Jewish music performed on an evocation of the 10-string Biblical 'Kinnor' - the lyre of my very own, very ancient Levite ancestors...

"Lyre of the Levites – Jewish Music for Biblical Kinnor" is the sequel to my 2008 album, "King David's Lyre; Echoes of Ancient Israel". Both of these albums are dedicated to recreating again, for the first time in

Jewish music performed on an evocation of the 10-string Biblical 'Kinnor' - the lyre of my very own, very ancient Levite ancestors...

"Lyre of the Levites – Jewish Music for Biblical Kinnor" is the sequel to my 2008 album, "King David's Lyre; Echoes of Ancient Israel". Both of these albums are dedicated to recreating again, for the first time in almost 2000 years, the mystical, ancient sounds of the "kinnor"; the ancient Jewish Temple lyre, once played by my very own, very ancient Levite ancestors in the Courtyard of the Temple of Jerusalem, to accompany the singing of the Levitical Choir (II Chronicles 5:12). For myself then, putting together these fascinating musical projects have been quite literally, the ultimate experiment in recreating my own extreme “roots music”!

THE CHOICE OF REPERTOIRE FOR THE ALBUM

"Lyre of the Levites" uniquely features arrangements of primarily traditional melodies from the Jewish Klezmer repertoire arranged for solo Levitical Lyre - the concept of the musical performances on this album, are meant to be evocations, not reconstructions, of the sounds & playing techniques that were possible on the ten-stringed Kinnor of the Bible; there are sadly too few unambiguously notated melodies from antiquity to make an album of "note for note" reconstructions of ancient instrumental solo lyre music a feasible reality.

However, the traditional Jewish scales/modes in which these pieces are actually written may well have roots which stretch deeply back to these distant, mystically remote Biblical times, according to the fascinating research of the late Suzanne Haik Vantoura, in attempting to reconstruct the original 3000 year old music of the Hebrew Bible.