe renewed and to progress as an art the composer therefore must choose,

join the orchestra, symbolizing the union of man and his soil, the Homeland, in a profound andcomplete sense.” (Le motif de la Montagne retentit au loin. Mais c’est la montagne libérée, rassé-rénée comme après un orage. Ce motif s’épand, grandit, en un lyrisme de plus en plus intense,puis il se mêle à celui de la Paix et, par une ardente progression, amène l’Hymne final, où j’en-tends nettement la foule se joindre à l’orchestre, symbolisant l’union de l’homme et de son sol, laPatrie, au sens profond et complet.) Lewinski and Dijon, Ernest Bloch, 2:815–16.

38. Downes, “Ernest Bloch, the Swiss Composer,” 11.39. Program of Flonzaley Quartet performance, Ernest Bloch Collection, Music Division,

Library of Congress, Box 59. Bloch delivered this description in a 1917 letter to Pochon inFrench. Ernest Bloch collection, ARCHIVES BLOCH 1, Music Library, University of California,Berkeley, Box 15, Folder 2, Item 35. In the French, Bloch uses the word “hébraïque” to implyancient biblical Jewish origins; in the English program notes this was translated as “Hebrew.”

40. See for instance, “Programme Given by the Flonzaley Quartet . . . ,” 29. Schiller suggeststhat Downes was in large part responsible for Bloch’s reputation as a “Jewish” composer, in Bloch,Schoenberg, and Bernstein, 25–26.

41. In The Boston Sunday Post, 1923. Quoted in Ernest Bloch: Biography and Comment, 16.42. In The New York Times, 1924. Quoted in Ernest Bloch: Biography and Comment, 18.43. “Tower of Babel,” Ernest Bloch Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress,

Box 23, Folder 4. Emphasis in the original.




according to Bloch, a proper balance of influences from the compositional tradition of his predecessors, on the one hand, and from his or her own racialconsciousness and customs, on the other.

Despite his strong statements of the role he believed race played in his workas a composer, however, Bloch’s sense of his Jewish identity and his concep-tion of “Jewish” music were complicated by the fact of his Swiss lineage. As he observed in 1915 in a letter to Romain Rolland, he was viewed as tooFrench for German listeners, too German for the French, and too Jewish forall: “In Germany I am a Frenchman. In France, I am too German. And a Jew,to boot! As if one were not a man above all.”44 But in trying to build a reputa-tion in Jewish-themed composition, he also ran into difficulty as a CentralEuropean Jew in a field in which many of the recent innovations had emergedin Eastern Europe. Works in the genre typically incorporated elements fromHasidic culture, Yiddish song, and liturgy believed to come from the biblicalhomeland. And indeed, Bloch searched for authenticity in the tropes andmelodies of Eastern European Jewish music, rather than the Jewish culture ofhis native Switzerland.

The symbolism of the East is powerful in both religious and secular Jewishculture. The synagogue is constructed to allow congregants to face East—i.e.,toward Jerusalem—when they pray, and the word “East” appears in Sabbathprayers (in Hebrew, mizrakh).45 The association between Jewish folk song andthe Orient was a common subject among Jewish ethnomusicologists;Idelsohn, for example, having conducted research with a phonograph in theregion around Jerusalem in 1911 in search of what he characterized as themost ancient and authentic forms of Jewish traditional music, devotes consid-erable space in his book to the study of the similarities between Jewish songand “the song of the other ancient Oriental peoples,” i.e., “Israel’s ancientneighbors.”46 This eastern orientation can also be detected in the field of artmusic depicting Jewish themes, and became a complex issue for Bloch, as aCentral European Jewish composer of so-called Jewish works. Bloch hoped to overcome the obstacle that his nationality posed by attempting to learn

44. “En Allemagne, je suis un Français. En France, je suis trop Allemand! Et juif, par surcroît!Comme si l’on n’était pas homme avant tout. . . .” Lewinski and Dijon Ernest Bloch, 1:657.Translation in Schiller, Bloch, Schoenberg, and Bernstein, 22.

45. Bohlman and Davis, “Mizrakh,” 96. European Jewish scholars of the nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries often focused on the notion of the East or “orient” in studying Jewishculture and history. Some romanticized the orient as the Jews’ point of origin; others invoked itnegatively when characterizing Jews who continued to adhere to older religious traditions in spiteof the social developments of modernity. These approaches can be seen in part as responses to thetradition of anti-Jewish orientalism that was common in European scholarship and thought sincethe late eighteenth century. See Kalmar and Penslar, “Orientalism and the Jews,” xviii.

46. Idelsohn, Jewish Music, 3. See also Bohlman, Jewish Music and Modernity, 44. Bohlmandiscusses Idelsohn’s methods for seeking out “authentic Jewish music” on pages 44–48. OnIdelsohn’s research on music in Jewish communities in the East in relation to his Zionist politicalideology, see Loeffler, “Do Zionists Read from Right to Left?,” 389.




Hebrew and gesturing toward a Jewish past to the east in his music with references to genres and techniques associated with Hasidic tradition. Theseeastward glances, however, were based not on personal encounter—as foundin some of the works of members of the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music, who engaged in their own research or collaborated with ethnomusicologists—but largely on such factors as the influence of oriental-ized stereotypes of Eastern European Jewish culture he grew up with inGeneva and his later study of the Jewish Encyclopedia, with its CentralEuropean roots in the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement.

Bloch’s Central European background posed a challenge to his reception,too, among some Eastern European Jewish composers who felt the need toaccount for why they might favor his music, in spite of his origins. As a devo-tee of Bloch’s music, Lazare Saminsky, writing in Musical America in 1924,rationalized his support of the composer by asserting erroneously that Blochhad Russian lineage and could thus be counted among the ranks of RussianJewish composers. He differentiated Jewish composers of the “Easterntype”—who are “body and soul connected with Eastern Hebrew masses” andthe “true cultivators of Hebrew folk-song”—and the “Western type,” who are“hysterical, neurotic, assimilating and accentuating ideas and feelings adaptedfrom [their] neighbors.”47 Saminsky continued, “We must count ErnestBloch in the . . . Eastern group in spite of his being born in Switzerland andhis avowed aversion to cultivating folk-songs in composition. As far as I re-member, Mr. Bloch told me once that his father was a Russian Hebrew andthat in his boyhood he was nursed on traditional Eastern Hebrew tunes sungin the family.”48 Joseph Achron, a composer, violinist, and editor who becamea prominent member of the Society for Jewish Folk Music in 1911, similarlylocated Bloch’s musical—if not biological—legacy in the East, arguing in hisYiddish-language “Notits vegn yidisher muzik” (Essay on Jewish Music) thatBloch’s “Jewish” compositional techniques were based on the innovationsand accomplishments of members of the Society.49

In a 1917 article in The Seven Arts, the American critic Paul Rosenfeld de-scribed Bloch’s music as “an authentic expression of what is racial in the Jew,”explaining this as a product not only of eastward-oriented references in “thesynagogical modes on which it bases itself” and “the semitic pomp and colorthat inform it,” but also of the fact that a listener “hears in this music the harshand heavy accents of the Hebrew tongue, sees the abrupt and passionate ges-tures of the Hebrew soul, feels the titanic burst of energy that created the race,and carried it safely across lands and times, out of eternal Egypt, through theeternal Red Sea.”50 This symbolism, with references to the exile from Egypt,

47. Quoted in Schiller, Bloch, Schoenberg, and Bernstein, 60.48. Quoted in ibid., 61.49. Achron, “Notits vegn yidisher muzik,” 60.50. Rosenfeld, “Music of Ernest Bloch,” 413.




Semitic expression, and the sounds of the Hebrew language and the syna-gogue modes, gestures toward the east—both Eastern Europe and the MiddleEast—to explain the “authenticity” heard in Bloch’s works on Jewish themes.But while these figures and others sought Easternness in Bloch and his musicin order to explain his success in producing authentic “Jewish” compositions,and Bloch indeed played into this tendency, his own sense of identity was fre-quently changing and would always remain difficult to generalize, a fact evi-dent not only from his essays and letters, but also from the divergent subjectsand titles of three of the large-scale symphonic works he composed during his career, representing three distinct regions with which he felt a patriotic and cultural affinity: Israel (1912–16), America: An Epic Rhapsody (1926),and Helvetia (1900–1929).

Baal Shem: Three Pictures of Chassidic Life

Bloch’s Baal Shem: Three Pictures of Chassidic Life is exemplary of the com-poser’s so-called Jewish style, and is among his most enduringly popular com-positions, still a canonic component of the repertoires of violin pedagogy andperformance. The movements of Baal Shem are titled after Hasidic ritual withparenthetical explanations: the first is “Vidui (Contrition),” referring to con-fession; the second is “Nigun (Improvisation),” after the Hasidic vocal genreof the nigun; and the third is “Simchas Torah (Rejoicing),” named for the annual autumn celebration of both the end and the beginning of the Penta -teuchal cycle, marked by the completion of the weekly readings of the Torahand the return to the first chapter of Genesis. The manuscript copies of thistriptych demonstrate that even by the time Bloch had completed a draft of thecomposition, he still intended to use a different set of titles: he first called the work “Jewish Moods,” then later “Three Jewish Pieces,” and he initiallylabeled the movements “Meditation,” “Rhapsody,” and “Yontef,” a Yiddishderivation of the Hebrew Yom tov, the term for a religious festival.51 The mod-ifications Bloch made to these titles suggest the way his conception of the mu-sic altered. Where the early titles are general, the later ones are more specific,giving the impression of direct, detailed representation of Hasidic musicalgenres and events. The subtitle “Three Pictures of Chassidic Life” describesthe work by analogy to visual media, to describe the movements as souvenirdocumentary snapshots or postcards of Eastern European Jewish communities.

During the early decades of the twentieth century, a debate raged amongJewish music scholars and composers over what music should be consideredthe more authentic expression of the Jewish people, Yiddish folk and Hasidicsong and dance, or biblical liturgical music, mostly in Hebrew. While the

51. Manuscript copies of the sketches with original titles to the second and third movementsare held in the Ernest Bloch Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Box 2, Folder 8.




prominent ethnographer and composer Joel Engel was among the most out-spoken proponents of the study of Yiddish folk and religious music, Saminsky,a cofounder of the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music, adamantly argued on behalf of the greater authenticity of biblical liturgical music, evendevoting a significant portion of his book Music of the Ghetto and the Bible,whose title refers to this debate, to reprinting the letters he exchanged withEngel over the subject.52 For Saminsky, Hasidic music was too modern and,worse, based on tawdry “Oriental” musical features. In his words: “I loath allthe rickety tonal elements and the traits of racial neutrality, the well knowntraits of the vagabond pan-Oriental music which I perceive only too vividly inthe inferior type of the chassidic melody and in many of our domestic pseudo-folksongs.”53

Bloch, for his part, refrained from entering into such a debate; rather thantreating these repertoires as fully distinct, he favored the use of techniquesfrom both liturgical chant and Hasidic song as models for art music composi-tion. Bloch heard Hasidic music first-hand on Manhattan’s Lower East Side,where he was invited in 1918 to attend a Sabbath morning service at a Hasidicsynagogue whose congregants were primarily immigrants from Poland andGalicia.54 In a private letter about the event, he described receiving a blessingfrom the Rabbi, and characterized his feelings of inspiration and delight at thecommunity’s powerful religious devotion and its music:

Neither organ, nor instruments, nor choir. Everyone his own orchestra. . . .Everything was vibrant, living, creating an extraordinary atmosphere. I dis-solved with emotion. . . . I assure you that my music seems to me a very poorlittle thing beside that which I heard. You will understand everything that thisexperience means for me. It’s a great joy. It’s also extreme sorrow; for my lifehas been split in two. I would have been able, as a single man, to plunge myselfinto this Truth, even at my age, letting it live anew in me, and creating a formi-dable work, linking this granite past to the present, to the future. . . . Alas, alas,I can’t.55

Bloch was intensely affected by his visit to the Hasidic service, moved by boththe aesthetic quality of the music and what he perceived as the community’sdeep connection with, and authentic understanding of, a Jewish past thatguided them in their lives. In portraying the singing as lacking instruments orchoir but vocalized with the strength and range of the orchestra, he describedwhat he experienced to be a transcendent and organic mode of musical expression.

The title of Baal Shem refers to the Baal Shem Tov, or Master of the GoodName, the rabbi Israel ben Eliezer (ca. 1700–1760), founder of the Hasidic

52. For detailed discussion of this debate and its context, see Loeffler, Most Musical Nation,177–88; and Móricz, Jewish Identities, chap. 2.

53. Saminsky, Music of the Ghetto and the Bible, 246.54. Knapp, “Bloch.”55. Translated in ibid.




movement. Following the Baal Shem Tov’s death, the Hasidic movementcontinued to grow, carried on by a number of separate courts, or Hasidicsects, each of which was led by a rebbe, or dynastic spiritual leader. The nigun,the genre that was a model for Bloch’s second movement, was of central im-portance in Hasidic tradition. Since the eighteenth century, song and dancehave been considered in Hasidic practice as the chief methods for worshipersto express joy and attain a hypnotic state of elevated spirituality that reaches itsclimax in the achievement of unity with God, referred to as devekut.56 In manyHasidic courts, nigunim (the plural form of the word nigun) came increas-ingly to be performed collectively by gatherings of men rather than in privatecontemplation.57 Nigunim were often composed by the rebbe, who was inmany instances a figure with considerable musical abilities, though in somecases the rebbe might hire a professional musician to compose melodies for thecourt.58 The melodies of nigunim often derive from preexisting tunes fromsurrounding non-Jewish cultures, at times borrowing from folk and dance tra-ditions, and at others from Western art music.59 They are commonly sung tovocables such as ya-ba-bam rather than to text, because it is believed thatmelody and the act of singing, rather than any associated language, providethe principal means to reach the stage of devekut, and that music is a mediumof personal expression that transcends the specific meanings of text.60

Furthermore, whereas a texted song must come to an end, a song intoned tovocables can continue on as long as the singer wishes. The founder of ChabadHasidism, Shneur Zalman of Liady, explained this conception of the transcen-dence of wordless song: “For the songs of the souls—at the time they areswaying in the high regions to drink from the well of the Almighty King—consist of tones only, dismantled of words.”61

Nigunim are constructed of multiple adjoining sections that often exhibitcontrasting musical characters and express the multiple progressive stages ofthe process of reaching devekut.62 In such nigunim, this ascent from worldlyexistence to transcendence is represented by the use of techniques includingincreasing speed, sudden rhythmic changes, and rising pitch, until after a cli-mactic point conveying ecstatic communion with God the melody falls down-ward again, to mirror the return to consciousness after trance or divine

56. Mazor and Hajdu, “Musical Tradition of H. asidism,” 426–47. See also Avenary, “TheHasidic Nigun,” 60; and Idelsohn, Jewish Music, 414. For a history of discussions and definitionsof multiple categories of nigun in Hasidic written sources, see Mazor and Seroussi, “Towards aHasidic Lexicon,” 131–34.

57. Mazor and Hajdu, “Musical Tradition of H. asidism,” 427.58. Ibid., 428; and Idelsohn, Jewish Music, 415.59. Mazor and Hajdu, “Musical Tradition of H. asidism,” 427.60. Ibid., 427 and 429. 61. Idelsohn, Jewish Music, 416.62. Mazor and Hajdu “Hasidic Dance-Niggûn,” 139–40. On the stages of the process to-

ward achieving communion with God as outlined in Chabad Hasidism, see Idelsohn, JewishMusic, 418–19.




inspiration.63 Among early twentieth-century commentators on Jewish tradi-tional music, Saminsky described the nigun as “formally, a developed recita-tive,” referring to the rhythmically free style of many nigunim (though someare in fact strictly rhythmical), and the ethnographer Susman Kiselgof, also amember of the Society for Jewish Folk Music, portrayed it as mystical.64 Bothscholars called it a “song without words,” referring in part to the fact that thesongs are usually sung without lyrics, but also expressing what they viewed tobe the nigun’s metaphysically vocal quality, conveying a spiritual meaning thattranscends language but is rooted in human expression.

In his 1913 pamphlet Das jüdische Volkslied, Kiselgof refers to the Yiddishauthor Isaac Leib Peretz’s fictional story “Kabbalists,” in which the head ofthe school of Jewish religious mysticism in the town of Lashtchev describesthe nigun.65 Peretz writes:

There is a melody that needs words—that’s a low level. . . . On a higher plane isa melody that is sung, completely without words, a pure melody! But thismelody still needs a voice, and it passes through lips. You understand that lipsare part of the material world. And even the voice, although it is a refined mate-riality, remains materiality. Let us say that voice stands on the border betweenspirituality and materiality! . . . The true melody sings itself without a voice. Itsings within, in the heart, in the bowels. . . . This is part of the melody withwhich God created the world, and part of the soul he breathed into it.66

Peretz illustrates the Hasidic conception of melody as an expressive mediumthrough which the singer can achieve an elevated spiritual level. Later in thestory, a student awakens in the middle of the night, hearing music inside him-self, having reached a “high spiritual level.” Before his ecstatic death, he re-counts that the singing became:

A kind of playing . . . as if I had a violin inside me, or Jonah the klezmer musi-cian was sitting inside me and playing Sabbath songs, like at the Rebbe’s table!But the playing was even better, more refined, with even more spirituality. Andeverything was without a voice, without any sound—with pure spirituality!67

In Peretz’s rendering, the violin becomes a poetic analogy for the transcen-dent voice that utters the Hasidic nigun. In another short story, “The MissingMelody,” Peretz similarly depicts the Hasidic association of worshipful Jewishsinging with both the sound of musical instruments and the notion of tran-scendence. His character, the rebbe of Nemirov says: “As numerous as thevoices which carry the song are the instruments, each with a melody to cleave

63. Avenary, “Hasidic Nigun,” 61; and Idelsohn, Jewish Music, 419.64. Saminsky, Music of the Ghetto and the Bible, 41; and Sholokhova, “Zinoviy Kiselhof,” 68.65. Kisselhoff, Das Jüdische Volkslied, 9–10. Although this book was published with the au-

thor’s name spelled as “S. Kisselhoff,” his name is typically transliterated as Kiselgof today.66. Peretz, “Kabbalists,” 148.67. Ibid., 151.




to it, which it alone can play; for the instrument is the body, the melody itssoul. Every man too is an instrument and life is his melody.”68

Bloch at times used similar descriptive tropes, referring to the musical rep-resentation of Jewish identity with the metaphor of the “voice,” which heconsidered capable of expressing that “Jewish soul” he sought to locate in hismusic. In a letter from December 1937, he wrote:

I made myself listen to a voice from within, profound, intimate, urgent, passion-ate, an instinct . . . a voice that appeared to me from a great distance, from atime before me, before my parents . . . a voice that throbbed in the reading ofcertain passages from the Bible, Job, Ecclesiastes, the Psalms, the Prophets. . . .The entire Jewish heritage overwhelmed me, and from it was born the music.69

In the case of at least one work, Schelomo, this metaphor of a subjective voiceof Judaism also inspired Bloch’s choice of instrumentation, in particular hisuse of the cello, which he associated with the timbres of the voice: “Since I didnot know Hebrew the sketches mounted while the work lay dormant. . . .Why—instead of a human voice, limited by text and language, should not myEcclesiastes utilize the soaring unfettered voice of the cello?”70 He discoveredthat setting traditional songs for solo instruments would allow him to repre-sent Jewish traditions without recourse to texts in Hebrew, which he andmany of his audiences did not fully understand.71 He thus changed Schelomoduring its early stages from a work for singer with Hebrew text to a cello solowith orchestral accompaniment, creating, in effect, a “song without words.”

The association of the Jewish “voice” with the sounds produced bystringed instruments no doubt derives in part from the common invocation ofsinging as a metaphor for soaring violin virtuosity, found in European treatises

68. Peretz, “Missing Melody,” 196.69. Quoted in Kushner, Ernest Bloch Companion, 152.70. Bloch and Heskes, Ernest Bloch, Creative Spirit, 50. In this statement Bloch exaggerated

his lack of familiarity with Hebrew, perhaps to emphasize that his knowledge of the language wasnot fluent or confident. He had learned some Hebrew as a youth in preparing to declaim a por-tion of the Torah before the synagogue congregation for his Bar Mitzvah ceremony at the age ofthirteen. Furthermore, he recalled later in a letter to Henry Minsky (1 July 1943) that his father,who “knew Hebrew perfectly well,” every year conducted the Passover seder, the ritual dinnerthat commemorates the liberation of the Jews from slavery in Egypt, and that he “often sangHebrew melodies—which impressed me deeply.” Lewinski and Dijon, Ernest Bloch, 1:736n6.Bloch began to study Hebrew in his early thirties; in autumn 1911, Fleg wrote to Bloch, “I amdelighted that you are applying yourself to Hebrew.” (Je suis heureux que vous vous mettiez àl’hébreu.) Translated in Schiller, Bloch, Schoenberg, and Bernstein, 16.

71. On Bloch’s sense of discomfort with the setting of musical texts and his belief that devel-oping greater fluency in Hebrew at an earlier age would have helped him as a composer, see hisletter to Fleg in October 1911, in which he writes, “I am more and more convinced that it is notfor nothing that I have never been able to compose lieder; the language [French] bothers me.Hebrew would suit me better, I am certain of it.” (Je suis de plus en plus convaincu que ce n’estpas pour rien que je n’ai jamais pu composer de lieder; la langue me gêne. L’hébreu m’irait mieux,j’en suis certain.) Lewinski and Dijon, Ernest Bloch, 1:551.




on performance, music criticism, and other discourse from at least the lateeighteenth century.72 It also originates in the central role of the violin inJewish folk music and the expressive mode of its performance. From at leastthe late nineteenth century, the violin was a familiar icon of Jewish culture inmany Jewish-themed works of music, literature, and visual arts. It seems likelythat Bloch’s association between stringed instruments and the “Jewish voice,”and the prevalent role of the violin in Eastern European Jewish musical prac-tices, inspired his decision to compose Baal Shem for accompanied violin.Using the violin to evoke the voice also served, in reverse, to represent Bloch’sdescription of Hasidic singing in which each person’s voice became “his ownorchestra.”

Although a comparison of the sounds of a Hasidic nigun and Bloch’s com-position “Nigun” would reveal more differences than similarities, it is evidentthat Bloch took inspiration from a number of critical elements of the vocalgenre in order to represent its formal and expressive techniques in the mediumof art music composition. In the entry on “Niggun” in the Jewish Encyclo -pedia, Cohen and Adler explain that the root of the Hebrew verb form thatgave birth to the term means “to play strings” and “to make music,” and thatthe noun therefore indicates a “tune” or “melody.” The short entry states inaddition that, “The word is also used to designate a droning, formless intona-tion set to a text, and, more especially, the particular melody-type or prayer-motive to which a service is traditionally rendered.”73 The authors direct thereader to a definition of the term in Cohen’s entry on “Music, Synagogal,”which, in the context of a discussion of prayer motives, relates “niggun” to“steiger,” or shteyger, a Yiddish term that refers to the modal scale and will bediscussed further below. Here Cohen concludes:

This intonation is designated by the Hebrew term Niggun (“tune”) when itsmelody is primarily in view, by the Judæo-German term “steiger” (scale) whenits modal peculiarities and tonality are under consideration, and by theRomance word “gust” and the Slavonic “skarbowa” when the taste or style ofthe rendering especially marks it off from other music. The use of these terms . . . shows that the scales and intervals of such prayer-motives have long beenrecognized . . . and observed to differ characteristically from those of contem-porary Gentile music, even if the principles underlying their employment haveonly quite recently been formulated.74

Given his close attention to the music articles in the Jewish Encyclopedia, itseems likely that Bloch would have read these descriptions of nigun and thatthey might have influenced his creation of the “Nigun” in Baal Shem. Theemphasis on structural freedom, the correlation with prayer, the association ofnigun with modality, and even, perhaps, the reference to the origins of the

72. See Kawabata, “Violinists ‘Singing.’ ”73. Adler and Cohen, “Niggun,” 303.74. Cohen, “Music, Synagogal,” 122.




term in a verb referring to string playing seem to have inspired his composi-tional creation. It is possible as well, given the interest Bloch expressed in hisletters on the centuries-old legacy of some Jewish musical practices and the degree to which they were unique among other European religious musics,that the initial impetus to write such a movement was due in part to the arti-cle’s discussion of the age-old roots of this musical tradition and its differencefrom Christian liturgy.

In his “Nigun,” Bloch makes considerable use of the shteyger that is re-ferred to in the context of Ashkenazi synagogue music as the Ahavah rabbah(“With great love”) mode because it is associated with a prayer beginning withthis phrase. In other contexts, including Yiddish and Hasidic song, the modeis called freygish, a Yiddish adaptation of the term “Phrygian,” in reference tothe notion of the scale as a form of altered Phrygian mode.75 The shteygers ofsynagogue music are theoretical constructs: composite scales created by thealignment of the interval patterns in motifs that tend to occur together withfrequency at the opening and ending, as well as in intermediate linkingphrases, in religious chants.76 The Ahavah rabbah scale is reproduced inExample 1, with the central octave represented by black note-heads. The in-terval pattern within the central octave, with the augmented second betweenthe second and third scale degrees, and sometimes also between the sixth andseventh, can be found in both Jewish and non-Jewish folk musics of a numberof regions in South Eastern Europe, and is equivalent to the Arabic maqam hijaz.77 Each different mode is said to possess its own character or ethos; theAhavah rabbah was often considered symbolic of lament.78 In the late nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries, the augmented second and freygish scalewere purposefully adopted from folk and liturgical music into Yiddish popularsong by Abraham Goldfadn and other composers of Yiddish theater.79 AmongAmerican listeners to Yiddish song, these melodic elements consequently became associated with a sense of Jewish history and nostalgia, as they weredivorced from the South Eastern European context.80

Bloch is likely to have first heard the mode as a child during visits to thesynagogue in Geneva, as well as at home, where his father sang traditionalsongs.81 He presumably also encountered the scale again when he heard

75. Avenary, “Shtayger,” 523. Like other synagogue modes, the Ahavah rabbah was namedfor one of the most important prayers in Jewish religious practice that is chanted using its particu-lar set of intervals. The Ahavah rabbah prayer is recited during the daily morning prayer service.

76. Shiloah, Jewish Musical Traditions, 126; and Cohon, “Structure of the SynagoguePrayer-Chant,” 18–19. See also Avenary, “Nusah.,” 351.

77. Shiloah, Jewish Musical Traditions, 126.78. Cohon, “Structure of the Synagogue Prayer Chant,” 18; and Slobin, Tenement Songs,

187.79. Slobin, Tenement Songs, 187.80. Ibid., 191–92.81. Bloch incorporated some of the songs he learned from his father into his youthful

Symphonie orientale (1894–96). Knapp, “Jewishness of Bloch,” 100.




Yiddish folk music and Hasidic song in America. Moreover, the augmentedsecond and the Ahavah rabbah scale had been used since the late nineteenthcentury as orientalizing gestures in the music of Russian composers includingNikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Modest Mussorgsky, Mikhail Glinka, and AntonRubinstein to represent Jews, other ethnic minorities, and Eastern cultures.The scale was also used by Jewish composers at the turn of the century, includ-ing Engel, Achron, and other members of the St. Petersberg Society forJewish Folk Music.82 Bloch likely further formed his impression of the scale’simportance to Jewish traditional music during his study of the JewishEncyclopedia, where it appears (without the name Ahavah rabbah) in a table ofscales under the entry on “Music, Synagogal.”83 On the same page, the entryaddresses the subject of chromaticism in cantorial singing, which is attributedto Eastern origins: “The chromatic intervals survive as a relic of the Orientaltendency to divide an ordinary interval of pitch into subintervals.” It contin-ues, “Even among Western cantors, trained amid mensurate music on a con-trapuntal basis, there is still a remarkable propensity to introduce the intervalof the augmented second, especially between the third and second degrees ofany scale in a descending cadence. Quite commonly two augmented secondswill be employed in the octave—much loved by Eastern peoples—termed byBourgault-Ducoudray . . . ‘the Oriental chromatic.’ ”84 This explanation is followed by a musical staff on which this scale is transcribed in twelve notes, of which the first octave resembles the central octave of the Ahavah rabbahmode with augmented seconds between scale degrees two and three, and sixand seven.

Bloch’s “Nigun” follows a four-part structure that maps the expressive trajectory of multi-part nigunim, beginning slowly and contemplatively, andbecoming increasingly rapid and excited, reaching a peak in the penultimatesection, and receding at the conclusion to a slow and quiet state. The har-monic motion follows this characteristic progression, with relatively stable harmonies in sections one and four framing central material in the middle twosections that become increasingly ambiguous and unstable, with chromatic

82. On the use of the augmented second and Ahavah rabbah scale in the music of Jewish andnon-Jewish composers in Russia, see, for example, Móricz, Jewish Identities, chap. 2; Loeffler,Most Musical Nation, 36–37; and Taruskin, “Yevreyi and Zhidy,” 197.

83. Cohen, “Music, Synagogal,” 123.84. Ibid. The author cites page 20 of Bourgault-Ducoudray’s Trente mélodies populaires de

Grèce et d’Orient. The use of the word “ordinary” to describe the intervals familiar in Westernmusic that are divided into smaller intervals in “Oriental” tradition is exemplary of the Westernperspective of the Jewish Encyclopedia articles on music.

& œ œb œ# œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ# œb œ ˙ ˙# ˙ ˙Example 1 Ahavah rabbah scale




motion and diminished chords leading to the climax of the melody in sectionthree, which is marked at a loud volume and high pitch. The first three partsare based on distinct melodic motifs, and the fourth returns to the thematicmaterial of the first. The interval pattern of the Ahavah rabbah scale offers thebasic structure underlying the melodic themes of sections two and three.Section one (mm. 1–23) is in the tonic key of G minor (with a brief toniciza-tion of the parallel key of B-flat major, mm. 16–18), and concludes on a domi-nant D-major chord (m. 23). This chord operates as a pivot between theG-minor key of section one and the opening modality of section two, whichbegins in the D-Ahavah rabbah scale (mm. 24–37). Bloch employs the aug-mented second between the second and third and the sixth and seventh scaledegrees: witness the tetrachord D–E �–F�–G in the piano melody in mea-sures 24–25 and 27–28 and in the violin melody in measure 28, as well as thetetrachord A–B �–C�–D in the violin part in measures 26–27 (Ex. 2). The ris-ing emotional excitement of Hasidic nigun performance is indicated by the shifting modality from Ahavah rabbah to a shteyger often referred to as the“Ukrainian Dorian” on D in measure 32. This mode resembles the Dorianscale, but with a raised fourth scale degree, creating an augmented second in-terval between the third and fourth degrees. In the context of Ashkenazi syna-gogue music, it is called the Mi sheberakh (“May the one who blessed”) or Avharachamim (“Merciful father”) shteyger.85 This is followed in measure 35 bya downward scale in the violin part in the Ukrainian Dorian scale on A, withthe addition of the raised seventh degree, producing another augmented sec-ond between the sixth and seventh scale degrees (see Ex. 6b below).

This passage leads to the opening of section three in the modality of EAhavah rabbah. Section three (mm. 38–87), analogous to the most transfor-mative and frenetic part of the nigun, shows the greatest harmonic instabilityand chromaticism as it moves toward D Ahavah rabbah at the climax (m. 76),where the melody is played high on the E string at fortissimo. From this apex,the melodic contour and volume begin gradually to drop, until a simple oscil-lating pattern of two notes leads to the final section, a recapitulation openingin G minor (mm. 88–108). The conclusion of this movement seems to repre-sent an exhausted collapse—or even death, recalling the story by Peretz—following an ecstatic vision. The Ahavah rabbah scale retains a presence in thisfinal section: the double-stops in the violin part in measures 91–92 spell outthe lower tetrachord of the scale on G, G–A �–B�–C (Ex. 3). After a transi-tional two measures in which the violin plays a repeating melodic fragment inUkrainian Dorian on G (mm. 100–101), the coda begins in D Ahavah rabbah(mm. 102–108, Ex. 4). In the coda, a short melodic gesture is repeated, dolcissimo, three times, in ever-higher octaves and at an increasingly slowertempo. Roman numerals indicate that pitches are to be played in high positions

85. On the “Ukrainian Dorian” mode, see Idelsohn, Jewish Music; and Beregovski, OldJewish Folk Music, 549–67.




on lower strings, creating a rich, throaty timbre and avoiding the brash soundof the thin E string. The low bass notes in the piano appear to lead the violinto a halt, and the piece concludes with a natural harmonic on D, played highon the G string, with an authentic cadence in D Ahavah rabbah on the D-major chord.

Bloch depicts the improvisatory nature of Hasidic prayer in a series of pro-longed cadenzas that feature leaps, double-stops, repetitions, and fast rhyth-

Example 2 Ernest Bloch, Baal Shem, movement 2, “Nigun,” mm. 24–28

&

&

&

b b

b b

b b

c

c

c

24

∑œ> œ# - .œ œ œ œ œ .œ

-œ œ˙

œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ œ ‰3 3

3

3? &

espr.

°p

Ó Œ ‰ œœ> œœ

>

w

œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ œ ‰3

3 3 3

? &

20

f

&

&

&

b b

b b

b b

26 œœ- œœ##- œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

3 3

œ Œ Œ ‰ œ> œ>

œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ œ ‰3 3 3

3

?

14

2 4 2 21 ˙ œ œ œ# œ œ œ œ œ

œ> œ# - .œ œ œ œ œ .œ œ œ˙


3 3 3

&

2 2 3 4 3 2 3 2

&

&

&

b b

b b

b b

IV28 Rœ# œ- œ- œ- œ- œ- œ# - œ- . .œ rœw


3 3

?

f 2

0 4




mic passages. The first of these passages, in measures 14–15, is notated as along measure without bar lines (Ex. 5a). The second, in measure 87, is notmarked as a cadenza, but is unaccompanied and divided only by dotted lines,and thus is similarly free from strong downbeats and metric divisions (Ex. 5b).The third, in measure 97, is the recapitulation of the first cadenza, in a shorterpassage featuring one long, undivided measure (Ex. 5c).

Amidst these passages, Bloch composes additional runs and scales in the vi-olin part that reflect improvised gestures. One of these (mm. 21–22, Ex. 6a) ismarked “ad lib”; another (mm. 35–36, Ex. 6b) is unaccompanied, to permitthe performer rhythmic freedom. Although Bloch prescribes the pitches anddurations, the markings “cadenza” and “ad lib,” the omission of measure lines,the use of dotted lines, and the lack of piano accompaniment allow the violin-ist to improvise onstage, changing tempo at will and adding expressive ges-tures to represent the freedom and spontaneity of Hasidic nigun performance.

In “Nigun,” Bloch loosely adapts, as the model for section three, a preex-isting Hasidic melody in the lively genre of the freylekhs, a dance commonly

Example 3 Bloch, “Nigun,” mm. 90–92

&

&

?

b b

b b

b b

42

42

42

c

c

c8vb

90

‰ jœœ≥ œœ

≤œœ œœ3

˙ ˙

œœ- œœ

fjœœ-

œœb jœœ-œœn œœU ‰ œœ, œœ œœ œœ

3 3

˙ ˙ ˙U

˙jœœ

≈ œ œ œ jœfl≈ œ œ œ fl

U3 3marc.

&

&

?

b b

b b

b b

92 œœb œœn œœ œœ œœ œœ œœn œœb œœ œœ œœ œœ- œœ- œœ-3 3 3 3

˙ ˙ ˙ ˙

œœ- œœnn -œœbb - œœ## -

accel. allarg.

accel. allarg.




performed at weddings and other festive occasions, in which participants holdone another’s hands or shoulders and dance in a long chain (Exx. 7a and7b).86 He writes grace notes and turns in his slow, melancholy quotation ofthis lively dance, adding a syncopated groove in the bass to the otherwisestaid, chordal accompaniment. Here and throughout the movement, he no-tates trills, grace notes, and other melodic ornaments liberally, and juxtaposesduple and triple divisions of the beat, techniques that can be found both inHasidic song and in evocations of various folk music styles in numerous com-positions of Western art music.

86. Knapp, “Jewishness of Bloch,” 107–8. This freylekhs melody is also printed in Beregovski,Old Jewish Folk Music, 439. The final movement of Baal Shem, “Simchas Torah (Rejoicing),” con-tains another quotation of a preexisting melody, the Yiddish songwriter Mark Warshawski’s song“Di Mezinke Oysgegeben” (The Youngest Daughter Married), which appears in Kiselgof ’s an-thology of Yiddish songs, Lider-zamelbukh far der Yidisher shul un familie (Collection of Songsfor the Jewish School and Family).

Example 4 Bloch, “Nigun,” mm. 102–108

&

&

?

b b

b b

b b

c

c

c8vb

III102 U ‰U jœ

, ≥œ œ œ

3

Œ ˙#U œœœ., ? &

Œ ˙Uœ.

,

lunga

π

dolcissimo

p π

˙ œ œ œ œ œ3

...œœœ# > ® œœœn > ...˙>

..œœ>® œœ>

..˙>

dim.p

˙ œ œ œ œ œ3

. .. .. .œœœ œœœn > . .. .. .œœœ# > œœœ> ˙

. .. .œœ œœ>. .. .œœ> œœ>

˙

rit.

rit.

&

&

?

b b

b b

b b(8vb)

105 œU œ œ œ- œ œ œ œ# œ œ3 3 3

wwwU

wwU

œ œ œ œ# œ œ- œ-

wwwww

II III

rit.

w

˙ Œ œœœ?

˙ Œ œœ<

IV

π pesante

˚ w

www# -

ww-




&

&?

b b

b b

b b

c

c

c

11

. .œ rœ ˙

..˙ ‰ . Rœœœ-?

> ˙ ˙ ˙F π

.˙ ®Uœ-

" œ- œ- œ œ œ œ

˙- ˙-U

˙ ˙ ˙U

a tempo

f Rœœœ

.œU Jœ≤ œ œ. .œ œn>

œœœ . .. .. .œœœ- œœœn ˙U&

˙ ˙ ˙ ˙U

2

F

&

&?

b b

b b

b b

accel.14 œ œ œ œn œ œ œ œ œœ- œ- œn - œ- œ- œ- œ- œ œ œ œn œ œ jœ>

‰U3 3 3

6

.˙ .˙ ˙ ˙U jœ

‰U

(Cadenza)(a tempo)

ƒcolla parte

UG

&

&?

b b

b b

b b

IV≈ œ-≥

œ- œ- œ œ œ œ Rœ- œ-,

œ œ œ œ œ œ Rœ- œ-,

œ œ œ œ œ œ

Œ Œ Ó

2 4 1 2 4

1

F(14)

&

&?

b b

b b

b b

allarg.15 œ œ œ œ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ

∑

∑

ƒ˙˙

> œœ ≈ œ≥ œ œ œ œ œ3

...œœœ> ® œœœ> ...˙>

˙ ˙ ˙ ˙

a tempo

largamente

f

Example 5a Bloch, “Nigun,” mm. 11–16




In the second section of “Nigun,” the opening melodic phrase played in alternation in the violin and piano resembles the concluding notes of a“Sabbath introit,” the prayer “Shoken Ad,” as transcribed in the JewishEncyclopedia under the entry “Music” (Exx. 8a and 8b).87 Though Blochomitted the opening pitch and internal minor third between B � and D in the“Shoken Ad” melody, he incorporated the other intervals into the phrase. Thegrace note in the Jewish Encyclopedia transcription is included as a measuredpitch, and the final gesture of a pickup of eighth-note triplets followed by a

87. Cohen, “Music, Synagogal,” 127.

& b b c87 œœ œœ œœ œœ# œœA œ

2˙

≥œ# œ œ œ

cresc.F˙œ# œ œ œ ˙œ œ œ œ

string.

˙œ œ œ œ ˙>

˙ ˙ ˙>

˙ ˙allarg. molto

˙>

˙ ˙ ˙>

˙ ˙

&

&?

b b

b b

b b

c

c

c

97 œ- œ œ œ œ œn œ- œ œ œ œ œ œ- œ œ œ œ œ œ- œ œ œ œ œ6 6 6 6

wwwU

˙ ˙U

3

colla parte

&

&?

b b

b b

b b

8va

œ œn œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ- œ-

˙U ˙

3 4allarg.(97)

Example 5b Bloch, “Nigun,” m. 87

Example 5c Bloch, “Nigun,” m. 97




held note occurs in both the transcription and Bloch’s melody. Given thebrevity of this melodic fragment, the similarity between the prayer and“Nigun” might be coincidental. Nevertheless, the fact that Bloch workedpainstakingly to copy out all of the transcriptions in the Jewish Encyclopedia in-dicates his familiarity with this musical phrase, and the emphasis he gives tothis arrangement of notes in the second section of his movement through rep-etition in both voices raises the possibility that Bloch purposefully adapted themelodic fragment from this prayer.

The rhythmic and melodic techniques Bloch incorporates into “Nigun” todepict Hasidic song are commonly used in evocations of Jewish culture in artmusic. In other works since the nineteenth century, similar tropes includingthe augmented second, juxtaposition of duple and triple rhythms, and orna-mentation were often combined to bring to mind the music of Romany com-munities and Eastern cultures. Saminsky, who otherwise favored Bloch’smusic, deplored what he called the “banal, penny-Judaism of the Baal-Shem

&

&?

b b

b b

b b

c

c

c

21

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œn œ# œ œ œ œ œ œn œ# œ œ œ œ œ œn œ#

14www

ww

ad lib.

RœU

≈ œœ> œœnn

> œœ##> . .. .œœ

URœœ

>

Jœœœ ‰ Œ Ó

Jœœ ‰ Œ Ó

poco allarg.

13

&

&

&

c

c

c

8va

8va

35 œ- œ- œ œ œ# œ œ œ# œ œ

Jœœœœ ‰ Jœœœœ ‰ Jœœœœ ‰ Œ

Jœœœœggggggggggggggggg ‰ Jœœœœ

ggggggggggggggggg ‰ Jœœœœggggggggggggggggg ‰ Œ

4 4 3 2 1 01

4 3 2 œ œ# œ œ œ# œ œ œ œ# œ œ œ# œ œ œ-∑

∑

3 2 4 2 1 0 4 2 1 4 3 2

Example 6a Bloch, “Nigun,” mm. 21–22

Example 6b Bloch, “Nigun,” mm. 35–36




suite,” likely referring to the exotic signification of these sonic tropes.88 Bycontrast, other musicians including Engel, Achron, and Bloch, as well as criticsincluding Downes, indicated in their compositions and writings that they be-lieved that if used correctly, these techniques could operate as effective signi-fiers of Jewish culture and identity.89 The intensity of this disagreement andthe variety of the interpretations of this work—is it essential and authentic, oris it cheap exoticism?—were typical and characteristic of the frequent debatesabout musical representations of Jewish culture during this period, and high-light the heterogeneity of Jewish listeners’ conceptions of the roles of Judaismin the construction of their own identities. With such significant diversity inpeople’s understandings of what constitutes Jewish selfhood, any attempt in the field of composition to distill “Jewishness” to a single essencewould be accepted by some and rejected by others, for the same reason thatthere could never be a commonly accepted definition of the category of“Jewish music.”

88. Saminsky, Music of the Ghetto and the Bible, 118.89. See, for example, the uses of augmented seconds, triplets, and other such tropes in

Engel’s “ ‘Chabad’er Melodie,” Op. 20, no. 1 (1923) and Achron’s most famous work “HebrewMelody” Op. 33 (1911).

& 42 œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ# .œ œ# œ œ œ œ 1.œ œ œ# œb œ 2.œ œ# œ œb œ

&

&?

42

42

42

42jœjœjœJœ

F œ œ œ

˙˙# ‰ œ Jœ

III2 2 jœ œ œ œ œ#

˙#

‰ œ- Jœ.

œ œ œ œ# œ œ

˙#

‰ œ- Jœ.

œ# œ œ œ

..œœ# jœœ#

.œ jœ‰ œ- ‰

poco animando

Example 7a Freylekhs, reprinted in Beregovski, Old Jewish Folk Music, p. 439





& b b b c .jœ rœu - be -

œ .jœ rœ œn œke -. reb ke -. do -

˙ œn œ jœ œ œ œ3

shim tit - kad -.

˙ ‰dash.

&

&

&

b b

b b

b b

c

c

c

24

∑œ> œ# - .œ œ œ œ œ .œ

-œ œ˙


3

3? &

espr.

°p

Ó Œ ‰ œœ> œœ

>

w


3 3 3

? &

20

f

&

&

&

b b

b b

b b

26 œœ- œœ##- œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

3 3

œ Œ Œ ‰ œ> œ>

œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ œ ‰3 3 3

3

?

14

2 4 2 21 ˙ œ œ œ# œ œ œ œ œ

œ> œ# - .œ œ œ œ œ .œ œ œ˙


3 3 3

&

2 2 3 4 3 2 3 2

&

&

&

b b

b b

b b

IV28 Rœ# œ- œ- œ- œ- œ- œ# - œ- . .œ rœw


3 3

?

f 2

0 4

Example 8a Excerpt from “Introit (Sabbath)” transcribed in Cohen, “Music, Synagogal,” 127





Performance Contexts and Tropes

Baal Shem proved an international success, and the second movement,“Nigun,” rapidly became a canonic part of the repertoire. “Nigun” was fea-tured frequently in the concert programs of violinists Joseph Szigeti andMischa Elman, as well as Menuhin. In 1925, Szigeti took the movement ontour to New York, Paris, London, Berlin, and Florence. Béla Bartók and theviolinist Zoltán Székely performed “Nigun” in the Netherlands in 1925, on a program that also featured Székely’s duo arrangement of Bartók’sRomanian Folk Dances.90 The standard format of recitals arranged by Elmanand Szigeti across decades of their careers typically involved an opening seriesof two or three multi-movement works in the genre of sonata or concerto, followed by one or two groups of miniatures that were often representative oftraditional music, in the manner of “Nigun,” or arrangements of nineteenth-or twentieth-century works for piano or orchestra. For example, a recital givenby Szigeti in Prague on 19 October 1930 opened with Handel’s violin sonatain D major, followed by a work by J. S. Bach in A minor (this is unspecified,but is likely the violin concerto or the second solo sonata), and Beethoven’s“Kreutzer” sonata; finally, Szigeti played a group of five miniatures consistingof “Nigun,” Ravel’s “Pièce en forme de Habanera,” a brief piece by Scriabin,Bartók’s Hungarian Folk Tunes, and an arrangement of excerpts from Stra -vinsky’s Petrouchka.91 Similarly, a concert given by Elman in Los Angeles on22 April 1939 began with accompanied sonatas by Giuseppe Valentini andCésar Franck, followed by Édouard Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole and a group ofminiatures, beginning with “Nigun” and continuing with Grigoras Dinicuand Jascha Heifetz’s “Hora Staccato” (based on the Romanian dance genre ofthe hora), Elman’s arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s Romance for voice and piano, Op. 6, no. 6, under the title “None But the Weary Heart,” and finally,Pablo de Sarasate’s show-stopping Zigeunerweisen.92 In these programs,“Nigun” is associated with canonic genres and works in the classical reper-toire, as well as with similarly brief representations believed to be characteristicof other folk cultures, such as rural Hungarian dances, the habanera, and theHungarian Romany verbunkos.

“Nigun” was also played on programs dedicated to teaching audiencesabout Jewish culture, celebrating Jewish holidays, or promoting Jewish politi-cal and charitable causes. In some of these cases, it stood alone as the onlywork on Jewish themes, for example in a concert given by Elman at CarnegieHall in 1930 to benefit the Society for the Advancement of Music in

90. Kenneson, Székely and Bartók, 89–90.91. Joseph Szigeti Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston

University, Box 12.92. Mischa Elman Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston

University, Box 12.




Palestine.93 In others it was played alongside similar works, as in a 1933 “festival concert of Jewish and Biblical music” at Carnegie Hall, when Szigetiperformed both “Nigun” and Achron’s Stempenyu Suite, a three-movementarrangement of his incidental music to Sholem Aleichem’s Yiddish playStempenyu. The concert, sponsored by the Young Judea Clubs for the benefitof the Palestine Institute of Musical Sciences, also included works of art musicbased on Jewish traditional song for a variety of different instrumentations.94

Similarly, in December 1946, in celebration of Hanukkah, the Festival ofLights, a concert featuring Baal Shem was organized at Temple Emanu-El inNew York, where Saminsky worked as musical director after immigrating toAmerica.95 The violinist Esther Glazer performed Bloch’s piece alongsideSaminsky’s Hasidic Suite, as well as works for solo organ and songs for tenor,and lectures on the history of music in Jewish culture by Saminsky, FrederickJacobi, and Joseph Yasser, then chairman of the Jewish Music Forum.96 Inthese different contexts—incorporated into recital programs with other piecesin a variety of styles, and included in musical evenings related thematically toJewish culture and social issues—“Nigun” reached large and diverse audi-ences, and entered canons of musical works both in the standard violin-recitalrepertoire and in American Jewish culture.

Between the 1920s and 1960s, “Nigun” was recorded repeatedly by violin-ists including Szigeti, Menuhin, Elman, and Nathan Milstein. These violiniststypically incorporated rubato, slides, and other expressive effects in their inter-pretations of compositions in a variety of styles, but when they performedarrangements of folk and religious music such as “Nigun,” their increased useof these techniques created the impression of a free and interpretive mode ofperformance that evoked the improvisatory style of the traditional music onwhich the compositions were based.97 In his 1927 recording with pianist KurtRuhrseitz, which appears to be the first disk to feature the “Nigun,” Szigetitakes advantage of the freedom Bloch builds into the score with the markingsof cadenza and ad libitum and extended passages of virtuosic patterns withbare accompaniment in the piano.98 He alters the tempo between musicalphrases, modifies the printed rhythmic relations between notes, and slides be-tween pitches in the melody by moving a single finger slowly from one pitchto the next, rather than shifting position quickly with the left hand or playing

93. “Elman Gives Recital with Gabrilowitsch,” 36.94. “Festival of Jewish Music,” 13.95. The eight-day winter festival of Hanukkah (literally, “dedication”) commemorates the

rededication of the Second Temple after the triumph of the revolt led by Judah Maccabee againstthe Seleucid Greek leader Antiochus Epiphanes.

96. “Hannukah Marked by Music Festival,” 30.97. For a discussion of early recordings of Béla Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances by Szigeti

and the violinist Zoltán Székely in which both musicians similarly use interpretive performance effects to evoke the playing style commonly associated with rural folk music, see Walden,“Performing the Rural,” 421–31.

98. This recording is identified by Matrix number WA 3527/8.




consecutive pitches with different fingers. As a gesture through which the vio-lin was commonly employed to imitate vocal expression, Szigeti’s slides high-light the association of the composition with the sung genre of the nigun.99

Szigeti might also have aimed with his slides to evoke the technique of violin-ists in klezmer ensembles, the professional groups of instrumentalists whoplayed at Jewish ceremonies and festivals.100 Szigeti plays “Nigun” at a fasttempo with a rapid vibrato and occasional sharp and rough timbres that con-tribute to an energetic interpretation.

Recording the work several decades later in the early 1960s, Elman playsslowly, with a wide vibrato and repeated slides; the duration of his rendition ismore than two minutes longer than Szigeti’s, at approximately seven minutesand thirty seconds. This recording was released on an LP titled HebraicMelodies, whose nine tracks include an arrangement of Goldfadn’s “Rozh -kinkes mit mandeln,” Achron’s “Hebrew Melody,” Julius Chajes’s “TheChassid,” and Elman’s own arrangement of “Eili, Eili.”101 Elman interpretsthe “Nigun” in the manner of a fantasy, conveying a sense of affective varietyin his quasi-improvisatory performance style, and giving the impression thatthe work follows a generally free form. His playing is declamatory in character,with the sense of meter, adhered to more distinctly in Szigeti’s recording, fre-quently obscured by stylized pauses between many of the phrases and unpre-dictable tempo alterations. He plays with a rich sound in louder passages byadding pressure to the bow as it moves, even producing a raspy timbre onmultiple chords and structural downbeats by raising the bow in order to makeaudible the impact of the bow on the string.

Szigeti’s and Elman’s recordings of “Nigun” thus share a handful of rhyth-mic, melodic, and timbral features including idiosyncratic changes of tempo,melodic slides, and variable speeds of vibrato. In employing such sonic meansin unique combinations in their recordings, these violinists produce two ex-ceedingly different interpretations of Bloch’s score, which, new at the time ofSzigeti’s performance, had become a standard component in the solo violinrepertoire by the year Elman entered the recording studio. The subtitle ofBloch’s movement is “Improvisation,” and the score permits a particularly im-provisatory style of performance though its compositional elements and verbalinstructions. Musical performance of a notated score always entails an act ofinterpretation, of course, and all performances of any one piece are unique, inthe manner of individual analytical glosses on canonic texts, no matter howfaithfully a musician intends to convey the music as it appears in print.102 But

99. The portamento was a common feature of violin performance during the early twentiethcentury. On the history of the technique, see Katz, “Portamento and the Phonograph Effect,” 211–32; and Leech-Wilkinson, “Portamento and Musical Meaning,” 233–61. On thenineteenth-century precedent, see Milsom, Theory and Practice, chap. 3.

100. For a detailed history of the term klezmer, see Rubin, Art of the Klezmer, 20–25.101. The album was released with the identification number Vanguard VRS 1099.102. On the variability of performance in relation to the fixed text of the printed score, see

Bowen, “History of Remembered Innovation,” 141–45; and Leech-Wilkinson, Changing Soundof Music, chap. 2.




in the case of “Nigun,” the space Bloch leaves in his score for an improvisa-tional approach to performance meant that different musicians’ recordings—and, in some cases, multiple recordings by the same violinist over a period ofyears—appeared to exhibit deeply personal explorations of Bloch’s and theperformers’ own interpretations of both Eastern European Jewish musical traditions and modern Jewish identities.

Yehudi Menuhin and Ernest Bloch

Menuhin’s personal relationship with Bloch and his 1929 recording of“Nigun” serve as a useful case study of the ways in which a performer’s rendi-tion of the composer’s score can be understood by analogy to the complexhermeneutics of textual commentary. Like commentary on sacred texts,Menuhin’s performance of “Nigun” offered an interpretation of a receivedwork in a manner that many contemporary listeners believed provided themwith a link to its historical origins and even helped sustain their connectionwith a community in the contemporary world. As a childhood protégé and,later, a friend of Bloch, Menuhin became well known for his performances of“Nigun.” He played the work in his 1926 New York debut at the ManhattanOpera House, when he was nine years old, and included it on his 1928 bonvoyage concert in San Francisco, before his first European tour. Menuhin’sfirst meeting with Bloch, then the head of the San Francisco Conservatory,had occurred only a few days before the farewell recital. Bloch was initiallyskeptical about child virtuosos, but found himself so moved by Menuhin’srendition of “Nigun,” which he believed represented the improvisatory andinterpretive character he had imagined in writing the work, that he composeda new piece for the young violinist, Abodah. This duet is based on the melodyof the prayer Vehakkohanim (And the Priests . . .) from the service on YomKippur (the Day of Atonement); Bloch copied the melody with near precisionfrom the transcription in the Jewish Encyclopedia.103 Menuhin, like Szigeti andElman, often featured “Nigun” on recital programs as one of a final group ofminiatures following several longer works. In a concert at Carnegie Hall on6 January 1929, for example, he performed Antonio Vivaldi’s Violin Con -certo in G minor, Johannes Brahms’s Sonata in D minor, Camille Saint-Saëns’s Concerto in B minor, and a group of short pieces beginning with“Nigun” and including Gustave Samazeuilh’s “Chant d’Espagne” andNiccolò Paganini’s “I Palpiti”; as an encore, Menuhin played Abodah.104

Menuhin was to perform Baal Shem as one of the principal works in hisrepertoire during his first world tour. This required some bravery and confi-dence in parts of Europe where anti-Semitism was already widespread. Inpreparing a recital in Munich in 1929, Menuhin recounted later in life, he was

103. Menuhin and Meyer, Violin, 207. The transcription of Vehakkohanim is printed in theJewish Encyclopedia in the entry by Cohen, “Abodah, Music of,” 77–78.

104. Downes, “Music,” 41.




repeatedly asked by a concert promoter to take Baal Shem off his program.His father grew anxious and asked Menuhin how he felt about this demand,but the young violinist stood firm; he is reported to have said, “If we give in tothis sort of hysteria, the next thing we know, they’ll be asking me to changemy name. I shall play Nigun and I dare them to throw anything at me.”105

The promoter’s fears proved to be unjustified: the immediacy of the emo-tional expressivity of Bloch’s work and Menuhin’s performance moved the au-dience, and Menuhin received an ovation that would not stop until heperformed it again.

Young Menuhin was raised in a family that was secular and liberal, but inwhich Jewish culture was a dominant feature and Hasidism played an impor-tant but idiosyncratic role. His father Moshe was born in Gomel (today inBelarus) to a family that could be traced back to a Hasidic rebbe, and hismother was a member of the Schneerson dynasty, from which came genera-tions of Lubavitch Hasidic leaders.106 Menuhin explained that when he was ayoung child, his father would sing Hasidic songs on road trips throughCalifornia: “The motion of the automobile, California’s landscape, and my fa-ther’s singing curiously blended into one sensation that has left a lasting im-pression on me.”107 Menuhin’s knowledge of Hasidic musical culture wastherefore tied in his imagination to the golden hills of his home state, perhapsmore evocative of Jewish biblical landscapes than the green farmlands andwoods surrounding the Eastern European Jewish towns where the traditionsfirst developed. From its composition to Menuhin’s performances, “Nigun”was thus a unique product of the expansive Jewish Diaspora, a representationof Eastern European Hasidic tradition by Jewish musicians whose personalknowledge of this tradition was attenuated, from the perspective of regionaland religious associations, yet whose interest in perpetuating Jewish culturewas strongly felt despite their displacement.

Members of the press immediately remarked on what they perceived as theJewish character of Baal Shem and Menuhin’s interpretation of the work.Reviewing Menuhin’s performance of “Nigun” at the San Francisco farewellconcert, the critic Alexander Fried wrote, “From the violin came singing elo-quence that wove a spell. The aged cantor of the synagogue knows no fullerfeeling of his creed than Yehudi showed them.” Referring to the Englishmeaning of Yehudi, “Jew,” Fried concluded, “He is well named.”108 The ideaof a particularly “Jewish” style of violin performance of course depended onessentializing notions of Jewish identity and a reductive understanding of therelationship between Jewish musicians and works based, like “Nigun,” onJewish traditional themes. The critic interprets the expressive choices in

105. Burton, Yehudi Menuhin, 105.106. Ibid., 5.107. Magidoff, Yehudi Menuhin, 25.108. Burton, Yehudi Menuhin, 82.




Menuhin’s playing in light of his knowledge of the violinist’s background aswell as assumptions about his identity to conclude that what he hears is a“Jewish” sound, and a persuasive and authentic evocation of EasternEuropean Jewish prayer.

There was, however, a large measure of deliberate role-playing involved inthe performance of such “authenticity.” Menuhin described his instrument asa tool that helped him “to bridge the world between the popular fiddle andthe great works of musical repertoire,” and characterized his approach to per-formance as involving the adoption the personae of musicians from differentcultures.109 He thus characterized Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole for violin andorchestra (which he performed during the same San Francisco concert atwhich he played “Nigun”) as “a work which allowed my imagination to castme in a Spanish role.”110 Performing such pieces involved, for Menuhin, a the-atrical element, the acting out of the role of a stereotyped Spanish or Hasidicmusician. This form of sonic enactment becomes audible in his 1929 record-ing of “Nigun,” where the violinist relies on interpretive gestures that are notnotated in the score to emphasize particular aspects of the work, in order toevoke Hasidic music making as he imagined it.111 He produces a wide vibratoand frequently adds slides of various speeds between notes. He modulates thegiven rhythms by holding pitches (including many that do not fall under a fer-mata) for a longer time than expected, expressively lengthening the notes andphrases. He accentuates the melancholy affect by placing increased weight onthe first note of downward sighing gestures, while elsewhere he adds drama by emphatically rolling chords across multiple strings.

In this recording, one of Menuhin’s chief modes of expression is throughthe performance of portamento. The following score excerpts are annotatedwith markings that represent some of the performance techniques Menuhinemploys that are not prescribed by the printed score, in particular, straightlines between notes to denote portamento, and forward and backward arrowsrepresent acceleration and deceleration. The first of Menuhin’s many addedslides can be heard in the opening phrase, as he drags his finger from the heldB� under the fermata to the G (mm. 6–7, Ex. 9a). With this gesture, hepoignantly inflects the sighing motif that descends across the minor third thatis the basis of the tonic chord, and announces the mournful tone of the piece.Elsewhere he slides audibly at moments of structural importance, for examplein measure 22, adding dramatic emphasis to the cadence on the D-majorchord on the next downbeat, which leads directly to section two (Ex. 9b). Hissliding becomes more frequent and concentrated from the measure precedingthe start of section three to the end of the section’s first melodic phrase, whichin his interpretation becomes one of the quietest and most tender parts of the

109. Menuhin and Meyer, Violin, 139.110. Ibid., 136.111. Recorded 12 December 1929. Matrix CVE 49849/49850.




movement (mm. 37–47, Ex. 9c). Menuhin’s slides here bring out the gentleundulation of the melody and the vocal quality of its narrow tessitura.Similarly, he slides the fingers gently between several of the notes in the finalmeasures of the piece, as the pedal in the piano and the gradual descent of the melody convey the winding down at the end of the Hasidic nigun(mm. 105–108). In these and other passages, Menuhin uses portamento torepresent expressive as well as structural elements of the work, sometimesadding emphasis and sometimes portraying the timbres of the human voice.

Menuhin’s interpretation of “Nigun” also incorporates a considerableamount of rubato. While his speed alterations sometimes follow general in-structions in the score—Bloch provides occasional tempo indications such asallargando but does not offer precise metronome markings after the openingmeasure—Menuhin’s variations in tempo often occur where no instruction isgiven, and sometimes even run counter to a printed marking of a tempo.Menuhin slows down at many of the important structural cadences, and whenhe encounters upward and downward runs, he often begins slowly, graduallyincreasing the tempo to conclude the run at a rushing speed. He alters thetempos most freely during cadenzas and unaccompanied passages, emphasiz-ing the improvisational aspect of his interpretation; thus, rubato occurs both

Example 9a Bloch, “Nigun,” Menuhin’s interpretation, mm. 6–7

Example 9b Bloch, “Nigun,” Menuhin’s interpretation, mm. 22–23

Example 9c Bloch, “Nigun,” Menuhin’s interpretation, mm. 37–47

& b b c6

.œ jœ .œ œ œ œ œ œ# œ œ .œ œ .˙

& b b c 4622 Rœ

U≈ Jœœ

> œœnn> œœ##

> . .. .œœU

Rœœ

>poco allarg.

jœœ

ww Óa tempo

& c 4237

œU œIV rit. .œ# jœp

Poco meno lento {q = 80}

˙ ˙ œ ‰ jœF œ œ œIII

&43

œ œ œ œ œ œ# œ œ# œ œ œ# œ œ œpoco animando œ œ œ# œ œ œ œ œallarg.




in runs and at moments of structural importance in the first cadenza (see ru-bato tempo alterations annotated over mm. 11–16, Ex. 10). He uses tempofluctuation to perform the affective development of the four-part structure,playing with increasingly variable expression through the first two sections,reaching the height of fervent emotion in section three, and finally concludingthe work at a slow tempo, with disregard for notated rhythm in an almostametrical, fantasia style, becoming quiet and tender in the last notes of thework.

Menuhin’s performance gestures contributed to the interpretation of somelisteners—Bloch and Fried included—that the violinist conveyed the subjectiv-ity of a Hasidic musician. Later in life Menuhin expressed a keen interest inJewish and Romany cultures and believed the violin to be the expressive corewithin these ethnic groups. “The violin is the poor man’s instrument,” hewrote, “but it is, strangely enough, also the instrument which offers to the in-dividual the greatest and most immediate means of expression. . . . The instru-ment for the country folk, for Jews and gypsies—that heritage lies at the heartof the violinist’s calling.”112 Elsewhere Menuhin commented, in characteristi-cally romantic terms, that the “strolling fiddlers of yesteryear, the wandering

112. Menuhin, Compleat Violinist, 12–13.

Example 10 Bloch, “Nigun,” Menuhin’s interpretation, mm. 11–16

& b b c11

. .œ rœ ˙ .˙ ®Uœ-

" œ- œ- œ œ œ œa tempo

f Rœœœ

.œU Jœ≤ œ œ. .œ œn>2

& b b allarg.14 œ œ œ œn œ œ œ œ œœ- œ- œn - œ- œ- œ- œ- œ œ œ œn œ œ jœ>

‰U3 3 3

6(Cadenza)(a tempo)

ƒ& b b IV≈ œ- œ- œ- œ œ œ œ Rœ- œ-

,œ œ œ œ œ œ Rœ- œ-

,œ œ œ œ œ œ

2 4 1 2 4

1

F(14)

& b ballarg.15 œ œ œ œ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ ˙

˙> œœ ≈ œ≥ œ œ œ œ œ

3ƒ

a tempo

largamente




musicians, these heralds of people’s musical language, are the ancestors of vio-linists. . . . The violin should never be allowed to lose contact with its folkroots.”113 Freely associating, he linked Romany melodies with Hasidic nigun -im and Marc Chagall’s paintings of violinists on the roofs of the shtetl.

The mature Menuhin, meditating on the nature of the violin, suggestedthat musicians integrate the sound of improvisation into their performances:“The violinist should be allowed to express a degree of intuition. . . . The vio-linist seems to live and move in the empty spaces between notes and trans-forms and fashions them in accordance with his own and the listener’ssensibilities.”114 He argued that as a result of the suffering of members of theJewish and Romany Diasporas, music functioned as their most immediate,spontaneous mode of expression, and this spontaneity should be learned fromand integrated into any modern violinist’s playing.115 From this perspective,the essence of violin playing lies in “the making of sound at the very instant—that is, improvisation.”116 Menuhin’s interest in the improvisational elementsof violin performance is evident in his recording of Bloch’s work. His rubato,slides, and other gestures not demanded by the score emphasize the personalnature of his interpretation; his performance operates as an analysis of, or com-mentary on, the score. Bloch’s compositional technique invites this perfor-mance style, allowing the work to become a product of collaboration with thefuture performer. It was most likely Menuhin’s use of such improvisationalgestures in his quasi-theatrical representation of Hasidic singing that im-pressed Fried and Bloch as sounding authentically “Jewish.”

In a letter to Menuhin in 1955, Bloch wrote affectionately of a “Menuhinfestival” he had recently staged by listening to the violinist’s recordings athome on his new hi-fi, and he explained that he still believed in the role of race as a decisive factor in musical style. Contrasting his views to those of contemporary anthropologists including Franz Boas, who sought to shift thefocus in his discipline from questions of race to the study of culture, Bloch ar-gued: “Despite the assertions of Franz Boaz [sic], I believe that the [conceptof ] race, and many races, exist . . . despite all the mixtures and ‘impurities’ . . . [and] that different languages are not the product of chance. . . . What arethe profound reasons that have differentiated languages, musical or otherwise,of the different peoples on this small planet?”117 Bloch thus continued to grapple with his own sense of a Jewish identity and his view that language and

113. Menuhin and Meyer, Violin, 100 and 104–6.114. Ibid., 68.115. Ibid., 120.116. Ibid., 283.117. “Malgré les assertions de Franz Boaz, je crois que la Race, les Races, existent . . . malgré

tous les mélanges et ‘impuretés’ . . . que les différents langages ne sont pas un produit du hazard. . . . Quelles sont les raisons profondes qui ont différencié les langages—musicaux ou autres desdifférents peuples sur cette petite planète?” Ernest Bloch collection, ARCHIVES BLOCH 1,Music Library, University of California, Berkeley, Box 14, Folder 4.




musical style were inborn traits that evince the existence of some sort of racialdifferentiation.

The characteristic sound that so many commentators identified as “Jewish”in art music during the early twentieth century can thus be understood as theresult of collaborations between composers and performers, in spite of the sig-nificant variations in the meanings that the category of “Jewish” music evokedfor these musicians as well as for their listeners. A Swiss Jewish immigrant tothe United States who studied the Jewish Encyclopedia and other written docu-mentation to learn more about Jewish musical tradition, Bloch felt that it wasa direct spiritual connection to biblical Jewish history that most directly en-abled him to represent his Jewish identity in his music. The American-bornMenuhin, by contrast, invoked memories of his father’s singing and his latertravels around the world, as well as what he believed to be the Jewish andRomany roots of modern violin performance, in explaining what most directlyallowed him to articulate Jewish identity in his renditions of Bloch’s music.Taking the scores of Bloch’s works as canonical texts, Menuhin interpreted themusic through his performances in a manner that he believed provided himwith the opportunity to apprehend and express the Jewish soul. WhileMenuhin sometimes appeared in his adult writing to be bemused by his ownyouthful impressions of fear, awe, and excitement at his meetings with Bloch,the importance of these encounters in Menuhin’s career, and Bloch’s privateletters and his dedication of Abodah to the violinist, underscore the crucialroles of Bloch’s performers in constructing his broad reputation as a composerof a definitive Jewish music. Moreover, Menuhin and other musicians workedwith Bloch to create compositional and performance tropes for the represen-tation of Hasidic song. To gain a richer understanding of Bloch’s works and,more generally, of early twentieth-century pieces based on Jewish themes, it isnot enough to focus on the compositions’ forms and contexts, given that theirperformance histories and the sounds that survive on early audio recordingshave contributed so significantly to their reception. The complex diversity ofthe ways in which Western art music was used to construct Jewish identitiesduring the early twentieth century becomes apparent when composition, performance, and listening are recognized as acts of interpretation reminiscentof other hermeneutic efforts, including traditional Jewish exegesis of sacredtexts, that attempt to bridge a distance between individuals and their culturalheritage.

Works Cited

Archival Collections

Ernest Bloch collection. ARCHIVES BLOCH 1. Music Library, University ofCalifornia, Berkeley.

Ernest Bloch Collection. Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.




Mischa Elman Collection. Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at BostonUniversity, Boston, MA.

Joseph Szigeti Collection. Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at BostonUniversity, Boston, MA.

Other Works

Achron, Joseph. “Notits vegn yidisher muzik.” Bodn: A Quarterly Revue 1 (1934):55–60.

Adler, Cyrus, and Francis L. Cohen. “Niggun.” In Jewish Encyclopedia, 9:303.Adler, Cyrus, Gotthard Deutsch, Louis Ginzberg, Richard Gottheil, Joseph Jacobs, et

al. “Preface.” In Jewish Encyclopedia, 1:vii–xxi.Avenary, Hanoch. “The Hasidic Nigun—Ethos and Melos of a Folk Liturgy.” Journal

of the International Folk Music Council 16 (1964): 60–63.———. “Nusah. .” In Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed., 18:251.———. “Shtayger.” In Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed., 18:522–23.Beregovski, Moshe. Old Jewish Folk Music: The Collections and Writings of Moshe

Beregovski. Edited by Mark Slobin. Publications of the American Folklore Society,New Series 6. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000.

Bloch, Suzanne, and Irene Heskes, eds. Ernest Bloch, Creative Spirit: A Program SourceBook. New York: Jewish Music Council of the National Jewish Welfare Board,1976.

Bohlman, Philip V. “Erasure: Displacing and Misplacing Race in Twentieth-CenturyMusic Historiography.” In Western Music and Race, edited by Julie Brown, 3–23.Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

———. Jewish Music and Modernity. AMS Studies in Music. Oxford and New York:Oxford University Press, 2008.

Bohlman, Philip V., and Ruth F. Davis. “Mizrakh, Jewish Music and the Journey to theEast.” In Music and Orientalism in the British Empire, 1780s–1940s, edited byMartin Clayton and Bennett Zon, 95–125. Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT:Ashgate, 2007.

Bourgault-Ducoudray, Louis-Albert, ed. Trente mélodies populaires de Grèce etd’Orient. Paris: Lemoine, 1876.

Bowen, José A. “The History of Remembered Innovation: Tradition and Its Role in the Relationship between Music Works and Their Performances.” Journal ofMusicology 11 (1993): 139–73.

Buber, Martin. “Address on Jewish Art.” In The First Buber: Youthful Zionist Writingsof Martin Buber, edited and translated by Gilya G. Schmidt. Syracuse, NY: SyracuseUniversity Press, 1999, 46–64.

Burton, Humphrey. Yehudi Menuhin: A Life. Boston: Northeastern University Press,2001.

Cohen, Francis L. “Abodah, Music of.” In Jewish Encyclopedia, 1:76–79. ———.“Music, Synagogal.” In Jewish Encyclopedia, 9:119–35.Cohon, Baruch Joseph. “The Structure of the Synagogue Prayer-Chant.” This

Journal (1950): 17–32.Downes, Olin. “Ernest Bloch, the Swiss Composer, on the Influence of Race in

Composition.” Musical Observer 15 (1917): 11–12.———. “Music: Throng Again Acclaims Menuhin.” New York Times, 7 January 1929.




Dubal, David. Conversations with Menuhin. New York, San Diego, and London:Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.

“Elman Gives Recital with Gabrilowitsch.” New York Times, 15 April 1930.Encyclopaedia Judaica. 2nd ed. Edited by Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik.

22 vols. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007.Ernest Bloch: Biography and Comment. San Francisco: Mary Morgan Co., 1925.“Festival of Jewish Music.” New York Times, 1 March 1933.Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Translated by James

Strachey. International Psycho-analytical Library 6. New York: Boni and Liveright,1922.

Hale, Philip. “The First Musical Spokesman of the Jewish Race.” Current Opinion 62(1917): 327–28.

“Hannukah Marked by Music Festival.” New York Times, 20 December 1946.Idelsohn, Abraham Zvi. Jewish Music in Its Historical Development. New York: Henry

Holt, 1929.Jacobs, Joseph. “Anthropology.” In Jewish Encyclopedia, 1:619–21.———. The Jewish Encyclopedia: A Guide to Its Contents, An Aid to Its Use. New York:

Funk and Wagnalls, 1906.———. “Purity of Race.” In Jewish Encyclopedia, 10:283–84The Jewish Encyclopedia: A Descriptive Record of the History, Religion, Literature, and

Customs of the Jewish People from the Earliest Times to the Present Day. 12 vols. NewYork: Funk and Wagnalls, 1906.

Kalmar, Ivan Davidson, and Derek J. Penslar. “Orientalism and the Jews: An Intro -duction.” In Orientalism and the Jews, edited by Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar, xiii–lx. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2005.

Katz, Mark. “Portamento and the Phonograph Effect.” Journal of MusicologicalResearch 25 (2006): 211–32.

Kawabata, Maiko. “Violinists ‘Singing’: Paganini, Operatic Voices, and Virtuosity.” AdParnassum: A Journal of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Instrumental Music 5(2007): 7–39.

Kenneson, Claude. Székely and Bartók: The Story of a Friendship. Portland, OR:Amadeus, 1994.

Kisselgof, S[usman]. Das jüdische Volkslied, by S[usman] Kisselhoff. Berlin: JüdischerVerlag, 1913.

———. Lider-zamelbukh far der Yidisher shul un familie. St. Petersburg: Society forJewish Folk Music; and Berlin: Leo Winz, 1912.

Knapp, Alexander. “Bloch.” Jewish Quarterly, 23 July 2010. http://jewishquarterly.org/2010/07/bloch. Accessed 30 September 2011.

———. “The Jewishness of Bloch: Subconscious or Conscious?” Proceedings of theRoyal Musical Association 97 (1970): 99–112.

———. “The Life and Music of Ernest Bloch: Problems and Paradoxes.” In JüdischeMusik und ihre Musiker im 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Wolfgang Birtel, JosephDorfman, and Christoph-Hellmut Mahling, 287–302. Mainz: Are Musik, 2006.

Kushner, David Z. The Ernest Bloch Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002.———. “The ‘Jewish’ Works of Ernest Bloch.” Journal of Musicological Research 3

(1981): 259–73.Le Bon, Gustave. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Dunwoody, GA:

Norman S. Berg, 1984.




Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel. The Changing Sound of Music: Approaches to StudyingRecorded Musical Performance. London: CHARM, 2009. http://www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/studies/chapters/intro.html. Accessed 20 August 2012.

———. “Portamento and Musical Meaning.” Journal of Musicological Research 25(2006): 233–61.

Lewinski, Joseph, and Emmanuelle Dijon, eds. Ernest Bloch: Sa vie et sa pensée. 4 vols.Geneva: Slatkine, 1998.

Loeffler, James. “Do Zionists Read Music from Right to Left? Abraham Tsvi Idelsohnand the Invention of Israeli Music.” Jewish Quarterly Review 100 (2010):385–416.

———. The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire. NewHaven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.

Magidoff, Robert. Yehudi Menuhin: The Story of the Man and the Musician. GardenCity, NY: Doubleday, 1955.

Mazor, Yaacov, and André Hajdu. “The Musical Tradition of H. asidism.” InEncyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed., 8:425–31.

Mazor, Yaacov, and André Hajdu, with Bathja Bayer. “The Hasidic Dance-Niggûn: AStudy Collection and Its Classificatory Analysis.” Yuval: Studies of the Jewish MusicResearch Center 3 (1974): 136–266.

Mazor, Yaacov, and Edwin Seroussi. “Towards a Hasidic Lexicon of Music.” Orbismusicae 10 (1990–91): 118–43.

Menuhin, Yehudi. The Compleat Violinist: Thoughts, Exercises, Reflections of anItinerant Violinist. Edited by Christopher Hope. New York: Summit Books, 1986.

———. Unfinished Journey. New York: Knopf, 1977.Menuhin, Yehudi, and Catherine Meyer. The Violin. Paris and New York: Flammarion,

1996.Milsom, David. Theory and Practice in Late Nineteenth-Century Violin Performance:

An Examination of Style in Performance, 1850–1900. Aldershot, UK: AshgatePublishing, 2003.

Móricz, Klára. Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music. California Studies in 20th-Century Music 8. The S. Mark TaperFoundation Imprint in Jewish Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press,2008.

———. “Sensuous Pagans and Righteous Jews: Changing Concepts of Jewish Identityin Ernest Bloch’s Jezebel and Schelomo.” This Journal 54 (2001): 439–91.

Móricz, Klára, and Ronit Seter, eds. “Colloquy: Jewish Studies and Music.” ThisJournal 65 (2012): 557–92.

Nemtsov, Jascha. Die Neue Jüdische Schule in der Musik. Jüdische Musik 2. Wiesbaden:Harrassowitz, 2004.

Pasler, Jann. “Theorizing Race in Nineteenth-Century France: Music as Emblem ofIdentity.” Musical Quarterly 89 (2006): 459–504.

Peretz, Isaac Leib. “Kabbalists.” In Classic Yiddish Stories of S. Y. Abramovitsh, SholemAleichem, and I. L. Peretz, edited and translated by Ken Frieden, 147–51. Syracuse,NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004.

———. “The Missing Melody.” In The I. L. Peretz Reader, edited by Ruth R. Wisse,196–200. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2002.

“The Programme Given by the Flonzaley Quartet . . . .” Boston Post, 31 December1916.




Radano, Ronald, and Philip V. Bohlman, eds. Music and the Racial Imagination.Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Rosenfeld, Paul. “The Music of Ernest Bloch.” The Seven Arts 1 (February 1917):413–18.

Rubin, Joel. “The Art of the Klezmer: Improvisation and Ornamentation in theCommercial Recordings of New York Clarinettists Naftule Brandwein and DaveTarras 1922–1929.” PhD diss., City University, London, 2001.

Saminsky, Lazare. Music of the Ghetto and the Bible. New York: Bloch Publishing, 1934.Schiller, David M. Bloch, Schoenberg, and Bernstein: Assimilating Jewish Music. Oxford

and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.Schwartz, Shuly Rubin. The Emergence of Jewish Scholarship in America: The

Publication of the “Jewish Encyclopedia.” Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press,1991.

Shiloah, Amnon. Jewish Musical Traditions. Detroit: Wayne State University Press,1992.

Sholokhova, Lyudmila. “Zinoviy Kiselhof as a Founder of Jewish Musical FolkloreStudies in the Russian Empire at the Beginning of the 20th Century.” In Klesmer,Klassik, jiddisches Lied: Jüdisches Musikkultur in Osteuropa, edited by Karl E.Grözinger, 63–72. Jüdische Musik 1. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2004.

Slobin, Mark. Tenement Songs: The Popular Music of the Jewish Immigrants. Music inAmerican Life. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1982.

Stokes, Martin, ed. Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place.Berg Ethnic Identity Series. Oxford and Providence, RI: Berg Publishers, 1994.

Taruskin, Richard. “Yevreyi and Zhidy: A Memoir, a Survey, and a Plea.” In OnRussian Music, 190–201. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,2008.

Walden, Joshua S. “Music of the ‘folks-neshome’: ‘Hebrew Melody’ and ChangingRepresentations of Jewish Culture in the Early Twentieth Century AshkenaziDiaspora.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 8 (2009): 151–72.

———. “Performing the Rural: Sonic Signifiers in Early Twentieth-Century ViolinPlaying.” In Before and After Music: Proceedings from the 10th International Con -gress of the International Project on Musical Signification, Vilnius, 21–25 October,2008, edited by Lina Navickaite-Martinelli, 421–31. Vilnius/Helsinki: LithuanianAcademy of Music and Theatre, Umweb, International Semiotics Institute, 2010.

Abstract

This article examines Ernest Bloch’s Baal Shem: Three Pictures of ChassidicLife, considering its score, its performance history, and early recordings of thesecond movement, “Nigun,” by Yehudi Menuhin, Joseph Szigeti, and MischaElman, to investigate the idea, promoted by the composer and many of hisperformers and critics, that the music represented Jewish identity through theevocation of Hasidic song. Bloch’s score and Menuhin’s performances weredescribed as expressing what was often characterized during the early twenti-eth century as a self-affirming racial feeling that linked the modern diaspora inAmerica to Eastern European Hasidic Jewish communities. With Baal Shem,




Bloch and his performers and listeners participated in a self-conscious effort toconstruct a modern Jewish identity that they believed could be conveyed inthe sounds and structures of art music. Menuhin’s lifelong friendship and col-laboration with Bloch underscores the crucial roles of Bloch’s performers inworking with the composer to devise compositional and performance tropesfor the representation of Hasidic song, and in creating his broad reputation asa composer of a definitive Jewish music, a reputation Bloch would sometimesembrace and at other times disavow.

Keywords: Ernest Bloch, Yehudi Menuhin, Baal Shem, violin, race



"An Essential Expression of the People": Interpretations of Hasidic Song in the Composition and...

Documents

Transcript of "An Essential Expression of the People": Interpretations of Hasidic Song in the Composition and...