Music of Israel

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 then 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 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 then Palestine.

The Second Aliyah, beginning in 1904, saw an increase in composition of original songs by Jewish settlers in Palestine.[28] Among the earliest composers of folk songs were Hanina Karchevsky ("BeShadmot Beit Lehem"), and David Ma'aravi ("Shira Hanoar").

Over the next 30 years, Jewish composers began to seek new rhythmic and melodic modes that would distinguish their songs from the traditional European music they had been brought up on.

Leaders of this musical movement were Matityahu Shelem ("VeDavid Yefe Eynaim", "Shibbolet Basadeh"), Yedidia Admon ("Shadmati"), and others. These composers sought to imitate the sounds of Arabic and other Middle Eastern music. They used simple harmonies, and preferred the natural minor to melodic and harmonic minors used by European music. They especially eschewed the interval of the augmented second, part of the "gypsy minor" scale used typically in klezmer music. "Its character is depressing and sentimental", wrote music critic and composer Menashe Ravina in 1943. "The healthy desire to free ourselves of this sentimentalism causes many to avoid this interval."

Some musicians of the period, like Marc Lavry ("Shir Ha-Emek", "Kitatenu Balayla Tzoedet"), wrote in both the new Hebrew style and the European style in which they were trained. For example, "Zemer" is a song in the new style; Dan HaShomer is an opera in the European classical tradition. Others, like Mordechai Zeira, lamented the fact that they did not write in the new Hebrew mold. Zeira, one of the most prolific and popular composers of the period ("Hayu Leylot", "Layla Layla", "Shney Shoshanim"), referred to his inability to write in the new style as "the Russian disease".

Emanuel Zamir worked in the 40s and 50s in a genre known as "shirei ro'im" (shepherd songs). He combined Bedouin music with Biblical-style lyrics, often accompanied by the recorder.

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