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September 26, 2003/Elul 29 5764, Vol. 56, No. 1
Project provides musical translation of psalms
LEISAH NAMM
Managing Editor
Hebrew text from the Bible, translated into music, is now available on compact disc.
Eight years ago, Uri Harel, founder of the Center for Biblical Hebrew in Phoenix, became fascinated with the notion that the text of the Bible contains multiple layers of meaning. Harel believed that one of these embedded layers must be music.
After many hours of experimentation, Harel assigned each of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet to a different musical note on a keyboard. He then proceeded to apply this musical translation to portions of Hebrew text in the Bible.
The formula for this project, known as "Music from God," is based on ancient tradition, Harel says. "The notion that there is music in everything in the universe and it's all reflected in the Torah is an ancient idea, but nobody took the last step to make it into actual music that you could hear."
After this concept took shape, Harel met with one of his students from the center, musician Kevin Zaday, and they put out the first "Music from God" CD in 1998. It was recorded on a "shoestring budget," using a synthesizer.
"Then it took me four more years to try to get professional musicians in the project," Harel says. "It was hard to convey the idea; some musicians grasped the idea and some didn't."
He eventually found Gal Drimmer, an Israeli guitarist.
Together they worked on the musical translation of eight psalms and the "Song of Moses" from the Book of Exodus. The result is the CD "Days of Majesty," which features professional musicians on violin, cello and other stringed instruments. If a psalm included a description of specific musical instruments, the musicians used those -or similar instruments - in that song, Harel notes.
Drimmer served as the project's composer. "I would feed him with notes that I took from the text and he would compose the melodies," Harel explains.
"Frequency and the sequence: those are the two ingredients that cannot be touched," Harel says. But Drimmer chose the melodies, pitch and length of the tones.
"The role of musicians in this project is to turn the individual notes into 'full-fledged music' by adding chords, arrangements and musical instruments to each translation of a particular biblical chapter," according to the organization's Web site.
Harel gives an analogy for the process - in the hamotzi, prayer for bread, the Hebrew is translated to "Blessed are you, O Lord our God, ruler of the universe, who brings forth bread from the earth."
"God doesn't bring bread from the earth - he gives us grain and we are the ones who do the work and we go in and we make bread. But we still thank God for allowing us to participate in the process," Harel says. Similarly, "God gives us the letters, the frequency and the sequence and then we take that and we make the music from it."
The duo then approached musician and songwriter Gardner Cole, a Valley resident who has written songs for Madonna, Tina Turner, Al Jarreau and Amy Grant, among others. He served as the arranger, deciding which instruments would be used in each melody and then composed the music for an orchestra. Next they hired professional musicians to perform, including violinist J'Anna Jacoby, currently the fiddler and mandolin player for Rod Stewart.
"The music is just heaven," Harel says. "It's beautiful."
However, the theory behind "Music from God" is more than a way to produce pleasant sounds.
Harel believes that it gives listeners an opportunity to get in touch with a level of spirituality that one might reach only after reading the Torah.
"If you can't read the Torah and you still want to get in touch with that reality, with that wisdom, then the music that will be extracted from the text of the Torah would be one way of doing that," he says.
Harel uses teachings of the Ba'al Shem Tov, founder of the Hasidic movement, to explain the affect music may have on people.
The Ba'al Shem Tov believed in the power of the Hebrew letters, Harel says. He is quoted as saying: "He who knows how to use the Hebrew letters in the right order can build or destroy worlds."
He also taught that there are three dimensions of reality: the material world, which he called "Worlds," the human spiritual world he called "Souls" and the expression of God's reality, or "Divinity, " Harel explains. The wisdom of the human spiritual world is expressed through music, which "allows us to connect intuitively with information that is beyond our logical mind," Harel says. The wisdom of the reality of God is only expressed in the Hebrew text of the Torah.
According to tradition, the Torah was given in a long string of letters, which is also a long stream of numbers, Harel says.
"It was said that this depicts one long name of God, or in more concrete terms, the formula for the entire creation itself.
"By translating these letters, in the correct order, to musical notes, we may be able to connect with that divine level, a connection otherwise reserved only to those who can delve into Torah study in Hebrew," he adds.
Through its dedication to translating the Hebrew text of the Bible, letter by letter, into its corresponding frequency or musical note - keeping the exact sequence of the text intact, the "Music from God" project exposes a new music, says the Web site. "Music that is a reflection of wisdom and patterns beyond the mathematics of matter and energy, maybe beyond our understanding altogether."
"But we don't really need to 'understand' this music in our analytical mind," says Harel. "The fact that so many people are able to listen to and enjoy this beautiful music is a proof that we are on to something here."
Samples of the CD can be heard at www.musicfromgod.com. Musicians interested in participating in the project can call 602-48-BIBLE or e-mail uriharel@musicfromgod.com. The mission of the Center for Biblical Hebrew, founded in 1999, is to study the text of the Hebrew Bible in its original Hebrew.
The CD is available at the Center for Biblical Hebrew, Israel Connection, Jewish Quarter and at www.musicfromgod.com. Negotiations are underway for a deal with a record company, Harel says, which will result in national distribution.
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