Dead Sea Scrolls and Introduction to Jewish Music

Mehmet Okonsar

Discography by Mehmet Okonsar

J.S. Bach "Die Kunst der Fuge"

All CD's available at amazon.com and (partly) at cdbaby.com

The Actual Dead Sea Scrolls Biblical And Extra-Biblical Documents Found In The Fifties

Short presentation over the historical circumstances and the importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

J.S. Bach "Musikalische Opfer"

F. Liszt: "modern" works

J.S. Bach "Well-tempered Clavier"

Recital: "Live at Salt Lake City"

J.S. Bach The Goldberg Variations

Piano Solo Improvisations: "Shadowy Arcade"

All CD's can be auditioned entirely and freely at their respective pages. Click on the images.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a group of more than nine hundred writings which includes the Hebrew Scriptures and also extra-biblical documents, discovered between 1947 and 1956 at Khirbet Qumran over the northwest shoreline of the Dead Sea within the West Bank.

The texts are of fantastic spiritual and also historic value, they contain the actual earliest recognized surviving replicates of Biblical and also extra-biblical documents and maintain proof of awesome distinctiveness inside advanced Second Solomon's Temple epoch of the Judaism.

They are created in Hebrew, Aramaic and also Greek, mostly on parchment, but along with a little bit penned on papyrus.

The particular scrolls are typically identified with the Judaic sect known as the Essenes, although a bit of current readings have questioned this specific association and defend that the scrolls ended up being composed by priests within Jerusalem, Zadokites, or other not known Judaic communities.

The actual Dead Sea Scrolls are split into three groups: "Biblical" hand-writings (clones of writings from the Hebrew Bible), which contain roughly forty percent of the all discovered ones; "Pseudepigraphical" manuscripts (i.e. "Apocryphal"), identified documents from the second Schlomo's Temple Period, similar to "Sirach","Tobit", "Jubilees", "Enoch" as well as some non-canonical Psalms which in turn encompass roughly one third that belong to the whole revealed scrolls; and also manuscripts of "Sectarian" types, previously unknown records that articulate towards the guidelines and philosophy of a distinctive group or communities throughout larger Judaism), those are like the "War Scroll", "Community Rule","Pesher" on Habakkuk ("commentary") and the "Rule of the Blessing", that also consist of close to thirty percent of the discovered scrolls.

A handful of those documents were released early. Each of the actual writings in Cave 1 appeared throughout printing between 1950 and 1956, those through eight other caves appeared to be released within 1963, and 1965 saw the publication that belong to the Cave 11: Psalms Scroll. Their particular translations into the English language quickly followed.

Even though publicized as one discovery associated with terrific occurrences inside modern day archeology, the breakthrough discovery of the scrolls is in fact not necessarily devoid of disputes.

Every bit of the particular manuscripts were initially put under the oversight of one committee of historians hired by the Jordanian Department of Antiquities. This responsibility appeared to be assumed by the Israel Antiquities Authority after 1967.

Earlier than 1968, a good number of them as well as pieces of those scrolls ended up being kept in the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem. After the Six Day War, these scrolls and fragments were initially relocated to the Shrine of the Book, in the Israel Museum.

The Publication of the scrolls took decades, and also the actual delay has got recently been a source of educational dispute.

By 2007, a pair of volumes keep to be finalized, together with the whole sequence, with breakthroughs in Judean Desert, running to thirty-nine volumes in whole.

Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago is home for some scrolls. Several of them are now kept within the "Shrine of the Book" inside Jerusalem, whilst some are housed in Princeton Theological Seminary, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Azusa Pacific University (all in the U.S.A.) and some in the hands of private enthusiasts.

The vast majority of the longer, fuller scrolls, happens to be revealed just after their particular discovery. The majority of the scrolls, on the other hand, contains miniature, weak pieces, which are revealed at a speed considered by many for being much too slow.

Much more disturbing for some was the point that the use of the unpublished files was basically restricted to the actual editorial board.

In 1991, specialists at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio declared the invention of a computer software that utilized earlier revealed scrolls to reconstruct the unreleased writings. Officers from the Huntington Library in San Marino, California declared that they could enable research workers unrestricted authority to access the library's complete shots associated with the scrolls. Their monopoly weakened, the actual administrators associated with the Israel Antiquities Authority accepted to remove their long-standing limitations over the full use of the scrolls.

In autumn 1991, Wacholder shared seventeen documents that has been reconstructed within 1988 and put into the hands of historians outside with the International Team; in the same time, there took place the finding and publication of a total group of facsimiles that belong to the Cave Four materials at the Huntington Library, which appeared to be certainly not blanketed by the "secrecy rule".

Immediately after additional delays, public interest attorney at law, William John Cox acting representation of an "undisclosed client" presented a whole set of unregistered shots, and contracted for their particular publication.

Professors James Robinson and Robert Eisenman indexed the pics and authored an introduction to a "Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls", that has been published by the Biblical Archeology Society. Because of that, the actual "secrecy rule" had been lifted.

After the publication of the "Facsimile Edition", Professor Qimron sued Hershel Shanks, Eisenman, Robinson as well as the Biblical Archaeology Society for the purpose of copyright laws infringement of just one of the scrolls, that he decrypted. The Area Court of Jerusalem found in favor of Qimron.

The Court gave a restraining order, which in turn disallowed the publication that belong to the deciphered text. Defendants appealed the Supreme Court of Israel, that approved the District Court's decision, in 2000.

The Top Court further required that the defendants give over to Qimron every one of the actual infringing duplicates. The decision met Israeli as well as foreign critique from copyright regulation researchers.

Emanuel Tov, well-known scholar, was appointed as editor-in-chief in 1990. Publications associated with the Cave Four documents soon started, together with five volumes within print through 1995.

London publisher "Facsimile Editions" has been commissioned in 2007 by the "Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation" for creating genuine facsimiles of three scrolls. From the initial three facsimile collections, an exhibition in Seoul, South Korea, showed one and the second set appeared to be purchased by the British Library.

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Mehmet Okonsar is a pianist-composer-conductor and musicologist. Besides his international concert carrier he is a prolific writer. Founder of the first classical music-musicology dedicated blog-site: "inventor-musicae" as well as the first classical-music video portal: "classical videos".

Discography by Mehmet Okonsar

J.S. Bach "Die Kunst der Fuge"

All CD's available at amazon.com and (partly) at cdbaby.com

Introduction To The Music Of The Hebrews

Summary on Jewish music. A short introduction.

J.S. Bach "Musikalische Opfer"

F. Liszt: "modern" works

J.S. Bach "Well-tempered Clavier"

Recital: "Live at Salt Lake City"

J.S. Bach The Goldberg Variations

Piano Solo Improvisations: "Shadowy Arcade"

All CD's can be auditioned entirely and freely at their respective pages. Click on the images.

Hebraic music is without question not a monolithic being.

When Israelites eventually left the Holy Land they settled groups inside all the states of Europe, Asia in addition to North Africa. While, for the many part, they were being bodily segregated from the local populations, their vocabulary and their tunes had taken on most of the color of their particular host countries. There is definitely no such issue as Jewish music, yet somehow alternatively Jewish musics.

Judaic melodies is simply, above all, oral it happens to be sung. That is definitely not to say the fact that there may not be without vocal music and songs which in turn is simply Judaic, it's only that above two millennium connected with relegation have mixed, stirred as well as shaken our own musical fundamentals so thoroughly that it is undoubtedly next to unattainable to make sure the actual Jewish originally from the Arab, Romanian, Armenian, German or Russian. The text, even so, stay inevitable Judaic in essence, whether or not they are typically within Hebrew, Ladino, Yiddish or Yemenite, as well as so that it is to the written text that we all switch and come back.

Pre-modern Hebraic music and songs is certainly one particular substantially folk history. Inherent inside the existence of folk music customs, is definitely its unwritten methods of transmissions. Folk music practices are observed for the purpose of anonymity and also borrowing connected with source material. Developed customs often receive and even re-use material right from folk-music tunes cultures. Researchers claim the fact that Israelite performers borrowed elements, music instruments, as well as musical varieties ranging from around cultures, popular music genres and even cultured. If the Second Temple songs associated with the Levites had been the cultivated tunes of that era, I would believe that it lifted originally from folk type songs musics. Western European Classical melodies, the particular cultivated melodies of post-Renaissance European society, additionally were known to access everything from folk-music tunes music and songs, recasting it within the situation of its aesthetics, forms, as well as social milieu.

'What is undoubtedly referenced to us as Judaic melodies is in fact actually one particular compilation of styles and also rhythms harvested over decades as well as received in various ways and starting from numerous origins. On the other hand, musicologists the sphere over concur that the cleanliness of the Judaic song has constantly been retained. The high quality that causes it to become uniquely Judaic, regardless of the influence on it, is bound to have stayed untouched as well as properly recognizable.

On the other hand, as mentioned, even mainstream modern Israeli music and songs is really certainly not authentic Hebraic music and songs in the faith based sense identified previously. And also even what is known as "Hassidic" popular music today, aside straight from just a few tunes which are based upon on real, inspirational melodies authored from Hassidic masters of old, is simply a lot more commercial compared to non secular. Still, to the scope to which in turn the tunes and even verses are usually positive, contemplative and also meaningful, they might be considered a form of Hebraic songs. Yet, one should nonetheless be careful to listen to and also make full use of this music in the context of one particular mitzvahs in purity and holiness in addition to not as qualifications popular music for unwanted behaviour.

Melding Hebraic songs along with other kinds is not one particular newer issue; a great deal present-day Jewish tunes is truly Israeli fusion. Yiddish music and songs, in particular Klezmer, was combined along with jazz approximately as soon as it arrived within America, gaining the moniker "Jewish jazz." And mixtures of Jewish music and songs along with every thing coming from hip-hop to trance have spread throughout recent decades.

The Jewish most people in addition to their popular music have their root base in the Middle East, specifically in the land of Israel, in addition to their divisions almost everywhere. They have lived, for the purpose of over 2000 years, between many ethnicities, both Eastern and also Western - through Iran to Israel, to the Western Mediterranean and North Africa, to Europe, in addition to the vast majority of just lately, the Americas.

Modern Israeli music and songs happens to be greatly influenced by its ingredients, which in turn embody Jewish immigrants right from much more than One hundred and twenty international locations surrounding the world, that have brought about their musical customs, making Israel one global melting pot. The Israeli tunes is undoubtedly pretty accommodating and also unites aspects of both western and eastern music. It is often highly diverse as well as comprises a extensive selection of influences everything from the Diaspora as well as more modern cultural importation to Hassidic melodies, Asian in addition to Arab pop, especially Yemenite singers, and even hip hop or heavy metal.

The texts of countless Pizmonim go as far back towards Middle Ages or perhaps earlier, and are typically oftentimes relying on verses throughout the Bible. Many are usually taken starting from the Tanakh, while other people turned out to be created by the poets like Yehuda Halevi in addition to Israel Najara of Gaza. A little bit of melodies are truly old, while others might be based mainly on popular Middle Eastern music and songs, along with the words penned specifically to adjust to the particular melody.

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