By BRIAN BLUMupfront224(photo credit: )Extract from Issue 16, November 24, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Reportclick here.
I've always been fascinated by the fact that in the ancient Jewish Temple, the Levites used to play music on Shabbat and holidays. What did it sound like? What instruments were used? How is it that the tradition of music on the holy days became lost and later even prohibited?
Ilan Green had a similar interest. An established rock and roll musician - he was formerly a member of the popular Israeli group "The Tractor's Revenge" - Green has spent the last year and a half building putative versions of 16 out of the 30 musical instruments that are mentioned in the Bible, Mishna and other Jewish texts, as well as trying to reconstruct the music that he surmises would have been played on them.
His work resulted in an October concert by Green and three band mates, commissioned by Jerusalem's pluralistic Beit Avichai cultural center, which was both full of wonder and not a bit perplexing. Wonder because the music itself - a blatantly anachronistic mix of jazzy funk, chants and rap, with a pinch of anthem rock and audience sing along - was inspiring. Perplexing because I couldn't help asking: How could he know what the instruments and the music were really like?
The truth admits Green - who plays a number of stringed instruments - is that he can't. Instead, he's taken a large dose of creative license, and his interpretation is more personal than historical.
For example, Psalms 8:1 refers to David, the harpist king, as playing something called a gittit. Green turned that vague mention into an instrument resembling a small ukulele.
Green's main percussion unit is shaped like a Star of David, each point generating a different sound. Next to it stands a metal tree with small bells on each branch that Green calls ayelet hashahar, meaning morning star or dawn.
Instead of tambourines, Green took the reference to the shivat haminim, the seven species of grains and fruit mentioned in the Torah, and turned them into wooden rattles with biblical names, including the pomegranate, grape, fig. olive and date (the latter looked liked a Mancala board strung with real date pits).
There's also a stringed instrument that looks like a piano and that is plucked and tapped with a mallet; a triangular harp with a dove carved into its base; and a contraption called David's violin that is the closest to the instrument we use today.
The concert was billed as "Voices from the Levites," named after the tribe that played the music at the Temple. Up front and center among the four musicians and their panoply of strange instruments was a female vocalist, Avital Raz, whose piercing contralto would definitely not have been heard in the male-only Temple itself, but which sounded entirely at home in the Jerusalem of today. Raz spent five years in India learning Indian devotional music and, on her return to Israel two years ago, has gained a following on the alternative music scene here.
Going alternative has also been Green's direction since leaving "Tractor's Revenge." His repertoire of late ranges from electronic and trance to the more academic, in keeping with his day job as head of the music department at the Naggar School of Photography, Digital Media and New Music in Jerusalem's Musrara neighborhood.
Extract from Issue 16, November 24, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Reportclick here.
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