Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music (review)

Well over a century has passed since Richard Wagner published his notorious Judaism in Music, yet the question of Jewishness in art music still receives much scholarly and popular attention. The idea that the music of Jewish composers must consciously or subconsciously express a vaguely defined 'Jewish essence' is one of the most persistent manifestations of this question; a notion that has endured well beyond the national-racial thinking of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In the present volume, Móricz sets out to tackle such assumptions head on via three indepth case studies of twentieth-century composers who, alongside their other works, composed music specifically intended to be 'Jewish': a group of Russian-Jewish composers of the early twentieth century including Yoel Engel, Lazar Saminsky, Lev Morduchov Zeitlin, and Alexander Krein; the Swiss-American composer Ernest Bloch, and Arnold Schoenberg. Approaching her subject matter via a masterful combination of information, anecdotes, and musical commentary, reflecting meticulous archival work and a welcome synthesis of historical and social material with substantial music analyses, Móricz critiques the frequent assumption that there must be a coherent continuum of Jewish music from the Hebrew Bible until the present, or even that there must necessarily be significant links between Jewish composers including those discussed here. By examining the social and political milieu of each composer, their output, and the reception of their works, she demonstrates that rather than acting as the voices of a hypothetical unified Jewish people, these composers displayed multiple, fluid, and complex identities, among which Jewishness coexisted alongside many other facets.

Móricz's first case study focuses on composers connected with the Society for Jewish Folk Music, founded in St Petersburg in 1908. Strongly influenced by the Russian Mighty Handful, these composers sought to create Jewish compositions by arranging or incorporating Jewish musical materials into art music. However, a controversy reigned between those who chose to express Jewishness via the use of contemporary folk materials, and those who dismissed this music as banal, instead seeking to reclaim or reimagine the 'pure' Hebrew musical heritage of the Bible. Móricz links these positions to wider contemporary debates within Russian Jewish society between those who saw the vernacular Yiddish as the authentic language of the Jewish people, and those who sought to identify with the new revival of Hebrew. While this binary opposition will be well known to anyone acquainted with the cultural milieu within which these composers worked, Móricz combines this framework with a perceptive analysis of attitudes to internal Otherness among these composers, tackling the complex topic of Jewish anti-Semitism, or the internalization of negative portrayals of the Jew as Oriental.

Móricz suggests that in their selection of folk materials, these Jewish composers embraced modes that were indeed based in Jewish musical traditions, but which attempted to purge these materials of Otherness by avoiding overtly Oriental musical references (p. 72). While her analysis is convincing, her comments occasionally illustrate the difficulty of describing folk musical materials within the language of classical music. By using the terminology of church modes rather than the modal types of Ashkenazic Jewish music, she spots innovation where none is likely intended: for example, a cadential flattened 2nd and the use of both the natural and the sharpened sixth degree are inherent features of the Mogen Avos mode, unlike the Western Aeolian, which it otherwise approximates. Correctly diagnosing the mode as Mogen Avos would perhaps have helped explain why Saminsky referred to a song in this mode as 'the highest, truly national melodic type' (p. 74). Likewise, other comments, such as the 'stripping of an "original" melody of grace notes' (p. 57) might also be rephrased to avoid connotations of fixed melodic form and relationship between melody and ornamentation, which are better suited to the description of art music than a folksong overheard from a neighbour.

Móricz's...