Sarah M. Ross - Armenian and Jewish Experience between Expulsion and Destruction

Edited by

Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum in Kooperation mit dem Zentrum Jdische Studien Berlin-Brandenburg

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ISBN 9783110695335

e-ISBN (PDF) 9783110695403

e-ISBN (EPUB) 9783110695533

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Sarah M. Ross

Regina Randhofer

At the beginning of the twentieth century, two men, who never met, had the same idea. Hundreds of miles apart, they collected over many years thousands of traditional songs that they saw as the long forgotten, unadulterated, and pure music of their people. The Armenian priest and musician Komitas Vardapet (18691935) searched for genuine Armenian music. He found it in folk tunes that were practiced in villages in the Armenian Highlands, a region divided between the Ottoman and Russian Empires, that was of great historical and symbolic importance to the Armenian people. Komitas collection of Armenian melodies became the foundation of modern Armenian national music. The Jewish cantor Abraham Zvi Idelsohn (18821938) went on a similar mission to locate authentic Jewish music. Idelsohns search took him to the Land of the Fathers, to Palestine then, a province of the Ottoman Empire. On the basis of the liturgical melodies that he collected among local Oriental Jews, Idelsohn formulated his idea of an essentially Jewish music rooted in the Orient. With his collection, Idelsohn became the founding father of Jewish music studies.

The common objectives of these two men were no coincidence: both music researchers belonged to collectives that, after centuries of statelessness and dispersion in the Diaspora, were searching for a new self-understanding as a nation. Both were born in the diaspora Komitas in Ktahya, Anatolia, and Idelsohn in Filzberg, Latvia. Komitas and Idelsohn both reflected on the alienation of their people and the resulting loss of traditions. And both perceived and responded to debates on modernization, ethnicity, and nation that emerged under the influence of Western enlightened thought, which were accompanied by efforts to transform the traditional-religious self-image into a modern national affiliation. It was not a coincidence that both scholars discovered music as a resource for national identity: music has always been related to cultural ideas such as religion, politics, economics or literature in many different ways. Music not only serves as a symbolic representation of cultural ideas and existential experiences, but it is also a powerful medium for generating and directing emotions. Academic disciplines dealing with music are therefore required to take the numerous contexts in which music is encountered into account, as well as its various functions and manifold relationships with other cultural concepts.