From Aesthetics to Experience: How Changing Conceptions of Prayer Changed the Sound of Jewish Worship

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-62
Author(s):  
Ari Y. Kelman ◽  
Jeremiah Lockwood
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Music Reading ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Jewish Prayer

ABSTRACTThis article tracks changes in conceptions of American Jewish congregational prayer music during the second half of the twentieth century, paying specific attention to the late 1960s and early 1970s. During those years, more than fifty albums of new American Jewish synagogue music were released. These drew on the sounds of folk and rock music, and they represented a shift from the sounds of classical cantorial synagogue music. These changes have largely been understood as a shift away from cantorial styles, which emphasized performance and virtuosity, and toward more accessible and more participatory forms of prayer. This article contributes to our understanding of the sounds of American Jewish prayer practices by attending to the larger discourses in which the musical changes were situated. By listening to the music, reading album liner notes, and contemporaneous writings about Jewish prayer music, we discover a shift in descriptions and expectations of how Jewish prayer ought to work, from one that emphasizes the aesthetics of the music to one that emphasizes the experience of the music. We argue that music is one element of a larger shift in how people who made music for congregational prayer understood prayer and how best to engage congregations in that practice.

‘A magic science’: rock music as a recording art

Popular Music ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 195-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Clarke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Sound Recording ◽  
Musical Practice ◽  
Order And Disorder ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
And Control ◽  
Jimi Hendrix ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Jimi Hendrix once claimed ‘I'm working on music to be completely, utterly a magic science’ (Henderson 1981, p. 337). It is a description that fits not just the best of Hendrix's own music, but the best of all that late twentieth-century music in which the ability to capture and control sounds (on tape or disc) has become a means of extending old musical forms and traditions, and establishing new possibilities for them. Throughout his career, Hendrix drew nourishment from his musical roots in black traditions, but it was not until the summer of 1967 that he plugged himself fully into the new possibilities opened up by the technology of sound recording. Hendrix had already proved himself something of a musical ‘magician’ in the ancient sense in that he attempted, through music, to mediate between order and disorder, using his guitar as an expressive extension of himself to flirt with the danger and power of musical disintegration (for the parallel with non-Western musical practice see Shepherd 1977, p. 72; Mellers 1973, pp. 24–6; Clarke 1982, pp. 227–9).

Mediating Judaism: Mind, Body, Spirit, and Contemporary North American Jewish Fiction

AJS Review ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-253
Author(s):  
Sara R. Horowitz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
North American ◽  
Traditional Practices ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Women Novelists ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Jewish Immigrants ◽  
Canadian Culture

That Jewish literature in North America is an altogether secular venue has long been regarded as a truism among many influential literary scholars. Indeed, for much of the twentieth century, the fiction of Jewish immigrants and their progeny wrote its way into American and Canadian culture through narratives that captured the process of acculturation by distancing itself from Jewish traditional practices, construed mockingly or nostalgically as relics of a European life left behind, a wellspring of historical or textual memories that oppress or elevate. The few departures from this trend—fiction that represents Judaic ritual and experience sympathetically, with complexity and depth—are exceptions that prove the rule: Chaim Potok’s novels, for example, beginning in the late 1960s and continuing through the close of the twentieth century, and a handful of women novelists negotiating Jewish feminism in stories and novels of the 1980s and 1990s.

Creating American Reform Judaism

1998 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sefton D. Temkin
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
New World ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Reform Judaism ◽  
American Jews ◽  
Prayer Book ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Jewish Prayer ◽  
Union College

Isaac Mayer Wise (1819–1900), founder of the major institutions of Reform Judaism in America, was a man of his time — a pioneer in a pioneer’s world. When he came to America from his childhood Bohemia in 1846, he found fewer than 50,000 Jews and only two ordained rabbis. With his sense of mission and tireless energy, he set himself to tailoring the vehicle of Reform Judaism to meet the needs of the growing Jewish community. Wise strove for unity among American Jews, and for a college to train rabbis to serve them. The establishment of Hebrew Union College (1875) was the crowning achievement of his life. His quest for unity also led him to draw up an American Jewish prayer-book, Minhag America, to found the Central Conference of American Rabbis, and to edit two weeklies; their editorials, breathing fire and energy, were no less important in his quest for leadership. Here as elsewhere, it was his persistence that won him the war where his impetuosity lost him many battles. This book captures the vigour of Wise’s personality and the politics and concerns of contemporary Jewish life and leadership in America. The biography is a lively portrait of a rabbi whose singular efforts in many fields made him a pivotal figure in the naturalization of the Jew and Judaism in the New World.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document