Jewish art music movement
The group founded the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music, a movement that spread to Moscow, Poland, Austria, and later Palestine and the United States.
With the outbreak of World War I and the rise of Communism in Russia, most of the composers active in the Jewish art music movement fled Eastern Europe, finding their way to Palestine or America.
In Hungary, Zoltán Kodály and later Béla Bartók undertook a massive project of recording and cataloging folk melodies, and incorporating them into their compositions.
Other composers such as Antonín Dvořák and Leoš Janáček were increasingly seeking a uniquely national sound in their work.
"Europe was impelled by the Romantic tendency to establish in musical matters the national boundaries more and more sharply," wrote Alfred Einstein.
"[1] Parallel with this trend toward national music styles was an awakening of nationalist sentiment among the Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe.
Long subjected to severe restrictions on their lives, outbursts of violent antisemitic pogroms, and forced concentration in a segregated region of Russia called the Pale of Settlement,[2] Russian Jewry developed an intense nationalist identity during the 1880s onward.
Many of the great violinists of the last century — Jascha Heifetz, Nathan Milstein, Efrem Zimbalist, Mischa Elman, to name a few — were Jewish students of Leopold Auer, who taught at the conservatory.
While many of these students came from orthodox Jewish backgrounds — Achron, for example, was son of a cantor — their studies of music at the conservatory were strictly of the western classical tradition.
[3]: 28 Abraham Goldfaden, founder of the Yiddish theater in Russia, incorporated many folksongs and folk style music in his productions.
Engel set out to study the folk music of the Jews of the Russian shtetls, spending the summer of 1897 traveling throughout the Pale, listening to and notating Yiddish songs.
These included the composers Solomon Rosowsky, Alexander Krein, Lyubov Streicher,[6] Mikhail Gnessin, and the violinist Joseph Achron.
[3]: 48 Among the artists performing in these concerts were violinists Jascha Heifetz and Efrem Zimbalist, cellist Joseph Press and the bass Feodor Chaliapin.
This songbook was a monumental six volumes, and includes, in addition to folksongs collected by Kisselgoff and others, original art songs and a section on cantillation of religious texts.
The advent of World War I and the Russian Revolution put an end to the formal existence of the society, but its members continued their activities and influence in Russia and abroad.
[8] In a similar manner, the lyric basso Sidor Belarsky left Russia in 1930 after completing his studies at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and acquired a faculty position at Brigham Young University where he continued to pursue scholarly research in to Judaic folk music.
[12] Solomon Rosowsky moved to Israel, and later to the United States, where he continued composing, teaching and researching Jewish music.
His religious works were performed in New York City at Temple Emanuel, (where he became a "house composer"), as well as the Park Avenue Syngagogue and the 92nd St. Y.
Her aria "Song of Solomon" was more recently performed in 1998 by soprano Harolyn Blackwell at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall in a gala "Salute to Israel's 50th Birthday" concert conducted by Leon Botstein with the American Symphony Orchestra.
