The liturgical music of the Jewish Ashkenazi tradition has remained a practice without a theory for many centuries. For most of its history this tradition has been transmitted orally, and to a significant degree it still is. This liturgical performance is characterized by extemporization or improvisation, but the practitioner’s freedom to improvise has been regulated by what we may reasonably suggest are implicit guidelines that provide a set of parameters for creating this music. Even with the appearance of written music, mainly in the nineteenth century, we find no documentation of how, in addition to the music itself, a convention that governs the semi-improvised aspect of this discipline has been transmitted. The underlying premise of this discussion is that this convention can be conceptualized and articulated by “translating” its implicit guidelines into a model of music theory. Moreover, viewing this discipline in music-theory terms is the key to unpacking it, and to understanding its inner workings. Over the last 150 years some sporadic attempts were made, primarily by insider practitioners, to create such a theory. All of those endeavors incorporated a traditional nineteenth-century concept of “modes” as chiefly scales or modal scales. I argue that a theory befitting the phenomenology of this practice has to adopt a different paradigm that does not necessarily identify scalar structure as the primary defining feature of this system. The new paradigm must also take into account the interconnections among different musical variables as well as integrating a variety of built-in extra-musical factors that govern performance. Above all, the new paradigm must recognize that all of these constituents operate within a variety of degrees of freedom. The primary basic building blocks of this musical tradition, therefore, comprise a more flexible set of constituents—motif-types—that likewise accommodate these degrees of freedom. To illustrate how a new paradigm might better enable us to describe and explicate Ashkenazi liturgical music, I examine one of the traditional “prayer modes,” “Adonai Malach.” The paper does not encompass all of the variables that determine a particular performance that utilizes this mode. Rather, it focuses on motif-types and the degrees of freedom in which they express themselves, their interconnections with textual elements and the structure they create, norms of performance, time factors, and the liturgical calendar.

Keywords: Jewish prayer modes; Jewish music; Nusah, Nusach; Jewish liturgy; Jewish liturgical music; Synagogue music; Ashkenazi tradition; Jewish music history; Modality; Music improvisation; Extemporized performance

Contributor Information:

Dr. Boaz Tarsi is an associate professor at the College of Music of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

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