Language:
English
Year of publication:
2020
Titel der Quelle:
In Geveb; a Journal of Yiddish Studies
Angaben zur Quelle:
(2020)
Keywords:
Zaludkowski, Elias,
;
Cantors (Judaism) Biography
;
Concerts
;
Popular culture
Abstract:
In his published writings Cantor Elias Zaludkovsky established an identity as a conservative, castigating contemporary cantors for corrupting tradition through excessive commercialization and mediatization of sacred music. Cantors embracing populism and divorcing liturgical music from its ritual context, especially through making records, engendered an unregulated populist liturgical culture in which cantors served as entertainers, threatening to demean and degrade the hard-earned sense of dignity that professional cantors had struggled for over the course of the nineteenth century. Although Zaludkovsky condemned musical populism, he himself maintained an active concert career performing for a mass concert audience outside of synagogues. Through an analysis of press accounts of Zaludkovsky’s concerts that he collected in his scrapbook, a nuanced picture emerges of the kinds of performance and music that Zaludkovsky valued and that he believed to constitute appropriate musical fields for a cantor to pursue. I argue that in his concert career Zaludkovsky walked a fine line between performing the sacred identity of cantor and falling into the forms of cultural crime that he himself had identified, addressing himself to multiple strands of the internally diverse Jewish community of interwar Poland while maintaining his commitment to cantorial ethics.
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