The Earliest Corpus of Ashkenazi Cantorial Music (ca. 1740-1840)

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

Abstract

Whereas the earliest musical notation for Gregorian chant is from around the year 800, there are no surviving musical sources in Hebrew until the twelfth century, and these are limited to two folios from the Cairo Geniza. Despite the existence of a few individual items over the next five centuries, we do not have a corpus of Jewish music until 1622/23, when Salamone Rossi published his thirty-three sacred Hebrew songs.
For all practical purposes, the history of Ashkenazi liturgical music begins ca. 1840 with the publication by Salomon Sulzer, cantor in Vienna, of the first volume of Schir Zion, a collection of liturgical compositions by Sulzer and a handful of other composers, including Schubert, who contributed a Hebrew setting of Psalm 92. This was not the first printed collection of Ashkenazi liturgical music, but it was the first that became widely disseminated and influential.
For historical purposes, however, we may begin a century earlier. The musicological reference series Répertoire International des Sources Musicales includes two Hebrew volumes, both edited by Israel Adler, the founder of the Jewish Music Research Centre at Hebrew University in Jerusalem: Hebrew Writings Concerning Music and Hebrew Notated Manuscript Sources. Almost all of the approximately 300 items in the latter are from the period 1740-1840. The catalogue includes works by Aron Beer (1738-1821), cantor in Berlin; Isaac Offenbach (1779-1850), cantor in Cologne; and Salomon Weintraub, known as Kashtan (1781-1829), cantor in Dubno.
The repertory in these cantorial manuscripts is often vocally virtuosic. It gives us concrete examples of the synagogue trio of m’shor’rim (assistant singers), even if aspects of the notation—such as entrances and text underlay—are not so clear as scholars would like. It also provides the earliest notations of famous chants like Kol nidrei and Aleinu, and other important Ashkenazi musical motives. It shows that cantors often treated these motives more freely in the eighteenth than in the nineteenth century. I have been studying this repertory for twenty-five years, and will present a survey of the sources and of current research, including new archival discoveries.

Author

• Daniel Katz, Martin Buber Institute, University of Cologne