Moshe Idel on Music

The historian of Kabbalah who traced music as a technique through the tradition rather than as its decoration — from ecstatic Kabbalah's use of sound and breath to the Hasidic melody.

The wing needs a scholar and not an enthusiast, and it needs one who is careful about the difference between a resemblance and a lineage. Idel's value here is that he separates the strands the popular account fuses: Abraham Abulafia's use of vocalisation as a technique of induced ecstasy is not the same thing as a Hasid singing at a Sabbath table six centuries later, and neither is the same as a concert composer quoting a mode. Watch this before anything else in the wing.