During the early middle
ages, the Jews of Ashkenaz  developed their own
distinguishable culture. The most prominent group among them spoke the
Middle High German that later developed into Yiddish. Wherever they
migrated, they retained special dialects of the old German language
mingled with Hebrew and local vernacular words; a distinctive pronunciation
of Hebrew; and their own religious music and customs, often carried
far afield by traveling rabbis who also served as cantors. The most
venerated authority in this regard came to be R. Jacob Levi Moellin,
known as the Maharil (c. 1356-1427), who served in the double capacity
of rabbi and cantor in various German and Bohemian communities, and
whose rulings are still considered obligatory for the Orthodox Ashkenazirn.
By the end of the
fifteenth century, Ashkenazi Jewry can be subdivided into two cultural
segments: western Europe (Minhag Ashkenaz proper, sometimes known
also as Minhag Rinus, or the Rhineland rite) and eastern Europe (Minhag
Polin, or the Polish rite). Both branches shared the main features
of the liturgy and the old Ashkenazi piyyutim, and they retained similar
basic prayer chants and cantillation motives. Gradually, each branch
developed independent cultural and musical characteristics, but various
melodies traveled from one branch to the other, thanks to migrating
cantors and wandering rabbinical emissaries who crossed cultural borders.
The mass immigration
of European Jews from the second half of the nineteenth century and
the destruction of the Jewish communities of Europe in the Holocaust
transplanted the Ashkenazi tradition to Palestine, Australia, South
Africa, and America. Though here and there the western tradition was
retained or even prevailed (e.g., among nineteenth and early twentieth-century
American Reform Jews, or in pockets where German subculture is still
venerated, as in New York City's Washington Heights), 
in most places, the eastern liturgical and musical tradition came
eventually to dominate.
The traditional synagogue
chant of the Ashkenazi Jews, both east and west, consists of four interacting
layers, each of which emerged in a different time: (1) cantillation
of Scripture (2) nusach (3) misinai melodies, and (4) cantonal improvisation.
The earliest layer
is probably the musical motifs used for the cantillation of Scripture.
When they are first heard, the eastern European cantillation motives
seem very different from their older western European counterparts.
But both stem from a common origin. We do not know when the proto-Ashkenazi
motifs emerged and how they are related to the ninth-century Tiberian
chants, since no early musical transcriptions of te'amim exist. 
Nevertheless, they show some agreement with early verbal descriptions
of the old motifs and therefore it seems plausible that they were
already in use during the eleventh or twelfth centuries.
The second layer,
the simple prayer chants known as nusach, developed simultaneously
with, or slightly later than, basic melodic patterns of the te'amim.
Usually sung by lay precentors, these chants consist of simple psalmodic
formulas for the opening morning prayers and psalms (pesukei dezimrah)
and patchwork melodies for more complex texts, such as the week day
benedictions of the Tefillah. Some of these chant patterns are related
to cantillation Motifs. 
A third layer, misinai
tunes, are sung on solemn occasions, especially the High Holy Days.
They are common to both eastern and western Ashkenazim who revere
them highly. We do not know when the term misinai (literally, from
Sinai) was first coined, but cantors of the past two or three centuries
have believed that the tunes were very old, perhaps revealed like
the Torah itself to Moses on Sinai and, therefore, equally unalterable.
Even less naive people use the term to distinguish the old, obligatory
tunes from the new, fashionable ones.
In all probability,
misinai melodies date back to Germany or northern France at various
times between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries. In 1926, Idelsohn
linked misinai tunes to the melodies of the medieval German minnesinger
and concluded that the tunes combine oriental Jewish and German elements.
Continuing Idelsohn's line of thought, Eric Werner compared the great
Alenu, one of the most sacred misinai tunes, to the Gregorian Sanctus
and Agnus Dei of the ninth Mass. 
The most famous misinai
tune is the one used for Yom Kippur eve's Kol Nidre and is considered
by many to be the crown of Jewish liturgical chant. In a brilliant
article, Idelsohn concluded that the tune was compounded from melodic
patterns of various sources; that some important patterns were derived
from the western Ashkenazi cantillation of the Prophets; and that
the tune showed clear influence of German minnesinger melodies. The
tune was probably composed in southern Germany in "the later part
of the Period of the Minnesong," namely the end of the fifteenth or
the beginning of the sixteenth century.  Unfortunately,
no extant transcriptions of the Kol Nidre tune predate the eighteenth
century, by which time it was already outfitted with many late cantorial
Two misinai tunes
became famous in non-Jewish circles after they were arranged by great
gentile composers. The Kaddish by Maurice Ravel is an imaginative
arrangement of a faithful transcription of the misinai Kaddish melody
that introduces the High Holy Day period's Selichot and Musaf services.
 One of the many versions of the Kol Nidre tune
has become famous in Max Bruch's setting for cello and orchestra.
The fourth layer
of Ashkenazi liturgical music consists of cantorial improvisations.
These are built on tunes and motifs of the previous layers with the
addition of musical elements that are borrowed from vocal and instrument
music of the day.  During the eighteenth century,
musical idioms were borrowed from European baroque and early classic
styles; during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the idioms
of Italian opera penetrated cantorial improvisations.
The traditional improvisations
are based on special modes called (in Yiddish) shtaygers (German:
Steiger).  A shtayger is a musical corpus of
melodic patterns that are related to a scale and are associated with
particular prayers, functions, and services. Unlike the European scales,
shtayger modes contain different sequences of tone and sermitone in
different octaves. The shtaygers are said to be connected to certain
notions of ethos or emotional contexts, but how much so is disputed
among scholars. Cantors recognize three main shtaygers and a few auxiliary
ones, and name them by the prayers with which they are most often
sung. The three main shtaygers are these: Adonay malakh (whose scale,
in the main octave only, resembles the Mixolydian mode), Magen avot
(similar to natural minor mode but with many additional features),
and Ahavah rabbah (with a tone-and-a-half step between the second
and the third degrees of the scale). The last shtayger, which is common
to many eastern European, Jewish and non-Jewish folk tunes (e.g.,
the famous Havah Nagillah), has become the symbol of Jewish music,
although it is by no means the characteristic mode of all, or even
a majority, of the Jewish tunes. 
The scales of the
shtayger need not contain the same accidentals in all octaves; on
the contrary, one of the salient characteristics of some shtaygers
is the variety of tone and semitone series in the different octaves.
The melodic patterns of some shtaygers help cantors modulate from
one shtayger to another and back again. All have clear formulas for
the beginning of a piece or a section and for cadencing at the end
of a piece, and other melodic gestures for various musical functions.
However, all of the patterns are flexible enough to allow for regional
and personal stylistic differences. In this respect they resemble
jazz patterns which good musicians play with as if they were musical
At its best, cantorial
improvisation seeks to highlight the text of the prayers by means
of musical interpretation. The cantor tries to convey the emotional
contents of the prayer or to depict in sound some of its visual images.
At its worst, it deteriorates into a vain display of vocal tirade.
The art of cantorial improvisation developed into virtuoso style in
eastern Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Some of the improvisations by cantors such as Ephraim Zalman Razunini,
Pinchas Segal " Pinchik, " Joseph Rosenblatt, and Leib Glantz were
of sublime beauty. After long developmental and incubational periods,
some of these great improvisations were finally transcribed into musical
notation or recorded by their creators. Once published, they became
part of the common stock of cantorial art that many cantors sang as
Folk polyphony is common
to many non-European cultures. Jews, too, have practiced such unlearned
polyphonic devices as drones, simple two-part singing, and the like.
 Simple drones may even have been used in the
Second Temple. A particularly interesting form of polyphony, practiced
by Yemenite Jews, consists of the congregation forming parallel lines
of heterophonic singing at the intervals of perfect fourths and fifths.
This remarkable phenomenon is redolent of medieval European organum
as described in theoretical treatises of the tenth and eleventh centuries,
and it can be called heterophonic organum.  However,
it seems that European polyphonic art music was introduced into the
synagogue only at the end of the sixteenth or the beginning of the seventeenth
Simple European polyphony
seems to have been sung by a small group of singers in some Ashkenazi
(Tedeschi) synagogues in northern Italy around the year 1600. It is
possible that this kind of polyphony was related to the practice of
the vocal trio of cantor, bass, and boy singer that was common in
Ashkenazi synagogues until the nineteenth century. Most of the singing
by this trio was done from memory or by extemporization, and melodic
accompaniment followed well-known conventions of droning and responding
to solos with a word or two in simple chords. Some of these conventions
are still heard in choirs of Orthodox synagogues. 
The first musician
to introduce composed polyphony into the synagogue music was Salomone
di Rossi of Mantua (c. 1565? - after 1628). In 1622, he published
his compositions in a set of part books printed in Venice under the
title Hashirim asher Lishlomoh (The Songs of Solomon). The books were
intended to provide polyphonic substitutes for the cantor's part in
some services, as well as choral settings of some psalms and piyyutim.
 Although the publication of Rossi's compositions
was warmly supported by one of the greatest rabbinical figures of
the time, Yehudah Arieh (Leone) di Modena, it found no immediate followers.
Nevertheless, during the second half of the seventeenth century, the
Jews of Italy introduced baroque cantatas into some ceremonies of
the synagogue. The favored ceremonies were connected with the inauguration
of new synagogues and celebrations of pious societies, especially
on the last intermediary day of Sukkot (Hoshanah Rabbah). Frequently,
non-Jewish composers were commissioned to set ancient and newly invented
Hebrew texts. 
During the eighteenth
century, cantatas were composed and sung in various communities of
Europe, such as Comtat Venaisin in southern France and the Portuguese
synagogue in Amsterdam. When rabbinic law permitted it, instrumental
music, too, was used in a few synagogues. In some towns, welcoming
the Sabbath (Kabbalat Shabbat) was celebrated on Friday afternoons
with instrumental music, and some synagogues even introduced the organ.
In Prague, for instance, the three main synagogues namely,
the Pinkas-Schul, Altneuschul, and Meisel-Schul all possessed
portable organs and celebrated Kabbalat Shabbat with organ and other
instrumental accompaniment until the end of the eighteenth century.
 New trends of polyphonic music were introduced
into the European synagogues during the nineteenth century, and these
are treated elsewhere in this volume. 
As we saw above, rabbinic
Judaism deemphasized the role of music, seeing in it a potential source
of disrespect for the memory of Jerusalem and even a cause of what they
considered promiscuity. Thus even though all Jewish communities sang,
danced, and played musical instruments whenever possible, no theoretical
support for such activities was offered by rabbinical texts. This changed
in the sixteenth century, with the popularization of several forms of
mysticism generally subsumed in the title, Kabbalah. Convinced that
music possessed the power to lift the human soul to the Eternal, 
or even to attain prophecy,  early Kabbalistic
literature explored music's magical and theurgical powers. But Kabbalistic
literature was originally the province of the elite. Only with the rise
of Kabbalistic adepts in sixteenth-century Safed (in Israel's eastern
Galilee) did its mystical doctrines penetrate every aspect of Jewish
life to the point where unlearned Jews practiced Kabbalism without even
knowing that they did so.
The Kabbalah of Isaac
Luria (1534-1572), the central figure in Safed Kabbalism, and his
disciples revolved around the central idea of tikkun, i.e., mending
the catastrophic break within the divine emanation. The Kabbalistic
myth of creation held that in the process of divine emanation whence
the universe came into being, the divine light had become embroiled
with kelipot (shards of evil), such that the created cosmos abounds
with evil too. Tikkun, "reparation," will return the sparks to their
pristine state, redeeming both Creator and created simultaneously.
Performing mitzvot (acts commanded by God) accomplishes tikkun olam,
"the reparation of the cosmos."
The Kabbalists viewed
music, too, as having fallen into the realm of evil, on account of
human sin. It was therefore necessary to find a tikkun for music,
so as to lift it up towards its divine source. The tikkun for music
was to sing it in sacred circumstances, such as during the Sabbath
meal or with the holy words of prayer. For centuries, Jews had been
borrowing secular and non-Jewish tunes for their worship, but without
theoretical support for what was merely an instance of a universal
pattern known to all cultures. Now, however, the practice was outfitted
with a theological rationale. A direct and immediate result of the
new freedom to recast secular melodies as sacred entities were the
piyyutim of Israel Najara, which were based on Arabic and Turkish
sounds. Najara used to sit in Arabic coffee houses in order to learn
new tunes (and was severely criticized for this, even in Kabbalistic
circles). The idea of tikkun also inspired European Jews to introduce
baroque music into the synagogue, and the same idea inspired eastern
European Hasidim to adopt foreign tunes and "Judaize" them.
postulated also that the various stages of emanation could be conceptualized
as Sefirot, or spheres of light, that came into being at intervals
of time different from the moment when the light was set loose from
its source until it eventuated in the final act of bringing an actual
world into being. In the idealized state of divine wholeness, nothing
had separated one Sefirah from another, but now, the Godhead itself
was in disarray. This was particularly so because one Sefirah contains
the feminine principle, while another holds the masculine principle,
such that masculine and feminine exist in disharmonious separation
from each other, a condition mirrored by earthly travail as well
the exile of Israel from the Holy Land, for instance, which is an
earthly reflection of the exile of the divine feminine power from
its masculine counterpart. Tikkun olam leads to the Messianic era
when God's male and female powers will be reunited for good and Israel
will return to its country.
To foster this reunion,
the Kabbalists established private devotions known as tikkun chatsot,
a midnight vigil of penitential prayers to be chanted on weekdays,
when the exile of the feminine principle is particularly evident.
By contrast, temporary union occurs every Sabbath, which is known
as a "taste of the world to come." Kabbalist liturgy thus fostered
rituals designed to celebrate the divine reunion of male and female,
most notably, the Kabbalat Shabbat service that actually welcomes
the Sabbath queen and bride as the sun sets on Friday evening. By
the seventeenth century, this service had become an integral part
of the liturgy in every community, even non-Kabbalistic ones which
accepted the new ritual for its beauty, without perhaps even knowing
its Kabbalistic rationale. The central piyyut of this service is Lekhah
Dodi by Solomon Halevi Alkabetz, who embedded in its lyrics many allusions
to the divine reunion. The poem attracted hundreds of tunes all over
The same Kabbalistic
ideas led to the establishment of other Friday night ceremonies too:
a Sabbath Eve meal with after-dinner singing (as if one is attending
the divine marriage); and Bakkashot services in Syrian and Moroccan
communities on Friday nights in winter after midnight (see above),
where to this day, the best Middle Eastern cantorial singing can still
pietism led to eastern European Hasidism, which borrowed directly the
motifs of Lurianic Kabbalah. Its founders, Israel Baal Shem Tov and
his disciples, were convinced that God was best worshiped out of a sense
of great joy. Music and dance were the most important means for releasing
the soul from the influence of the shards of evil. 
The Hasidic theory
of the niggun a melody without lyrics maintained that
melodies, too, contain divine sparks, so that defiled melodies can
be redeemed by being sung in sanctity. Further, melodies, like souls,
are of divine origin, yet not all are equal. There therefore exists
a hierarchy among the various kinds of niggun. The lowest melodic
form is simply an expression of joy. Higher up are liturgical songs
that express the inward meaning of the prayers. But the highest melodies
are those created by the tzaddikim, Hasidic leaders and saints; the
musical patterns of their songs were believed to express secret Kabbalistic
A melody's place
in the musical hierarchy varied also with its relationship to a text,
in that melodies with texts are like souls with bodies, whereas melodies
without texts are like pure souls. Therefore the Hasidim composed
many melodies with any text and sang them with nonsense syllables
such as ya-ba-bam or doy-doy-doy and the like.
At times, such wordless
niggunim served as substitute prayers: a long wordless melody would
be followed by a hasty recitation of the corresponding prayer.
some of whom were themselves gifted musicians, encouraged the creation
of new niggunim. They or their followers composed melodies for statutory
worship and for distinctive Hasidic rituals like the ceremonial meal
known as a Tisch. Other leaders employed court composers, whose musical
output was carefully scrutinized. It was not uncommon in the middle
of the nineteenth century for Hasidic masters to employ their own
chazzan, along with choirs of meshorerim charged with the task of
disseminating new melodies by teaching them to the pilgrims who flocked
to the tzaddik's court during the Holy Day seasons. Thus different
melodies and different performance practices developed under the various
Hasidic dynasties. Until recently, all the melodies were considered
torah shebe'al peh (oral law) not to be written, but in the last four
decades some Hasidic authorities have begun permitting, and even encouraging,
the notation of their niggunim as a means of preservation and proliferation.
Among the many genres
of niggunim, the most important are short dance melodies; melodies
used in services, either as introductions to prayers or as substitutes
for them; and long meditative melodies called dveikes and used in
important gatherings at the tzaddik's table. Most melodies contain
two to four sections, but some may have as many as thirty-six! The
sections are said to represent stages of ecstasy or cleavage to God.
music is well and thriving. New melodies for many occasions are composed
by the various courts, and these regularly replace old ones. The influence
of Hasidic music is felt even in the liturgical music of non-Hasidic
Jews. Genuine Hasidic melodies have penetrated Orthodox, Conservative,
and Reform services alike. Furthermore, imitations of Hasidic music
are quite fashionable in wide circles, even among pop composers, whose
work is highlighted in an annual Israeli "Festival of Hasidic Music,"
whence it travels to non-Hasidic services worldwide. Even the Reform
movement, which arose as a bastion of anti-Hasidic sentiment, now
features services that claim to have been composed in Hasidic style,
though most of the imitations are much-simplified versions of the
At the beginning of this
century, scholars of Jewish music, including Idelsohn, believed that
some Jewish communities, such as the Yemenite or Babylonian Jews, preserved
their ancient musical traditions in pristine purity. Proof of the antiquity
of their chants was to a great measure the simplicity of the melodies.
This innocent belief became a major factor in the rebuilding of Jewish
musical culture, especially in its old-new homeland. But the more we
study Jewish musical traditions, the more we are aware of the changes
that took place in each tradition throughout the ages. Recent studies,
especially those by Amnon Shiloah,  have tried
to understand the dynamics of change that influenced the traditional
oriental chants during their encounter with the new cultural milieu
of modem Israel. Similar changes, though not at as fast a pace, must
have been the norm all along and need now to be documented.
We no longer can
believe that some Jewish communities were so secluded that they never
were influenced by others. The essence of the Jewish experience with
history has been that Jews have moved like peddlers from community
to community, carrying their musical merchandise with them. Some rabbis
and cantors traveled to distant places expressly intending to transplant
their liturgical chants to the cultural soil of foreign Jewish communities.
Thus, for instance, modern studies should inquire whether the resemblance
of the Amsterdam Portuguese chants to their Moroccan counterparts
is related to the fact that both communities are descendents of the
Sephardim of Spain, or whether other factors were involved. Perhaps
the Moroccan chant was imported to Holland by Moroccan rabbis and
cantors such as Isaac Uziel of Fez, an authoritative rabbi and excellent
musician who was invited by the Dutch community in around 1610 to
lead the congregation there.  Neither can we
subscribe to the idea that the simpler the melody, the more ancient.
Liturgical melodies may have developed from the simplest patterns
to the most complex ones; or they may have shrunk from highly developed
forms into simple patterns. Indeed, melodies have a tendency to undergo
various changes through the ages, especially if they are transmitted
The study of change
in Jewish liturgical music must take into account the major historical
factors that were presented in this survey: the destruction of the
Temple and rise of the synagogue; the development of the cantillation
of Scripture; the ascent of the piyyut; the influence of Arabic culture;
the infiltration of non-Jewish melodies during the Middle Ages and
later; the changing nature of the cantorate in different places and
times; the introduction of polyphony into the services; and finally,
the influence of Kabbalah and Hasidism.
This page is reproduced,
in three parts, by permission of the author and publisher in three parts
from "Jewish Liturgical Music from the Bible to Hasidims" by Eliyahu
Schleifer, in Sacred Sound and Social Change: Liturgical Music in
Jewish and Christian Experience published by University of Notre
Dame Press. This book is available in our liturgical web store (learn
Lotharingian part of the Carolingian Empire, including the Rhineland,
some northern parts of France, and Flanders.
His dicta on liturgical customs and chants were collected by his disciple,
Zalman of St. Goar, and were published in 1556 as Sefer Minhagei
For synagogue music in the United States, see Mark Slobin, Chosen
Voices: Yhe Story of the American Cantorate (Urbana and Chicago,
The western Ashkenazi motifs were first transcribed into European
renaissance notation by non-Jewish humanist scholars of the sixteenth
century. The earliest published transcription, by Johannes Boeschenstein,
was printed in Johannes Reuchlin's Hebrew grammar, De Accentibus
et orthographia linguae Hebraicae (Hagenau, 1518). To suit the
taste of the time, the melodic patterns were set in four parts (SATB),
the tenor part containing the original melody. Needless to say, the
reading of Scripture was never chanted in polyphony. On other early
transcriptions, see Avenary, Biblical Chant, pp. 10-16.
An excellent nusach collection (mostly west European) is Abraham Baer,
Ba'al T'fillah oder "Der practische Vorbeter" (Ghenburg, 1877).
The second edition (1883) was reprinted as vol. 1 of the series, Out
of Print Classics of Synagogue Music (New York, 1953). For a recent
scholarly exposition of simple weekday nusach patterns, see Brian
J. Mayer, "The Origins and Identification of the Nusach lechol of
Frankfurt am Main," Journal of Synagogue Music 19/1 (July,
ldelsohn's original article, "Der Missinai-Gesang in der deutschen
Synagog," appeared in Zeitschrift f Musikwissenschaft 8/8
(May, 1926): 449-72, and was revised for his Thesaurus of Hebrew
Oriental Melodies, vol. 7 (1932), ch. 5 of the introductory section.
Eric Werner treats misinai tunes in A Voice Still Heard,
"The Kol Nidre Tune," Hebrew Union College Annual 8/9
The earliest extant transcription is a manuscript (Mus. 102a) notated
between 1765 and 1783 by Aron Beer (1738-1821), in the Birnbaum Collection,
Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati. Beer's version was published by
Idelsohn in his Thesaurus, vol. 6 (1932), no. 1. For this and
other early transcriptions, see Israel Adler, Hebrew Notated Manuscript
Sources up to Circa 1840, (Munich, 1989). See also Werner, A
Voice Still Heard, pp. 35-38, who tries, in an over - simplified
way, however-especially on p. 36-to reconstruct the original.
Ravel includes only the cantor's part, not the congregational response.
Only the beginning and the end of the composition come from the original
Kol Nidre tune; the rest is borrowed from an unrelated nineteenth-century
See, for instance, improvisations that embellished the misinai
tune of Alenu and similar chants, in Hanoch Avenary, "The Cantorial
Fantasia of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," Yuval
1 (1968): 65-88.
For a survey of the literature on the modes, see Max Wohlberg, "The
History of the Musical Modes of the Ashkenazic Synagogue and Their
Usage," Journal of Synagogue Music 4/1-2 (April, 1972): 46-61. Baruch
S. Cohon maps out all the Ashkenazi shtaygers in "The Structure of
the Synagogue Prayer-Chant," Journal of the American Musicological
Society 2 (1950): 17-31. See also Hanoch Avenary, "The Concept of
Mode in European Synagogue Chant," Yuval 2 (1971): 11-21; his "Second
Thoughts about the Configuration of a Synagogue Mode," Orbis Musicae
9 (1986): 11-16; and Joseph A. Levine, "Toward Defining the Jewish
Prayer Modes with Particular Emphasis on the Adonay Malakh Mode, "
Musica Judaica 3/1 (1980-1981): 13-41.
Idelsohn (Jewish Music, pp. 84-89) traced this mode to Mongolian or
See Edith Gerson-Kiwi, "Vocal Folk-Polyphonies of the Western Orient
in Jewish Tradition," Yuval 1 (1968): 169-193.
For European organum, see Richard H. Hoppin, Medieval Music (New York,
1978), pp. 178-98. Simha Arom and Uri Sharvit, who are now studying
the Yemenite phenomenon, call it "Yemenite Plurivocality." For their
findings, see forthcoming in Yuval 6.
Indications for the bass and boy singers occur already in some eighteenth-century
manuscripts. See Adler, Hebrew Notated Manuscript Sources, Index 14a,
A "modernized" version of Rossi's Hashirim was published by Samuel
Naumbourg as Cantiques de Salomon Rossi hebreo (Paris, 1877) reprint
ed. (New York, 1954). A better, scholarly edition in three volumes
was published by Fritz Rikko (New York, 1967-1973). A new critical
edition by Don Harran of Jerusalem is planned as part of the publication
of Rossi's collected works. On Rossi's innovation and its background,
see Israel Adler, "The Rise of Art Music in the Italian Ghetto," in
A. Altmann, ed., Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies, (Cambridge,
Mass., 1967), pp. 321-64; and Don Harran, "Tradition and Innovation
in Jewish Music of the Later Renaissance," Journal of Musicology 7/1
(Winter 1989): 107-30.
Various cantatas of this sort were discovered and published by Israel
Adler through the Israel Music Publications, Jerusalem.
See Alfred Sendrey, The Music of the Jews in the Diaspora (New York,
1970), pp. 348-56.
See below, Geoffrey Goldberg, "Jewish Liturgical Music in the Wake
of Nineteenth-Century Reform."
See Amnon Shiloah, "The Symbolism of Music in the Kabbalistic Tradition,"
The World of Music 20 (1978): 56-69.
See Moshe Idel, "Music and Prophetic Kabbalah," Yuval 4 (1971): 150-78;
and his Hebrew article in the Hebrew section of the same volume.
See Idelsohn, Jewish Music, ch. 19. The best early collection of Hasidic
melodies is Idelsohn's Thesaurus, vol. 10 (1932). A rich collection
of melodies is Velvel Pasternak's Songs of the Chassidim (Cedarhurst,
N.Y., 1971). For explanations of Hasidic melodies, see Chemjo Vinaver,
Anthology of Chasidic Music, Eliyahu Schleifer, ed. (Jerusalem, 1985).
See also Andre Hajdu and Yaacov Mazor, "The Musical Traditions of
Hasidism," Encyclopedia Judaica (Jerusalem, 1971), vol. 7, cols. 1421-32;
and the extensive Mazor-Hajdu article, "The Hasidic Dance-Niggun:
A Study Collection and Its Classificatory Analysis," Yuval 3 (1974):
136-265. Some of Hajdu-Mazor's authentic recordings were included
in Hasidic Tunes of Dancing and Rejoicing: Anthology of Musical Traditions
in Israel (Jerusalem, 1976), RCA (n.n.)
See for instance, Amnon Shiloah and Eric Cohen, "The Dynamics of Change
in Jewish Oriental Ethnic Music in Israel," Ethnomusicology 27 (1983):
See Edith Gerson-Kiwi's preface to David Ricardo, ed., Selected Tunes
from the Portuguese Jews' Congregation, Rishon LeZion [Private publication,
1975]; and Israel Adler, Musical Life and Traditions of the Portuguese
Jewish Community of Amsterdam in the XVIIIth Century, Yuval Monograph
Series, o. 1 (Jerusalem, 1974), pp. 11,93.
See Hanoch Avenary, "the Aspect of Time and Environment in Jewish
Traditional Music," Israel Studies in Musicology 4 (1987): 93-112.