Music of Israel - Early History

Early History

The first efforts to create a corpus of music suitable for a new Jewish entity that would eventually become Israel were in 1882. This was the year of the First Aliyah, the first wave of Jewish immigrants seeking to create a national homeland in Palestine. As there were no songs yet written for this national movement, Zionist youth movements in Germany and elsewhere published songbooks, using traditional German and other folk melodies with new words written in Hebrew. An example of this is the song that became Israel's national anthem, "Hatikvah". The words, by the Hebrew poet Naftali Herz Imber, express the longing of the Jewish people to return to the land of Zion. The melody is a popular eastern European folk melody.

In 1895 settlers established the first Jewish orchestra in Palestine. The orchestra was a wind band, located in the town of Rishon LeZion, and played light classics and marches.

Avraham Zvi Idelsohn, a trained cantor from Russia and a musicologist, settled in Jerusalem in 1906, with the objective of studying and documenting the musics of the various Jewish communities there. At the time, there were a number of Jewish enclaves in Jerusalem, for Yemenites, Hassids, Syrians and other Jewish ethnic groups. Idelsohn meticulously documented the songs and musical idioms of these groups. He also made the first efforts to bring these songs to the attention of all Jewish settlers, with the aim of creating a new Jewish musical genre.

Idelsohn was joined in Palestine by a few more classically trained musicians and ethnomusicologists, including Gershon Ephros in 1909 and, later, Joel Engel in 1924. Like Idelsohn, Engel worked to disseminate traditional ethnic tunes and styles to the general Jewish public of Palestine.