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Musical Dialogues of East and West: An Introduction
by Malcolm Miller
posted 14 February 2006
Musical Dialogues of East and West is an exciting programme of concerts, dance, and discussion, which explores and aims to illuminate the diverse cross-influences of Middle Eastern and European musical styles as exemplified particularly in the music of Israel and her Arab neighbours.
Certainly the incorporation of a variety of eastern musical styles within Western music has a long, and colourful history. One need cite only a few famous examples as the Turkish music of Mozart and Beethoven, the Hungarian and Gypsy styles of Liszt, Spanish and Japanese works by Ravel and Debussy, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Arabian orientalism in Sheherezade, and Benjamin Britten’s uses of Javanese Gamelan. Since the tonal language of the Western tradition was based on Gregorian Church modes, themselves an evolution of the Byzantine and earlier Biblical Temple modes, one could even argue that the whole repertoire of Western music is an expression of a on-going “Dialogue of East and West”!
Yet the music of Israel, which features prominently in today’s fascinating concerts, exemplifies the synthesis of East and West perhaps more than that of any other country, perhaps due to its unique historical and geographical position, with its sources and traditions drawn from communities scattered across the world including the Middle East and the Levant.
Already from the beginning of the Twentieth Century, fieldwork by composers from Russia and central Europe had rediscovered the rich vein of Jewish, Arabic and East European folk music in expeditions ranging from Palestine to the Pale of Settlement. The work of Abraham Zvi Idelsohn, the ‘father of Jewish Music’, in Jerusalem resulted in a vast Thesaurus of Hebrew Oriental Melodies (1923-1933), which made available for the first time Jewish folk music drawn from Sephardi and Oriental communities in Arabic and African lands. It became a basic resource for the immigrant generation of composers who came to Israel in the 1930s from central Europe, including such leading figures as Boskovich and Ben-Haim. These composers made conscious efforts to absorb Middle Eastern musical idioms, benefiting from local performers such as the Yemenite singer Bracha Zefira, for whom many songs were arranged.
Rejecting their heritage of Eastern Europe and Yiddish culture, they forged a new vision of collective art in which music reflected the national aspirations of Zionism. The resultant ‘Mediterranean Style’, was a pastoral evocation of the biblical and desert landscape of the Holy Land, awakening the dynamic idealism of its people, and drawing on both Arab dance rhythms and scales, and Israeli Hora and Jewish modes, as well as biblical and Psalm texts. The new idiom represented a rejection of the Germanic tradition in favour of French impressionism and its exoticism, as shown in many works featured today, notably Boskovich’s Semitic Suite with its imitations of the oud, and Ben-Haim’s lyrical works for instruments and voice, with its eastern decorative melisma and dance movements. Such assimilation of folkloric influences into a western formal idiom can be compared to the folk-inspired works of their contemporaries around the world, Vaughan Williams, Holst and later Britten in Britain, Copland in America, Bartok and Kodaly in Hungary. At the same time certain Israeli composers retained ties with central European modernism, notably Josef Tal, a pioneer of electro-acoustics, and Mordecai Seter, whose music is included in the afternoon’s choral concert.
The music of the two Israeli composers, Yehezkel Braun and Menachem Wiesenberg, whom we are honoured to welcome to this event, exemplifies the way that subsequent generations deepened their awareness of Arabic, Judeo Spanish and other Jewish and Middle Eastern styles. Their music increasingly combines Arabic techniques such as improvisatory ‘taqsim’ and the ‘maqam’ modes, and Jewish cantillation and Hebrew text setting, with Western forms and techniques. For Menachem Wiesenberg, like many of the younger generation, the varied musical soundscape of modern Israel, symbolized perhaps by the intermingling of the chants of the muezzin and chazzan, is no longer exotic but a part of the fabric of daily life
Thus their music alludes to a far wider gamut of diverse traditions, from Yiddish, to klezmer to Arabic and Ladino, as well as jazz, all these assimilated within the avant-garde and contemporary international idioms of our time. It is a process that finds resonances with the current generation in Europe, such as the synthesis into the classical arena of Yiddish dances, Klezmer and jazz in the music of the British composers Adam Gorb, and Rohan Kriwaczek, who will join us today for premieres of their works.
A similar symbiosis of diverse musical cultures in the freer improvisatory genre of world music colours the concluding concert by George Samaan, the Palestinian Arab composer and oudist, with the Israeli bassist and composer Daphna Sadeh, whom we are privileged to welcome. In our era of globalisation, the whole question of multi-layered identities in music has become a crucial issue in an evolving universal idiom.
The explosion of world music is an indication of the need to search both for roots and cultural dialogue and synthesis. Alongside the myriad fusions of western and eastern genres, from various continents, Indian, African, Indonesian and Australasia, the Arab-Israeli fusion articulates a quest for bridge-building across political and cultural divisions to create and foster harmonious coexistence.
At a purely musical level, like the classical composers mentioned above and featured in the exciting array of concerts presented here, they express a profound concern for a balance of regional and international influences which places music in Israel and her neighbours at the cutting edge of contemporary music in the international arena. It is in this context that Handel’s colourful oratorio Judas Maccabaeus, topical for its dramatic and musical connection with the forthcoming Jewish festival of Hanukah, offers an aptly symbolic climax for the day. Handel, the German-born, London-based composer of Baroque Italian opera, whose most famous work, the Messiah was premiered in Dublin, embodies that creative confluence of cosmopolitan influences that enabled him to create an enduring and universally relevant series of biblical masterpieces. It is in a similar spirit of artistic multi-culturalism that we present ‘Musical Dialogues of East and West’ through which we hope to stimulate fresh perspectives on issues of identity and influences in classical and world music in the broadest sense; to enhance appreciation of the music of Israel and her Arab neighbours and to foster fruitful musical dialogue in the continuing quest for peace and harmony.
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