Temple origins
The earliest synagogal music was based on the same system as that used in the Temple in Jerusalem. According to the Talmud, Joshua ben Hananiah, who had served in the sanctuary Levitical choir, told how the choristers went to the synagogue from the orchestra by the altar,Talmud, Sukkah 53a and so participated in both services.
Biblical and contemporary sources mention the following instruments that were used in the ancient Temple:
the , a 12-stringed harp the a lyre with 10 strings the , a hollowed-out ram's horn the , or trumpet, made of silver the or small drum the , or cymbals the or bell the , a large flute
According to the Mishna, the regular Temple orchestra consisted of twelve instruments, and the choir of twelve male singers.
A number of additional instruments were known to the ancient Hebrews, though they were not included in the regular orchestra of the Temple: the (small flute), the (a reed flute or oboe-like instrument).
After the destruction of the Temple and the subsequent diaspora of the Jewish people, there was a feeling of great loss among the people. At the time, a consensus developed that all music and singing would be banned; this was codified as a rule by some early Jewish rabbinic authorities. However, the ban on singing and music, although not formally lifted by any council, soon became understood as only a ban outside of religious services. Within the synagogue the custom of singing soon re-emerged. In later years, the practice became to allow singing for feasts celebrating religious life-cycle events such as weddings, and over time the formal ban against singing and performing music lost its force altogether, with the exception of the Yemenite Jews. The Jews of Yemen maintained strict adherence to Talmudic and Maimonidean halakhaMishneh Torah, Hilkoth Ta'niyyoth, Chapter 5, Halakhah 14 (see Touger commentary, footnote 14); Responsa of Maimonides, siman 224 (ed. Blau [Jerusalem, 1960/2014]: vol. 2 p. 399 / vol. 4 [Rubin Mass and Makhon Moshe, Jerusalem, 2014] p. 137); Rabbi Yosef Qafih's commentary to Mishneh Torah, ibid., in note 27 following his citation of Maimonides' responsa, "לא דיים ששותים יין בכלי זמר שיש כבר שתי עברות כפי שמנה רבנו לעיל" (English: they drink wine with musical instruments, which alone involves two sins as our master enumerated above [prohibitions three and four of the five enumerated in responsum siman 224]). Rabbi Yosef Qafih's Collected Papers, volume 2, השירה והלחנים בתפילת יהודי תימן (Hebrew), page 959: "אין יהודי תימן מלווים שירתם בכלי ואפילו שירים הנאמרים בבתי משתאות בגלל האיסור שבדבר, קל וחומר תפילתם, כך שאין יהודי תימן מכירים שירה בכלי כלל (מה שמקצת כפרים מלווים את שירת משתיהם על פח איני יודע אם ימצא מי שהוא שיקרא לזה כלי שיר) לא כלי הקשה לא כלי פריטה ולא כלי נשיפה." English translation "Yemenite Jews do not accompany their song with instruments–even songs said in houses of feasting–due to the prohibition of the matter, all the more so their prayers. Thus Yemenite Jews do not at all recognize song with instruments (that which some villages accompany the songs of their feasts by tin, I don't know if there's anyone who would call this a musical instrument), neither percussion instruments, string instruments, nor wind instruments." and "instead of developing the playing of musical instruments, they perfected singing and rhythm."Spielberg Jewish Film Archive - Teiman: The Music of the Yemenite Jews: 4:32–4:48: "Drumming was used by all. Mourning the destruction of the second temple resulted in the prohibition of using musical instruments. The Yemenites, stringent in their observance, accepted this ban literally. Instead of developing the playing of musical instruments, they perfected singing and rhythm." (See Yemenite Jewish poetry. For the modern Yemenite-Jewish musical phenomenon, see Yemenite Jewish music.)
It was with the piyyutim (liturgical poems) that Jewish music began to crystallize into definite form. The cantor sang the piyyutim to melodies selected by their writer or by himself, thus introducing fixed melodies into synagogal music. The prayers he continued to recite as he had heard his predecessors recite them; but in moments of inspiration he would give utterance to a phrase of unusual beauty, which, caught up by the congregants.
Adaptations from local music
The music may have preserved a few phrases in the reading of scripture which recalled songs from the Temple itself; but generally it echoed the tones which the Jew of each age and country heard around him, not merely in the actual borrowing of tunes, but more in the tonality on which the local music was based. These elements persist side by side, rendering the traditional intonations a blend of different sources.
The underlying principle may be the specific allotment in Jewish worship of a particular mode to each sacred occasion, because of some esthetic appropriateness felt to underlie the association. In contrast to the meager modal choice of modern melody, the synagogal tradition revels in the possession of scale-forms preserved from the remote past, much as are to be perceived in the plain-song of the Catholic, the Byzantine, and the Armenian churches, as well as Hungarian, Roma, Persian and Arab sources.
Cantorial and synagogue music The traditional mode of singing prayers in the synagogue is often known as hazzanut, the art of being a hazzan (cantor). It is a style of florid melodious intonation which requires the exercise of vocal agility. It was introduced into Europe in the 7th century, then rapidly developed.
The age of the various elements in synagogal song may be traced from the order in which the passages of the text were first introduced into the liturgy and were in turn regarded as so important as to demand special vocalization. This order closely agrees with that in which the successive tones and styles still preserved for these elements came into use among the Gentile neighbors of the Jews who utilized them. Earliest of all is the cantillation of the Bible, in which the traditions of the various rites differ only as much and in the same manner from one another as their particular interpretations according to the text and occasion differ among themselves. This indeed was to be anticipated if the differentiation itself preserves a peculiarity of the music of the Temple.See Hebrew cantillation
Next comes, from the first ten centuries, and probably taking shape only with the Jewish settlement in western and northern Europe, the cantillation of the Amidah referred to below, which was the first portion of the liturgy dedicated to a musical rendering, all that preceded it remaining unchanted. Gradually the song of the precentor commenced at ever earlier points in the service. By the 10th century, the chant began at Barukh she'amar, the previous custom having been to commence the singing at "Nishmat," these conventions being still traceable in practise in the introit signalizing the entry of the junior and of the senior officiant. Hence, in turn, appeared cantillation, prayer-motive, fixed melody, and hymn as forms of synagogal music.
Reminiscences of non-Jewish sacred melody
The contemporaneous musical fashion of the outer world has ever found its echo within the walls of the synagogue, so that in the superstructure added by successive generations of transmitting singers there are always discernible points of comparison, even of contact, with the style and structure of each successive era in the musical history of other religious communions. Attention has frequently been drawn to the resemblances in manner and even in some points of detail between the chants of the muezzin and of the reader of the Qur'an with much of the hazzanut, not alone of the Sephardim, who passed so many centuries in Arab lands, but also of the Ashkenazim, equally long located far away in northern Europe.
The intonations of the Sephardim even more intimately recall the plainsong of the Mozarabian Christians, which flourished in their proximity until the 13th century. Their chants and other set melodies largely consist of very short phrases often repeated, just as Perso-Arab melody so often does; and their congregational airs usually preserve a Morisco or other Peninsular character.
The Cantillation reproduces the tonalities and the melodic outlines prevalent in the western world during the first ten centuries of the Diaspora; and the prayer-motives, although their method of employment recalls far more ancient and more Oriental parallels, are equally reminiscent of those characteristic of the eighth to the 13th century of the common era. Many of the phrases introduced in the hazzanut generally, closely resemble the musical expression of the sequences which developed in the Catholic plainsong after the example set by the school famous as that of Notker Balbulus, at St. Gall, in the early 10th century. The earlier formal melodies still more often are paralleled in the festal intonations of the monastic precentors of the eleventh to the 15th century, even as the later synagogal hymns everywhere approximate greatly to the secular music of their day.
The traditional penitential intonation transcribed in the article Ne'ilah with the piyyut "Darkeka" closely reproduces the music of a parallel species of medieval Latin verse, the metrical sequence "Missus Gabriel de Cœlis" by Adam of St. Victor (c. 1150) as given in the Graduale Romanum of Sarum. The mournful chant characteristic of penitential days in all the Jewish rites, is closely recalled by the Church antiphon in the second mode "Da Pacem Domine in Diebus Nostris" ("Vesperale Ratisbon," p. 42). The joyous intonation of the Northern European rite for morning and afternoon prayers on the Three Festivals (Passover, Sukkot and Shavuot) closes with the third tone, third ending of the Gregorian psalmody; and the traditional chant for the Hallel itself, when not the one reminiscent of the "Tonus Peregrinus," closely corresponds with those for Ps. cxiii. and cxvii. ("Laudate Pueri" and "Laudate Dominum") in the "Graduale Romanum" of Ratisbon, for the vespers of June 24, the festival of John the Baptist, in which evening service the famous "Ut Queant Laxis," from which the modern scale derived the names of its degrees, also occurs.
Prayer-motives
Next to the passages of Scripture recited in cantillation, the most ancient and still the most important section of the Jewish liturgy is the sequence of benedictions which is known as the Amidah ('standing prayer'), being the section which in the ritual of the Dispersion more immediately takes the place of the sacrifice offered in the ritual of the Temple on the corresponding occasion. It accordingly attracts the intonation of the passages which precede and follow it into its own musical rendering. Like the lessons, it, too, is cantillated. This free intonation is not, as with the Scriptural texts, designated by any system of accents, but consists of a melodious development of certain themes or motives traditionally associated with the individual service, and therefore termed here prayer-motives. These are each differentiated from other prayer-motives much as are the respective forms of the cantillation, the divergence being especially marked in the tonality due to the modal feeling alluded to above. Tonality depends on that particular position of the semitones or smaller intervals between two successive degrees of the scale which causes the difference in color familiar to modern ears in the contrast between major and minor melodies.