Description: Discoursing on music, three early modern Jewish scholars stand out as original: Judah Moscato presented music as a spiritual phenomenon; Leon Modena asked about the legitimacy of art music in the synagogue; Abraham Portaleone treated music in the Ancient Temple.
Review Quotes: Harrán's approach is thorough, meticulous, and very readable. His knowledge of this subject is impressive. In addition to a lengthy bibliography and an index, he provides a lexicon of the Hebrew musical terms that he noted in his translations (again, transliterated), and an index of the biblical, rabbinic, and classical sources that the three writers used. Books on Jewish musical theory are rare, and this is an excellent addition to the corpus. Recommended for academic libraries with comprehensive collections focused on Jewish music --Beth Dwoskin (Beth Israel Congregation, Ann Arbor, MI), AJL Reviews Vol V, No.4
The volume on the whole is extremely accurate, the English translation is generally very faithful to the Hebrew text, and there is a rich set of footnotes, mostly of a philologicallinguistic nature and concerning the sources used by the authors. The book is an essential tool for all those who want to study in detail one of the crucial chapters in the history of Jewish music. Don Harrán passed away on 15 June 2015. May his soul be bound in the bond of life. --Gabriele Mancuso, Medici Archive Project, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. LXX, No. 2