Iacobus Leodiensis [Iacobus de Montibus, Iacobus de Oudenaerde]

Isoz [d’Isoz], Kálmán

(b Budapest, 7 Dec 1878; d Budapest, 6 June 1956). Hungarian musicologist of French descent. After qualifying at the Budapest School of Commerce (1895) he became a bank clerk and started studying music seriously, learning the piano and theory at the Budapest Conservatory (1895–9) and the flute privately. He joined the staff of the Hungarian National Museum (1897), of which he subsequently became general secretary (1920–24), and in 1908 began a course (interrupted by war service, 1914–18) at the arts faculty of Budapest University, where he took the doctorate in 1921 with a dissertation on the notation of the Pray Manuscript. Having served for ten years as principal librarian of the Széchényi Library (1924–34), where he organized the music department, he became secretary of the Hungarian Royal Academy of Music (1934–43) and co-editor, with Bartha, of Musicologia Hungarica. In 1928 he organized the Hungarian section of the International Music Exhibition at Frankfurt, and in 1936 lectured at the Bayreuth Liszt Festival.

Isoz was one of the leading Hungarian musicologists of the early 20th century, producing invaluable studies of early 19th-century Hungarian music and musicians, musical life in Hungarian cities, the history of Hungarian music publishing and instrument making, and of Liszt’s associations with Hungary. As a librarian he established modern methods of music bibliography in Hungary; he also contributed extensively to periodicals and newspapers, and to the Zenei lexikon.

WRITINGS

with I. Mészáros: A Filharmóniai társaság múltja és jelene, 1853–1903 [The Philharmonic Society past and present] (Budapest, 1903; Fr. trans., 1903)

Arnold György (Budapest, 1908)

‘Erkel és a szimfónikus zene’ [Erkel and symphonic music], ‘Erkel emlékek és levelezéz’ [Erkel documents and correspondence], Erkel Ferenc emlékkönyv, ed. B. Fabó (Budapest, 1910), 125–56, 157–72

Erkel Ferenc (Budapest, 1910)

Doppler Ferenc levelei Erkelhez [Letters from Doppler to Erkel] (Budapest, 1911)

‘Lettres inédites ou peu connues de Francis Liszt’, BSIM, vii/7 (1911), 11–34

Latin zenei paleográfia és a Pray-kódex zenei hangjelzései [Latin musical palaeography and the musical notation of the Pray Manuscript] (diss., U. of Budapest, 1921; Budapest, 1922)

‘Le manuscrit original du “Rákóczy” de Berlioz’, Revue des études hongroises et finno-ougriennes, ii (1924), 5–17

Buda és Pest zenei művelődése, i: 1686–1873 [The musical culture of Buda and Pest] (Budapest, 1926)

Magyar zenemüvek könyvészete: Petőfi dalok [Hungarian bibliography of music: Petőfi songs] (Budapest, 1931)

A Pest-Budai Hangászegyesület és nyilvános hangversenyei, 1836–1851 [The musical society of Pest-Buda and its public concerts, 1836–1851] (Budapest, 1934)

Erkel Ferenc ‘Bátori Máriá’-ja (Budapest, 1944)

JOHN S. WEISSMANN

Israel.

Country in the Middle East. The history of the Jewish people was dominated by the traumatic destruction of the Second Temple (70 ce) and the dispersal of the majority of Jews in the Diaspora. Longing for a return to the Holy Land became a basic tenet in Jewish faith. Religious devotion, persecutions and the emergence of a Jewish national movement in the late 19th century triggered successive immigration waves of Jews to Palestine, beginning in 1880. The Jewish community of Palestine, referred to as the Yishuv (‘Settlement’), was culturally autonomous both under Ottoman rule (until 1918) and under the British mandate until the foundation of the independent state of Israel in 1948.

Israeli society has always been dominated by the ideological call to return to the Eastern biblical roots of the nation and to act as a melting pot, contrasted with internal pressures to preserve the heritage of the diverse Jewish ethnic groups, including the performance and study of classical Western repertory. Music played a role in bringing people together, whether for active participation in choirs, bands and folk singing, or as concert audiences. The deliberate revival of Hebrew as a modern language of communication was their most powerful unifying tool, and vocal music was encouraged as a potent device for disseminating the use and the correct accent of the language among immigrants. Lacking a common tradition of folksong, amateur and professional composers turned to inventing a new tradition of Hebrew songs in the hope of their dissemination among the people. Jewish communities of ancient Sephardi, or Middle Eastern, descent comprised expanded families that settled together, leading a mutually supporting cultural and religious life around their synagogue, with daily services and family events providing ample opportunities for music-making. By contrast, most European, or Ashkenazi, Jews immigrated as individuals or in nuclear families, and socialized through the Western institutional model of public concerts. Processes of acculturation ranged from complete compartmentalization to syntheses of traditions.

I. Art music

II. Folk and popular music

III. Arab music

JEHOASH HIRSHBERG (I), NATAN SHAHAR (II, 1, 2(i)), EDWIN SEROUSSI (II, 2(ii)), AMNON SHILOAH (III)

Israel

I. Art music

1. Before 1948.

2. East–West encounters.

3. Since 1948.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Israel, §I: Art music

1. Before 1948.

(i) 1880–1918.

The number of Jews in Palestine under the Ottomans grew from 8000 in 1839 to 80,000 on the eve of World War I. A small, strictly religious community, known as the ‘Old Yishuv’, settled in the ‘holy towns’ of Safed, Tiberias, Jerusalem and Hebron. The first waves of religious immigration of Jews from the Yemen, and of nationally motivated immigration from Europe, mostly from Russia, arrived in the 1880s. Musical activity started with the first amateur communal orchestra in the settlement of Rishon Le-tsiyon (leZion; 1895), soon emulated in most other settlements as well as in Jerusalem and Jaffa under the auspices of Agudat Kinnor Tsiyon (‘The Violin of Zion Society’). Their repertory consisted of light classics, marches and arrangements of Jewish folksongs. The Jews became the largest ethnic group in cosmopolitan Jerusalem, where limited musical activity was conducted within small cultural enclaves such as the private homes of diplomats or among such religious groups as the Templars.

In January 1907 the cantor and scholar A.Z. Idelsohn (1882–1938) settled in Jerusalem and conducted pioneering ethnomusicological research among the numerous local Jewish ethnic groups there, using a cylinder phonograph. His goal was to define the common elements of Jewish liturgy that might reveal the heritage of the Temple. His study of the Yemenites culminated in the first volume of his Thesaurus (1914). He was also active as a teacher and choral conductor.

Tel-Aviv was founded in 1910 as the Jewish suburb of Jaffa, and in the same year the singer Shulamit (Selma) Ruppin (1873–1912) founded the first music school in the country. Basing its curriculum on that of the traditional German conservatory, it served as a model for other music schools, with violin, piano and voice classes, a student orchestra and choir and ear training classes. World War I had disastrous consequences for the small Jewish community, and musical life was halted.

(ii) 1919–30.

With the establishment of British rule, Jewish immigration resumed, mostly from Russia and Poland. Tel-Aviv became a vibrant urban cultural centre, with fine professional musicians settling in the country. But many imaginative initiatives soon ran aground because of the unstable economy. The conductor Mark Golinkin (1875–1963) initiated in 1923 the Palestine Opera, which performed operas by Verdi, Rossini, Meyerbeer, Anton Rubinstein and others in Hebrew translation, strongly supported by the literary Jewish élite. With fine singers but a deficient orchestra, the Opera performed for capacity audiences in dreary cinemas; lack of funds forced its closure in 1927. In 1925 the conductor Max Lampel had started a short-lived monthly series of outdoor symphonic concerts.

In 1924 Joel Engel (1868–1927), who had founded a Society for Jewish Folk Music in St Petersburg in 1908, made Tel-Aviv the centre of his Niggun society, active mostly in the low-cost publication of hundreds of arrangements of Jewish folksongs from eastern Europe. Music societies in Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem cultivated small audiences for chamber music. The Jerusalem Musical Society, founded in 1921 by the British-born cellist Thelma Yellin and her violinist sister Margery, formed the first professional string quartet in the country and sponsored high-standard chamber concerts in Jerusalem for 15 years. Music critics, especially David Rosolio and Menashe Ravina, published detailed reviews in the daily press, insisting on high standards of performance. The European Classical-Romantic canon soon came to dominate concert programmes, delegating the light classics to a secondary position.

Composition was concentrated on the invented folksong, with new art music limited to a handful of works, notably the first Hebrew folk opera, The Pioneers (1924) by Jacob Weinberg (1870–1958). The dominating spirit of socialism spearheaded by the idealistic kibbutz (communal village) movement and the idealization of agricultural pioneer work were the backdrop for the Institute for the Promotion of Music among the People, which sponsored lectures, workers' choruses and courses for choral conductors all over the country. The economic depression of the late 1920s and the deterioration of Arab-Jewish relations in 1929 dealt a heavy blow to these frail initiatives.

(iii) 1931–48.

The rise to power of Nazi and fascist regimes in Europe provoked a large wave of immigration from Europe. The Jewish population more than doubled, to 445,000, with well trained and musically committed immigrants from central Europe immediately taking the lead in musical life, both as professional musicians and as a highly discerning and demanding audience. In October 1933 the violinist Emil Hauser, former first violinist of the Budapest Quartet, settled in Palestine and founded the Palestine Conservatory, which again emulated the German model, with a staff of 33 teachers of most instruments, as well as classes in theory, music history, composition and music education. In March 1936 the British administration established the Palestine Broadcast Service (PBS), transmitting on one channel and shifting daily from Arabic to Hebrew and then to English programmes. The small and under-funded music department was run by British and Jewish musicians, with relatively large slots for live music from the studio. The studio ensemble soon expanded into the radio orchestra and stressed performances of Jewish and locally written new compositions.

The major event of the 1930s was the founding of the Palestine Orchestra. Conceived by the violinist Bronisław Huberman (1882–1947) as a visionary, multi-faceted musical centre situated in the fresh East in response to what he had regarded as the decline of the West, it soon turned into a salvage operation for the finest Jewish musicians who had lost their positions in some of the best orchestras of central Europe. Huberman supervised and financed most of the operation. Inaugurated in December 1936 as a powerful anti-Nazi protest under Toscanini, the Palestine Orchestra maintained high standards from its inception, performing with the finest international conductors and soloists for capacity subscription audiences. Members of the orchestra formed chamber ensembles, such as the Israeli Quartet, that preserved the central European chamber-music tradition with regular series in intimate halls, such as the old Tel-Aviv Museum. The founding of the orchestra completed the stratification of musical life in the Yishuv.

More than 40 well trained composers came to Palestine during this period. They had not known each other before immigration, and did not constitute any cohesive school. Foremost were Stefan Wolpe (1902–72), Paul Ben Haim (1897–1984), Erich Walter Sternberg (1891–1974), Josef Tal (b 1910) and Marc Lavry (1903–67), all trained in Germany, and A.U. Boskovitch (1907–64) and Verdina Shlonsky (1905–90), who had received most of their training in Paris. Menahem Avidom (1908–95) and Mordecai Seter (1916–94) came to Palestine at a young age, but received their advanced training in Paris. Slightly younger composers, such as Haim (Heinz) Alexander (b 1915), halted their studies in Germany and completed them in Palestine. The Palestine Orchestra provided an incentive for symphonic works, such as Lavry's Emek (1936), eulogizing the pioneers through the insertion of the horah folkdance into a symphonic poem, or Sternberg's large-scale Twelve Tribes of Israel (1938), in which he transplanted the high pathos of the late Romantic German style to express his identification with Jewish history. Other important compositions were Ben Haim's Variations on a Hebrew Tune (1938), based on the Arab melody that had been turned into the folksong My Motherland, the Land of Cana‘an, and Wolpe's Dance in a Form of a Chaconne (1938), which boldly combines horah rhythms with a strict chaconne pattern and atonal harmony.

The bold and innovative Wolpe felt alienated in the traditionally inclined local musical community and emigrated to the USA in 1938, but all the other composer immigrants overcame the resettlement trauma and stayed. In 1938 Sally Levi, a dentist and amateur composer, initiated the World Centre for Jewish Music, which started a huge network of correspondence with Jewish musicians, published a single issue of Musica hebraica, and sponsored performances, most notably of Bloch's Sacred Service, until the outbreak of World War II stopped its activities. The intense compositional activity led to the creation of ACUM, the performing rights society, founded in 1936 and officially registered in 1940. The Academy of Music in Tel-Aviv opened in 1944.

During World War II the country was nearly cut off from the outside world, but concert life continued, with local musicians substituting for international conductors and soloists, and with the composition and performance of such key works as Ben Haim's First Symphony (1940), Mordecai Seter's cantata Sabbath (1940), Boskovitch's Oboe Concerto (1943) and Semitic Suite (1945), and Lavry's opera Dan the Guard (1945). Founded by the American singer Addis de Philip in 1948, Israeli opera survived for 30 years, marred by chronic economic and personal difficulties.

Israel, §I: Art music

2. East–West encounters.

An East–West dichotomy dominated many aspects of musical life. National ideology demanded rejection of the European Diaspora and called for the revival of the ancient roots of the Jews in the East. However, there were few who insisted on a total rejection of the Western musical heritage; the chief argument was between those searching for a West–East synthesis and those upholding the value of individual freedom of expression. Idelsohn's bold endeavour triggered respect and even a romanticization of ethnic traditions, especially that of the Yemenite Jews, among Western musicians. But the lack of training in ethnic interaction, and the economic pressures on the immigrant musicians to make ends meet, hindered most attempts to reach out to the East, and left the core of the problem – the lack of compatibility between the two musical worlds – unresolved. Eastern elements in most early compositions were transplants of Russian orientalism or French exoticism.

Deliberate East–West contacts started in the 1930s almost simultaneously from both directions. A few fine musicians of Middle Eastern origins brought ethnic Jewish and Arab traditions to Western audiences through concerts and radio programmes. The Yemenite singer Brakha Tsefira (Bracha Zefira; 1910–90), raised as an orphan by foster families of different Eastern ethnic groups, from whom she absorbed diverse oral traditions, started an international career in 1930 with the improvising pianist Nahum Nardi, while collecting by memory further traditional songs. In 1939 she turned to most of the immigrant composers and commissioned arrangements, which she performed with members of the Palestine Orchestra on European instruments, as well as with piano, disregarding intonational clashes. The Iraqi-born 'ud player and composer Ezra Aharon (1903–95) was a member of the Iraqi Royal Band. In 1932 he participated in the Cairo conference of Arab music, where he met the ethnomusicologist Robert Lachmann (1892–1939); they continued to collaborate after their settlement in Palestine. Aharon was head of the Arab music ensemble of the PBS, and he also experimented in playing with members of the radio orchestra. The Yemenite Sarah Levi-Tanai was a singer, composer and choreographer who brought Yemenite traditions to the stage, culminating in her dance work ‘Inbal (1948).

The gap left by Idelsohn's emigration was filled by Lachmann, who conducted an intensive recording and research project, continued and much expanded after his early death by the ethnomusicologist Edith Gerson-Kiwi (1908–92).

The composer A.U. Boskovitch presented a well articulated ideology based on the dialectics of time and place. He regarded the Israeli composer as a representative of the collective, one who should strive for a new national style based on what he called ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’ landscapes, referring to the vocal rhetoric of Sephardi Hebrew and of Arabic. Stressing the regional culture rather than Jewish heritage, he expressed his ideology in the second movement of his Oboe Concerto (1943), in which the oboe emulates the sound of the zurna in improvisatory melismas over a three-note string ostinato, and in the Semitic Suite (1945), where he imitates the sound and melody of an Arab takht.

Israel, §I: Art music

3. Since 1948.

(i) Ensembles and venues.

The young state of Israel acknowledged the role of music as a powerful social, educational and promotional tool, and the Ministry of Education appointed a High Music Council (later the music wing of the Public Council for Culture and the Arts). The Palestine Orchestra, renamed the Israel PO, was sent on frequent concert tours of Europe and the USA, and fine recitalists were dispatched as cultural ambassadors. The first Israel Prize for composition was granted in 1954. The government sponsored large-scale international events, such as the International Harp Contest (from 1960) and the annual Israel Festival (from 1961). The newly built Jerusalem Congress Centre (1953) and Frederic Mann Auditorium (1957) provided spacious concert venues.

Increased immigration to Israel in the 1950s further diversified its culture, with massive waves of Bulgarian Jewry and entire communities from Yemen and North Africa. Urban growth encouraged new performing groups, such as the Haifa and Be’er-Sheba‘ orchestras, the Rinat (Israel National Choir) and the Israel Chamber Orchestra. The immigration of musicians from the Soviet Union in the early 1970s led to the expansion of the small radio orchestra into the Jerusalem SO (1972), housed at the new performing arts centre of the Jerusalem Theatre.

The New Israeli Opera opened in Tel-Aviv in 1985, performing in the original language with Hebrew surtitles; the Tel-Aviv Opera House opened in 1994. Further huge immigration from the Soviet Union (1989–94) trebled the number of musicians in Israel and encouraged the founding of new orchestras, such as the chamber string orchestra Rehovot Camerata (in Jerusalem since 1996) and Rishon Le-tsiyon SO, which has functioned also as the opera orchestra. The Musica Nova and Caprisma ensembles have specialized in contemporary repertory, and the early music movement found fertile soil.

Chamber music has continued to attract audiences, with regular series held at the Israel Museum, Tel-Aviv Art Museum, Tel-Aviv Conservatory, etc. Ensembles such as the Israel and Tel-Aviv string quartets, Yuval Trio, Israel Wind Quintet and Be’er-Sheba‘ Piano Duo have survived for more than two decades.

(ii) Composition.

Tension between individualism and ideological collectivism increased when a new generation of composers (such as Yehezkiel Braun, Ben-Zion Orgad, Tzui Avni, Noam Sheriff, Ami Ma‘yani), born in the 1920s and 30s joined the founders of Israeli music. Most of them composed with a personal commitment and under external pressure to find a new national style. At the same time they were exposed to and attracted by new developments in the West after 1950. No consensus nor a national Israeli school ever emerged, and the search only increased pluralism and polemics. Of special significance was the use of the sound and rhythm of the Hebrew language, whether biblical or modern, in vocal music. Contrasting techniques were at times juxtaposed within a single composition. For example, Josef Tal quoted a simple folktune by Yehudah Sharett as an ostinato bass under atonal progressions in his Piano Sonata. Oedoen Partos quoted two Yemenite melodies, altering their structural 5ths into Bartókian tritones, in Visions. Tzui Avni integrated passages of declamatory heterophony into rich and dissonant orchestral harmony in Meditations on a Drama. Composers frequently alternated techniques according to context and genre: Haim Alexander, for example, used serialism in his Patterns but folk-like modality in his Nature Songs. New immigrant composers who came at the prime of their creative power went through profound artistic transformations. Mark Kopytman, who arrived in 1972 from the Soviet Union, integrated a traditional Yemenite song as sung on stage by the Yemenite folk singer Gila Bashari into dense heterophony in his Memory. In the 1970s the melting-pot ideology disintegrated and postmodern pluralism gained the upper hand. Third- and fourth-generation composers entered the stage, further expanding the stylistic diversity of Israeli music from the iconoclasm of Aric Shapiro to Haim Permont's and Michael Wolpe's nostalgic mementoes of Yishuv times.

(iii) Instruction, research and publication.

The Hebrew University, founded in 1925, became involved in music in 1933. The University National Library is the main repository of manuscripts and prints of Jewish and Israeli music. The Sound Archives house numerous field recordings. The Jewish Music Research Centre has initiated projects such as the RISM catalogues and the periodical Yuval.

The first department of musicology was founded at the Hebrew University in 1965, followed by Tel-Aviv University (1966) and Bar-Ilan University (1969). Their varied research fields and curricula include the theory and history of European music, Jewish music, world music and ethnomusicology in its broadest sense. The laboratory of musicological research at the Hebrew University was among the pioneers in the development of the melograph.

Instruction in performance and composition has been provided by the Rubin Academies in Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv, the latter incorporated into Tel-Aviv University. The Jerusalem Music Centre, founded in 1971, sponsors master classes by distinguished international teachers, as well as specialized concerts and symposia. Until the 1980s institutional instrumental instruction involved European instruments only, with the exception of Erza Aharon's limited activity at the Jerusalem Conservatory. The Hebrew University initiated a workshop in the performing practice of Arab and Javanese music, having acquired a full gamelan. Instrumental instruction in Classical Arab music started in 1996 at the Rubin Academy in Jerusalem and at a school for Eastern music sponsored by Jerusalem City Council.

In 1951 Peter Gradenwitz founded Israeli Music Publications, and in 1961 the Culture and Arts Council founded the Israeli Music Institute as a publicly sponsored publishing house for Israeli music. The Israeli Composers League, founded in 1953, established in 1993 its own publishing house, the Israeli Music Centre.

Israel, §I: Art music

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A.Z. Idelsohn: Gesänge der jemenischen Juden (Leipzig, 1914)

Musica Hebraica, i–ii (Jerusalem, 1938)

M. Bentwich: Thelma Yellin, Pioneer Musician (Jerusalem, 1964)

I. Ibbeken and Z. Avni, eds.: An Orchestra is Born (Tel-Aviv, 1969)

M. Brod and Y.W. Cohen: Die Music Israels (Kassel, 1976)

A. Shiloah and E. Cohen: ‘The Dynamics of Change in Jewish Oriental Ethnic Music in Israel’, EthM, xxvii (1983), 227–52

I. Adler, B. Bayer and E. Schleifer, eds.: The Abraham Zvi Idelsohn Memorial Volume (Jerusalem, 1986) [with Eng. summaries]

J. Hirshberg: ‘Tel-Aviv: Israel Philharmonic Orchestra’, Symphony Orchestras of the World, ed. R.R. Craven (New York, 1987), 202–7

A. Tischler: A Descriptive Bibliography of Art Music by Israeli Composers (Warren, MI, 1989)

P.V. Bohlman: The Land where Two Streams Flow: Music in the German-Jewish Community of Israel (Urbana, IL, 1989)

J. Hirshberg: Paul Ben-Haim: his Life and Works (Jerusalem, 1990)

A. Shiloah: Jewish Musical Traditions (Detroit, 1992)

P.V. Bohlman: The World Centre for Jewish Music in Palestine, 1936–1940: Jewish Musical Life on the Eve of World War II (Oxford, 1992)

J. Hirshberg: Music in the Jewish Community of Palestine 1880–1948: a Social History (Oxford, 1995)

R. Fleisher: Twenty Israeli Composers: Voices of a Culture (Detroit, 1997)

Israel