Jüdische Kunstmusik im 20. Jahrhundert: Quellenlage, Entstehungsgeschichte, Stilanalysen (review)

The year 2008 marks the centennial of the founding of the Society for Jewish Folk Music in St. Petersburg by a group of composers, performers, and ethnographers of music that musicologist Leonid Sabaneev called the "Jewish National School" in a 1924 essay. These musicians shared the goals of promoting the ethnographic study of Jewish secular and religious traditional music in rural areas and urban centers, and of creating an art music style that would represent Jewish national identity. The society lasted only a decade and a half, folding in the early 1920s due to a lack of adequate financial support and the emigration of many of its most important members in the face of growing anti-Semitism and restrictions on Jewish culture in Russia. During its brief existence, however, the society was hugely influential. It inspired the formation of satellite groups and other similar associations and provoked interest throughout the Jewish Diaspora in Jewish traditional and art music. Jüdische Kunstmusik im 20. Jahrhundert is based on the proceedings of the 2. Potsdamer Tage jüdischer Musik, the second of a series of two conferences held in Potsdam, Germany in 2002 and 2004. Edited by Jascha Nemtsov, it brings together a collection of English and German language essays by an international body of scholars, and covers a broad range of subjects relating to the Society for Jewish Folk Music and its legacy through the twentieth century and to the present day.

The book is divided into five sections. The first of these combines articles that summarize the history and contents of international archives' collections of manuscripts and papers belonging to composers Joachim Stutschewsky, Solomon Rosowsky, Lazare Saminsky, and the father and son Grigory and Yulian Krejn. These articles provide critical background information for scholars of the "Jewish National School" who wish to view primary sources. Gina Genova's description of the holdings of the Lazare Saminsky papers is particularly lucid in its presentation. Genova opens her essay with essential biographical information about Saminsky's important work as an ethnographer, essayist, and composer, followed by a clear outline of the collection's holdings, and descriptions of some of its most salient contents. Her essay provides a useful roadmap for researchers, and alerts readers to the vital work being done by the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music, which maintains the estates of Saminsky and a number of other Jewish musicians.

The second section of this book addresses the compositional and performance activities of the "Jewish National School" in the first half of the 20^th century. What emerges from these three articles is the international nature of this musical movement throughout the Diaspora. In addition to essays on Jewish composers in Russia and Poland, this section includes an article by Neil W. Levin that provides an illuminating history of the Palestine Chamber Music Ensemble, or Zimro. This group was founded by Russian musicians who aspired to give recitals of works by Jewish composers alongside canonical Western works in concert venues around the globe, in order to raise funds to build a "Temple of Jewish Art." Zimro performed compositions by members of the Society for Jewish Folk Music internationally, around Europe, Asia, and the United States. Its members spread awareness of Jewish art and traditional music and associated this music with the cause of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

The book's third section offers three case studies that examine closely the work of individual Jewish composers. Section four contains a particularly compelling set of essays that describe how art music by composers in the "Jewish National School" relates to traditional music, and discuss the influence on these composers of newly developed early twentieth century ethnographic methodologies and sound recording technologies. Lyudmila Sholokhova provides in her essay an informative discussion of the history of Jewish musical ethnography between 1898 and 1914. The chief proponents of this movement included Joel Engel, Shlomo An-sky, and Susman Kiselgof, who, as Sholokhova makes clear, viewed the...