What "Kabbalistic Music" Usually Means

The uncomfortable audit: how much of the music filed under Jewish mysticism is a reading of the Kabbalah, and how much is a modern composer reaching for an atmosphere and finding a mode.

⭐⭐⭐ THE OBJECTION GOES IN FIRST AND AT FULL STRENGTH, BECAUSE FLATTERING A LISTENER IS A KIND OF CONTEMPT. Ernest Bloch had no Hasidic training and said outright that his "Jewish" works came from inside himself rather than from research. Leonard Cohen set the liturgy of the Days of Awe, which is not Kabbalah. Scriabin was a Theosophist who never read a page of Hebrew. John Zorn named a project after a fortress and a scale, not a doctrine. ⚠⚠ The methodological rule is the one ▨ the unpaintable already uses: the moment you can hear anything as Kabbalah you can hear everything as Kabbalah, and then you have said nothing. ⭐ So the section below is filed as REACHING, not as descent — and that turns out to be the more interesting category anyway, because it asks what these composers thought they were reaching for.