On Drums and Strings and Trumpet Blasts (Book Review‪)‬

THIS IMPRESSIVE BOOK'S CHAPTERS are divided into numbered sections, and the illustrations are numbered accordingly, e.g., "plate III/2-4" indicates chapter III, section 2, fourth illustration. Chapter I, the introduction, traces the history of scholarship on the music of ancient Israel/Palestine and notes the predominance of evidence from the Hebrew Bible up until about the middle of the twentieth century. This concentration on biblical sources led to misperceptions about the music cultures in the non-Israelite local cultures of Israel and to misidentification of the names of instruments. It was only toward the end of the twentieth century that research began to pay attention to extra-biblical evidence that, in turn, has helped to objectify and enrich scholarly discussion, which fully acknowledges that music was "a power interwoven in all human affairs" (p. 1, after H. Avenary). Many misconceptions concerning music in the Bible were carried through Greek and Latin studies, post-biblical Jewish literature (such as the Mishnah and Talmud), and the European Middle Ages. The author reviews carefully and in detail the growth of historical studies of ancient Jewish and early Christian music that, beginning in the seventeenth century, produced some encyclopedic works that resonated in the general musical historical literature up to the twentieth century. Many treatises, especially from about the eighteenth century, included commentaries on the kind of music (i.e., nomadic psalms, or folksongs) supposed to have been typical of ancient eastern Mediterranean cultures, in addition to repeated attempts to identify biblical names of instruments. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw increasing attention paid to iconographic sources related to music and dance (such as the Bar Kochba coin that depicts a string instrument) as well as to comparative materials from neighboring countries. It was in 1941 that the biblical kinnor was correctly identified as a lyre, and shortly thereafter (1950s and 1960s) that the excellent and still valuable studies of Sachs, Sendrey, Bayer, and others appeared. Increasing attention was paid to the archaeological record, which has culminated in the riches now available, e.g., in the latest edition of MGG, where textual study is combined with archaeology and iconography.