{"id":1831,"date":"2025-04-29T11:44:09","date_gmt":"2025-04-29T11:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/?p=1831"},"modified":"2025-05-13T15:57:43","modified_gmt":"2025-05-13T15:57:43","slug":"hearing-our-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/?p=1831","title":{"rendered":"Hearing Our History"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By reconstructing lost musical compositions, a Bar-Ilan musicologist is enriching the world\u2019s classical repertoire and restoring a soundscape that promotes Israeli unity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1833,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspiration","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":"

Department of Music<\/h5>\n

Hearing Our History<\/h1>\n

By reconstructing lost musical compositions, a Bar-Ilan musicologist is enriching the world\u2019s classical repertoire and restoring a soundscape that promotes Israeli unity.<\/h3>\n

The Lost Renaissance<\/h6>
 \"Prof.
Prof. Alon Schab<\/figcaption> <\/figure>

In 2015, Prof. Alon Schab of the Department of Music invited the world\u2019s leading expert on Henry Purcell\u2014an English composer of the Baroque period, and the subject of Schab\u2019s dissertation\u2014to Israel for a lecture. In advance of his arrival, Schab decided to explore the performance of Purcell\u2019s music in Israeli history. What he found instead was a national musical renaissance largely unknown to today\u2019s Israelis.<\/p>

\u201cDuring 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.\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s rare expertise is reconstructing\u2014by ear\u2014history\u2019s lost musical compositions.<\/p>\n[video src=\"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/\u05e9\u05d7\u05d6\u05d5\u05e8-\u05de\u05d5\u05d6\u05d9\u05e7\u05d4-\u05e9\u05e9\u05e8\u05d3\u05d4-\u05d1\u05d0\u05d5\u05e4\u05df-\u05d7\u05dc\u05e7\u05d9-\u05e4\u05e8\u05d5\u05e4-\u05d0\u05dc\u05d5\u05df-\u05e9\u05d1-1.SUBS_.mp4\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1080\"][\/video]\n


<\/h6>

\u201cThere are compositions from the 17th and 18th centuries for which we have only a few instruments\u2019 parts, and the challenge is determining what the other parts were likely to have been,\u201d Schab says. \u201cThen there are compositions, like Jacobsohn\u2019s, 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.\u201d And in the case of Jacobsohn\u2019s music, he succeeded: Last year, Schab delivered a lecture at the National Library about the composer, whose music was performed\u2014for the first time in nearly seventy-five years\u2014at 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. \u201cWhen the music was finally rehearsed, a student in the music department came to us and pointed out all the nigunim<\/em> (Ashkenazi Jewish religious melodies) that Kompaneyets weaved into his masterpiece,\u201d recalls Schab. \u201cI 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\u2019s unique ability to transcend superficial differences.\u201d For his research in musical reconstruction and the recreation of Israel\u2019s musical history, Schab was awarded the 2024 Rector\u2019s Prize for Innovation.<\/p>

\u201cIf 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\u2019re here. That\u2019s why I view this musical construction as not only an artistic, but also a national contribution,\u201d says Schab. \u201cI hope we always remain curious about our past, because there\u2019s still so much buried treasure there.\u201d<\/p>\n\"Notes","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1831"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1831\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2948,"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1831\/revisions\/2948"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}