Jewish music
The history of religious Jewish music spans the evolution of cantorial, synagogal, and Temple melodies since Biblical times.
[3] The instruments included the kinnor (lyre), nevel (harp), tof (tambourine), shofar (ram's horn), ḥatzotzᵊrot (trumpet) and three varieties of pipe, the chalil, alamoth and the uggav.
There was no standard form of musical notation utilised by the Jews and these modes and synagogue melodies derived from them were therefore handed down directly, typically from a chazzan to his apprentice meshorrer (descant).
The synagogal reading of the parashah (the weekly extract from the Torah) and the haftarah (section from the Prophets), may recall the melodic tropes of the actual Temple service.
In practice the cantillation often echoes the tones and rhythms of the countries and ages in which Jews lived, notably as regards the modality in which the local music was based.
With the piyyutim (liturgical poems—singular: piyut), dating from the first millennium after the destruction of the Temple, one stream of Jewish synagogal music began to crystallize into definite form.
A well-known piyyut is Adon Olam ("Master of the World"), sometimes attributed to Solomon ibn Gabirol in 11th century Spain.
The baqashot are a collection of supplications, songs, and prayers that have been sung for centuries by the Sephardic Aleppian Jewish community and other congregations every Sabbath eve from midnight until dawn.
Baqashot reached countries all round the Mediterranean and even became customary for a time in Sephardic communities in western Europe, such as Amsterdam and London.
Changes in European Jewish communities, including increasing political emancipation and some elements of religious reform, had their effects on music of the synagogue.
The Jewish scholar Eric Werner notes that among the European Ashkenazi communities of Europe "between 1660 and 1720 the musical tradition was waning, and the second half of the eighteenth century witnessed its worst decay".
[11] The historian of Jewish music Abraham Zevi Idelsohn considers that "Eighteenth-century manuscripts of Synagogue song display a striking monotony of style and texts".
These included Salomon Sulzer in Vienna,[20] Samuel Naumbourg in Paris,[21] Louis Lewandowski in Berlin,[22] and Julius Mombach in London.
Around the 15th century, a tradition of secular (non-liturgical) Jewish music was developed by musicians called kleyzmorim or kleyzmerim by Ashkenazi Jews in Eastern Europe.
Sephardic music adapted to each of these locals, assimilating North African high-pitched, extended ululations; Balkan rhythms, for instance in 9/8 time; and the Turkish maqam mode.
Salamone Rossi (1570 – c. 1630) of Mantua composed a series of choral settings called "The Songs of Solomon", based on Jewish liturgical and biblical texts.
"[24] Jacques Offenbach (1819–1880), a leading composer of operetta in the 19th century, was the son of a cantor, and grew up steeped in traditional Jewish music.
The resulting music is a marriage between often melancholy and "krekhtsen" (moaning) melodies of the shtetl with late Russian romantic harmonies of Scriabin and Rachmaninoff.
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895–1968), an Italian composer who immigrated to America on the eve of World War II, was strongly influenced by his Sephardic Jewish upbringing.
These composers included Paul Ben-Haim, Erich Walter Sternberg, Marc Lavry, Ödön Pártos, and Alexander Uriah Boskovich.
Modern Israeli composers include Betty Olivero, Tsippi Fleischer, Mark Kopytman and Yitzhak Yedid.
At first, songs were based on borrowed melodies from German, Russian, or traditional Jewish folk music with new lyrics written in Hebrew.
"The huge change in our lives demands new modes of expression", wrote composer and music critic Menashe Ravina in 1943.
"[29] The youth, labor and kibbutz movements played a major role in musical development before and after the establishment of Israeli statehood in 1948, and in the popularization of these songs.
The national labor organization, the Histadrut, set up a music publishing house that disseminated songbooks and encouraged public sing-alongs (שירה בציבור).
