Yair Klartag: Music of the Sephiras

A documentation of a lecture given by Prof. Gerhard Ginat in 1968, in which he describes his research on the life and works of the Sabbatean composer Moshe Najara–a key figure in the development of jewish kabbalistic music of the late 17th century. Najara was the great-grandson of the famous liturgical poet Israel Najara and the son of Jacob Najara who was appointed as the high priest of Gaza by Shabbetai Zevi. Najara’s messianic sonic visions are documented in his book »Music of the Sefirot« that consists of both texts about his kabbalistic views on music theory (and his famous mystical ¾ tones interval) and cryptic three dimensional scores of his pieces.

Ginat attributes several factors to the groundbreaking musical work of Najara: his will to restore his great grandfather fame, a misunderstanding of recent developments in European polyphony (copies of musical manuscripts were practically unavailable in Gaza of the 17th century) and an accidental encounter with Johannes Kepler’s »Harmonices Mundi«.

Together with Prof. Régeny, Prof. Ginat realized some of Najara’s scores which were performed live for the first time at this lecture-concert from 1968.

Yair Klartag

 

»I’ve always been very interested in lyrics and how lyrics and meanings work in music. … I don’t use the text as musical material, but as actual sound. It has a meaning, it says something, but it’s all in the world of sound. I’ve always been a bit jealous of visual artists who feel very comfortable using text in their art. In music, we tend to either use text completely structurally or use it as musical material. And I’ve always found it interesting to find those in-between spaces.«