Music in Jewish mourning rituals

[lethargic_man]

I went on Sunday to a most interesting talk, by Alex Knapp, on "Music in Mourning Rituals, with special reference to the Jewish tradition"; darcydodo and pseudomonas would have found it interesting, I'm sure. Amongst other things, we were played a recording of a tune for the Kaddish composed by a sixteenth-century Italian composer; it was chordal in five parts and sounded more like Monteverdi than anything Jewish.

We were also played pieces of music composed by the inmates of Terezin. Apparently there was such a wealth of musical talent lost in the concentration camps that had they survived, the whole history of western classical music in the second half of the twentieth century might have turned out different.