Ruth Rubin
Ruth Rubin was a Canadian-born ethnomusicologist and a prominent figure in the study of Yiddish folk songs, born in Montreal in 1906. Growing up in a multilingual environment, she began performing Yiddish folk songs at a young age and later moved to New York City, where she pursued music studies while working as a secretary. Her research primarily focused on collecting, transcribing, and publishing Yiddish songs, and she is recognized for her significant contributions to the preservation of Yiddish cultural heritage during a time when such studies were declining due to historical events impacting Jewish communities. Over her career, Rubin collected more than two thousand songs, publishing them in various anthologies and examining their sociohistorical contexts, notably in her book "Voices of a People: The Story of Yiddish Folksong." Despite facing challenges as an outsider in the field of musicology and only earning her Ph.D. in 1976, her work laid the groundwork for future generations of ethnomusicologists. Rubin's archives are preserved at various esteemed institutions, reflecting her lasting impact on the field and the revival of Yiddish music. She passed away at the age of ninety-three in 1999, leaving behind a rich legacy as a pioneer in her field.
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Subject Terms
Ruth Rubin
Ethnomusicologist
- Born: September 1, 1906
- Birthplace: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
- Died: June 10, 2000
- Place of death: Marmaroneck, New York
A singer and a collector of Yiddish folk songs, Rubin analyzed the language, musical style, and social history of thousands of songs and presented them to audiences by performing them, lecturing about them, and publishing them.
Early Life
Ruth Rubin (REW-bihn) was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in 1906. She attended public school and the Peretz Shule (a Yiddish school) in Montreal, and she grew up speaking Yiddish, English, and French. Beginning at the age of seven, Rubin occasionally performed Yiddish folk songs in public. It is likely that she was introduced informally to the repertoire by her mother (Rubin’s father died when she was five years old) and added to her knowledge during her education in the Yiddish school; however, her systematic education in music began in New York, where she moved at the age of eighteen. Working as a secretary during the day, she went to Hunter College at night, studying music and American literature. Her first publication, a book of Yiddish poems, dated from 1929 (she had written Yiddish poetry as a teenager).
Rubin’s early ethnomusicological research was devoted primarily to the folk music of England and France and its influence in Canada and the United States. However, she appears to have been influenced in her subsequent work on Yiddish folk songs by the field research of the Russian Jewish ethnomusicologists Peysakh Marek and Saul Ginsberg at the turn of the twentieth century and by the establishment of the Society for Jewish Folk Music in St. Petersburg and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Vilna. Rubin almost single-handedly brought their professional objectives to the New World. She married Sam Rubin in 1932. They had one son, Michael, who died in young adulthood.
Life’s Work
Beginning in 1935, Ruth Rubin began her long work of collecting, performing, and lecturing devoted to Yiddish folk songs. While not the first to collect such sources (she credited Yehuda Leib Cahan with demonstration of possible methodology, although he could not notate the songs he collected), she was a pioneer in recording and publishing her written transcriptions of Yiddish songs, comparable to the field work Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály undertook in Eastern Europe. During a period of several decades, she collected more than two thousand songs, which were published in several anthologies and discussed in sociohistorical context in many articles and ultimately in the book Voices of a People: The Story of Yiddish Folksong (1963).
She undertook this work under less than ideal circumstances; among professional musicologists she was treated as an outsider because she continued to earn her living as a secretary, and she did not earn her Ph.D. degree until 1976, with a dissertation on “The Jewish Woman and Her Yiddish Song” (Union Graduate School, Yellow Springs, Ohio). Her work was also undertaken during a period when study of Yiddish culture was in decline; during the period from the 1930’s to the 1960’s, many Yiddish speakers from Eastern Europe were killed by the Nazis and Communists, and those who survived emigrated to the United States or Israel, where there was little understanding of life in the old country.
Nevertheless, Rubin worked among the survivors who came to New York and gradually gained recognition for her performances (in which she sang without accompaniment, in contrast to staged productions of Yiddish theater, which were far more familiar to Jews in New York than her repertoire) and for her publications. She was recognized with an honorary doctorate by the New England Conservatory of Music. By the time of her death at the age of ninety-three in a nursing home in Marmaroneck, New York, she was regarded by folk-song specialists as a progenitor in their field.
Significance
Rubin’s work was significant because of her thorough documentation of her research. Unknown to all but a select group of specialists, including Chana Mlotek, Hankus Netsky, Mark Slobin and other ethnomusicologists of later generations, she was a powerful participant in the early years of the profession of ethnomusicology, influencing scholars involved in the Yiddish music revival to the present day. Her archives are located at the YIVO Institute in New York, the Library of Congress, and the Ethnographic Museum in Haifa.
Bibliography
Mlotek, Chana, and Mark Slobin, eds. Yiddish Folksongs from the Ruth Rubin Archive. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007. Published in cooperation with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, this resource is based on materials in Rubin’s archive and edited by two scholars influenced by Rubin’s work.
Netsky, Hankus. “Ruth Rubin: A Life in Song.” Pakn Treger 57 (Summer, 2008): 18-23. Summarizes Rubin’s life, the context of her work as performer, lecturer and scholar, and her influence on other scholars.
Rubin, Ruth. “A Comparative Approach to a Yiddish Song of Protest.” Studies in Ethnomusicology 2 (1965): 54-73. Foreshadows extended study of Yiddish folk song developed in Voices of a People.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. A Treasury of Jewish Folksongs. New York: Schocken Books, 1950. Early collection from a period when research on Yiddish folk songs was not published widely. Anticipates Rubin’s later more extensive work. The piano settings are by Ruth Post.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Voices of a People: The Story of Yiddish Folksong. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Historical, social, and analytical study of Yiddish folk song interspersed with musical examples. Later edition of Rubin’s pioneering study from 1963.