Prosodic Rhythm in Jewish Sacred Music: Examples from the Persian-Speaking World

Musical rhythms are connected to prosodic principles in many Jewish sacred music practices. For Persian-speaking Jews of Iran and Central Asia, rhythms are especially informed by ingrained habits of interpreting Persian quantitative poetic meters, applied to both Hebrew- and Persian-language texts. For describing and analyzing Jewish sacred music in the Iranian and Central Asian traditions, the term “prosodic rhythm” usefully highlights the importance of syllable length and other rhythmic features of a text, with broader implications for the study of Jewish sacred music and music without a steady pulse in general.