Jewish Hammered Dulcimer Players in Jewish and non-Jewish Contexts in the Eighteenth Century

• In Event: The Study of Early-Modern Jewish Musics: Mapping the Field (I)

Abstract

In the study of Jewish music of the early modern period, the place of the tsimbl (Yiddish) had been successfully situated as an integral instrument in the musical landscape of Ashkenazi Jews. Widespread in the 17th and 18th centuries, the traditional use of the hammered dulcimer among Jews declined as a result of emancipation processes and has largely disappeared since the Shoah.
The correlation with the use of hammered dulcimers by Christians, which was common throughout Europe in various levels of society before declining around 1800, is obvious. The interest in the re-discovery of historical West European hammered dulcimers in research, musical practice, and organology had developed only in the last couple of decades. The considerable number of different variations in means of historical dulcimers manufacture, performance practices, and cultural contexts have proposed new questions regarding their use in the performance of historical music nowadays and in the historiography of their performers: men and women. This was enabled due to the scholarly study of musical and textual sources and their revaluation in the light of informed performances on original historical dulcimers or copies.
In this presentation the study case of the virtuoso and composer Georg Noëlli (1727-1789), a Portuguese Jew converted to Lutheranism who is missing in most of the literature about Jewish music in early modern Europe will be examined. This study case opens a handful of further directions for research regarding the identity of Jewish musicians and their integration in non-Jewish musical contexts, historically informed musical practice, the connection of Jews to scholarly music in the 18th century, in light of the Haskalah and processes of modernization.
This presentation will map the historical study of Jewish hammered dulcimer performance between Ashkenazi to Sephardi, Jewish and Christian, popular and erudite, as part of the general history of dulcimers in Western Europe of the early modern period.

Author

• Nadav Ovadia