Kol Isha

I agree with the sentiment here if I might perhaps have looked to express it differently.

I think what is called for here is a bit of historical analysis, going back to Talmudic times, to see where the issue in question has arisen and, more particularly, how. I am not disposed to be as sweeping as you have been with your comment (though I do, as I say, have sympathy). I think it is unquestionably the case that some women through the ages have been involved in singing and musical activities of, shall we say, a provocative nature, and the same is undoubtedly true today with a good many of the more exhibitionist pop singers. (The same can of course be said of selected male performers too.) Equally, it is hard to see (or hear) why there should be a problem with respect to cultured performances by singers of either gender, and insofar as the Zemel Choir is anything, I'd like to suggest that its musical performance is liable to be described as "cultured" rather than "provocative".

There is a great deal of misinformation about the extent of the so-called prohibition in any case. To put things in perspective, I have heard, or run into, people who have determined to extend their concerns to:

(a) Singing by little children who happen to be girls. If an adult female is capable of suggestive behaviour, I do not think any of us surely can think that a 6-year-old girl should fall into the same category. For whatever it is worth (and when you read this, you may consider that this is not a whole lot), scholars of Midrash consider that a girl as young as 3 may be considered to be possessed of the suggestive qualities that attend the conduct of cetain mature women, and base this on the supposition that Rebecca, who watered Abraham's servant and all of his camels (see Genesis 24) was a mere three years old at the time. Most commentaies do not take this suggestion for her age seriously (though undoubtedly she was no great age and perhaps merely a young teen), but it is from episodes such as this that we find a lot of interwoven nonsense accumulates.

(b) Recordings of women. Now, as far as I am aware, even if you consider that live performance by women is a problem, audio recordings are not, since the visual ingredient of this exercise is missing. But that does not stop some folk from taking this supposed prohibition a stage further and keeping even CDs etc, of lady singers out of reach.

(c) Women performing for women only. Leaving aside whether this is musically effective, it seems to me that there is capacity for just as much stimulating emotion in this sort of performance as in a performance in mixed company.

(d) Women playing musical instruments. I have heard and even seen all sorts of nonsense here. If the prohibition is against the woman's voice, which is defined by refence to musical output that comes from within her body, how is it relevant to include instrumental performance? Yet many do. I have heard of occasions where the female members of a mixed house band at a very religious wedding or similar party have been placed behind a screen so that the guests not be shocked and horrified. (The problem with this, of course, is that everybody then makes a point of peering behind the screen anyway, so the whole thing is grossly self-defeating.)

Where does all this come from? There is so much accretion upon accretion by now that it is not simple to deal with this any more. Let's do a few "nots" first. The supposed prohibition is not mentioned in the Torah. The only instance of direct and exclusive involvement of women in song in the Torah is at the Red Sea after the vanquishing of the Egyptians, and it is very clear that the women among the Israelites participated in singing, dancing and the playing of perhaps rather basic musical instruments. (By the way, dancing is another big subject, but let's leave that for a Jewish dance web site to address.)

References in the Prophetic books are few and far between, but equally clear. Deborah sang her song of victory over Sisera (see Judges 5). However, the rabbinical scholars will doubtless insist that all she did was fashion the poem rather than perform it out loud. I don't buy that. There is an intriguing refeence in Ecclesiastes to the character called Kohelet (traditionally associated with King Solomon) havig assembled, among his many achievements, ... sharim v'sharot ..., and the only obvious translation of this is that of (groups, choirs, of) male and female singers. Note (for what it is worth) that the ArtScroll translation of this verse is "... musical instruments of all types ...", which all goes to show that if the ultra-religious world cannot explain something in the text in a way that it likes, it simply affords us a convenient mistranslation.

As far as I am aware, any sense of concrete prohibition, or opporbrium, attaching to the matter of women and song in Judaism is very late indeed, and derives from the 3rd century CE sage Shmuel, who holds "kol isha ervah", which, translated, means "the voice of a woman is akin to the biblically prohibited public exposure of a women's nakedness". I do not know what prompted Shmuel to say this, nor whether there was consensual support for it, opposition to it or complete ignorance of it in context. Nor have I had the chance to probe any deeper and see how the matter evolved from here. But all sorts of things ae possible, including: Shmuel did not like the sound of women in song, or of one particular women perhaps; his was a reaction to social conditions of the time; and he was not intending to give a formal ruling but was merely making an anecdotal observation (these abound in the Talmud, and we do not treat them all as hard and fast rules).

Comments from others on this admittedly incomplete note would be welcome.

All I'll say in conclusion is this. A filtering out of licentious or suggestive conduct - in men and women - is a hallmark of traditional Jewish observance going back centuries. It is fair and accurate to say that aspects of vocal performance do now fall and always have fallen into this broad categoy. The result of the general approach of being consistently too careful in this regard has taken us to the position where rather too many Jewish religious authorities are worried they cannot trust themselves to tell the difference between a pop diva performing raunchy songs in her underwear and a mixed-voice Jewish choir performing some of the most hallowed religious music that the Jews are proud to call their own. I suspect that, as with so many things, what we really have here is the usual tussle between those for whom conservative ritual at the expense of a broad and cultured approach to Judaism is just that bit easier to manage.

Daniel Tunkel
9 March 2010

* Of the 24 melodies used by Isaac Nathan as music for the poetry
of Lord Byron, in two volumes published in 1815-16, and which he
indicates were melodies used at the Great Synagogue, Duke's Place,
London, a few are still in use, certain others can be identified but the
majority are not recognisable any longer. Those that are clearly
recognisable include Maoz Tzur, a melody still used for the half-kaddish
after reading the Torah on Festival days, a very jolly four-phase tune
for Yigdal that is traditional to Sukkot (though where sung, is usually
performed in a simplified form, as set out in the United Synagogue "Blue
Book") and part of a melody sometimes used for Ya'aleh Tachanuneinu on
Kol Nidrei night.
* The oldest extant melody by far, in the sense that we have
evidence of its use at Duke's Place as early as the late 1760s, is the
traditional Friday night service melody for Yigdal, which passed into
Church use as well, when notated by Thomas Olivers in c 1771 for use in
the Methodist hymnal for a verse called "The God of Abraham, Praise".
In Christian and church circles, this melody is always referred to as
"Leoni", after Leoni, also known as Leon Singer, who was the cantor's
assistant at Duke's place in the 1750s and 1770s. His fame spread to
the London operatic stage, where his developing career brought him into
constant friction with the Duke's Place community elders, until they
were obliged to fire him at some point in the 1780s when it became known
he had performed in Handel's "Messiah". The oldest notation of this
melody is not in Nathan (noted above - and actually and a but
surprisingly, Nathan does not use that melody at all), but in a curio
published in or around 1770-80 by one William Keith, an organist from
West Ham who arranged six melodies from the Duke's Place tradition for a
trio of musical instruments with figured bass. The other 5 cannot be
identified positively (though I believe one of them to be a now long
disused Adon Olam.
* Certain other melodies may possibly predate the
Sulzer/Lewandowski period. It is, first of all, interesting to note
that in the first edition of the United Synagogue "Blue Book", there are
four Sulzer items and none at all from Lewandowski or the majority of
the other continental composers of that period. This was produced in
1887, and suggests that musically, the community considered itself
self-sufficient at that time. The foremost of its composers was Julius
Mombach, who served the Great Synagogue and also the so-called New
Synagogue in the heart of London until his quite sudden death in 1880.
Not having published in his lifetime, music attributed to him was rushed
into print in 1881 under the title of "Neim Zmiros Yisroel", but the
volume in question contains quite a bit of material that was not by
Mombach at all and may merely have been arranged by him. Three items
of particular note (for the purposes of this question) are: the
traditional Adon Olam used at the end of the Kol Nidrei service; the
traditional United Synagogue melody for Odecha, used in the Hallel
service on all festivals; and a well-loved Mechalkeil Chayim from the
Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur liturgy. None display evidence of
Mombach's compositional style, and the last of these three in particular
suggests a structure based around the old trio structure to the music at
Duke's Place (from before Mombach started a full choir there in 1841).
It is also interesting that the Adon Olam and Odecha melodies are given
in the "Blue Book" as "traditional", whereas had they been by Mombach
surely his name would have been given.

All of this is an area ripe for further research and investigation.

What happened to Rossi? Interesting question, to which I have only a
tilt at an answer. We do not have precise dates for his birth or death
- usually you will see him quoted as c 1570 - c 1630. What we do know
is that at that time, in North Italy, there were quite a few Jews in the
musical service of certain of the Italian noble families (often
referenced in registers of names etc. as "ebreo" = Hebrew or Jew).
Salamone Rossi is thought to be the only one of this group to have left
us with Jewish music, though the compositions of some others in the
secular or instrumental musical field have, I believe, survived.

The evidence suggests that Rossi's music was not universally acceptable
to the Jews of his period; I suspect many felt it was insufficiently
Jewish in character and owed more to polyphonic musical style more
typical of the late renaissance church. It might have taken a person
of Rossi's talent and standing to see that it was performed at all, and
one supposes that on his death, there may have been nobody to step into
his shoes. Pure conjecture on my part.

What is clear, though is that Rossi's apparent death coincided with the
demise of his patrons, the Gonzaga Dukes of Mantua. That precipitated
a succession war, an invasion of a large part of North Italy by Spanish
forces and a general deterioration in the hitherto relatively benevolent
attitude towards Jewish cultural participation in Italian life.
Whether Rossi's music was forced off the agenda, and if so whether this
was due to external pressure or Jewish communal acquiescence, or simple
lack of resource, I confess I do not know.

Was Rossi's music sung in the Shabbat services in Italy when he was alive and why did it disappear for such a long time if indeed it is so good?

May 4, 2009 |

Thank you so much for your first contribution to the new Jewish Choral Music Forum. I have found your initial article very interesting and I am sure that it will help to stimulate much debate in the future.
From what you have written, maybe it is no coincidence that I enjoy singing Jewish liturgical music today, when I recall that some 40 years ago I sang in a recital of Bach's B-minor Mass when I was at school -I cant remember if I was a treble or a bass !