Sacred Sound

Dr. Kristina Nelson (Cairo) | Bashar al-Hout (Wuppertal)

Dr. Kristina Nelson (Cairo), author of The Art of Reciting the Qur'an (UT Austin Press 1986 and AUC Press, Cairo 2001), attempted in her eponymous lecture to demonstrate the authoritative role that sound plays in the meaning of the Qur'anic experiential process.

Religious scholarship sets standards for Qur'anic recitation and demands them as well. As for melodic parameters, they are usually dealt with only in the context of a prohibition, sanction, or restriction. While the classical sources confirm that recitation is not music, they also point out the importance of musical artistry, as the sound can have an amplifying effect on the listener. Many of us have a bias when dealing with texts, as we absorb our information through reading rather than listening.

Hafiz Bashar al-Hout (Wuppertal) accompanied the lecture and gave sound examples from the Qur'an to those present. In doing so, he recited Qur'anic verses [24:26], [24:35-40], [30-31], [41:35-37], [95:1-8] and [21:1-29].

Dr. Merav Rosenfeld-Hadad (Cambridge) | Rabbi David Menahem (Jerusalem)

Dr. Merav Rosenfeld is an honorary lecturer at Royal Holloway University of London. In her lecture, she drew on the Judeo-Arab rabbinic school of the last thousand years to present her view of Arab music in Jewish life and worship. She demonstrated the influence of Arabic music, the maqām, to create the Judeo-Arabic space of worship, the makān. These aspects were thereby examined in the context of Islamic tradition. Moreover, this lecture indicated the essentiality of this sound space for Judeo-Arab life and identity, both before and after the Jews left the Arab-Islamic territories.

A successful Arab-Jewish rabbi, gifted cantor and musician, Rabbi David Menahem carries on the legacy of his family, which produced famous pre-singers in both Baghdad and Israel. Rabbi Menahem also maintains close contact with Muslim scholars and musicians of Israel. Rabbi David Menahem played Arabic folk songs on the oud, which Jews incorporated into the liturgy and usually added new lyrics for sacred use.

Prof. Dr. Stefan Morent (Tübingen) | Schola Cantorum (Tübingen)

Prof. Dr. Stefan Morent is a professor at the Institute of Musicology in Tübingen. In his lecture, he presented lost chorale manuscripts that fell into oblivion with the introduction of the Reformation in the 16th century and the dissolution of many monasteries. The codices, which had been produced over centuries with the greatest artistic effort, were now considered to be witnesses of an outdated liturgy. The "papist books," as they were now called, had only material value. The valuable parchment on which the chants were notated could be recycled as sturdy binding material for files. Thus, thousands of chorale manuscripts were cut up and henceforth served as a "dress of notes" for book covers and to reinforce book spines. For centuries they were thus stored as fragments in dusty archives.

The Schola Cantorum, under the direction of Prof. Dr. Stefan Morent, performed fragments from the monasteries of Weingarten, Maulbronn, Alpirsbach Lorch/Melk, Hirsau, Salem and Bebenhausen. Each page, each cut strip, tells its own exciting story and leads back to the time when, according to their purpose, they were once used to sing the liturgy in a monastery.