Music has always accompanied the most important moments of religious life: in all the happy and sad feasts the liturgy is sung, without accompaniment of musical instruments. The melodies, transmitted orally, are different from place to place. Originally, the chant of the synagogues of the Italian Jews followed the Roman tradition. Then the liturgies were transformed, influenced by the arrival of new groups of Sephardic Jews (the Iberian Peninsula and the Mediterranean area) and Ashkenazi (Central Europe). Over time, Jewish music absorbed non-Jewish melodies, as dialectal popular songs, operatic arias, Risorgimento marches and hymns. The relationship with the surrounding world has always been strong: in the ghettos, from the end of the sixteenth century, polyphonic music in the Baroque style was composed. Jewish cantatas were composed during special festivals in Venice, Siena and Casale Monferrato and became an integral part of the musical heritage of the time, like those of Salomone Rossi (Mantua, 1570-1630), at the Gonzaga court in Mantua. In 1622-1623 a collection of synagogal polyphonic songs was published in Venice, with the psalms in Hebrew.
Much of the rich musical heritage of the Italian communities has been lost. A part (about one thousand melodies) has been "saved" by the musicologist Leo Levi (19/12/1982) who, in a registration campaign between 1954 and 1959, with the collaboration of the RAI and the Santa Cecilia National Academy, recorded the synagogal chants of about twenty Italian Jewish communities now extinct. The collection of Leo Levi, today kept in Rome (Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia) and in Jerusalem (National Sound Archives, National and University Library), has been the subject of intensive cataloging and research work. Recently the klezmer music, typical of Eastern Europe, despite not having Italian roots, has become very popular.
Music