Jews in classical music

When I read your initial essay I would hazard a guess Mahler are not your cup of tea. In our generation my nomination for most influential Jewish composer would probably be Jerry Goldsmiths.

 

Einstein played the violin. Sherlock Holmes, too. Perhaps the pitch of violin sound resonates with brain waves and stimulates right side functions of the brain - intuition, creativity etc. Or left side stuff - logical reasoning etc. Perhaps I could try deep meditation while listening to Bach sonatas and partitas for solo violin.

 

John Zorn.

-- Ian

 

What an fascinating link, cocytus (a rather rambling article, but no less interesting for all that).

 

And you'd be wrong, Wolfgang. While not my favourite composer, I do like Mahler. After a listening session at Titian's I bought the DG set of his symphonies and I'm listening my way through them.

Jerry Goldsmith? My daughters are big fans - but that's because they're big Trekkies and he wrote some of the better Trek scores. (Well, they were big Trekkies, until "Enterprise" came along and ruined it all).

 

If we extend this enquiry to distinguished performers of classical music who happen to be Jewish then I am sure that the "out of all proportion" assertion would be more than vindicated. On looking through some sections of my record/CD collection I find it hard to discover artists who are not Jewish. And I'm not counting Bernstein - I never could stand him conducting anything, not even West Side Story.

 

To quote the original post:

"We all know of the prodigious number of great Jewish artists"

I was more concerned with composers.

 

Sorry for going off-topic and being juvenille, but Bernstein *rules* man!

Are you familiar with his reading of Rhapsody in Blue (NY philly iirc)? Awesome stuff imho.

DT

 

As always, you're entitled to your opinion. I'll stick with mine - and I do know the cited Gershwin recording.

 

Veering far OT into the Horizon of the Aten

While the Hymn to Aten and Psalm 103 are often compared, the biggest formative influence on Judaism seems to have been the period of exile in Babylon.
The god represented by the sun disc or "Aten" was not invented by Amenhotep IV as Akhenaten was known before he changed his name. The sun god Re was an ancient and powerful deity linked intimately with the king and the after life already by the time of the 18th dynasty. Pharaoh means son of Re.
Aten in the new state religion was the creator of everything, which was not a particularly new idea, however Aten as sole creator and giver of life rendered all other deities effectively meaningless. What Akhenaten seems to have done here is take a trend and develop it to it's "logical" conclusion.
In addition, and probably crucially to the final outcome, the king and the royal family and *not* the priesthood where Aten's chief (sole...) interlocutors. This is made very clear on the famous Amarna plaques which depict Akhenaten with Nefertitti receiving the life-gving rays directly from Aten. This implication of this is fairly obvious.
The motivation for religious reform seems to have been as much practical as visionary: Akhenaten was attempting to restore legitimacy and power back to the throne and out of the hands of a rich and powerful priesthood. This was a process he did not start, but one he did take forward at incredible pace.
There is no evidence that Akhenaten met a grisly end (the busts seem to portray a frail man). It was probably in the interest of his opponents in the priesthood to spread this kind of misinformation, though.
The other really striking, epochal innovation of Amarna is the art, which was even more radical than the religion.
What is undeniable is that the Amarna revolution was a truely spectacular failure that lasted barely two decades.
The Amarna period could be said to have formally ended when Akhenaten's son, Tutankhaten, renounced his father's innovations (probably under the influence of his advisors) and adopted a convential Pharaonic name that paid tribute to the revived deity Amun.
His new name: Tutankhamun.
Class over. You can all wake up now.