Music is gone as soon as it is made; especially where music is not recorded in some fashion, a piece of music can be reconstructed only if there are people who remember it and how to perform it. Because of the cultural and linguistic differences between our civilization and that of the ancient Israelites, it is difficult to recover the exact sound and use of biblical music in its historical context.
Words about music are secondary to music itself. This is the dilemma of the historian, whose obligation it is to bring enlightenment and perspective to music-making. He is successful only if his work finally draws the reader to music itself and if he avoids the temptation of allowing word impressions to replace the musical ones.
Music is the most abstract of the arts. Its components—pitch, duration, texture, rhythm, color, and ultimately form—speak their own language. The composing experience, which brings these together in a satisfying wholeness, is to be matched in the listening experience, which then must comprehend this wholeness. Hence, the final meaningfulness of music lies in the aural experience. Other experiences are merely adjuncts or glosses on the acoustical event.
All of this is true whether one is dealing with music for its own sake, a comparatively recent phenomenon in Western culture, or music that is inseparable from function as in the case of music in the Bible. In either instance, the primary problem is the hearing and understanding of inherent musical sound as it occurs in its cultural contexts. Furthermore, music is gone as soon as it is made. It is a temporal art; its sounds do not coexist as the parts of a painting do; they succeed each other chrono-rhythmically. Their recapture or repetition does not guarantee entire faithfulness to the original. One cannot return to a performance of a concerto or a folk song the way he can to a painting or an artifact. The advent of electronic media has only partially solved this problem. A very important element, the performer, is still missing, and total fidelity to the original sound is unattainable even with the most sophisticated equipment.
The historian’s problem is further complicated when the primary data—the music itself—is partly or completely missing, and the secondary data—the historical contexts—are removed by vast cultural and linguistic distances. The success with which these barriers are overcome determines how accurately deductions can be made as to what the music of another culture in another time might have been, what its instrumentations were, and what its formulae and functions entailed.
Many recent archaeological discoveries, coupled with heightened musicological skills and insights, have clarified much of what was previously obscure or romanticized. Still, the primary task in the field of biblical music is to be assumed by the scholar whose insights into biblical history are coupled with a mastery of the languages of biblical contexts. The role of the musicologist is to be taken only when judgments are to be made in the presence of musical data that surface one way or another. While the first two sections of the present article depend to a great extent on the outstanding research of scholars such as Eric Werner, Abraham Idelsohn, and Egon Wellesz, it assumes a theological and biblical perspective different from theirs.