Music In The Old Testament/Ancient Near East Time Period
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Music played a huge role in the Old Testament/ Ancient Near East time period. In that time period, music was used for multiple aspects. It was used to tell stories, perform, and also to pass on to now and days in our recent hymns that we sing in church and children’s music that is sung about specific events that take place. Music was categorized in four different main areas that were used for different things, which are antiphony, cantillation, hymn songs, and orchestration. In this paper I will go more in depth about these four areas individually. The Bible mentions many uses of music including songs of praise, songs of victory, songs of mourning, and the Psalms. Another form of music was performed through dancing and it was one of the popular…show more content… The Kings and other leaders of the time period was made known through the music during worship and multiple celebrations that took place. In the Old Testament, music was used in different traditions. There are four main types of music used in different ways. Cantillaiton is the ritual chanting of the Hebrew Bible in synagogue services. Antiphony is a responsorial singing where two separate choirs would sing back and forth to each other as responses. Hymn Songs were performed during a service by either a soloist or a group of people. The last type was orchestration, which was musical instruments. These four types of music had their own special meanings in this time period and reflected many events and feelings that were taking…show more content… Cantillation is the ritual chanting of the Hebrew Bible in synagogue services. In English we look at these marks of ritual chanting as accents in our language. These cantillation markings are what guides the rituals and begins the chanting of the spiritual, religious text. When a word was written, each word was giving a specific cantillation mark which provided instruction on how exactly to sing that word. Every section of the bible contains different types of phrases through cantillation to explain how to sing the specific words. In the Old Testament there are two main types of cantillation shown. The first type is used in the twenty-one prose books of the Old Testament and the second type is used in the poetic books of the Bible such as Job, Proverbs, and Psalms. Not only was cantillation used in musical aspects of the Bible, but it was also used in the Ten Commandments. The cantillation was put in lower and upper case forms that both served different meanings such as upper was for dividing it into the Ten Commandments and lower was for dividing it into the verses. Cantillation was in two main groups which were disjunctive and conjunctive which either separated or connected things. They served three functions of musical, syntactical, and phonetically. Cantillation helped allow for the spiritual text to be chanted in service in a music like form and to be spread among the