e
ages. But the blending of widely different emotions is not favorable in
the creation of melody. Secular occurrences set their seal upon
religious music, of which some have so high a conception as to call it
one of the seven liberal arts, or even to extol it beyond poetry. Jacob
Levi of Mayence (Maharil), living at the beginning of the fifteenth
century, is considered the founder of German synagogue music, but his
productions remained barren of poetic and devotional results. He drew
his best subjects from alien sources. At the time of the Italian
Renaissance, music had so firmly established itself in the appreciation
of the people that a preacher, Judah Muscato, devoted the first of his
celebrated sermons to music, assigning to it a high mission among the
arts. He interpreted the legend of David's AEolian harp as a beautiful
allegory. Basing his explanation on a verse in the Psalms, he showed
that it symbolizes a spiritual experience of the royal bard. Another
writer, Abraham ben David Portaleone, found the times still riper; he
could venture to write a theory of music, as taught him by his teachers,
Samuel Arkevolti and Menahem Lonsano, both of whom had strongly opposed
the use of certain secular melodies then current in Italy, Germany,
France, and Turkey for religious songs. Among Jewish musicians in the
latter centuries of the middle ages, the most prominent was Solomon
Rossi. He, too, failed to exercise influence on the shaping of Jewish
music, which more and more delighted in grotesqueness and aberrations
from good taste. The origin of synagogue melodies was attributed to
remoter and remoter periods; the most soulful hymns were adapted to
frivolous airs. Later still, at a time when German music had risen to
its zenith, when Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven flourished,
the Jewish strolling musician _Klesmer_, a mendicant in the world of
song as in the world of finance, was wandering through the provinces
with his two mates.

Suddenly a new era dawned for Israel, too. The sun of humanity sent a
few of its rays into the squalid Ghetto. Its walls fell before the
trumpet blast of deliverance. On all sides sounded the cry for liberty.
The brotherhood of man, embracing all, did not exclude storm-baptized
Israel. The old synagogue had to keep pace with modern demands, and was
arrayed in a new garb. Among those who designed and fashioned the new
garment, he is prominent in whose honor we have met to-day.

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