Apropos my earlier post about the prospect of a Jewish florist asked to make an Easter flower arrangement, I found this article about Jewish singers who regularly sing in churches during the Christmas season to be quite interesting.
It seems quite clear that religious majorities and religious minorities have very different understandings about the degree to which they can be expected to encounter and interact with other faith traditions, including messages that contradict their own beliefs. Church singing was, above all, a good job in a profession where regular paydays aren't always easy to come by. The singers accordingly generally viewed church singing as just a job -- even though the hymns they sung would have (understandably) expressly Christian messages, even though they sometimes encountered direct antisemitism there. They draw a clear distinction between singing a rehearsed song versus praying in their own voice.
For what it's worth, I tend to view singers as towards the far end of a spectrum ranging from "jobs expected to serve anyone who comes in the door" to "jobs where the professional has absolute discretion to pick and choose clients." The further you proceed down that spectrum, the more justifiable it is for a professional to refuse to take a job for whatever reason they want -- so I don't feel it would be unreasonable for a Jewish tenor to turn down a church job, even as in practice they typically seem able to maintain the conceptual separation I argue the florist should have. But the nebulousness of the spectrum (where do florists fall? I think somewhere in the middle, but reasonable minds can disagree on that) is part of why the anti-discrimination/free speech issues here are so difficult.
In any event, though, I wanted to flag the piece less because it illustrates any major theoretical point, and more for it says about how many Jews think about these issues in practice. Simply put, we can't afford to be hypersensitive in the way that many Christians -- perhaps for the first time experiencing the barest hints of conflict between their religious precepts and the public arena -- demand the law provide protection for. To borrow from Kimmy Schmidt: "It's so funny what people who aren't minorities think is oppressive!"
5 comments:
It would be extremely difficult for a singer who is not living in an insular Jewish community to completely avoid Christian music. I'm guessing that 70-80% of the music written for choirs in the Western canon is at least mildly Christian in nature, given the way that patronage of composers worked during most of the classical eras. High school and college choirs routinely treat pieces like Magnificats and Glorias as secular, when they in no way are - there is rarely any attempt at "balance" or "secularization" the way there is with music at Christmastime, for example. So most Jews who sing are extremely used to the notion that they have no belief connection to what they are singing, and that the audience doesn't need them to. It's only a small step from there to being paid to sing in church choir (which I've done on multiple occasions).
As you note, there's a big difference between that and a florist or baker being asked to take on work they disagree with. Singers choose to sign on to sing in churches, and this isn't a situation where a singer holds themself out as someone who sings and is expected to take all comers. A Jewish singer who signs on to sing in a church choir for pay, whether they approached her or otherwise, knows exactly what she is doing and it's an active choice. No one expects a singer to be forced to take on any work they are offered, but we assume when someone opens a shop that they will.
It would be extremely difficult for a singer who is not living in an insular Jewish community to completely avoid Christian music. I'm guessing that 70-80% of the music written for choirs in the Western canon is at least mildly Christian in nature, given the way that patronage of composers worked during most of the classical eras. High school and college choirs routinely treat pieces like Magnificats and Glorias as secular, when they in no way are - there is rarely any attempt at "balance" or "secularization" the way there is with music at Christmastime, for example. So most Jews who sing are extremely used to the notion that they have no belief connection to what they are singing, and that the audience doesn't need them to. It's only a small step from there to being paid to sing in church choir (which I've done on multiple occasions).
As you note, there's a big difference between that and a florist or baker being asked to take on work they disagree with. Singers choose to sign on to sing in churches, and this isn't a situation where a singer holds themself out as someone who sings and is expected to take all comers. A Jewish singer who signs on to sing in a church choir for pay, whether they approached her or otherwise, knows exactly what she is doing and it's an active choice. No one expects a singer to be forced to take on any work they are offered, but we assume when someone opens a shop that they will.
A little late to the party on this post. But my perspective as a Jewish classical singer... If you are engaging with Western art music, it is virtually impossible to avoid Christian music, as Lola Banana said, because so much of it was commissioned either by/for Christian use, or because its commissioner wanted to show how Christian he was. And, beyond this, many of the standard musical forms in the practice become Christian liturgical ones... which is how you get not only irreligious people of cultural Christian background (e.g., Johannes Brahms) but also Jewish composers like Leonard Bernstein writing on the basis of Christian liturgical forms... When it comes to non-vocal music, of course, you get much more in the way of what isn't specifically Christian (because choral music in particular in Europe was especially religious in nature, excluding opera chorus parts, before the Romantic era).
But anyway... in my opinion, it highly depends on what piece is being sung. For one, I think there's a difference between the performance of a piece in a secular setting vs. in a church (though as the piece to which you link here notes, many Jews sing in church settings). The audience coming to a secularly-set concert performance of Mozart's Requiem are probably not thinking of the event as a religious experience — except in the sense that music is "religious" to many fans. In other words, many audience members take that to be about as religious as a performance of Don Giovanni.
If it is performed in a church, that's more religious in nature, but still, as the piece implies, the cultural attitudes around singing are often (not always) somewhat disconnected from the religious origins of the works and religious spaces in the classical singing world. Most people I've met through singing are not Jewish. But most are not devout Christians either. The majority are pretty secular people, including many e.g., many baptized Catholics who do not practice, etc.
I guess it's about social signifiers. Performing Mozart's Requiem is certainly using a Catholic text, but it does not identify the singer or appreciator as meaningfully performing an act of Catholic piety in the contemporary musical-cultural context.
By contrast, performing contemporary Christian music usually DOES convey that the singer and/or appreciator are pious Christians. I am far from being inclined to listen to Christian Rock, and, more than that, there is NO way that I would become a fan or performer of it. I guess you could say that's because it socially signals that you are Christian, which I'm not. (Also, the music may not be aesthetically good, but that's a different question.)
Similarly, contemporary Christian holiday music is a link to a holiday I don't really wish to celebrate (although much of it was written by Jews). So I don't appreciate it, personally, and while it usually is linked to a secularized Christmas, it is separated from its original religious context in a different way than the secularly performed Mass settings are, and still tied to a culturally Christian celebration (secular Christmas), whereas the works of classical Christian choral music are often divorced from their liturgical use entirely (e.g., Requiem Masses not performed in the context of a mass, and not performed for a dead person at all). (Also, I think most Christmas music is aesthetically bad and I can't stand to hear those same songs year after year... but again, different issue.)
These thoughts are left in loose form and not entirely clearly formulated, but I hope you will forgive the rambling nature of the commentary. Anyway, it might seem strange, but I would not greet people with "Merry Christmas," but I would sing Handel's Messiah.
Oh, I'm also reminded that I knew a guy (Jewish, observant Orthodox) who insisted on singing "Adoshem" for "Adonai" in Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, an actual Jewish religious text, on the basis that the performance was secular. The same guy also sang Handel's Messiah.
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