OVERVIEW|VOLUME 1 looks at two important phases in the history of Jewish liturgical music in America: the Western Sephardi tradition of the Colonial era through circa 1830, and the music of Classical Reform as it developed from the mid-19th century through the First World War.

The predominantly Sephardi character of early American Jewish practice may seem surprising given that Jews of Ashkenazi heritage by far comprise the majority of American Jewry. But although Ashkenazim began arriving in America as early as the 17th century, they generally did not found their own communities or synagogues and instead joined the fold of existing Sephardi communal and religious structures—adopting the rites and customs of the Western (or Amsterdam) Sephardi tradition that had taken root decades after the arrival in New Amsterdam of twenty-three Sephardi Jews from Recife, Brazil in 1654. 

The roots of that tradition trace to the 16th-century conversos and marranos who fled the hostile environment of the Iberian Penninsula and found refuge in Amsterdam, where, devoid of significant knowledge of Jewish ritual and musical life (due to prohibitions enforced by the Spanish crown), they “invented” one. Recruiting cantors and rabbis from North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, these new “Western” Sephardim established links to an imagined continuum of Judaic tradition and rekindled their spiritual yearnings by adopting North African and Mediterranean Jewish practices—including musical ones. That music later underwent a process of Westernization by which it shed some of its eastern vestiges (i.e., more flexible metrical features, nasal vocal timbres, modal approaches, etc.), and the Western Sephardim emerged with a distinct liturgical musical tradition that carries forth to this day—referred to here as the Amsterdam|Western Sephardi tradition—and was America’s first Jewish musical tradition. So concerned with musical continuity were the early American Sephardim that they regularly imported hazzanim (cantors) from Amsterdam (or Western Sephardi communities in London) to serve their congregations, which also used prayerbooks imported from Amsterdam. The importance of music for maintaining Jewish identity and historical continuity is attested to by the fact that in no other domain of religious or communal life did they exert so much effort.

Our knowledge of the above gives relative assurance that the music contained in the first part of Volume 1—preserved in tact to this day in the repertoire of the Colonial-era Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in New York—is essentially the same as was sung in the American colonies throughout the 18th century (with the caveat that those congregational choirs would not generally have comprised the professional-grade ensembles featured on these recordings), and thus serves as an accurate representation of America’s first Jewish music.

But as waves of European Jewish immigrants continued to arrive throughout the 19th century, Ashkenazim came to comprise a culturally significant force in American Jewry and ultimately transformed it, both religiously and musically. Thus, the second part of Volume 1 focuses on the musical life of the American Reform movement. The onset of the Reform movement was accompanied by the need for new music that would not only speak to this new conception of Judaism and reflect its American environment, but also encourage congregant participation. In the words of one advocate, the music of a sacred service should be “so simple that after it has been sung once or twice, [the congregants] can all join in it.”

To create this music, composers—several of whom were not Jewish—drew primarily from two sources: highbrow European concert music and Christian hymns, either through wholesale appropriation of actual musical materials or by using them as models for new, original liturgical settings. Illustrative of the former in this volume is Frederick Kitziger’s setting of Psalm 130 to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

The intention of this most historically oriented of the volumes in the Milken Archive is to faithfully present a historically informed and representative sampling of some of the first Jewish musical sounds to reverberate on American soil. Noteworthy is the fact that while the music of the Western|Amsterdam Sephardi tradition presented here has persevered (see the American Choral Settings in Volume 2), the music of Classical Reform has largely become a relic of the past.

Read the full Introduction to Volume 1