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Jewish music, what is it actually?
Sure, everyone has heard of Klezmer by now.
But otherwise?
"I haven't offered a seminar on klezmer yet, although people keep asking for it," says Sarah Ross.
"The students should first get an overview of the Jewish music that is available around the globe."
Ross, ethnomusicologist and professor of Jewish music studies, has headed the European Center for Jewish Music (EZJM), an institute of the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media (HMTMH), since 2015.
“Jewish Music Studies” is offered here as a major subject in the Master’s degree in Musicology and Music Education.
Sarah Ross heads the European Center for Jewish Music in Hanover
Source: Philipp Ottendörfer
Whether a liberal or an Orthodox synagogue, whether Jewish music in India or Greece: In more than ten seminars per semester, the focus is on music in Jewish communities, "with a lot of reference to the present," as the professor emphasizes.
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Their listeners, mostly non-Jews, come not only from musicology, but also from other courses.
Many students also wanted to learn something about Jewish life through music, which is not limited to the years between 1933 and 1945, says Sarah Ross.
“
Jewish communities cannot just be a plaything for coming to terms with the past”.
Jewish music from many countries at the EZJM Summer School
Source: Jean Goldenbaum
Life's work of Andor Iszák
Among other things, you can learn about Jews in pop music.
Or, in the coming semester, about how topics from the Torah and Talmud find their way into music, of which the folk poet Leonard Cohen is a wonderful example.
The EZJM goes back to the life's work of Professor Andor Iszák.
The organist, conductor, composer and music researcher from Budapest founded the center in 1988 with the University of Augsburg before moving to Hanover in 1992 with his small collection of older synagogue organs.
The Villa Seligmann, a former upper-class residential building in Hanover-Oststadt, became the new domicile of the center.
Andor Izsák looked for sheet music, recordings and instruments from synagogues destroyed by the Nazis around the world
Source: picture alliance / dpa
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After Professor Iszák retired, responsibilities were divided.
As before, a large part of the listed building is used as a venue, primarily for concerts.
The university's musicologists have rented rooms on the second floor.
Together with the Chair for Jewish Music History in Weimar and the Ben Haim Research Center in Munich, which focuses on persecuted Jewish composers during the Nazi era, especially in southern Germany, the offer is unique across Europe, says Sarah Ross.
The Villa Seligmann in the so-called Zooviertel in Hanover
Source: picture alliance / dpa
Look through different glasses
The question of how to define Jewish music has been discussed for 200 years.
“There is no answer, and the young people should know that too.
We talk about Jewish music studies and Jewish music knowing that the name doesn't really mean what it is. "
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Sarah Ross speaks of “different glasses” through which one looks at the musical behavior of Jews in different parts of the world in the seminars.
"It can be the glasses of religion, that is the liturgical music of Judaism, but we can also look through the glasses of identity, whereby there are again different identities, whether ethnic, national, gender or cultural."
This also means tackling stereotypes.
Because hardly a TV report about Jewish history can do without sentimental clarinet tones.
“In Germany, everything that has anything to do with Jews is often thrown down,” says Liza Lengert.
The 24-year-old received the Peter Becker Science Prize from the university for her master's thesis “Jewish Music in Germany Today in the Framework of Remembrance Culture”.
The worldwide Klezmer wave of the last few decades, she emphasizes, goes back to Eastern European Jews and traditionally has little to do with Jewish life in Germany at first.
Musicians during a wedding ceremony in a synagogue in Moscow
Source: picture alliance / dpa
Preoccupation with Jewish studies important
Liza Lengert celebrated success with classical guitar and her own compositions at a very young age.
She began an artistic-pedagogical training at the University of Hanover, but came across the musicological course by chance.
"I found it really exciting to dive into this diversity that was completely new to me."
Liza Lengert was awarded for her master's thesis
Source: EZJM
She wrote her first term paper on musical life in the “Displaced Persons” camps in Germany after the Second World War.
Liza Lengert's main focus, however, was on the various directions of liturgical music.
She was able to do some field research in the liberal synagogue in her hometown of Hanover.
If one seriously pursues Jewish music studies, studying Jewish studies is essential, says her professor.
The dilemma: this course is not offered in Hanover.
With Hebrew courses and visits to synagogues, you want to impart at least some basic knowledge.
Cantor Assaf Levitin, graduate of the Abraham Geiger College in Potsdam, at the ordination ceremony in Hanover
Source: picture alliance / Julian Strate
Chance contact with the subject
Completely unprepared and more or less by chance, Andreas Wolff came across the subject in Weimar at the Franz Liszt School of Music.
“At first I couldn't do anything with the term Jewish music.” The now 27-year-old worked as a DJ for a long time, and it wasn't until he was 19 that he discovered playing the piano as an autodidact.
A late, but all the more passionate love: Wolff found an audience with his own minimalist piano works through concerts and recordings.
In Weimar he is now studying to become a teacher.
Musicology seminars are also part of the training.
Wolff found a musical cosmos with Professor Jascha Nemtsov, because Jewish musical tradition ranges from two and a half millennia old motifs, the so-called tropics, to the New Jewish School in the 20th century.
The latter is one of Nemtsov's specialties.
World-renowned pianist and music researcher: Jascha Nemtsov heads the chair in Weimar
Source: rut sigurdardottir
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The pianist and music researcher from St. Petersburg, born in 1963, enjoys worldwide renown.
His preoccupation with unknown or forgotten composers he has artistically documented with around 40 records, including many first recordings.
In 2013 Jascha Nemtsov was appointed professor for the history of Jewish music in Weimar.
The professorship was established with funds from the Federal Ministry of Education in connection with the Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg (ZJS), which was founded in 2012.
In addition to the three major Berlin universities, a partner of the ZJS is the Abraham Geiger College at the University of Potsdam, which is dedicated to the training of rabbis and Jewish cantors.
Nemtsov, who lives in Berlin, teaches half in Potsdam and half in Weimar.
Dealing with plurality
He has definitely found a definition for what Jewish music is: “Music that has to do with different expressions of Jewish identity.” The professor names the nigunim, the sung melodies of the devout Hasidim, as an example.
“This music partly has a completely different origin, but it is practiced in a Jewish spiritual context, so it is Jewish music.” This definition can be applied to synagogue sounds as well as to folk music, where elements from other cultures have been incorporated.
The scholarly examination of plurality is therefore one of the aims of the Weimar study profile “History of Jewish Music” within the master’s degree in musicology.
Four areas in particular are presented against their cultural and historical background: Jewish music in relation to religion and liturgy, Jewish musical traditions in the secular area, elements of Jewish identity in art music, and the rich, multicultural and multi-religious music scene in Israel.
The scientists, partly with the support of the students, keep researching bequests that have been given to the Weimar University.
With support from the Thuringian State Chancellery, special attention is paid to the work of composers from Thuringia who were persecuted by the National Socialists.
Not a springboard for a later career
How far the scientific field is overall can be seen in the courses that Jascha Nemtsov is offering in the coming semester: “My seminar is about film music in films that deal with the Holocaust.
And my lecture is about Jews in popular music, especially of the 1920s, with a focus on the Weimar Republic, Russia and Broadway. "
Andreas Wolff's interest has grown steadily.
He wrote his first term paper on Richard Wagner's diatribe “Judaism in Music”.
“First I had to swallow, until then I hardly had Wagner's anti-Semitism on the screen.” For the next housework, the native Coburg wants to deal with the Yiddish Summer Weimar.
For two decades the festival has been one of the most important drivers of the Jewish music scene internationally.
It is also a partner of the music academy like the Achava Festival Thuringia, which Jascha Nemtsov co-founded.
Andreas Wolff studies music as a teacher in Weimar
Source: Maximilian Hein
The course should offer various professional opportunities at universities, media and cultural industries, but it hardly offers a stepping stone for a career.
Professor Ross in Hanover knows that too: “The humanities in general and also the musicology do not train for a specific profession, they train for science.” So lifelong learning.
This, in turn, is an important element in Jewish thought.