Archives and Directories

Annotated references to other important Jewish music resources online.

• Visit shulmusic.org for other online resources related to chazzanut. They have an e-mail discussion list.
• Visit the Klezmer Shack for 'world music from a Jewish slant.' They feature a very active e-mail list.
• Home of Winston Weilheimer's online chazzanut radio station, with an associated chazzanut discussion list. The online Jewish Exchange radio station, with many genres of Jewish music.
• Visit the Jewish Music WebCenter for a comprehensive directory of Jewish music resources on the Internet. Roger Harris also has an extensive collection of relevant links.
• Zemerl is the first comprehensive database of Jewish music on the Internet, created by Inna Barmash. HebrewSongs.com features a very large collection of Hebrew song lyrics, maintained by Aura Levin Lipski. Chazzanut Online has a collection of singable translations of Hebrew songs.
• The Kol Tefilah choir features some nice audio examples and notes regarding Nusach, the collection of traditional prayer recitatives.
• Excellent sheet music archive of the London Jewish Male choir.
• Josh Sharfman has recorded an Eastern Ashkenazi nusach of more or less the whole year. He made it available on his website virtualcantor.com in no less than 725 MP3 tracks!
• A full page of midi transcriptions of Italian chazzanut.
• Spanish and Portuguese synagogue music. A page which presents many beautiful tunes from this tradition in midi format. Seder Hazanoet presents mp3 recordings of this tradition, and a clip of the Portuguese choir "Santo Servicio." Chazzanut Online also has some original Portuguese midis and scores.
• Chazzanut Online's section with wedding music, and a section with miscellaneous pieces.
• Peretz Weizman recorded some of the Passover seider recitatives, which are online available as mp3s.
• Website of the association of French cantors with many nice recordings. Of special interest is the integral recording of Megilat Esther by Michel Heymann. In the same tradition is Site Aschkenaze, a French site with mp3 recordings of many traditional yekish tunes.
• Jonathan Bloom also has some cantorial sheet music online as well as the card catalogue of the Tel-Aviv cantorial institute.
• MP3 files containing extensive home recordings by the Lithuanian chazzan Borekh Leyzer Peretz, made in New York somewhere in the 1970's.
• The catalogue to the Freedman collection of Jewish music.
• 613.org feautures Real Audio recordings of the friday evening service, kiddush, zemirot, grace after meals, as well as recordings of concerts by Reb Shlomo Carlebach, Robert Brody and others. Last but not least some recordings of Pesach tunes.
• Some recordings of selections from the shabbat mussaf service by Jordan Wosnick.
• Recordings of selections from the Friday night service, Shabbat morning and Haftarah by Michelle Freedman.
• Beautiful site developed by ORT, on which the Torah is chanted verse by verse according to the Eastern European tradition. Click the speaker symbols next to the verses to hear. Also available are notated and chanted examples of the individual cantillation patterns. Eliezer Segal has a page with midi renderings. Dave Curtis has a page with midi renderings of the Western European tradition, as used in Britain. Helmut Richter explains the grammatical background of the cantillation marks.
• Max Synagogue is a fascinating computer program that sings the entire Jewish Bible by computer speech synthesis, according to many different Jewish traditions. Available online is a detailed overview of the grammatical pronunciation rules used, notation of some of the musical traditions used, and a bibliography for further research.
• Description of rare Jewish music manuscripts and prints available at the Library of Congress.
• Prof. Edwin Seroussi's Jewish Music Research Center, featuring a thesaurus of Jewish music.
• You can listen to three beautiful High Holy Days songs, sung by the JTS Cantors Institute Choir, together with full information.
• The famous re-issues of classical chazzanut collections (Lewandowski, Sulzer, Baer, etc.), by the Sacred Music Press.
• The 12-volume Jewish Encyclopedia from 1906 is now freely available online. Entries of interest: Synagogue Music, Biblical Music, Hazzan, Abbodah, Zemirot.
• Selected discography of cantorial 78 rpm records.
• A detailed description of some of the special music collections available at the JTS Library.
• The Milken Archive, an undertaking to record, preserve and distribute a cross-section of American Jewish music from the past 350 years.
• Rozhinke Retreat, a series of workshops aimed at living reproduction of Cantorial art.
• Some sheet music used at Congregation Etz Chayim, Palo Alto.
• Several arrangements of Hebrew and Yiddish songs with easy piano parts.