While contemporary rabbinic law forbids musical instruments at funerals, this was not always the case. Matt Austerklein explains that flutes in particular were in ancient times associated with mourning by Jews, as seen from Jeremiah’s comment, “Like a flute my heart moans.”
In the Mishnaic period (1st-3rd centuries CE), the rabbinic interaction with Hellenism carried [the] practice of funerary flutes even further. These woodwinds became a standard part of professional mourning at Jewish funerals; as Rabbi Yehuda taught, “Even a pauper in Israel should not provide fewer than two flutes and a wailing woman” (Mishnah K’tubot 4:4).
And, Austerklein adds, the plaintive flute returned to Jewish music in the modern era, in the form of a kind of shepherd’s flute tune called doina:
This klezmer genre is closely related to the Romanian doina—a lonely shepherd’s melody often in free meter. In klezmer, the Jewish doina was played as a forshpil (prelude), used to attract the notice of the audience, and to make them concentrate and to ready them for a faster, danceable tune or suite of melodies. In Jewish culture doinas were played at weddings, and were also an opportunity for expressing virtuosic playing.
This genre is featured heavily in traditional East European cantorial singing on the High Holy Days. Cantors would do improvisations or compositions for the text k’vakaras ro’eh edro—“as a shepherd tends his flock”—in the mode and style of shepherd music, the doina.
More about: ancient Judaism, Jeremiah, Jewish music, Klezmer, Music
