Abraham Zvi Idelsohn (1882-1938)
Idelsohn was born in Filsberg, Lithuania and began his study of Jewish music in Libau where he trained to be a cantor. He continued his education at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin and at the Leipzig Academy. He received his PhD in music from Leipzig University.
Idelsohn served as a cantor at the Adat Jeshurun Synagogue in Leipzig, and in Regensburg and Johannesburg, South Africa before finally settling in Jerusalem in 1906.
In Jerusalem, he began working as a cantor and music teacher at the Hebrew Teacher’s college. Idelsohn was the very first Jewish ethnomusicologist, who dedicated his life to collecting, identifying and analyzing the great corpus of musical minhag of every community that he was able to reach in his lifetime. Idelsohn was greatly impacted by the diversity of the Jewish community living in Palestine, and embarked on a massive project to record their unique musical and linguistic traditions. To his end, Idelsohn was awarded a research grant from the Academy of Science in Vienna, along with a phonograph to use in his field work. In 1914, Idelsohn published the first volume of his seminal ten-volume work, Thesaurus of Hebrew Oriental Melodies, which was a comprehensive study of the Yemenite community in Palestine.
Idelsohn was particularly interested in this community because he perceived the origin of their Hebrew pronunciation and musical heritage as dating back to the first century C.E. He argued that their musical and linguistic traditions were relatively uninterrupted by outside influence and change because of their migratory history and secluded geographical location. In the subsequent volumes of his collection Idelsohn surveyed the musical traditions of Babylonian, Persian, Bukharian, Oriental Sephardi, Moroccan, German, Eastern European and Hassidic Jewish communities in Palestine and throughout the Diaspora. This immense project spanned over a period of 20 years, with the publication of the final volume in 1932.
During World War I, Idelsohn served in the Turkish Army as a bandmaster in Gaza, returning to his research in Jerusalem at the end of the war in 1919. In 1922, he published the Hebrew song book, «Sefer Hashirim,» which includes the first publication of his arrangement of the song Hava Nagila.
In 1924, Idelsohn was contracted to catalogue the Eduard Birnbaum collection of Jewish Music at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. Shortly thereafter he was appointed professor of Jewish music and liturgy at HUC, a position he held until his health began to deteriorate in 1934. With access to the Birnbaum collection, Idelsohn wrote extensively on the historical development of Jewish liturgical and cantorial music. During his time at HUC, he published the last five volumes of the Thesaurus of Hebrew Oriental Melodies as well as two other seminal works, Jewish Music in its Historical Development (1929) and Jewish Liturgy (1932).
Idelsohn also made important contributions in the area of comparative musicological research with his work on the ties between Jewish and Christian liturgical music. Though less well known, Idelsohn also dedicated himself to the study of Near Eastern maqam systems, which is outlined in his work Die Maqamen der arabischen Musik (1913). Idelsohn’s enormous literary output, as well as his field recordings (which number over 1,000) laid the foundation for the modern study of Jewish musicology.\\ \\
Bibliography:
A.Z. Idelsohn, Jewish Music in its Historical Development, Henry Holt, 1929