Music with a Jewish Eccent?

by Leonard J. Lehrman ©2005

Jack Gottlieb: Funny, it doesn’t sound Jewish: how Yiddish songs and synagogue melodies influenced Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood. Albany, NY: SUNY in association with the Library of Congress, 2004. 306 pp. incl. index and musical examples + 20 pp. of photos + a CD.

This is a warm, fuzzy, witty, fascinating, and funny book, which deserves a place in every self-respecting library with any size collection of Broadway and/or Jewish music. The product of decades of research through thousands of items, it comes with a CD of 50 tracks, including rarities only recently released (as part of large collections) of Judy Garland and Billie Holiday singing in Yiddish, with the greatest treasure of all saved for last: a 1965 recording of Leonard Bernstein (whose assistant Gottlieb was for many years) singing and playing Marc Blitzstein’s “Zipperfly” as he remembered it (differing slightly from the manuscript version, published in The Marc Blitzstein Songbook, v.1, 1999, Boosey & Hawkes, p. 68-72).

The central thesis of the book, whose title comes from one of the delicious “lecture-entertainments” Gottlieb has been delivering around the country since 1972 (others being ‘From Shtetl to Stage Door’ and ‘Sing Along: The Impact of Jewish Life on Tin Pan Alley’), is that if “not for composers and lyricists of Jewish origin, the touchstone classics of the American musical theater would be nonexistent.” (p.1) This has, of course, been an open secret, ever since the Episcopalian Cole Porter (who, Gottlieb speculates, may have been a “bit of both” anti-Semite and “philo-Semite”) told Richard Rodgers and E.Y. “Yip” Harburg that the secret to writing Broadway hits was, he had discovered, to “write Jewish music.”

But Gottlieb goes further, and deeper, asserting that “certain melodic fragments tend to cluster into family groupings,” that “these groupings have ethnic or allegiant connotations,” and that “latent snatches of song incubating in the subconscious later take wing in the creative process.” (pp. xv, 174) He finds these in Weill, Offenbach, Berlin, Arlen, Fain, and of course Bernstein, among dozens of others.

Theoretically, he builds on fairly solid ground, demonstrating the identifiably Jewish character of melodic patterns found in liturgical modes: the Adonai Malakh mode (modified Mixolydian, or major with lowered seventh and, in the upper extension, lowered third); the Magen Avot mode (natural minor or
Aeolian); and the Ahava Raba mode, also known as Phrägisch (Freygish in transliterated Yiddish) or modified Phrygian, or harmonic minor centering on the dominant, with lowered second and raised third, creating an augmented
second interval characteristic of many exotically eastern European and Arabic modes, not to mention—which Gottlieb does not—Moorish and Spanish).

A fourth mode, the so-called Ukrainian Dorian (a minor scale with a raised fourth, also known as Magyar, Hijaz, Aulos, traditional Mi shebeirach and Av horachamim) is treated separately, in part because of the enharmonic
closeness that the raised fourth bears to the lowered fifth, characteristic of blues. And here, in this ambiguous area, is where the writing and speculation become just a bit fuzzy or, “as they say in pidgin Yiddish, ‘farfetscht.’“ (p. 167)

Gottlieb correctly takes Jeffrey Melnick to task for the implicit anti-Semitism in his book A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and Popular Song (Harvard University Press, 1999), faulting it for not being as inclusive or as fair-minded as the same author’s 1994 Harvard doctoral thesis, Ancestors and Relatives: The Uncanny Relationship of African Americans and Jews. But he leaves himself open to a similar comparison between his book and his own 1964 University of Illinois doctoral thesis, The Music of Leonard Bernstein: A Study of Melodic Manipulations.

In his thesis, Gottlieb cited what he called an “Urmotiv” of a descending sixth followed by a descending second in Bernstein’s music, and quoted Bernstein himself, who “suggested that the origin of this particular motive comes from the deep impression made upon him by the ‘Lullaby’ from Marc Blitzstein’s opera No For An Answer (1937-1941). In my 1977 Cornell doctoral thesis on Bernstein’s Serenade, I speculated that Bernstein might more likely have been thinking of another song from the same opera, “Secret Singing,” in which the same melodic pattern occurs even more prominently, several times. (These songs appear side by side in The Marc Blitzstein Songbook, vol. 2, 2001, Boosey & Hawkes, pp. 26-38.)

In this new book, however, Gottlieb completely ignores the previously acknowledged Blitzstein influence on Bernstein, except for “Zipperfly,” which he speculates is in a “Jewish idiom” (p.223 n91) based on davening* (though the black shoeshine boy who intones “Now I lay me down to sleep” and envisions “Easter Sunday” in the song was not considered exactly Jewish enough to be included in the Blitzstein lecture-recital Helene Williams and I gave November 9, 2004 at the Center for Jewish History). Instead, Gottlieb now calls the descending sixth followed by descending second, which can be clearly heard in at least half a dozen Bernstein works, an “extension” of a “4th to a 6th,” thus relating it to a cadential High Holiday motive of descending fourth followed by descending second.This is truly manipulation, and question-begging, by a disciple of the master (Bernstein) whose “Infinite Variety of Music” lecture once demonstrated how many different ideas could all be traced to the same four notes of “How Dry I Am.” Outlandish” is the appropriate term of description here, as it is for Gottlieb’s suggestion “that triple meter connotes Trinitarian concepts of Christianity, while duple meter is more symbolic of the Jewish one-on-one relationship of man and God.” (p.33) Such statements are no less “farcical” than the observation (p.176) that “A Yiddishe Momme” begins with the same seven notes as Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries”!

Since Gottlieb has, in the usual authorial fashion, admitted “responsibility for... proffreading” [sic] (p. 266), and since he gleefully points our “blatant bloopers” (p. 37) in others’ works, a few glaring errors must be laid at his door, in hopes of correction in future editions. His Russian and Ukrainian transliterations (pp. 75, 88-9) are missing hyphens, rendering words as a series of nonsense syllables; and a German text by Brecht has been inadvertently Yiddishized (“Der erste” appears as “Der ershte,” among other errors, p. 288). Abel Meeropol’s classic “Apples, Peaches and Cherries” was never called “Pineapples, Peaches and Cherries” (p. 72). Examples 7-28a and 8-1c (pp. 135 & 145) each contain a measure with one too many beats, and the upper tetrachord of Ex. 5-27 (p.100) has one too many notes. Ex. 9-26b (p.172) contains an extraneous tie, ex. 5-28b (p. 100) an extraneous flag. The ninth note of ex. 12-14c (p.209) should be a D, not a Bb. And Bernstein’s Kaddish Symphony was #3, not #2 (p.184 n5; corrected elsewhere).

Blitzstein’s Idiots First is an opera, not a “theater piece” (p. 217). His “Gus and Sadie Love Song” could also have been cited as a descendant from “Khosn kale mazeltov,” much more so than “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” whose connection with the Yiddish wedding melody is stated but not convincingly demonstrated, at least for me. And the “psychologist” quoted by James Fuld and in turn by Gottlieb (p.32), Dr. Nathaniel S. Lehrman, is actually a psychiatrist (as well as my father).

But these are all small potatoes in a rich broth that consistently entertains at least as much as it enlightens, and for which we are all the richer. One last gem, to demonstrate the pricelessness of the materials contained herein: an unfinished Irving Berlin lyric for Fanny Brice called “Yiddisha Eskimo”: “Living in a house of snow without a steeple, I’m one of God’s frozen people.” (p.110)

* Prayer in the traditional Jewish manner, pronounced DAH-ven-ning.