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JEWISH MUSICAL MODERNISM, old and new

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Contents

Foreword: Are Jews Musical? Historical Notes on the Question of Jewish Musical Modernism SANDER L. GILMAN.........................................................viiAcknowledgments....................................................................................................................................................xviiIntroduction: The Transcendent Moment of Jewish Modernism PHILIP V. BOHLMAN.......................................................................................11. Multiple Modernisms? Episodes from the Sciences as Cultures, 1900-1945 MITCHELL G. ASH.........................................................................312. Sephardic Fins des Sicles: The Liturgical Music of Vienna's Trkisch-Israelitische Community on the Threshold of Modernity EDWIN SEROUSSI.....................553. Jewish Music and German Science PAMELA M. POTTER...............................................................................................................814. Echoes from beyond Europe: Music and the Beta Israel Transformation KAY KAUFMAN SHELEMAY.......................................................................1035. Charlotte salomon's Modernism MICHAEL P. STEINBERG.............................................................................................................125Epilogue: Beyond Jewish Modernism PHILIP V. BOHLMAN...............................................................................................................153Appendix 1. Moments Musicaux et Modernes: Jewish Modernism in Popular and Political Music: Accompanying CD by the New Budapest Orpheum Society.....................179Appendix 2. CD Texts and Translations..............................................................................................................................189Contributors.......................................................................................................................................................205Index..............................................................................................................................................................209

Chapter One

::: MITCHELL G. ASH

Introduction: The Plurality of Modernity and Modernism

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, after the storm of controversy over the question of "postmodernity" appears to have calmed somewhat, it seems appropriate to reconsider both the concepts of modernity and its alleged crisis, as well as the historical realities to which these concepts supposedly refer. Any effort to approach this task seriously, however, raises the question of whether the collective singular is actually the appropriate form of address, in view of the variety of political, economic, societal, and cultural developments that have been called "modern." Perhaps it would be better to speak instead of modernities and modernisms in the plural. The notion of multiple modernities has recently been advanced in the context of postcolonial theory, for example in discussions of so-called Islamic, East Asian, and Indian modernities (see, e.g., Multiple Modernities 2000). Such claims often appear to accept postmodernism's assertion of Western modernity as a totalizing project, in order to claim that postcolonial cultures have created entirely new modernities, or hybrids of Western and non-Western cultural constructs, forms of life, and so on. In this chapter I question a central position of postmodernism and advance instead the thesis that so-called Western modernity itself-or, more precisely, cultural modernism in the West-has always been plural.

The collective singular noun "modernism" (die Moderne in German) is the established property of the humanities and refers to developments in literature, music, the visual arts, and architecture. Without wishing to question this use, I nonetheless believe it appropriate to point out that it is equally established usage to speak also of modern physics, mathematics, chemistry, or biology. The term "modern" can hardly mean the same thing in all of these contexts. Indeed, as I will show, the term "modern" had multiple meanings even within the sciences. It therefore seems prudent to employ a descriptive rather than a normative approach to the concept of modernity, specifying what was considered modern, or modernistic, in particular contexts and then searching for common ground, rather than presenting one particular definition of modernism as such (for further discussion see Ash 1999; for a more unitary view of science and modernity, see Forman 2007).

My intention here is twofold. I wish to argue, first, that there are certain affinities between the breakthrough to modern ways of thinking in the natural sciences and mathematics and the radical changes in the arts that occurred at the same time. I should also like to argue, second, that modernism, and hence cultural modernity, in all these fields was nonetheless fundamentally plural. The larger agenda that I want to advance is to continue work begun by many others on the establishment of a historically grounded and therefore pluralistic concept of modernity as the most effective antidote to the rhetorical excesses of postmodernism, but one that is neither limited in advance to particular social systems, political regimes, or canonical cultural forms, nor prejudiced in advance by ideals of what we wish modernity could or should be (see, e.g., Giddens 1990; Mnch 1993).

In order to provide a rudimentary conceptual basis for this discussion, I introduce here without extensive elaboration a threefold distinction originally made by the historian of science Herbert Mehrtens between modernity, countermodernity, and technocratic modernity (Mehrtens 1990a; Mehrtens 1990b). Modernity as an intellectual style in science, as in many of the arts, involves a break with direct, supposedly pictorial representation of nature and a turn toward giving free play to abstraction and theoretical imagination. In order to characterize the affinities involved in at least a preliminary way, I propose to speak here of the breakthrough to "modern" thinking as the emancipation of self-referential symbol systems from the tyranny of supposedly realistic representationalism. In opposition to such emancipatory moves, advocates of countermodernity insisted on what they called Anschaulichkeit, by which they meant ways of thinking that preserved what they took to be the holistic connectedness of mind, or rather Seele, with nature. In contrast to both these styles of thinking, technocratic modernity presupposes a concept of knowledge based less on self-referential abstraction than on what can be done with, or to, nature as well as other human beings. It should be evident that I am speaking here of ideal types.

In the following remarks I hope to present examples to make these broad-brush characterizations more specific. In the first part of the chapter, I bring out affinities between modernity in the sciences and modernism in the arts at the turn of the century. In the second part, I briefly discuss controversies between modern and countermodern movements in the 1920s and the widespread talk of "crisis" of which these controversies were supposed to be symptoms. In the third and final part, I discuss very briefly the attacks on modernism in the sciences, the...