Time in Eastern-Ashkenazi Cantorial Improvisation

Analysis of the extant rabbinic sources and late audio-recordings reveals the musical-historical contexts in which the Eastern-Ashkenazi cantorial improvisation emerged and the way in which its aesthetic foundations were formed. This art was born out of an encounter between diverse musical worlds—first and foremost, Polish baroque and its focus on the individual listener, and then the aesthetic ideal of transcending the limitations of time, expressed in various genres of the Eastern European and Ottoman musical traditions. The persistence of traditional improvisation up to the post-Holocaust decades reflected the attitude of Eastern Ashkenazi society towards the cantor and klezmer: these artists were esteemed for evoking emotional awareness and thus a sense of both eternal and inner subjective time.

Time in cantorial improvisation is designed as a constant movement between intense multi-colored development and maximum deceleration for the sake of observation and introspective experience. This movement is achieved through various rhetorical means: pauses, melismas, modal constructs, cantor-choir interaction, word-painting, multiple repeats. The awareness of an overall framework, such as musical form, or a stock of recurring motives, is limited in East-Ashkenazi improvisation, unlike Western-Ashkenazi "cantorial fantasy" and Sephardi maqam. Musical structure is dictated rather by the words of the prayer and their potential to present different types of time. The frequent alternation between improvisation and the regular "nusach"—the latter symbolizing the intergenerational connection, the distant past, or the mythical future—serves as one of the main channels in deliberately addressing the listener and evoking a strong sense of the present. This rhetoric appears to have crystallized during the first half of the seventeenth century, existing since then primarily as an oral tradition.