Conference Agenda

Cantor Eduard Birnbaum (1855–1920) was the most prolific nineteenth-century collector of European Jewish music manuscripts and literature. His archive, now housed at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, preserves an encyclopedic record of the liturgical and secular music of various Jewish communities during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Scholarship on Birnbaum has typically focused on his collecting of the “music itself." This paper instead reexamines the intellectual genealogy of modern Jewish music research by foregrounding an overlooked facet of his archival practice: his systematic collecting, annotating, and historicizing of Christian sources on Jewish music.

While prevailing narratives credit Birnbaum and his contemporaries with inaugurating an empiricist, “scientific” approach to Jewish music through the documentation of repertoires (Bohlman, 2002; 2008; Seroussi, 2009), I argue that his archival work was more expansive—and more subversive—than mere collection. Drawing on Susannah Heschel’s (1998) and Philip V. Bohlman’s (2008) concepts of “counterhistory,” I theorize “archival counterhistory” as both a critical posture and a historiographical method in which the archive becomes an active site for transforming hegemonic Christian narratives into objects of historical critique.

I analyze Birnbaum’s unfinished bibliographical project, “Literaturgeschichte der hebräischen und synagogalen Musik,” together with his annotated manuscripts and materials from the Mus. 77 subcollection, to show how he reframed Christian writings into historicized artifacts and integrated them alongside Jewish sources to form more entangled genealogy of Jewish music scholarship. Through close readings of his engagement with figures such as Johann Gottfried Herder and Johannes Reuchlin, I trace how Birnbaum moved between critique and strategic appropriation to expose the theological and ideological underpinnings of Christian scholarship while also mining these sources for rare examples of Jewish music.

By shifting attention from Birnbaum’s role as a collector of musical sources to his work as a critical bibliographer of Christian literature on Hebrew music, this paper emphasizes his role as a foundational theorist of Jewish music historiography rather than simply its documentary precursor. It thus reconfigures both Birnbaum’s place within Jewish music studies and the broader narrative of how musicological knowledge about Jewish traditions was constructed in dialogue with Christian scholarship.

The history of modern plainchant is far more complex than the common narrative of baroque corruption and scholarly restoration. We have heard of a Solesmes-led revolution wherein chant books, corrupted in the seventeenth century and neglected, were overhauled and the medieval melodies were restored in a 50-year swoop. But chant revision was neither uniform nor linear. Theodore Karp, Marianne Gillion, and other scholars have laid a foundation for us to study modern chant.

In Québec, Father Pierre-Henri Bouchy single-handedly undertook a massive revision of the Canadian plainchant corpus in his Graduel and Processionnal romain of 1854. He edited the Québec editions first printed in 1800, which were faithful reproductions of a consistent modern French tradition. His revisions were based on humanistic principles commonly associated with the seventeenth centuries: text underlay was transferred to strong Latin syllables, melismas were truncated, and sharps were added to conform to tonal harmony.

Bouchy also provided a preface to the Graduel and a Histoire abrégée du chant ecclésiastique in the Processionnal where he explained his editorial philosophy and understanding of Catholic Church music history, respectively. He expressed admiration for and skepticism about the recent medieval manuscripts discovered in Europe in the preceding decade, including the efforts by Prosper Guéranger, Félix Danjou, Louis Lambillotte, Edmond Duval, and the Reims-Cambrai commission, agreeing with the conservative Adrien de la Fage that these initiatives were archaeological than pastoral. Bouchy characterized his reform as a temporary stopgap until plainchant scholarship improved; yet despite resistance to his work by younger contemporaries, his reforms remained universal in Québec until the twentieth century.

In this paper, building on Marie-Claire Bouchard’s and Jean-Pierre Pinson’s works, I examine both Bouchy’s melodic/textual revisions and his writings. I demonstrate how post-Tridentine chant history is still largely understudied and misunderstood. Bouchy’s reform actually went “backwards,” changing what was a conservative chant tradition in Québec into something akin to the radical revisions in Italy from two centuries before, including the Medicean gradual. We ought to examine such local traditions to better understand conceptions of plainchant before the Solesmes project won the day; its victory was hardly inevitable and assured.

Long before Goethe's drama, the Faust narrative served as a wellspring of inspiration in both literature and music. The origins of this reception can be traced back to the Historia D. Johannis Fausten, which was anonymously published by the Frankfurt printer Johann Spies in 1587. The consensus in literary and theological history holds that the text is imbued with strong polemic and pro-Lutheran overtones. This polemical intent was further elaborated in subsequent adaptations of the narrative. This is particularly evident in the three-volume expansion by Georg Widman (1599). Widman omits passages, adds episodes to the story, and above all, extends the text with theological reflections that transform the Faust narrative into a moralizing devotional book.

A comparative analysis between the original Faust book and Widman’s adaptation reveals a shift in Lutheran musical understanding in the late 16th century. The version printed by Spies in 1587 frequently evokes the music of the devil. Instead of adhering to the medieval tradition of portraying this music as dissonant and chaotic, Faust hears sounds reminiscent of monk chants; later, Mephistopheles even employs an ensemble of instruments to seduce Faust with his “Gauckelspiel”. The description of this music (including the term “Gauckelspiel”) incorporates contemporary stereotypes of Lutheran polemic against the music of the Catholic Church.

By the end of the 16th century, not only had the musical practice of the Lutheran Church been established (including the use of instruments), but the ongoing conflict with territories that had converted to Calvinism necessitated a profiling of the Lutheran positive disposition towards music against the Calvinist music-critical position. Consequently, in Widman’s version, the birthplace of Faust is moved to Calvinist Anhalt. The depiction of the devil's music is reduced to a few examples, with Widman clearly indicating that it is dance music, which was often negatively connoted even within Lutheranism.

The presentation will analyze the version differences of the Faust narrative in the 1587 print and Widman’s adaptation against the backdrop of the music-theological and confessional-political discourses of the late 16th century. In doing so, it will elucidate the evolution of musical understanding within the literary discourse of the time.