Underrated Classical Music: The 23rd Psalm

 I'm preparing to lead the service for a very close relative soon to pass. It could be tomorrow, it could be six months, it will probably be closer to tomorrow. She's in terrible pain, she's on narcotics, she can't watch movies or listen to music anymore, we're always worried she's going to fall and break a hip while going to the bathroom, all I can do is hug her as much as I can and remain in my parents house for however long it takes.

It's customary at Jewish funerals to chant the 23rd Psalm. Somehow I've never learned to sing the traditional melody, I've only heard it. Once the melody is in your bloodstream, it does not leave. It haunts you all day every day. I will not share it. Like so much Jewish music, no recorded version does justice to what you hear in person, and certainly none on youtube does. Nothing matches hearing a melody like this sung by a group of Orthodox Jews - it's like hearing a Welsh choir for the first time.

It reminds you that music's natural state is oral. It's not meant to be written, and in many ways, written music is a mark of decadence. When you hear the simple power of a melody, particularly a religious one, intoned entirely by ordinary laymen with didactic purpose, there is nothing in Mahler or Shostakovich or even Bach which carries that much devastating power, that much history, that much pain. It's the music of essential need, passed down generation to generation in origins lost to eternity, yet too urgent to ever forget. Perhaps time has crystalized the melody, until its arrived to us in a process of refinement that took millenia to find its most perfect and emotionally articulate version of itself.

I've often made fun of the Jewish musical tradition. By any objective standard, it sucks. Music is so trivial to Jewish life that barely a single musician thought to write their music down in Western notation until the 20th century.

But music was not meant to be art. It is not meant to be decorative, it did not even achieve a complex written notation or polyphonic independence (so far as we know) until 4000 years after the first written documents. Music gives definition to primal emotion. Melody documents our emotional process, and while the classical musics of the world document a more complex emotional process, they cannot document those primal moments, individual and communal but so often ceremonial, in which humanity stands in its greatest emotional need