Department of Music
Hearing Our History
By reconstructing lost musical compositions, a Bar-Ilan musicologist is enriching the world’s classical repertoire and restoring a soundscape that promotes Israeli unity.
The Lost Renaissance
In 2015, Prof. Alon Schab of the Department of Music invited the world’s leading expert on Henry Purcell—an English composer of the Baroque period, and the subject of Schab’s dissertation—to Israel for a lecture. In advance of his arrival, Schab decided to explore the performance of Purcell’s music in Israeli history. What he found instead was a national musical renaissance largely unknown to today’s Israelis.
“During the period of the British Mandate, European Jewish immigrants established dozens of string quartets. Their live performances became a cornerstone of pre-state cultural life, even if their story was eventually shadowed by that of the larger performing bodies, like the Israeli Philharmonic.” says Schab, who himself is a composer and professional recorder player. Surveying the ensembles, their concert programs, and radio program listings, Schab came across the name Gabriel Jacobsohn, a composer virtually unknown in today’s musical scene. A promising young composer from Berlin, Jacobsohn tragically fell in the War of Independence. Fortunately, there was a single surviving string quartet in the National Library of Israel archives. More fortunately still, Schab’s rare expertise is reconstructing—by ear—history’s lost musical compositions.
“There are compositions from the 17th and 18th centuries for which we have only a few instruments’ parts, and the challenge is determining what the other parts were likely to have been,” Schab says. “Then there are compositions, like Jacobsohn’s, for which we have only the recording, and we need to reverse-engineer the final product into its component parts. In both instances, the goal is enabling a contemporary ensemble or orchestra to bring that music back to life.” And in the case of Jacobsohn’s music, he succeeded: Last year, Schab delivered a lecture at the National Library about the composer, whose music was performed—for the first time in nearly seventy-five years—at a 2021 event in Haifa. Schab has also reconstructed the music of other composers from the pre-state period, including the Russian Grigory Kompaneyets, who, unknown to Schab at the time, based his composition on a Hasidic tune. “When the music was finally rehearsed, a student in the music department came to us and pointed out all the nigunim (Ashkenazi Jewish religious melodies) that Kompaneyets weaved into his masterpiece,” recalls Schab. “I had no idea that the music I was reconstructing contained so many different threads, from the musical and historical to the cultural and religious. To me, it was a lesson in music’s unique ability to transcend superficial differences.” For his research in musical reconstruction and the recreation of Israel’s musical history, Schab was awarded the 2024 Rector’s Prize for Innovation.
“If shared history is key to shaping national identity, the Jewish musical renaissance in Eretz Yisrael in the early 20th century can help remind us of who we are and why we’re here. That’s why I view this musical construction as not only an artistic, but also a national contribution,” says Schab. “I hope we always remain curious about our past, because there’s still so much buried treasure there.”
