‘Before and after … ’: two eras of ethnomusicology. Interview with Simha Arom

Abstract

History shows us that almost all great musicians were born and raised in permanent contact with music within the confines of their own family. Simha Arom’s childhood experience was that of accompanying his father, an amateur cantor, in the singing of Jewish liturgical chants, and this influenced his entire musical career. In particular, it aroused his curiosity about music that does not have any explicit theory, like the music found in African traditions. As he explains in the documentary Simha (2015),1 he and his brother used to sing the drone while their father sang the melody and through gentle nudges indicated when they had to change pitch. This is how they learnt, empirically, as is the case with the traditions just mentioned. After the ‘Kristallnacht’ pogrom in November 1938, Arom was forced to flee across Europe, a journey that profoundly affected his musical development. While crossing the Pyrenees into Spain on foot in 1944 en route to Palestine – then still under British mandate – he met a violinist called ‘Henry Violin’. It was so ‘miraculous’ listening to him play that it made Simha want to become a musician himself. Initially he was placed in a children’s village in Palestine, but soon managed to transfer to another such village, where he could study the violin. To do so, however, he first had to stage a ‘mild’ hunger strike and then had to work as a mason so that he had enough money to hire a violin in Tel Aviv and continue his studies. He was wounded in the right arm during military service in Israel’s War of Independence (1948), which put paid to his career as a violinist. But not his career as a musician, for he decided to change to the French horn, for which one mainly really needs the left hand... As Arom rather jokingly put it, this gave him more opportunities in Israel, where violinists were ten a penny but horn players rare. He began studying in Jerusalem, later pursuing his studies at the French National Conservatoire in Paris where