Ruth Katz (born 1927) is an Israeli
musicologist
Musicology (from Greek μουσική ''mousikē'' 'music' and -λογια ''-logia'', 'domain of study') is the scholarly analysis and research-based study of music. Musicology departments traditionally belong to the humanities, although some m ...
, a pioneer of academic musicology in Israel, professor emerita at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has been a corresponding Member of the
American Musicological Society
The American Musicological Society (AMS) is a musicological organization which researches, promotes and produces publications on music. Founded in 1934, the AMS was begun by leading American musicologists of the time, and was crucial in legitim ...
since 2011. She was named laureate of the
Israel State Prize in 2012.
Katz's work addresses ethnomusicology, philosophy and aesthetics of music, and music cognition. It is characterized by methodological sophistication, broad interdisciplinary perspectives and a synthetic view focusing on unveiling the ideational components. She is also concerned with the general historiography and sociology of culture and art, to aesthetics, and to ethnography and anthropology.
Biography
Ruth Katz (née Torgovnik) was born in Germany and immigrated to Israel/Palestine in 1934 with her family, settling in
Tel Aviv
Tel Aviv-Yafo ( he, תֵּל־אָבִיב-יָפוֹ, translit=Tēl-ʾĀvīv-Yāfō ; ar, تَلّ أَبِيب – يَافَا, translit=Tall ʾAbīb-Yāfā, links=no), often referred to as just Tel Aviv, is the most populous city in the ...
. After graduating from the ''
Herzliya
Herzliya ( ; he, הֶרְצְלִיָּה ; ar, هرتسليا, Hirtsiliyā) is an affluent city in the central coast of Israel, at the northern part of the Tel Aviv District, known for its robust start-up and entrepreneurial culture. In it h ...
'' gymnasium, military service in the
Israel Defence Forces
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF; he, צְבָא הַהֲגָנָה לְיִשְׂרָאֵל , ), alternatively referred to by the Hebrew-language acronym (), is the national military of the State of Israel. It consists of three service branch ...
, and a short period at the Israel Ministry of Defence, she was sent to
New York (1950) by the Jewish Agency's Youth department, as an emissary to the Inter-collegiate Zionist Federation of America. In New York she attended
Columbia University
Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...
(BA 1954, MA 1956, PhD 1963, all ''summa cum laude''). Returning to Israel with her husband (1956), she taught at the
Oranim teachers' college and began research in ethnomusicology. In 1963, she was among the founders of the department of musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she taught until her retirement in 1995,. She became known for academic innovation, including many new programs she developed and led, e.g. the ''Amirim'' interdisciplinary excellence program (the first of its kind in Israel, 1989-1995). In addition, Katz was president of the
Israel Musicological Society (1982-1985), chief musical editor of ''
Encyclopaedia Hebraica'' (starting 1969), and served on the
Israel Broadcasting Authority
The Israel Broadcasting Authority (IBA; ) was Israel's public broadcaster from 1948 to 2017.
History
The Israel Broadcasting Authority was an outgrowth of the radio station ''Kol Yisrael'', which made its first broadcast as an independent st ...
committee on music (1966-1978) and
Israel Ministry of Education
The Ministry of Education ( he, מִשְׂרָד הַחִנּוּךְ, translit. ''Misrad HaHinukh''; ar, وزارة التربية والتعليم) is the branch of the Israeli government charged with overseeing public education institutions ...
advisory board on higher education in music (1968-1975). Katz was also fellow of the ''Wissenschaftskolleg'' Berlin (1986-7),
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...
Institute for Judaic Studies (1995),
Bellagio Center
The Rockefeller Foundation is an American private foundation and philanthropic medical research and arts funding organization based at 420 Fifth Avenue, New York City. The second-oldest major philanthropic institution in America, after the Carneg ...
of the Rockefeller Foundation (1997) and the Liguria Center of the
Bogliasco Foundation
Bogliasco ( lij, Boggiasco) is a ''comune'' (municipality) in the Metropolitan City of Genoa in the Italian region Liguria, located about southeast of Genoa. Together with the ''comuni'' of Camogli, Recco, Pieve Ligure and Sori, it is part of t ...
(1999). She gave a ’s
Paul Lazarsfeld Memorial Lecture at Columbia Universitys (1992) and the Sterosta Lectures on Interdisciplinarity at the Hebrew University (1984). Katz was honored by an international colloquium on "Interdisciplinarity and Advancement in the Arts and Sciences" (the Hebrew University, 2008.) In 2011 she was elected a corresponding member of the American Musicological Society, and in 2012 received the Israel Prize, the highest state recognition of scholarly achievement in Israel.
Research
Western music: practice, theory, philosophy, society
Unveiling the ways in which the manifold forms of music and their surrounding historical worlds mutually constitute each other has been the underlying theme of Katz's work since her dissertation (1963), that differentiated between Western art music since 1600 from what preceded it in epistemological, sociological and culture-historical terms, challenging well-established views concerning the rise of opera. The dissertation linked the emergence of opera and related musico-dramatic forms in the early 17th century to the "
Scientific Revolution
The Scientific Revolution was a series of events that marked the emergence of modern science during the early modern period, when developments in mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology (including human anatomy) and chemistry transfo ...
" concomitantly under way throughout the West, presenting the former as expressions of a new music- aesthetic paradigm that emerged through "experiments" exploring the powers of music. On a more local level, Katz further attributed these developments to a 16th-century Italian tradition of proto-scientific, magic engagement with music, and to Italian literary and dramatic genres, thereby explaining why the operatic genre emerged in Italy rather than elsewhere, even though similar ideational developments took place throughout the West. Formulating the new paradigm thus in music-aesthetic terms, Katz applied it to the development of the operatic medium until the 1980s.
Katz's work on the constituting interactions between aesthetic ideas and the development of musical styles continued in her ''Contemplating Music'' (1987-1991; with
Carl Dahlhaus
Carl Dahlhaus (10 June 1928 – 13 March 1989) was a German musicologist who was among the leading postwar musicologists of the mid to late 20th-century. A prolific scholar, he had broad interests though his research focused on 19th- and 20th ...
), a four-volume annotated anthology containing texts by major thinkers, and mapping the main topics of Western philosophy of music from Classical Greece to the 20th century.
Continuing her exploration of the thinking embedded in the concrete musical phenomenon in “History as ‘Compliance’: The Development of Western Musical Notation in the Light of Goodman’s Requirements“, (1992), Katz connected analytical philosopher
Nelson Goodman
Henry Nelson Goodman (7 August 1906 – 25 November 1998) was an American philosopher, known for his work on counterfactuals, mereology, the problem of induction, irrealism, and aesthetics.
Life and career
Goodman was born in Somerville, M ...
's theory of the "Languages of Art" to the 500-year-long process that historically produced Western musical notation.
The twin volumes ''Tuning the Mind'' and ''The Arts in Mind'' (2003, with
Ruth HaCohen) presented the ideational components embedded in the language of Western art music of the 17th and 18th centuries, that eventually culminated in the Classical style. Using the perspectives of both the thought of late-18th-century English men of letters, and modern cognitive science, these volumes analyze the music as "sense formations without predication", in terms of the contemporary styles and genres, and via an examination of music's relation to its "sister arts", at the same time exposing the debt owed by present-day cognitive theories to historical aesthetic ideas and artistic practices.
A comprehensive synthesis of Katz's work on Western music appeared in her ''A Language of its Own: Sense and Meaning in the Making of Western Art Music'' (2009), a philosophical history of music examining Western art music in its entirety (10th to 20th centuries). By tracing the continuing dialogue between music and the theoretical and aesthetic discourse about it, as represented in music-theoretical writings throughout the centuries (that, in their turn, took part in the broader intellectual and cultural discourse of their time), Katz showed how the Western musical mentality, driven by an urge towards rationality, emerged from the vital interactions between intellectual production and musical creation, thereby explaining many of Western music's immanent distinctive properties, and offering, in a way, what may be considered a detailed elaboration of
Max Weber's famous thesis concerning the rational basis of Western society. The book follows in detail the process whereby Western music developed into a system of signification without external reference ("a language that explains itself from within") culminating in the Classical style of the late 18th century, this as an expression of concomitant changes in intellectual and social history. The book then traces the process of Western music further, into the 19th and 20th centuries, in which it became the locus of epistemological innovation anticipating linguistic and cognitive theories. Finally, Katz shows the gradual disintegration, in the 20th century, of that self-referential system, the drive towards which had informed Western music for the entire second millennium.
Ethnomusicology: the Middle East and folk traditions in Israel/Palestine
Katz's ethnomusicological work focuses on folk music in Israel – Palestinian Arab folk singing, music of the different Jewish communities, and the Israeli composed "folksong" – this, too, with the aim of unveiling the constituting ideational components –be they universal-cognitive patterns or culture-specific schemes. Part of these studies was conducted in collaboration with
Dalia Cohen, with whom Katz founded, in the 1950s, the Laboratory for Analysis of Vocal Information at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and led jointly, producing influential methodological and theoretical breakthroughs.
A turning point in Katz & Cohen's laboratory work was the development (in the mid 1950s) of the first model of the "Jerusalem
melograph", an electronic apparatus transcribing orally-transmitted monophonic music as a continuous graph representing changes in pitch and loudness over time, thereby providing information that is not only precise but also independent of cultural, stylistic, and notational conventions concerning three out of the four psycho-acoustic parameters (pitch, duration and loudness; timbre was added later). The melograph was at the base of all of Katz and Cohen's ethnomusicological work, since it made it possible to unveil latent principles regulating musical practice that are not expressed in a musical theory, cannot be extracted aurally or through use of available forms of notation (most of the work concerned oral traditions, to begin with), and of which not only researchers but also the carriers of the tradition were mostly unaware. Similar apparati were invented concomitantly but independently in Norway (
Olav Gurvin) and the USA (
Charles Seeger
Charles Louis Seeger Jr. (December 14, 1886 – February 7, 1979) was an American musicologist, composer, teacher, and folklorist. He was the father of the American folk singers Pete Seeger (1919–2014), Peggy Seeger (b. 1935), and Mike Seeger ( ...
), but the processing of the findings of the Jerusalem
melograph was accompanied by new, more culturally-independent theoretical categories, that proved highly fruitful not only for the specific musical traditions, but also for comparative ethnomusicological research in general, becoming widely accepted in the field, with implications for music-cognition research.
For example: the category of "
Melody type
Melody type or type-melody is a set of melodic formulas, figures, and patterns.
Term and typical meanings
"Melody type" is a fundamental notion for understanding a nature of Western and non-Western musical modes, according to Harold Powers' ...
", expanded by Katz and Cohen in their studies of Arabic music concerning questions of mode, a subject not well defined in oral musical traditions (even where there is a modal theory) and that has defeated many scholars. Katz and Cohen showed that even in cases of extreme variability, one can discover modal regularity in musical practice, if one defines it as a "type of
intonational skeleton" that may be realized by varying quantitative values. Katz and Cohen expanded the concept of “type” further, showing that many traditions conform to a system of "types" not only concerning mode, but in other parameters as well, some more latent that others, e.g. melismaticism, beat and density tempos, or timbral categories. This made it possible to formulate the aesthetic preferences of each tradition in terms of "type". It should be stressed that since aspects such as these change from one performance to the next, "typical" regularity necessarily relates also to the extent, range, and properties of variability, as well as to relations between manifest and latent factors.
The
melograph was eventually integrated into computerized methodologies, leading to further elaboration and to its application beyond ethnomusicology: e.g. in the study of Hebrew prosody, or in Western music performance studies.
Katz & Cohen’s monumental ''Palestinian Arab Music: Latent and Manifest “Theory” of a Maqām Tradition in Practice'' (2005) is a summary of 40 years of collaborative research into the vocal folk music of the Arabs in Israel. In addition to many findings concerning the particular tradition and its methodological and analytical sophistication, the book engages fundamental questions of ethnomusicology and general anthropology concerning the meaning of modal frameworks, the combination of text and music appearing as a-priori fusions, the dynamic between continuity and change in living oral traditions and the role of the individual creative artist therein, or how to assess authenticity.
Katz's other ethnomusicological research addressed inter alia the music of the Samaritans (1974), in which she identified a case of "oral group notation"' and a connection to the medieval Christian Neannoe-Ninnua, showing that both are rooted in earlier Hebrew traditions. In other studies she examined the singing of Baqqashot by the Aleppo Jews (1968; 1970), applying the notion of mannerism (until then applied mainly to Western art), as an index of cultural change. Both cases served Katz as test cases of the fundamental anthropological question concerning the reliability of oral traditions, a subject that continued to occupy her in various interdisciplinary international forums, as well as in her book ''The Lachmann Problem'' (2004),
[''“The Lachmann Problem”: An Unsung Chapter in Comparative Musicology'', Jerusalem: Magnes Press of the Hebrew University, 2004.] about
Robert Lachmann, a pioneer of comparative musicology who fled to Palestine from Nazi Germany. The book weaves together the history of the discipline, from its origins as "comparative musicology" in Germany of the early 1900s and the Weimar Republic with the history of the
Yishuv
Yishuv ( he, ישוב, literally "settlement"), Ha-Yishuv ( he, הישוב, ''the Yishuv''), or Ha-Yishuv Ha-Ivri ( he, הישוב העברי, ''the Hebrew Yishuv''), is the body of Jewish residents in the Land of Israel (corresponding to the ...
in British-mandate Palestine and of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Selected works
Books
*''The Origins of Opera: The Relevance Social of and Cultural Factors to the Establishment of a Musical Institution'', Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University, 1963.
*''The Israeli Folksong: A Methodological Example of Computer Analysis of Monophonic Music'', Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1970 (with Dalia Cohen).
*''Divining the Power of Music, Aesthetic Theory and the Origin of Opera'', New York: Pendragon Press, 1986.
*''Contemplating Music'' (Sources in the aesthetic of music, selected, edited, annotated and introduced, with original translations, in four volumes), New York: Pendragon Press, 1987-1991 (with Carl Dahlhaus).Vol. I ''Substance'' (1987); Vol. II ''Import'' (1989); Vol. III ''Essence'' (1991);Vol. IV ''Community of Discourse'' (1991).
*''The Powers of Music'', New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, Rutgers University, 1994 (paperback edition of ''Divining the Powers of Music'', revised with a new introduction).
*''Tuning the Mind'', New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, Rutgers University, 2003 (with Ruth HaCohen).
*''The Arts in Mind'', New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, Rutgers University, 2003 (with Ruth HaCohen).
*''"The Lachmann Problem": An Unsung Chapter in Comparative Musicology'', Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2004.
*''Palestinian Arab Music: Latent and Manifest “Theory” of a Maqām Tradition in Practice'', Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005 (with Dalia Cohen).
*''A Language of its Own: Sense and Meaning in the Making of Western Art Music''. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009; paperback edition 2013.
*''The Discursive March of Thought: An Interdisciplinary Roadmap'', New York: Israel Academic Press, 2015.
Selected articles
*“Explorations in the Music of the Samaritans: An Illustration of the Utility of Graphic-Notation“, ''Ethnomusicology IV'', 1960 (with Dalia Cohen).
*“The Melograph in Ethno-musicological Studies”, ''Ariel, XXI'', 1967 (with Dalia Cohen).
*“The Singing of Baqqashot by Aleppo Jews: A Study in Musical Acculturation”, ''Acta Musicologica, XL'', 1968.
*“Mannerism and Cultural Change: An Ethno-musicological Example”, ''Current Anthropology, XI'', 1970.
*“The Egalitarian Waltz”, ''Comparative Studies in Society and History, XV'', 1973.
*“Quantitative Analyses of Monophonic Music: Towards a More Precise Definition of Style with the Aid of the Computer”, ''Orbis Musicae, II'' (with Dalia Cohen).
*“On ‘Nonsense’ Syllables as Oral Group Notation: Evidence for Werner’s Neannoe-Ninnua Theory“, ''Musical Quarterly, LX'', 1974.
*“The Reliability of Oral Transmission: The Case of Samaritan Music”, '’Yuval, III'', 1974.
*“The Interdependence of Notation Systems and Musical Information”, ''Yearbook of the International Folk Music Council, XI'', 1979 (with Dalia Cohen).
*“Waltz Interlude”, ''The Imperial Style: Fashions of the Habsburg Era'', New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980.
*“The Contribution of Music to the Illumination of Ambiguity”, ''Molad'', 1982 (Hebrew).
*“Collective ‘Problem-Solving’ in the History of Music: The Case of the Camerata”, ''Journal of the History of Ideas, XLV'', 1984.
*“Societal Codes for Responding to Dissent“, in W. Bennis et al., eds., ''The Planning of Change'' (4th edition), New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985.
*“Exemplification and the Limits of ‘Correctness’: The Implicit Methodology of Idelsohn’s ‘Thesaurus’“, ''Yuval, IV'', 1985.
*“Ut Musica Poesis: The Crystallization of the Conception Concerning Cognitive Processes and ‘Well Made Worlds’“, in H. Danuser et al., eds., ''Das musikalische Kunstwerk'', Berlin: Laaber 1988 (with Ruth HaCohen).
*“Concerning the Relationships Among the Arts: The 18th-Century Legacy to the 19th Century“, in Peter Andrasche and Edelgard Spaude, eds., ''Welttheater'', Rombach Verlag, 1992 (with Ruth HaCohen).
*“History as ‘Compliance’: The Development of Western Musical Notation in the Light of Goodman’s Requirements“, in Mary Douglas, ed.: ''How Classification Works: Nelson Goodman among the Social Scientists'', Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992.
*“Separating Sense from Meaning: On Musical Thought and Cognitive Theory“, ''Paul F. Lazarsfeld Memorial Lecture'', Columbia University, 1992.
*“Musico-Poetic Arabic Tradition: A Comparison between the Oral-Palestinian and the Written Medieval Spanish”, ''Revista de Musicologia'', vol. XVI, no. 4, 1993 (with Dalia Cohen).
*“Structural Aspects of Musico-Poetic Genres in Practice and of the Medieval Hebrew Muwassah”, ''Proceedings of the Eleventh World Congress Jewish Studies'', Jerusalem, 1994 (with Dalia Cohen).
*"Attitudes to the Time Axis and Cognitive Constraints: The Case of Arabic Vocal-Folk-Music“, ''Proceedings of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music'', 1994 (with Dalia Cohen).
*“Why Music? Jews and the Commitment to Modernity“, in S. Volkov, ed., ''The Jews and Modernity'', Munich: Historisches Kolleg, 1995.
*“McLuhan: Where Did He Come From, Where Did He Disappear?” ''Canadian Journal of Communication, 23'', 1998; also in French, Quaderni (with Elihu Katz).
*“Wagner and the Jewish Commitment to Modernity“, ''The Sterosta Lectures'', Jerusalem: The Hebrew University, 1984.
*“Melograph“, ''New Grove Dictionary of Music'' (with Dalia Cohen).
*“The Waltz and the Public Sphere“, in J. Lautman & B.P. Lecuyer, eds., ''Paul Lazarsfeld (1901-1975): La sociologie de Vienne à New York'', Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998.
*“The Melisma as a Musical Parameter: Characterizing Oriental Ethnic Groups in Israel” (in Hebrew), ''Pe’amim, 77'', 1999 (with Dalia Cohen).
*“‘Authenticity,’ ‘Interpretation,’ and ‘Practice’: Probing Their Limits“, in David Greet, ed., ''Musicology and Sister Disciplines: Past, Present and Future'', Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
*“Universal Constraints Concerning the Choice of Stylistic Rules in Various Cultures“, ''European Meetings in Ethnomusicology'', vol. VIII, 2001 (with Dalia Cohen).
*“Rhythmic Patterns Reflecting Cognitive Constraints and Aesthetic Ideals“, ''Journal of New Music Research'', vol. 37, no. 1 (with Dalia Cohen)
*“Life and Death among the Binaries: A contribution to the symposium on Jeffrey Alexander’s essay on the Holocaust” (with Elihu Katz). New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Katz, Ruth
1927 births
Israeli musicologists
Women musicologists
Living people
20th-century musicologists
21st-century musicologists
Jewish emigrants from Nazi Germany to Mandatory Palestine
People from Tel Aviv
Columbia University alumni
Hebrew University of Jerusalem faculty