Secular Jewish music
At first, songs were based on borrowed melodies from German, Russian, or traditional Jewish folk music with new lyrics written in Hebrew.
"[1] The youth, labor and kibbutz movements played a major role in musical development before and after the establishment of Israeli statehood in 1948, and in the popularization of many of these songs.
The national labor organization, the Histadrut, set up a music publishing house that disseminated songbooks and encouraged public sing-alongs (שירה בציבור).
Some are children's songs; some combine European folk tunes with Hebrew lyrics; some come from military bands and others were written by poets such as Naomi Shemer and Chaim Nachman Bialik.
The canonical songs of this genre often deal with Zionist hopes and dreams and glorify the life of idealistic Jewish youth who intend on building a home and defending their homeland.
[2] Around the 15th century, a tradition of secular (non-liturgical) Jewish music was developed by musicians called kleyzmorim or kleyzmerim by Ashkenazi Jews in Eastern Europe.
Sephardic music adapted to each of these locals, assimilating North African high-pitched, extended ululations; Balkan rhythms, for instance in 9/8 time; and the Turkish maqam mode.
For Ashkenazi Jews in Eastern Europe, for example, dances, whose names corresponded to the different forms of klezmer music that were played, were an obvious staple of the wedding ceremony of the shtetl.
"Nevertheless the Jews practiced a corporeal expressive language that was highly differentiated from that of the non-Jewish peoples of their neighborhood, mainly through motions of the hands and arms, with more intricate legwork by the younger men.
While Jazz is primarily considered an art form with African-American originators, many Jewish musicians have contributed to it including clarinetists Mezz Mezzrow, Shep Fields,[5][6] Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw (the latter two swing bandleaders made significant contributions in bringing racial integration into the American music industry[7][8]), saxophonists Michael Brecker, Kenny G, Stan Getz, Benny Green, Lee Konitz, Ronnie Scott and Joshua Redman, trumpeters and cornetists Randy Brecker, Ruby Braff, Red Rodney and Shorty Rogers, vibraphonist Terry Gibbs, drummers Buddy Rich, Mel Lewis, and Victor Feldman, and singers and pianists Billy Joel, Al Jolson, Ben Sidran and Mel Tormé.
With the mid-1960s rise of the singer-songwriter, some (King, Diamond, Sedaka) became performers; others (such as Burt Bacharach) managed to continue to work primarily as songwriters.
Many American rock and metal bands have at least one Jewish musician: both Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley of KISS, Geddy Lee of Rush, Aerosmith drummer Joey Kramer, Grateful Dead percussionist Mickey Hart, Bon Jovi (keyboardist David Bryan), the Doors guitarist Robby Krieger, Metallica drummer and co-founder Lars Ulrich, Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian, Ramones' Joey Ramone and Tommy Ramone, and Guns N' Roses drummer Steven Adler, and Disturbed frontman David Draiman.
Jewish musicians have also been part of the progressive rock/metal movement, such as King Crimson bassist Tony Levin and Rod Morgenstein (drummer for the Dixie Dregs).
"Popular" music in Europe during the early 20th century would have been considered to be lighter classical forms such as operetta and entertainments like cabaret, and in these Jewish involvement was very large, especially in Vienna and Paris.
Hence the entry, in considerable numbers, of Jewish composers and performers on the musical scene in the middle decades of the nineteenth century was a phenomenon, and a closely observed one.
Notable examples of Jewish Romantic composers (by country) are Charles-Valentin Alkan, Paul Dukas and Fromental Halévy from France, Josef Dessauer, Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst, Karl Goldmark and Gustav Mahler from Bohemia (most Austrian Jews during this time were native not to what is today Austria but rather the outer provinces of the Empire), Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer from Germany, and Anton and Nikolai Rubinstein from Russia.
There were very many notable Jewish violin and pianist virtuosi, including Joseph Joachim, Ferdinand David, Carl Tausig, Henri Herz, Leopold Auer, Jascha Heifetz, and Ignaz Moscheles.
Sample Jewish 20th-century composers include Arnold Schönberg and Alexander von Zemlinsky from Austria, Hanns Eisler,[17] Kurt Weill and Theodor W. Adorno from Germany, Viktor Ullmann and Jaromír Weinberger from Bohemia and later the Czech Republic (the former perished at the Auschwitz extermination camps), George Gershwin, Aaron Copland and Samuel Adler[18] from the United States, Darius Milhaud and Alexandre Tansman from France, Alfred Schnittke[17] and Lera Auerbach from Russia, Lalo Schifrin and Mario Davidovsky from Argentina and Paul Ben-Haim and Shulamit Ran from Israel.
There are some genres and forms of classical music that Jewish composers have been associated with, including notably during the Romantic period French Grand Opera.
Arnold Schoenberg in his middle and later periods devised the twelve-tone technique and was a primary advocate of atonality, a system of composition which was later used by Jewish composers Paul Dessau and René Leibowitz.
George Rochberg and Milton Babbitt were leading composers in the school of serialism, Steve Reich and Philip Glass worked with minimalism, George Perle devised his own form of twelve-tone tonality, Leo Ornstein helped develop the tone cluster, Morton Feldman and Armand Lunel were noted composers of chance music (the latter is also considered the inventor of spatialization), and Mario Davidovsky was famous for writing a series of compositions mixing acoustic and electronic music.
In addition, Lera Auerbach, Alfred Schnittke and John Zorn have worked with Polystylism and other forms of Postmodern music, and Modernist Miriam Gideon combined atonalism and Jewish folk motives in her pieces.
Finally, many non-Jewish (mostly, but not all, Russian) composers have composed classical music with clear Jewish themes and inspiration, such as Max Bruch (Kol Nidre), Sergei Prokofiev (Overture on Hebrew Themes), Maurice Ravel (Chanson hébraïque in Yiddish, Deux mélodies hébraïques – including "Kaddisch" in Aramaic and "Fregt di velt di alte kashe" in Yiddish),[23] Dmitri Shostakovich (Second Piano Trio, From Jewish Folk Poetry and Symphony No.
13 "Babi Yar")[24] and Igor Stravinsky (Abraham and Isaac – used the Hebrew Masoretic text of a passage of Genesis, and was dedicated to the Jews and the State of Israel).
Many operatic works by non-Jewish composers show a direct connection with and sympathy for the Jewish people and history, like Saint-Saëns' Samson and Delilah and Verdi's Nabucco.
[28] Research regarding the Jewish identity of composers usually focuses on the assimilated German-speaking Felix Mendelssohn and Gustav Mahler; the former, although the grandson of the most famous philosopher of the Haskalah, was baptized and raised as a Reformed Christian, and the latter converted to Roman Catholicism to remove his most powerful obstacle to success (anti-Semitism) in musical Vienna.
5 "Reformation", St. Paul Oratorio and numerous chamber and other vocal pieces), and on one occasion he even changed his appearance to avoid looking like related Jewish composer Meyerbeer.
In both cases contemporaries (respectively, Richard Wagner in his Das Judenthum in der Musik, and the virulent Vienna press and Austrian anti-Semites such as Rudolph Louis[31]) argued that no matter how much the composer in question attempted to pass himself off as a good Austrian/German and a good Christian, he and his music would remain fundamentally and unalterably Jewish (in the context, with an obviously negative connotation).
[34]Regarding Wagner himself, it often seems ironic to some that many of the most influential and popular interpreters of his work have been Jewish conductors such as the aforementioned Mahler and Bernstein, as well as Daniel Barenboim, Arthur Fiedler, Asher Fisch, Otto Klemperer, Erich Leinsdorf, James Levine, Hermann Levi (who was chosen by Wagner to conduct the premiere of Parsifal[35] Lorin Maazel, Eugene Ormandy, Fritz Reiner, Sir Georg Solti, George Szell and Bruno Walter.
It was he Jew-as-Iconoclast which aroused the really deep rage... Mahler had begun it; Schönberg carried it on; both were Jews, and they corrupted young Aryan composers like Berg – so the argument went.
