Ishaq's Melodies

‘Melodies of Ishaq’ is a collective image of anonymous, nameless Jewish musicians, whose legends have been preserved in various versions on the territory of the Western-Central Asian region. All of them, without exception, convey a stable motive of a poor musician and an overbearing ruler, who, being dissatisfied, or unknowingly causing the musician suffering, without any special intention, eventually forgives him, and in some cases even generously rewards him with gold.
 
One of these legends, which preserved both the name of the musician and the name of the monarch, tells about Ishaq, the favourite musician of the Persian Shah Naser al-Din Qajar (1848–1896). The tradition records the mechanism of transmission of the melody of the Jewish synagogue liturgy into the oral professional musical tradition, palace music, known as mūsīqī-i moṭreban. The study of this legend in the context of written sources, in particular, the ‘History of Iranian Music’ by Ruhullah Khalegi (1906–1965), as well as in the context of the liturgical practice of the Jewish diasporas of Western Asia and the oral and professional music of this region, makes it possible to reconstruct in more detail the ways of preserving
the Jewish heritage of the entire region as a whole.

Keeping in mind that traditional music is a regional phenomenon, it is important to note that it was the Jewish tradition that secured the forms of intonation that are universal for the Near-Central Asian region as a whole for certain signs – teamim. This convention has been developed for centuries in the chanting of the books of the Tanakh. The convention of sign and sound eventually gave this bundle a strictly ordered character, binding intonation patterns into syntactic structures that lined up in a specific sequence. Which
one it was-it depended on the practical tasks, both performing and educational-didactic. It seems important that  melodics are recognized in different layers of traditional music as syntactic structures of synagogue chants.

The time has come to collect the stones, creating a complete picture of the Jewish traditional music of the communities in the territory of Western-Central Asia – fr om the liturgy to urban music-making, not limited to periods, nor the division of the musical heritage into one's own and another's. This will be helped by the study of the intonation vocabulary, the analysis of basic and ornamental patterns, the study of the process of transmission of intonations from one type of traditional music to another, from liturgy to palace music,
wh ere multi-part compositions of the so-called art of maqam were constructed-professional music, studied and transmitted orally from teacher to student (fron the book "The East of Reuven Mazel", p. 89).