<Musical Tradition.
[Jewish liturgy stiles in
Italy]
The various strata of Italian Jewry and the diverse origins
of the Jewish communities are reflected in the variety of
their musical traditions. Six stylistic traditions can be
distinguished:
(1) The Italian rite (also called Io'azi Italiki(lo'azi Italki) or Italyani) came to the
communities of north central Italy in the late Middle Ages.
In 1970 it was still in use in "Italian rite synagogues" or
Turin, Padua, Mantua, Venice, Ferrara, Alessandria, Ancona
and Siena. In Pitigliano, Reggio Emiloia, and Florence it
ceased some decades earlier. In Milan and Bologna it was
adopted in the modern synagogues.
(2) Sephardi rites and chants which came from Spain, either
directly or by way of North Africa, to the communities on
the west coast, chiefly Leghorn [[Livorno]]. Their use
eventually spread to Genoa, Naples, Pisa, and in the 19th
century to Florence (where they replaced the Italian rite
and its melodies).
(3) The Sephardi chant, originating partially from Marranos
in Spain but mainly from the Balkan Peninsula and the
Orient, and received by the communities on the Adriatic
coast, chiefly Venice, and later Trieste, Ferrara, and
Ancona. In the Venetian "colonies" of Spalato and Ragusa
this tradition is extinct.
(4) The rite of three small communities in Piedmont: Asti,
Fossano, and Moncalvo (extinct), which were settled by Jews
from France in the 14th to 15th century, and called *APAM
after their Hebrew initials.
(5) The Ashkenazi rite used by the communities of
south-German origin formed in the 16th-17th century at
Casale Monferrato, Padua, Verona, Venice, Gorizia. It is
extinct in Rovigo, Vercelli, Modena, Sandaniele del Friuli,
and other small centers.
(6) Rome, where until the beginning of the 20th century
various congregations had "Scole"
(synagogues) which, according to their origin, were called
Sicilian, Castilian, Catalan, or Italian. In the
20th-century Great Synagogue, inaugurated in 1904, the
different musical traditions fused into a single rite in
which the Italian element predominated, but in which the
influences of Sephardi chant and ancient and modern Roman
Christian liturgy could be discerned.
[Italian pronunciation of
Hebrew - italianized tunes]
The most important element common to these different
traditions is the Italian pronunciation of Hebrew. Because
of the nasalization of the ayin, the loss of the he, the pronunciation
of the tav without
dagesh as d, and especially since
all the vowels (including the sheva na at the beginning and frequently
at the end of a word) are fully pronounced, a peculiar
sonorousness of musical expression emerged which completely
italianized the tunes, including those of German and Spanish
origin.
Concomitantly, the chants of Germanic origin underwent a
leveling of their pentatonic and characteristically wide
intervals, and those of oriental origin lost such exotic
elements as the interval of the augmented second, the
plaintive and excessively melismatic turns, and the
coloratura passages. The majority of the chants and their
style of performance are characterized in all Italian rites
by an ecclesiastical solemnity or, at times, by operatic
idioms. In the 18th-19th centuries, the singing was also
influenced by the "learned" styles of Italian music or by
popular songs.
[Singing in Italian
synagogues according to the "Italian plan"- organs in the
Italian synagogues]
In the synagogues built according to the "Italian plan",
i.e., bipolar construction, the tevah or bimah is situated in an elevated niche,
like a counterapse, in the western wall opposite the aron; the benches are
therefore arranged in two rows along the northern and
southern walls and the worshipers are thus able to see the
face and gestures of the hazzan
(ḥazzan) [[cantor]]. The singing therefore
developed responsorial forms with much public participation.
Under the direction of the hazzan (ḥazzan) [[cantor]], who
became a kind of conductor of this homophonous choir, there
was participation even in the recital of the introductory
formulae of the Shema
and the psalms.
In the 19th century, with the construction of modern
synagogues where the bimah
is closer to the aron,
participation by the public was reduced; but following the
example of the Reform synagogues in Vienna and Paris, an
organized choir (male, sometimes mixed or female) was
introduced for which new collections of liturgical chants
were composed, even in such small Jewish communities as
those in Vercelli, Asti, Trieste, Saluzzo, and Mantua. Those
chants were composed mainly in 19th-century idiom,
reminiscent of the operatic style of Verdi or Rossini, or
based on patriotic songs of the Italian Risorgimento in
which the Jews had enthusiastically taken part.
This music required the use of an organ; however, after
(col. 1142)
World War II, the organ was abolished in all Italian Jewish
communities. It should be noted that the development of
"cultured" 19th-century music had its precedents in many
Italian cities in the art music composed for synagogue use
by Jewish and some non-Jewish musicians during the ghetto
period of the 17th and 18th centuries.
[16th and 17th century:
Jewish composers - rite in Rome - and more rites]
In the 16th and 17th centuries, Jewish musicians and
composers were greatly appreciated by and enjoyed the favor
of the local rulers. Salomone de Rossi of Mantua, Leone de
Modena of Venice, and the Christian Carlo Grossi of Modena
are examples of this Jewish-Italian musical symbiosis.
The Italian rite in Rome and in the northern communities
possesses its own tradition of biblical cantillation in the
reading of the *parashah,
the *haftarah
(including a special "festive" intonation of the haftarah), and in the
sung rendition of the psalms. This tradition is documented
in the notations of parashah
and haftarah tunes
published by Giulio *Bartolocci (1693) and in the intonation
of the psalms, notated first by E. Bottigari (1599) and some
years later by Jacob b. Isaac Finzi, hazzan (ḥazzan)
[[cantor]] of the Ashkenazi community of Casale Monferrato,
according to the tradition of his teacher, R. Abraham Segre
(preserved in the Hebrew manuscript, Jews College, London,
Montefiore 479, fol. 147b).
In this tradition, only five or six of the main
(disjunctive) accents are rendered by musical motives of
their own, the subservient (conjunctive) accents being
disregarded. The application of the motives does not
coincide with the "Tiberian" accentuation system with which
the biblical text is provided, implying the existence of an
independent system based on an oral tradition. This
independent system is related to the old Near Eastern
practice of Ekphonesis, an early Byzantine term meaning
public reading of the Scriptures. Since the Italian rite
derives from the Palestinian which dates from an earlier
period than the one in which the Tiberian system of the
Masoretic accents became established, it may be proposed
that this method of biblical cantillation is equally
ancient. (col. 1145)
The cantillation is limited to a strictly tetrachordal
(four-tone) range, and tends to be syllabic, without
melismas, the musical motifs being spread over entire words
or groups of words. In the Sephardi and Ashkenazi synagogues
of Italy, too, this syllabic rendition prevails in biblical
cantillation and even more so in the melodies of the
prayers. The medieval and oriental taste for melismatics is
preserved only in some archaic melodies of the APAM rite or
in rites of more conservative and isolated centers such as
Gorizia (Ashkenazi) and Leghorn [[Livorno]] (Sephardi).
However, there too, cantorial improvisation in the oriental
style is excluded, the melodic formulas for each liturgical
ceremony being fixed by tradition in the form of
leitmotiv-like systems which are peculiar to each community.
Italian rabbis often protested against the melismatic
influences of oriental or Ashkenazi hazzanim (ḥazzanim) on
the repertoire of a community, not only because they wished
to keep the local musical traditions intact but because
melismas interrupted or distorted the rendering of the text
according to the correct grammatical accentuation.
No liturgical or quasi-liturgical Judeo-Italian vernacular
songs are found in the tradition, and perhaps none existed.
There are, however, a few exceptions: songs in "Bagitto"
(the Jewish Livornese dialect), in Judeo-Corfiote (in
Trieste), and in Piedmontese-Jewish, all of which are
translations of Hebrew Passover songs, Purim parodies, and
the like. Moreover, in the middle of the 19th century, some
poems written in Hebrew, with parallel Italian translation,
were set to compositions and popular anthems of the
Risorgimento to celebrate the emancipation of the Jews.
The hymns of the proselytes of San Nicandro, created between
1930 and 1950, form a separate and peculiar repertoire. The
hymns are of biblical inspiration, but the language is the
dialect of the Gargano-Puglia region and the melodies are
adaptations of regional songs. Women perform the hymns in a
kind of primitive polyphony.
[Song collections]
The only systematic collection of traditional synagogal
melodies for the annual liturgical cycle is Federico
*Consolo's Libro del
canti d'Israele [[Book with Israeli songs]] (1892),
containing the Sephardi tradition of Leghorn [[Livorno]]. A
collection of Ashkenazi melodies of Ferrara was made in
1925-35 on the initiative of A.Z. *Idelsohn, but most of the
material has been lost. A collection from the present
repertoire of the Roman synagogue has been published by A.
Piatelli (see bibliography). An early and interesting
musical transcription is the "Twelve Biblical Intonations"
of the Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews of Venice. The gentile
composer Benedetto Marcello's setting of Italian psalm
paraphrases, Estro
poetico-armonico (Venice, 1724-27), was inspired by
these Jewish chants, which he notated and published together
with his own piece.
[L.LE.]> (col. 1146)
Encyclopaedia Judaica
