Posted on 09/09/2010 11:28:03 AM PDT by Borges
Today is the first day of Rosh Hashana, the holiday that marks the beginning of the Jewish new year. For the next 10 days, through Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, Jews around the world will gather to chant the prayers of the High Holy Days to melodies that have been used for generations.
Some of the melodies will be simple and some complex, and some will be particularly beautiful. What almost none of them will be is “classical”: Western classical composition, the dominant feature of Christian sacred music for more than a millennium, remains mostly absent from Jewish liturgical music. Given the number of extraordinary Jewish classical composers over the last two centuries, this absence is particularly striking.
But it’s not surprising. The reasons for the dearth of classical music in the synagogue may be tangled, but they all lie in the familiar ground of Jewish history and experience: religious observance, rabbinic law, social and legal exclusion, systematic persecution, love of tradition — and the complicated psychology of being Jewish in a largely gentile world.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Classical Music Ping
Hmmm...
Waiting to hear from our President concerning Rosh Hashana. I’m sure he will celebrate it with American Jews......right? Will he invite them to the White House for a dinner?
This article is the answer to a question no one asked.
May as well ask why there’s no Middle Eastern music played at malls on Christmas.
I’m betting Wagner isn’t on the program.
Zero is More likely to invite them to a Yom Kippur BBQ.
Or
The sheik of Araby
or
Ahab the Arab
Bet he gives them a recording of ‘’Elvira’’.
I envy that the Jews have been able to preserve their liturgical musical traditions more than we Catholics have. Vatican II said that the standard Gregorian chants of a millenium and a half years should have pride of place in the Catholic Church liturgy, and hardly a note of Gregorian chant has been heard in Catholic churches since.
BTW -- anyone know where I can find and download MP3 files of the Liber Usualis, the Gregorian chant hymnal?
There are various other sites, too, but that's a start.
As hubby is musically challenged, he didn't immediately get it, nor did an explanation really work. Too bad, it was one of my life's more humorous moments.
I still haven't figured out if the string quartet leader was playing a practical joke or if the bride and her mother were being ecuminical.
Somehow I doubt the ecuminicism.
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