A little shul music

Let me just say it—size matters.  😊  But in this case, I think smaller is better—while I enjoy hearing guitar or piano accompaniment to Kabbalat Shabbat, I, personally, feel that the service begins to sound more like a performance when more instruments are added.  On a similar note, I’m not fond of instrumental solos during a service—it’s not supposed to be a concert.

You may have noticed that I was discussing Kabbalat Shabbat above, and there’s a reason for that.  Kabbalat Shabbat consists largely of poems, parts or all of which have been set to Western-style music.  Maariv/Arvit/Evening Service, on the other hand, consists largely of nusach.  I know almost nothing about non-Ashkenazi synagogue music, and I’m not a trained musician, so I can only discuss Ashkenazi nusach, and not-necessarily in proper terminology—my impression is that Ashkenazi nusach is not entirely “Western.”  I say that mostly because Ashkenazi nusach does not always have a clearly-defined and predictable rhythm.  Consider the “Avot section,” the first paragraph of the Amidah prayer, as it appears in Shacharit/Morning Service.  It doesn’t seem to me that the nusach of either the weekday, the Shabbat (Sabbath), the Shalosh Regalim (Pilgrimage Festivals) or the Yamim Noraim (High Holydays) Avot Section has a sufficiently regular beat to be notated in standard European musical notation (at least, not easily!).  So why are we trying to force nusach into a Western musical mode by accompanying it with musical instruments?  Sure, you *can* accompany Chatzi Kaddish with a guitar, but is that necessarily a good idea?  I’m always delighted to see a baal/baalat tefillah (prayer leader) put down their guitar at the end of the last psalm of Kabbalat Shabbat and lead Maariv a cappella.

Several years ago, before the COVID-19 pandemic, singer/songwriter Elana Arian posted on Facebook that she was co-teaching a class with Cantor Jack Mendelson on integrating modern Jewish religious music with nusach.  I remember thinking that I would love to attend a class or two of that course.  I still would!  I’ve spent my entire life as a member of a cappella synagogues, and, to this day, there are some synagogues with wonderful rabbis, cantors, and music that I can’t attend because the instrumental accompaniment distracts me from praying.  Am I the only one?  How do we integrate traditional and modern Jewish religious music in the same service?  And what part should instrumental accompaniment play in that integration?  Your thoughts would be appreciated.