Abstract

The article attempts to provide a conceptual framework for the discussion of the liturgical music of the East-Ashkenazi Jews. It discusses why our commonly accepted categories such as "prayer," "speech," "sacred," "music," "art" cannot be applied, as separate categories, to East-Ashkenazi culture. The article discusses this issue by "fusion groups," conceptual categories that fuse categories that are commonly thought of as being distinct and separate. This fusion means that aspects listed as belonging to one fusion group appear in the practice of the religious Jews as an indivisible whole. For instance, in the traditional context, melody is not an additional element but part and parcel of the text, inseparable from it and inconceivable without it, and vice versa: text is inconceivable without its melody. Similarly, meaning is not separable from a transcendental state, and neither meaning nor religious state is separable from the actual performance of the text with melody. Thus melody does not "express" meaning—it becomes one with it. These ideas are explained and illustrated by documents coming from the sacred written sources as well as from the practices observed and the opinions received from informants during twenty years of fieldwork projects.

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