Our musical challenges of the present arise out of the interface and, to some extent, the conflict between, on the one hand, age-old musical traditions having a cultural life of their own and, on the other hand, the contemporary realities of North American culture. Part 1 establishes the nature of our musical traditions by summarizing the development of what has classically been considered “sacred sound” in synagogues (in the first two essays) and churches (in the third and fourth essays). At the same time, the authors explore the impact of social change in eras past, demonstrating that neither Jewish nor Christian liturgical music is homogeneous.
Eliyahu Schleifer, noted Jewish musicologist, teaches liturgical music history at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Jerusalem. His article, the first historical study in the book, is actually two essays in one. It begins with a detailed synopsis of presynagogue music, that is, music from the cult of the First and Second Temples. Since these institutions are the background out of which many later musical traditions arose, or to which they were retroactively linked, we have included the lengthy discussion of Temple music as a preamble for the entire historical discussion of part 1. The second half of the article chronicles the history of synagogue music from its inception until the rise of Reform Judaism in the nineteenth century.
Later, in the third essay, Margot Fassler and Peter Jeffery provide a parallel survey for Christian music up to the Protestant Reformation. Both authors are researchers in the field of medieval liturgical music. Fassler teaches the history of music at Brandeis University. Jeffery is currently on leave from the University of Delaware, with a John D. and Catherine T.MacArthur Fellowship.
We have chosen two chronologically disparate but functionally similar points at which to break up the essays in part 1. Following the suggestion in volume 2 of this series (and the order of volume 1), we see the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century and the rise of Reform Judaism three centuries later as parallel phenomena, two instances in which social change disrupted medieval traditions and successfully questioned each tradition’s continuity in the single authoritative form with which it had presented itself. With the thought that these two events might prove paradigmatic for our own age—which volume 2 suggests, in fact, is a “second reformation”—we asked the authors of our first and third essays to conclude their accounts at the point where the reformation relevant to their own tradition occurs.
To take our narrative through the reformation periods in question, we turned to Geoffrey Goldberg (for the second essay of the book) and Robin A. Leaver (for the fourth and final essay in part 1). Both a rabbi and a cantor, Goldberg is currently a faculty member of the School of Sacred Music, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, New York, specializing particularly in the music of nineteenth-century Reform Judaism. Leaver, who teaches at both Westminster Choir College and Drew University, is known for his research in the music and liturgy of the Reformation. Each in his own way, Goldberg and Leaver explore the impact of social change on sacred sound during another era: the birth of Reform Judaism, for Jews, and the Protestant Reformation, for Christians.