"Kol mekadesh shevi'i": A Liturgical Melody Sung at Home

Authors

Naomi Cohn Zentner, Bar Ilan UniversityFollow

Abstract

This article draws upon the unusual characteristics, origins and prevalence of the melody to the poem "Kol mekadesh shevii" [He who sanctifies the Seventh day] and discusses how it came to be recognized in the past seventy years as a signifier of Ashkenazi pre-Holocaust musical and religious culture and in particular as a sonic marker of liturgical sound, although it was sung at home. The Kol mekadesh melody came over time to represent two vastly different symbolic positions. As a melody adopted from non-Jewish sources bringing new, sometimes controversial sounds into the synagogue, and as a typical synagogal sound. Twentieth-century norms of aesthetic and social preference shunned Kol mekadesh once extremely popular, which was now deemed untuneful and unsuitable for new contexts and styles of performance practice. Its perceived antiquity as compared to other Zemiroth melodies ensured it remained in continuous use while at the same time relegated it as different and unique. Kol mekadesh remains a story of musical adoption and rejection and at its core reveals the complex and at times contradictory sonic economies of liturgical sounds in Ashkenazic Jewish domestic traditions of the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries.

Author Biography

Dr. Naomi Cohn Zentner is an Assistant Professor in Bar Ilan University's Music Department. Until recently, she was the head of the Masters program in Jewish music at the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies. Her Ph.D. from Hebrew University's Musicology Department focused on the singing of Zemirot Shabbat (ritual table songs) among Ashkenazi religious-Zionists in Israel. She has been a vising Fellow at Oxford University and the University of Pennsylvania's Katz Center for Advanced Judaic studies. Her research interests lie in historical ethnomusicology, sacred songs of the Ashkenazi domestic sphere and the cross-fertilization of Ashkenazi and Sephardi liturgical traditions. In 2022 she was the recipient of a three-year personal research grant from the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) for a project titled: Embodying spiritual sound: new musical practices among religious Jewish-Israeli women, which she is heading in collaboration with Dr. Abigail Wood of Haifa University.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Recommended Citation

Cohn Zentner, Naomi (2024) ""Kol mekadesh shevi'i": A Liturgical Melody Sung at Home," Yale Journal of Music & Religion: Vol. 10: No. 2, Article 1.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17132/2377-231X.1299