Music is a Job!

Haven't done this in a while, but time to bitch about something no one cares about!

Today's article, The Music You Won’t Hear on Rosh Hashana lists a couple of reasons that Jewish composers have "failed" to produce a body of Jewish liturgical music that can compare to the immense repertoire we have for the Christian liturgy. He makes a couple of good points, but instead of pointing to the most obvious cause, he turns to the collective subconscious of the Jewish people. While this mode of interpretation, the use musical works to perform psycho-analysis, is dubious when applied to a single composer, it becomes borderline racist when applied to a segment of composers that spans a huge chunk of both time and place.

My justification for this disparity between the two ethnicity/religions is much more practical: $$$$. While Hoffman rightly cites the fact that musical instruments were banned during Jewish religious services at the fall of the second temple, he doesn't take the next step: if there are no instruments, the temple isn't going to pay a composer. On the other hand, a huge chunk of the religious music that we now take as our canon was paid for handsomely by various churches. For example, JS Bach worked in churches his entire life. After all, he played organ; where else will you find one of those? On second thought, did he play organ because he worked for the church.

By contrast, Meyerbeer, who is mentioned by Hoffman as a Jew that doesn't hold up his end of the cultural bargain, worked in the lavish world of opera. He wrote immense compositions for the Paris Opera at its height. The man was getting paid! At the time, it wouldn't have occurred to a composer in that position that he needed to somehow contribute to this canon.

While I found this article extremely engaging, it ascribes our modern-day, relatively green notion of composition as a means of expression much to liberally. One wonders if Hoffman didn't include a discussion of pay-scale simply because it would damage the aesthetic that funds the American Chamber Players.