O Praise God in His Holiness!

In the early Byzantine era, it was not uncommon for Jews and Christians to appropriate imagery of Graeco-Roman gods, as this mosaic of David in the guise of Orpheus demonstrates. The synagogue community of Gaza (where this mosaic was discovered) would have been accustomed to Hellenistic imagery. The compelling parallel between the psalmist who drives out King Saul’s demon with his playing, and the Greek hero who tamed wild beasts through his song, probably made the syncretic image-type a particularly popular choice.

In this mosaic fragment, the boyish-looking musician is dressed as a Byzantine emperor (Ovadia 1991: 129–31); he is labelled as ‘David’, and is shown playing a fourteen-stringed lyre (or more likely the closely related kithera). The fingers of his left hand rest lightly on the strings as he strikes them with a small hammer in his right hand. The directional gesture of both his arms invites us to discern the most prominent member of his immediate audience, a lion cub, or lioness. The creature appears, in accordance with the Orphic legend, to be bowing its head in docile submission to the music.

For the synagogue worshippers, King David was the pre-eminent biblical musician (‘the sweet singer of Israel’; 2 Samuel 23:1 CJB), so intimately was his identity tied to the Sēfer Tehillīm (book of Psalms).

The Hebrew word tehillīm can be translated as ‘praises’ (without musical connotations), while ‘psalms’ derives from the Greek word psalmoi, meaning ‘instrumental music’. These slight divergences of meaning come together at numerous points in the psalm collection, including in Psalm 150:3, in which the psalmist summons the worshiper to ‘Praise him with lute and harp’ (see also Psalm 149:3).

Unlike Orpheus’s lyre, which had ‘elevating powers’ that allowed it to continue playing even after Orpheus’s death (Bernstock 2006: 35), David’s harp was an earthly object that relied on the Israelite king’s accomplishment. In David’s case the divine gift was not the instrument, but the ability to express his gratitude to God through music.

References

Bernstock, Judith. 2006. Under the Spell of Orpheus: The Persistence of a Myth in Twentieth-century Art (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press)

Friedman, John. 1960. Orpheus in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press)

Ovadia, Asher. 1981. ‘The Synagogue at Gaza’, in Ancient Synagogues Revealed, ed. by Lee I. Levine (Jerusalem: The Israel Exploration Society)

Before viewers can begin to decipher the musical score printed on the canvas of Jannis Kounellis’s ensemble Untitled, they notice the adjacent empty chair.

The lack of occupant is significant, acting as a sort of provocation. Once one does discern that the notes imprinted on the green-blue ground are a fragment of J.S. Bach’s St John Passion, the chair seems to take on added import, perhaps functioning as an indexical sign, or trace, of musical performance. Indeed, when this work was first displayed (at the Modern Art Agency in Naples), a cellist occupied it, playing the printed musical fragment over and over again.

The work of Kounellis (a Greek–Italian best known for his involvement in the Arte Povera movement) was often hybrid in nature, sitting somewhere between sculpture, installation, and performance art. As an example of this hybridity, Untitled offers a way in to considering the ontological nature of music itself. A work of music is materialized in its physical score (as symbolized by Kounellis’s canvas), thus becoming a historical ‘object’. But music is also an action which generates meaning in real time, in a specific environment, through live performance (as connoted by Kounellis’s addition of the chair).

What might the reaction of the congregation have been at Leipzig’s Nikolaikirche on Good Friday, 1794, when Bach’s work was first performed? Sadly, no documentary evidence survives. But today’s Western Christian musical worship owes much to the fresh spirit of the Lutheran tradition that nourished Bach, and which relied so heavily on the Psalter for its rich hymnal practice. The Passion’s opening chorus, ‘Oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is thy name in all the earth!’ borrows its words from Psalm 8, which shares the same spirit of exultant praise as Psalms 149 and 150. The story of Christ’s Passion is thus framed at the very beginning, not simply as a narrative of suffering, but as a vision of divine glory in which Christ’s death is a triumphal act.

‘Sing to the Lord a new song’, commands the psalmist in Psalm 149 (repeating a summons that also begins Psalms 96 and 98); Kounellis’s empty chair also functions as a kind of imperative. The work lies ‘dormant’ until ‘activated’ by the beholder.

Thus, it seems to invite new and endless completions. And the Psalms are like that too, continually awaiting new voices to give them utterance in fresh configurations, styles, and contexts.

Let them praise his name with dancing. (Psalm 149:3)

The Romanian-born artist Reuven Rubin completed his ‘Seekers of God’ woodcut series, from which The Dancers of Meron is taken, in 1923, shortly after moving from Europe to Palestine. It anticipates his better-known oil painting of the same name from 1926.

As with much of Rubin’s work, the woodcut series illustrates his experience of the Zionist optimism engendered by the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which gave political impetus to the possibility of a Jewish national home. The ecstatic gesture of the figure on the right was prominent within the choreographic vocabulary of Rubin’s friend the Romanian-born dancer-choreographer Baruch Agadati, who was responsible for establishing Hassidic dance traditions in Palestine following his own move there in the early 1900s (Manor 2002: 73–89).

Rubin developed an artistic idiom derived in part from German Expressionism and Russian neo-Primitivism to express a sense of ‘rootedness’ in Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel). ‘Rumania was forgotten, New York far away … In Palestine there was sunshine, the sea, the halutzim (pioneers) with their bronzed faces and open shirts … A new country, a new life was springing up around me … The world around became clear and pure to me. Life was stark, bare, primitive’, the artist proclaimed (Zalmona 2013:44).

The woodcut medium—with its associations of ‘primitivism’, and its discipline of simplification and elimination of extraneous detail—helped Rubin to distil the essential from his experience. The rhythmic continuity between the human forms and the landscape not only accentuates the figures’ gestures, but also serves to tie them into their environment.

‘Let Israel be glad in his Maker, let the sons of Zion rejoice in their King. Let them praise his name with dancing’ read verses 2 and 3 of Psalm 149. The two men in this woodcut enact the close association between communal dancing and worship among the Hassidic Jewish community, who make the annual pilgrimage to Mount Meron on the festival of Lag ba-omer.

While the figure on the left embraces the Torah scroll as he sways in a votive reverie, his companion raises his hands, as if overtaken by a spiritual frenzy. Their gestures may be complementary: holding Scripture close to your heart can at the same time open you to the heavens.

References

Manor, Dalia. 2002. ‘The Dancing Jew and Other Characters: Art in the Jewish Settlement in Palestine During the 1920’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 1.1: 73–89

Zalmona, Yigal. 2013. A Century of Israeli Art (Surrey: Lund Humphries)