Jewish music

This past Monday the ever-entertaining Rav Gil brought up the subject of Jewish music. The specific question was whether Erev shel Shoshanim, an Israeli love song, should be used as the melody to which we sing Kedushah in Shabbat services.

You cannot bring up a subject like this without a debate that follows certain predictable lines. And that is exactly what happened. By "predictable" I don't mean anything derogatory; I love that discussion, and always learn something wonderful from it. A mixture of sevara and trivia come together to the point in which most persons, including myself, realize that we are in deep waters, and that no hard-line position can be taken.

Just like the question, "What makes architecture Islamic?" there exists the debate question, "What makes music Jewish?" Is it the music or the words? If the music, what music? If the words, what words?

One line of debate says: "I have heard sacred Jewish words sung to the tune of X, Y, and Z secular songs, and most people know those songs first and foremost as the secular songs". Bonus points if the secular words are terribly inappropriate for religious sentiment.

Another line of debate says: "Some of the melodies that everyone takes for granted in sacred Jewish music actually come from X, Y, and Z secular songs, but those songs are so old that almost no one knows about them anymore". And we face the realization that it has been done already for so long, that it is an unavoidable process.

What is especially entertaining to me is that I saw this debate occur along nearly identical lines in the Christian world. I grew up and was educated in an environment that abhorred rock-and-roll and all manner of "contemporary" music (that was the word for it in the 1980s), and had an extremely hard time accepting that "Amazing Grace" came from a pub song, and so on and so forth. (Later, when I studied musicology in college, I learned that this was all quite true, and that were are hundreds more examples. See the Boston Camerata CD, "New Britain".) Everything that passed as acceptable Worship music was identifiable with some kind of secular genre.

The magic ingredient: most people did not know. Somehow, there is a power in that ignorance.

And so I am amused when "Land Down Under" passes for a Jewish wedding song, along with all the other examples you can see in that thread. It's ironic and therefore funny. But I am horrified and disgusted when Backstreet-Boys type music is played on "frum" radio, and when jazz-infused Hassidic rock becomes the de-facto choice for a religious celebration. Because there, there is no irony. Just ignorance.