Music in Israel

ISRAEL has won a considerable reputation as a music-loving country, partly as a result of some flattering reports from enthusiastic tourists and visiting artists. It is true, however, that the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra this year has about 24,000 subscribers —quite a number for a population of less than two million, half of which consists of people who were till yesterday practically excluded from Western civilization.

An artist is expected to perform the most esoteric music, both preclassical and contemporary, in remote villages and rural settlements. I have met an Israeli plumber who knew that a certain unimportant work by a little-known composer can be played either in a version for full orchestra or with string and percussion instruments only. But Israel’s reputation of musical culture does not depend on plumbers, nor on a responsive audience, but on the number and the quality of musicians and musical activities which the country can proudly claim as its own.

Nowhere else in the world can the beginning of an organized musical life be marked with such precision. It was in the year 1936 that Bronislaw Huberman created what he then called the Palestine Orchestra. Before that, a few modest music schools had been in existence, and some amateur or semiprofessional groups had occasionally offered concerts of chamber music, orchestral works, and even opera performances. Sporadically, famous virtuosos used to stop in Palestine on recital tours of the Middle East. In December, 1936, Arturo Toscanini inaugurated the first season of the Palestine Orchestra. Since that time, the population has enjoyed regular symphonic concerts with distinguished conductors and soloists and first-rate instrumentalists.

The exquisite concerts in the Tel Aviv Museum also started in 1936, and have continued every Saturday night until the present. Chamber music societies in Jerusalem. Haifa, and several provincial cities followed, and numerous conservatories were founded, dominated today by two full-scale academies with university status.

In this same period the Jerusalem BroadcastingStation was established. Its orchestra, though limited in size, systematically presents rarely played old and new music, emphasizing works by local composers. A similar pioneer spirit prevails in the Haifa Symphony and the Ramat-Gan chamber orchestras — even more praiseworthy, because these institutions are not free of box office worries. Fortunately, Israel has had the help of generous individuals — for example, the Baroness Bethsabee de Rothschild, who has sponsored an annual series of concerts entirely devoted to novelties — and organizations such as the AmericaIsrael Cultural Foundation, whose beneficiaries include the Tel Aviv Chamber Choir, the prizewinning and internationally acclaimed Rinat Choir, and the National Opera, which after a hard struggle for survival has at last become a permanent establishment, constantly improving its standards and extending its repertoire.

Besides the activities of professional musicians, there is a feverish assiduity in schools, in military camps, in villages and settlements about the teaching of music appreciation and the training of choirs, folk orchestras, and dance groups, under the direction of the Histadrut, which also organizes national festivals and publishes music. Young musicians perform in contests, congresses, and meetings. In all these activities emphasis rests on the young and their education.

The percentage of talented musicians is extremely high in Israel. As a rule, graduates from the conservatories and academies, completing their studies abroad, do very well, and some of them have distinguished themselves in international competitions. But the government is determined to promote the teaching of music not as a profession but as an integral part of education. For a few years, a special music section had existed in the Israel Ministry of Education and Culture. Its main achievement was the establishment of an Ethnological Institute of Oriental-Jewish music with the principal purpose of collecting and recording traditional tunes still alive among the immigrants from the Oriental countries. The music section also founded a central music library, supported by a philanthropic corporation of Chicago, Brotherhood through Music. Later on, an advisory arts council, including a music committee, was entrusted with cultural affairs, while the ministry limited its executive authority to the supervision of musical education in the public school system, starting as early as in the kindergarten.

The calendar of international events set up by the Tourist Corporation under the Prime Minister’s office shows at any given time several musical projects. So far, Israel has been the host to four assemblies of choirs from all over the world; four summer workshops of chamber music, taking place in a beautiful artists’ resort, Zikhron-Yaacov, with the participation of eminent teachers from abroad; one of the World Festivals of Contemporary Music, in Haifa. Since King David used to play the harp, the idea arose to organize the first international contest of harpists in Jerusalem. And though the Biblical instrument looked and sounded like anything but a modern harp, the response was so enthusiastic, the success so overwhelming that it was decided to hold similar contests in Israel every three years. A competition of cellists followed, under the honorary presidency of Pablo Casals, who, with Isaac Stern, Rudolf Serkin, the Budapest Quartet, and other celebrities, had taken part in the first full-scale Israeli music festival. Otherwise, international relations are sustained by the Israeli section of the International Society for Contemporary Music. For almost all of the annual World Festivals of the society, an Israeli composition has been chosen by an international jury. The section is a branch of the Israeli League of Composers, an organization comprising about two hundred members and running its own publishing house.

WHAT is Israel’s music like? What are the chief tendencies of the Israeli composer, his aims, difficulties, and fulfillments? Israel has been rightly called a melting pot, its population constituting a mixture of immigrants from many countries, from several continents. To the creative artist two basic questions present themselves: first, how to unify varieties of origin, the national problem; second, how to get along in the new Asiatic, Oriental surroundings with a background of experiences, learning, taste, and imagination acquired in the West.

At this point, I am afraid, some dealing with the worn-out term “folklore” will be unavoidable. In Israel it means more than a convenient tool for commonplace writing; it is a rather strange, hardly manageable raw material which is nevertheless to be approached with the intention of legitimate inheritance, recovery, ownership. Oriental music making is improvisational, monodic, or, to a certain degree, heterophonic. Any tonal, harmonic, metrical scheme works like a strait jacket. So, on a higher stage of Oriental folklore treatment, which at least reveals the composer as being aware of the tasteless gravy resulting from a mechanical West-East amalgamation, there appears the use of neutral intervals, for the most part fourths and fifths. Melodic devices include the simple quotation of actual folk tunes, the artificial imitation of idiomatic characteristics, such as ornamentation, falsetto effects, or the so-called gypsy scale (with the typical augmented second), and modality. Rhythm shows frequent deviations from the even beat, favors syncopation, and evokes associations with exotic plucked instruments such as the qanun and the oud, or drums. Orchestration is, accordingly, full of pizzicato, exhibits an abundance of percussion, prefers flutes, oboes, and clarinets (to replace the Arabic shepherd’s pipe). The final process, far more refined, consists in sublimating national elements to the point where the origin of a certain music can still be identified without the help of quotations or imitations.

A similar phenomenon is present in the mysterious French quality of Debussy’s music, the German quality of Brahms’s, the Italian quality of Verdi’s. But Israeli music is generally far behind these stages of national sublimation, which can probably be achieved only after many years of speaking the same language, breathing the same air, going through the same political, cultural, intellectual, and emotional experiences. However, even during its very short time of national consciousness, Israeli music is gradually overcoming its somewhat provincial narrowness and steadily growing into a more universal art. The younger composers, getting acquainted with new trends, techniques, and schools in the world, are learning how to make their choice out of professional, and not primarily chauvinistic, considerations. And strangely enough, their music, although following supernational systems such as dodecaphonic, serial, and electronic methods, is in a way more Israeli than many of the folkloristic attempts.

IT ALL began a little more than half a century ago, when a group of Jewish composers in Russia started a society of Jewish music, having in mind the creation, promotion, and protection of a specifically Jewish musical language, to be based upon eastern European Jewish folk songs and also on traditional liturgy. The only still active survivor of this generation is Yoachim Stutschewsky, Russian-born, about seventy years old, a cellist and author of a well-known book on cello playing. When confronted with the music of the Asiatic and African communities, Stutschewsky remained faithful to his beloved Hasidic tunes and went on composing, on the soil of the future Jewish state.

An obvious profusion and confusion of styles mark the efforts of composers born in eastern Europe, brought up in central Europe, influenced by western Europe, and finally transplanted to a different continent. A typical example is Joseph Kaminski, concertmaster of the Israel Philharmonic. “In my childhood in Warsaw,” he explains (Kaminski was born in 1906 in Warsaw), “I was first attracted by Scriabin; then, in Vienna, by Mahler and Richard Strauss; later still by the French impressionists; by Prokofiev, too. Finally, I discovered the local color of my new homeland. In addition,” he declares, “a modern-feeling composer can hardly avoid the twelve-tone row, and if I were to live in an appropriate place, I would certainly write serial and electronic music as well.”

The works of Oedoen Partos, viola player and director of the Israel Academy of Music, are filled with a similar variety of heterogeneous elements. They are molded and formed by a personality of unusual creative power. Although a great deal of his time is spent as an administrator and teacher, Partos is a prolific composer who has written large symphonic works, virtually keystones in the development of Israeli music. He is fifty-four years old and comes from the Bartók-Kodály school. His Hungarian heritage is evident even in Yemenite, Bokharan, or Turkistanian tunes, Persian maqamat, traditional chant, ancient Oriental psalmody, or progressive Western schemes. They all dwell together smoothly and satisfactorily in Partos’ compositions. There is probably no concept in our times which this open-minded musician has not approached, absorbed, and applied, in order to venture a possible synthesis with the venerable cultures of the ancient world.

Another exponent of East-West tendencies is Paul Ben-Haim, sixty-four, easily the most frequently performed Israeli composer. His appeal to large audiences is due to an admirable craftsmanship, acquired in his native Germany, and to his rather conservative style, which is never disagreeable, never provoking, never shocking. BenHaim has inherited Ernest Bloch’s pathos and dignity, chiefly in his symphonic and choral works; the proverbial German proficiency and solidity; and a vivid interest in colors, derived from his post-Romantic and impressionist past.

The Orient is full of colorful, picturesque, exotic scenes, always enchanting, even when presented in secondhand frames. Within a traditional sonata, aria, or rondo form, for instance, the accompaniment starts moving in parallel fifths; accompaniment and melody proceed in a moderate bitonality; the melodic material is modal, ornamental, syncopated in the Oriental way. For a considerable time, the term “Mediterranean style” was supposed to indicate a musical idiom embracing all the peoples living near the Mediterranean Sea. The emphasis was both on “peoples” and on “Mediterranean.” Menahem Avidom, after having spent many of his fifty-three years in his native Poland, in France, and in Egypt, is trying to revive this idea. One of his orchestral works is called Folk Symphony. He is also among the few contributors to the art form with the widest possible appeal, namely patriotic opera, sharing the popularity in this field with Marc Lavry, whose symphonic poems bearing the titles of Israeli landscapes have become favorites. On the other hand, Karel Salmon, born in 1892 in Germany, musical director of the Jerusalem Broadcasting Service from its beginning till 1958, went so far in his Mediterranean policy as to write an orchestral suite with Greek folk tunes and Hebrew dance patterns. Hanoch Jacoby, fifty-two years old and also of German extraction, started as an orthodox follower of Hindemith and had a long way to go before he finally “turned Oriental.”

However, the Orient is not the exclusive source of inspiration. No less influential is the Bible. Fortunately, we have been preserved from imitations of Biblical music, for lack of information. But there are enough happenings, thoughts, and emotions in the Bible to provide a piece of music with a national spirit, whether the composer wishes to express them by a specifically national vocabulary or not. In fact, the impact of the Bible on Israeli artistic creativity cannot be overestimated. Almost all the composers in Israel have turned to Biblical subjects. Some, such as E. W. Sternberg, born in 1898 in Germany, apply old and reliable Western techniques without much discrimination. Others, earnestly concerned with the national problem, are expressing the most divergent opinions.

Joseph Tal, another composer of German descent, and fifty-one years old, demands a strict separation between national interests and art. In his opinion, attention should be paid not to how Israeli the music is, but to what extent it is able to hold its own within the family of nations. He asserts that it is not the choice of technical means, not modality, syncopation, ornamentation, or Orientalism, that makes the national style, and that a composition can be definitely Israeli in spirit though conceived as dodecaphonic, serial, or electronic music. These and similar ideas are supported by Tal’s Biblical dramas, cantatas, and choreographic works, among them a nonelectronic and an electronic Exodus.

One of the strongest opponents of Tal’s views is A. U. Boscovich, a tough fighter for an unsentimental, unsophisticated, primitive Asiatic idiom which has as little to do with Western music as the Hebrew language has with Western languages. Coming originally from Transylvania and being a man of considerable knowledge who has a wide scope of interests, Boscovich the composer is taking into account, as far as Western music is concerned, only the Middle Ages in France — Machaut’s isorrhythmic motets, the antiphonal forms of the organum, and so forth, because these, he affirms, are still related to the chant (originating in the Hebrew cantillations). Boscovich is a professor of composition, including harmony and counterpoint, at the Israel Academy of Music. Yet it would be futile to look in his compositions for scholastic devices.

The younger generation of Israeli composers is likewise divided into opposing factions. Exponents of strictly cosmopolitan tendencies are Yitshak Sadai, born in 1935 in Bulgaria, who writes serial music; Herbert Bruen, forty-three, interested in electronic music, now in Munich; Czechoslovakian-born Yehoshua Lakner, thirtyseven, busy with theoretical experiments; and R. Haubenstock-Ramati, of Polish origin, forty-two, closely affiliated with the Boulez and Berio groups, at present in Vienna. A former Boulanger student, Mordekhai Seter, born in 1916 in Russia, has become an extremely efficient spokesman of the national school. He points out that there are fundamental differences between Western and Oriental music. While European music has developed from the Gregorian chant into the harmonic, polyphonic, rhythmical, formal, and instrumental complexities of our time, the essence of Oriental music has remained unchanged for a thousand years. On the other hand, Western evolution from the pentatonic to the twelve-tone series appears only as a poor achievement as compared with Arabic scales of seventeen, or Indian systems of twenty-two tones.

A further dissimilarity occurs in the idea of the function of the composer. In the Orient, the composer is producer and performer in one person, and the only bearer of exclusively oral traditions. These and other incompatibilities make a musical synthesis between East and West difficult. Seter suggests, therefore, trying such a synthesis only in those fields where at least some common features can be detected — for example, in the principle of variation, especially the chaconne, in the instrumental toccata, in the vocal cantata, and so forth. For the rest, he warns that any combination of Eastern and Western elements will produce paradoxical clashes or cheap, superficial exoticisms.

Ben-Zion Orgad is a truly indigenous Israeli musician. Now thirty-five, he was brought up in Palestine, went to school there, lived, worked, fought, composed there. He had been primarily concerned with such themes as national consciousness, personal joys and sorrows, for which the music served as an extensive medium of expression. Recently, while completing his studies in the United States, he discovered a new way of writing; his starting point is now the essence of an idea presented in utmost brevity. There is no exposition, only a succession of “gestures" creating certain tensions or relaxations and alternating through various regions of pitch.

This abstract, rhetorical idiom is closely related to the principles of the traditional reading of the Bible, to the Biblical tropes, where each word has its own musical symbol, where groups of symbols correspond with textual phrases, and where each symbol is classified according to the importance of the respective word.

Orgad has demonstrated that there can be a surprising connection between the oldest and newest musical practices. But then we must remember that Israelis drive on the same roads which served Herod’s soldiers.