Guteism: Facilitating Jewish Joy: An Ethnographic Study of an Israeli Wedding Ensemble

Both Jewish and Arab Israeli high school music graduates often find themselves employed in wedding ensembles as a way to ensure an income without leaving music, and still maintaining religious and cultural affiliation. While members of such ensembles often work to find creative outlets of originality, musicianship, and professionalism within this ensemble framework, group members often continue to contemplate, and sometimes pursue, parallel musical activities and higher education studies.

The current study focuses on a group of graduates of Israel`s musical high school for Jewish National Religious boys who have reunited as an ensemble called Gute Gute (Yiddish for "Good, Good"). Although formed as a professional artistically inclined group, Gute Gute ensemble currently performs mostly at community events – predominately at Jewish weddings. The purpose of this study is to explore group members` experience and conceptualizations of making a living and making music, and to learn how the members of the ensemble work to design, plan, manage, and perform Jewish wedding ceremonies and celebrations.

Throughout the Jewish spring wedding season of 2014, ethnographic tools of observation, in-depth interviews, focus groups, and artifact collection, were applied to the exploration of personal and group constructs of individual and group professionalism and musicianship. Data was coded in thematic analysis, assisted by Atlas.ti iPad App. Finally, themes were re-worked and re-considered to constitute a working model of an emergent ensemble philosophy.

Findings present the ensemble as enacting a marriage between "banding" – business, material, functional and practical aspects of communal music making – and "bonding" – transcendental aspects of ensemble member`s experience and phenomenological ensemble rationale. Ensemble member`s phenomenological reasoning reveals mystical underpinnings as instrumental in conceptualization of rationales that balance their experience of making a living and making music, and synthesizes ritual with transcendence. Ensemble members envision themselves as facilitators of a triumph of spirit over matter that I interpret as Guteism: Facilitating Jewish Joy.

Knowing that wedding ensembles are a likely future for graduates of Israel`s National Religious musical high school for boys suggests possibilities for re-thinking curriculum. Balance between "banding and bonding" as a prime constituent of these young Jewish musicians` experience stresses the importance of cultivating awareness of transcendental aspects of music making. Additional thought can be given to developing pedagogies supportive of the cultivation of informal communal music making. Musical and organizational leadership roles can also be incorporated as preparation for future post-graduation situations.