Religious Jewish music

This article describes the principal types of religious Jewish music from the days of the Temple to modern times.

The history of religious Jewish music is about the cantorial, synagogal, and the Temple music from Biblical to Modern times. The earliest synagogal music was based on the same system as that used in the Temple in Jerusalem. According to the Mishnah, the regular Temple orchestra consisted of twelve instruments, and the choir of twelve male singers. A number of additional instruments were known to the ancient Hebrews, though they were not included in the regular orchestra of the Temple: the uggav (small flute), the abbuv (a reed flute or oboe-like instrument).

After the destruction of the Temple and the subsequent diaspora of the Jewish people, music was initially banned. Later, these restrictions would relax, save for the Jews of Yemen who maintained strict adherence to Talmudic and Maimonidean halakha and "instead of developing the playing of musical instruments, they perfected singing and rhythm." (See Yemenite Jewish poetry. For the modern Yemenite-Israeli musical phenomenon, however, see Yemenite Jewish music.)

It was with the piyyutim (liturgical poems) that Jewish music began to crystallize into definite form. The cantor sang the piyyutim to melodies selected by their writer or by himself, thus introducing fixed melodies into synagogal music. The music may have preserved a few phrases in the reading of Scripture which recalled songs from the Temple itself; but generally it echoed the tones which the Jew of each age and country heard around him, not merely in the actual borrowing of tunes, but more in the tonality on which the local music was based.

From the time of the Renaissance Jewish communities in western Europe have shown some interest in modernizing the service by introducing composed music on the European model. Salamone Rossi, a composer at the court of Mantua, published a volume of psalm settings in a Baroque style similar to Monteverdi, but this did not become widely popular in synagogue use until revived in the late 19th century. In the 18th century the Venice community commissioned a number of works from non-Jewish composers such as Carlo Grossi and Benedetto Marcello.

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