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LAZARE SAMINSKY (1882–1959)belongs to the school of musicians,ethnologists, folklorists,and other intellectuals in Russiawho, during the first decade ofthe 20th century, attempted toestablish a new Jewish nationalart music based on ethnic as wellas religious heritage. Intriguedand encouraged by both theRussian and the more recent Russo-Jewish national-culturalpursuit of folklore, that coterie formalized itself in 1908 asthe Gesellschaft für Jüdische Volksmusik (Society for JewishFolk Music) in St. Petersburg—of which Saminsky was oneof the earliest members.Branches followed in Moscow, Riga, Odessa, and othercities. Although the initial phase of its activities centeredaround harmonizing and arranging Jewish folk musiccollected from various parts of the Russian Empire, itslong-range purpose was more artistic than ethnological.Its second transitory stage involved shaping such arrangedfolk material for concert rendition, and in its ultimate stageit aimed at original composition of works—based on orinspired by that Jewish heritage—which its members sawas accumulating to become a national Jewish musical art.Musical publication was therefore an important part of theSociety’s efforts, and it founded its own press.To some extent, the “Russification” path among Russiancomposers and in the Russian classical music world becamea model for a Jewish counterpart. But the mission espousedby the Gesellschaft composers also had been kindled andbred by a number of deeper forces operating among theJewish intelligentsia in the Russian sphere—includingthe awakening of a national consciousness, the modernrevival of Hebrew (apart from the language of prayer), theinterest in a secular Hebrew as well as Yiddish literature,and, of course, Zionism, with its cultural and historicalramifications. Underlying these currents were the powerfulcultural forces of the movement known as the haskala—the8.559439 26Jewish Enlightenment—which had sought to implantsecular culture and literature, humanistic thought, andwestern European–style social liberalism within easternEuropean Jewry. Indeed, cosmopolitan middle-classintelligentsia’s very embrace of “the folk” and its music inthe far-flung and often backward regions of the empirewas one manifestation of the liberal worldview fosteredby the haskala.Saminsky was born in Vale-Gotzulovo [-Hatzulovo], inthe Ukraine, some hundred miles from Odessa, to anupper-middle-class family that, on his father’s side, hadbeen long-standing residents and successful merchantsin that metropolis on the Black Sea. His mother was anaccomplished amateur singer who instilled in him a love formusic that he later traced to his earliest memories. He wasenrolled at the Emperor Nicholas I Lyceum of Commerce atthe age of eleven. Although he sang in school choirs (evenin a local church choir) and responded enthusiastically toan exposure to classical concert music performances bydabbling in childhood composition efforts, he did notbegin piano lessons until he was nearly fifteen—unusuallylate for any future professional musician. Followinginitial music theory studies in Odessa, he entered the St.Petersburg (Imperial) Conservatory in 1906, where hisprincipal teachers were Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, AnatoliLiadov, and Nikolay Tcherepnin, and where Prokofievwas among his classmates. Simultaneously, he pursuedhis other lifelong passion, studying mathematics at theuniversity in St. Petersburg, where he had wanted to enrollearlier but had been precluded as a Jew—until a degree ofliberalization following the 1905 Revolution now made itpossible for him. In Odessa, he had begun his examinationof the “philosophy behind the new geometry,” and bythe time he entered university, he was already engagedin a philosophical-analytical review of new geometricalconcepts.Midway into the period of his conservatory studies, hisinduction into the Gesellschaft ignited his theretoforeunexplored interests in music of historical, national, cultural,