Customer Reviews

Music and Kabbalah

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For some time now I have been looking to see if there is a connection between the art of music and the Kabbalah, now I know there is. Its a good book. For a deeper look at this issue there is a book by DovBer Pinson, Inner Rhythms: The Kabbala of Music.

This is a sinewy and obtuse text, but when worked through it is brilliantlly insightful. I enjoyed the auhtor's views of the intersection of music and religion through a mystical prism. I found the book challenging, informative, enlightening, and spiritually moving. I recommend it to everyone: performers, composers, listeners, and scholars.

In the first sentence, the author displays a lack of musical knowledge. His comments about the construction of the scale relate only to the Western "equal Temprament" system developed about 250 years ago. this therefore can't relate to a subject that claims to be some 2000 years old and from the Middle East which used/uses a totally different scale construction. I can't comment about the author's knowledge of Kabbalah but the relationship between the two is clearly fallacious. Very disappointing.

I read this book in hopes of finding inspiration for composing Kabbalisticly inspired music. However, the book has almost nothing about music that would be useful for actually making or performing music.

Instead, the book focuses on the Kabbalistic analysis of music related words. It's 99% gematria, which I'll define as the practice of discovering relationships between Hebrew words which have equivalent numerical values according to the numerology of the Hebrew alphabet. This is not a textbook definition, but I hope it's sufficient for someone to understand this review.

I have nothing against gematria, but it means to get much out of this book, the reader would have to know the Hebrew alphabet and have some familiarity with gematria. If you were such a reader, I think you could easily come up with your own analyses as good or better than what this book offers. If I say "dog is God spelled backwards", that is not insightful or deep, it's just a silly. Unfortunately, the use of gematria here seemed about as deep to me.

It's not a bad book exactly, just not very useful.