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Salamone Rossi’s ‘Songs of Solomon’ at 400

by Anne E. Johnson
Published November 13, 2023

The innovative, cross-cultural work of this Jewish, early-Baroque composer is more

relevant than ever

Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and Chorale presented ‘Songs of Solomon’ in 2015, curated by Francisco Spagnolo, at right
(Photo by Frank Wing)
In 1623, Salamone Rossi, a musician at the court of Duke Gonzaga in Mantua, published a
set of 33 Psalm-settings in Hebrew using techniques of Italian vocal polyphony. In the
synagogue, this new music, HaShirim Asher LiShlomo (typically translated as Songs of
Solomon), was a matter of some controversy; 400 years later, it’s still controversial. Its
musical value, however, is not up for debate.

The San Francisco-based

Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra
and Chorale will acknowledge
the 400-year milestone on
December 4 with a program they
first presented in 2015, Jews &
Music: Songs of Solomon.

While the war in Israel and Gaza

rages on, the innovative, cross-
cultural work of this Jewish,
early-Baroque composer seems
more relevant than ever. The
topic of early Jewish music can
be rife with emotion, especially
now. One specialist on Jewish
early music, Ian Pomerantz,
spoke to me just a few days after
the October 7 attack by Hamas
against Israel. A bass-baritone,
he’s sung Rossi’s HaShirim
many times over the years, and
although he’s not performing in
the Philharmonia’s Jews & Music
program, he’s followed the ‘HaShirim’ title page from its original printing
project closely. He began by
commenting, “My perspective has changed, and I think the needs of Jewish communities
and the early-music movement have changed overnight.”

The Philharmonia’s Jews & Music: Songs of Solomon program was developed, in part, by
UC-Berkeley’s Francesco Spagnolo, a scholar of Jewish music, in collaboration with then-
music director Nicholas McGegan. Spagnolo, now the Philharmonia’s scholar-in-residence,
has worked with the orchestra on several projects, lately with its current music director,
Richard Egarr.

When the Philharmonia’s Rossi project began, Spagnolo presented

the first of many controversies: “They were looking at Rossi
according to the mainstream narratives,” particularly those of Don
Harrán, a musicologist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem who
died in 2016. Harrán’s scholarship and editions of Rossi have
shaped how HaShirim is understood and performed.

An essential departure from that mainstream is Spagnolo’s

conviction “that non-Jews went to synagogue inside the ghettos.” In
Francisco Spagnolo performance, the Philharmonia uses an eight-person choir,
prepared by Valérie Sainte-Agathe, with the Hebrew text and
translation projected onto a screen. Spagnolo sits onstage, explaining his interpretation of
HaShirim as an “adaptation of Hebrew prayers through the ears of an intercultural group
that also includes non-Jews.”

Not everyone shares this perspective on Rossi. Joshua R. Jacobson is founder and director
of the Zamir Chorale of Boston and curator of https://www.jewishchoralmusic.com/, an
archive of articles (many by Jacobson himself) and other materials on Jewish music,
emphasizing Rossi.

While Jacobson has not seen evidence that Rossi’s Christian

colleagues knew his synagogue music, he does acknowledge that
Rossi’s work could sometimes be heard outside of worship:
“There’s evidence in some diaries of Jews of the time that they
sang these pieces just for fun in their homes, including a woman, a
rabbi’s wife. That would never have taken place in the synagogue.”

Within the synagogue, some Jews were less than pleased with Joshua R. Jacobson
Rossi’s polyphony. But Rossi had on his side Rabbi Leon Modena,
an influential and complex figure, to defend his work against conservatives objecting to his
Christian-inspired sounds. Jacobson sees the nay-sayers as a minority voice: “Modena was
reflecting a certain spirit of the times where Jews wanted to participate in the Italian
Renaissance culture.” The presence of Jews (not just Rossi) and their adapting of non-
Jewish cultural concepts in the Gonzaga court is another sign of the zeitgeist. “This could
only happen in places where there was a liberal enough attitude on the part of the Christian
population to allow the Jews to do this,” Jacobson says.
 Modena (1571-1648) wrote “a handbook for non-Jews to
understand Jewish rituals,” explains Spagnolo, which he interprets
as revealing the rabbi’s enthusiasm for Rossi’s experiment. “It
describes the sound landscape of the ghetto in Venice. When
Modena comes to the sounds of Italian Jews, he says this is the
least elaborate, the least sonically appealing. So there might have
been a conscious choice to enhance the sounds of the synagogue.”

Rossi’s most famous colleague at the Gonzaga court was Claudio

Rabbi Leon Modena Monteverdi, and Philharmonia Baroque includes Monteverdi on the
concert program. Jacobson rates Rossi’s polyphony “on a par with
any of Monteverdi’s madrigals.” Nevertheless, there is no evidence that the two composers
actually knew each other.“They were on the same payroll, but they may not have met as far
as we know,” Spagnolo says. “Or it could have been that Rossi was just a fiddler playing for
Monteverdi’s compositions.”

Like Monteverdi, Rossi considered publication as a part of the composition process. The
printing of HaShirim at the Bragadina Press in Venice bolsters Spagnolo’s argument that
this work bridges cultures: “Jews were not allowed to own printing presses, but there were
printing presses in Venice that specialized in Hebrew books where Jews worked as editors.”
However, Bragadina did not print music. “So it’s a fair assumption that Christian music
printers had to be called in to help with the musical layout of the page. Jews would have
been involved in printing the Hebrew. The press was a known place of encounter.” Knowing
that about the score, Spagnolo insists, is an element of historical performance.

Despite the high-quality Bragadina edition, “it was never reprinted,” says Jacobson. “We
have to assume that it was fairly isolated. It wasn’t until the 19th century that we find a full
flowering of polyphony in synagogue music.”

Still, Jacobson sees traces of Rossi’s later influence in an Italian synagogue chant for
Psalm 80, verse 4, Elohim hashivenu, which bears a striking similarity to the canto part in
Rossi’s setting of the same verse. “Did Rossi actually use a traditional synagogue chant?”
wonders Jacobson. “I concluded that it’s probably the opposite. That it [the Rossi] became
well known, and then the congregation adapted it and turned it into a congregational
melody.”

Early Jewish music specialist Pomerantz, artistic director of Les Enfants d’Orphée, agrees
that Rossi’s impact on Jewish liturgical music may be deep-seated. He cites the work of
scholar Matthew Austerklein, claiming that “part books and prints of Rossi’s work made their
way to Prague and informed the birth of what was to be the modern
cantor and modern art music in the synagogue.”

When Pomerantz attended Westminster Choir College, he was one

of only three Jewish students in his class. “It really forged my
Jewish identity, and I started to pursue my Sephardic heritage.” In
the intervening decades, he has sought out and recorded little-
known Jewish music, including Rossi’s. “I’m seeing our current Bass-baritone Ian Pomerantz
period reflected in the music of the past. It feels like I am
discovering new parts of my story and new parts of myself, and I think there are a lot of
people in my community who are doing the same.”

The liturgical aspect of the HaShirim is of paramount importance to Pomerantz: “I love

singing his music in a liturgical context. To see him not as an early musician or historical
performer but as a cantor.” The context within the service makes a difference, Pomerantz
finds. “Are the congregants sitting or standing? I see how much of a text-driven composer
he is. The liturgical placement of his Bar’chu, for example, gives me a whole new
perspective on how he approaches the setting of words and harmony and his knowledge of
Hebrew.”

The tendency for performers to ignore the liturgical aspect frustrates Pomerantz, who
wishes Rossi’s Psalm-settings would be seen as more than just Jewish madrigals. “When
we actually see them at work in a community or a synagogue, they turn into something
different. I think we’re only getting half the story.”

The ghetto and cross-pollination

The liturgical context can have a practical impact on performing the work. Jacobson was
baffled by Rossi’s use of double bars, a symbol used in Christian music to indicate when the
choir stops and the priest or congregation takes over. He applied this theory to Rossi. “I
found some traditional Italian Jewish synagogue chants from roughly 100 years ago. I
inserted those, and it was like pieces of a puzzle fitting in.” His Zamir Chorale now performs
those chants interpolated between Rossi’s sections.

Plenty of other performance-practice puzzles remain. Most prominent is the issue of text
underlay, combining left-to-right music notation with right-to-left Hebrew words. Originally,
the music was printed in the usual way, and each word was right-to-left, but the order of the
words progressed left-to-right. Showing which syllables go under which notes was
impossible (a problem familiar to singers of medieval music in any language).
Spagnolo’s concept of text underlay was changed by his philological research. “The Hebrew
transcriptions in the scores of Rossi’s music interpret Hebrew according to the modern
pronunciation.” Instead, he says, “All your vowels need to be Italian vowels. In Italian, the
length of the vowels is sometimes different, and that length needs to be accommodated by
going over more than one note.” Among Spagnolo’s sources for this hypothesis is a
bilingual but homophonic poem by Rabbi Modena. “It sounds almost the same in both
languages, but it means two different things.” There are also field recordings as late as the
1950s that “show continuity in this pronunciation.”

Continuity is an essential element for bass-baritone Pomerantz. “In early music we are
ourselves revivalists,” he says, whereas “Jewish music schools have an unbroken tradition.”
He envisions meaningful HIP discoveries from that untapped resource. “There are at least
three schools of Jewish sacred music in the United States and several unions of Jewish
sacred musicians. These aren’t being utilized at all.”

“Right now in early music,” Pomerantz continues, “non-Jewish performers are working
without the creative involvement of Jewish communities. It’s very presumptuous for a [non-
Jewish] early musician to say, ‘We have rediscovered your tradition, now let us come to the
synagogue or the concert hall and present it for you.’”

Philharmonia Baroque’s 2015 ‘Songs of Solomon,’ led by then-music director Nic McGegan (Photo by Frank Wing)
For Spagnolo, a historically informed performance of HaShirim should focus on aspects of
theatricality. “Aside from the linguistic connection,” he says, “the synagogue itself could be
considered a theatrical space just like the court was.” It’s that parallel, Spagnolo says,that
inspired non-Jews to go to the synagogue. “Christian humanists discovered that what they
called the Old Testament had been originally written in Hebrew. Synagogues were, for
Christian scholars, like a theological and liturgical Jurassic Park. They expected to hear how
the Bible had been chanted at the time of the Christ.”

The ghetto is key to the cross-pollination of Jewish and non-Jewish ideas as well as Italian
Jewish creativity, Spagnolo believes. In his view, the ghetto represents “the first time in
Italian history where Jews were allowed to have a permanent or semi-permanent resident
status within the boundaries of a city.” He calls it “a place that has porous walls. The sounds
of the ghetto can be heard from outside the ghetto. And vice versa. What was happening in
the synagogues in the ghettos in the 1600s was almost a proto-Enlightenment.”

The intercultural aspect of Jewish early music continues, says Spagnolo. Another of his
Philharmonia programs explored the relationship of Handel’s first English-language oratorio,
Esther, with that of Cristiano Giuseppe d’Arte, a non-Jewish composer using a Hebrew
translation of Handel’s libretto, which was written mostly by John Arbuthnot. Spagnolo
points out that some of the subscribers to Handel’s oratorios in London were Sephardic
Jews.

“So we have a lot of non-Jews writing music for the synagogue,” says Spagnolo. Jacobson,
for example, has published an edition of Cantata Ebraica, a 1680 Hebrew work by Carlo
Grossi, a non-Jew. (And there’s plenty of Baroque music by Jewish composers besides
Rossi. “The great repository of Jewish Baroque music is the Amsterdam and London
communities,” says Pomerantz. He recommends the digitized holdings at Amsterdam’s Ets
Haim Library. “They have music of Italian Jews and of immigrants. There are entire
oratorios and cantatas starting from the mid-17th century.”)

For all the conflicting priorities and opinions among scholars and
performers, there’s no controversy about the overall goal: getting
this music performed. “The Rossi motets are not just of historical
interest,” says Jacobson. “These are really good pieces of music.”
He also points to Rossi’s innovation beyond the synagogue. “Rossi
was the first to publish trio sonatas and also madrigals with basso
continuo accompaniment. That is significant.”

Spagnolo finds that Jewish music tends to be marginalized in

Salamone Rossi concerts. When he brought a group of Israeli cantors to sing at the
Ravenna Festival, “they were listed under ‘world music,’ not ‘liturgical music.’”

As Jacobson puts it, “You’re doing Monteverdi? A concert of early Baroque music? Throw in
some Rossi.”

Hopefully Spagnolo’s work with Philharmonia Baroque will bring more attention to Rossi and
spark conversations about Jewish early music: “It’s about re-tuning our heads and our ears
and rethinking the context.”

Anne E. Johnson is a freelance writer based in New York. Her arts journalism has appeared
in the New York Times, Classical Voice North America, Chicago On the Aisle, and PS
Audio’s Copper Magazine. She teaches music theory and ear training at the Irish Arts
Center in Manhattan. Her latest writing for EMA discusses TENET Vocal Artists’ 15th
season.

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