What "When Do We Eat Already?" sounded like 370 years ago

April 9, 2014 5:52 PM

Back in January, blogger Mississippi Fred Macdowell posted scans of the Rittangel Hagaddah [pdf], a 1644 Hebrew-Latin Haggadah that has the distinction of including musical notations for two of the songs. Last month, high school students at the Tannenbaum Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto performed them in concert. Here's his followup post with video of the performance.
posted by Mchelly (5 comments total)

Fun factoid from the first link: Chad Gadya in Latin is "Unum hoedulum, unum hoedulum"
posted by Mchelly at 5:53 PM on April 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

Back in January...2012.

Just clarifying for others who might be confused - this is very cool!
posted by Lemurrhea at 6:12 PM on April 9, 2014

...blogger Mississippi Fred Macdowell...

*cries*
posted by middleclasstool at 6:50 PM on April 9, 2014

Faster versions of Adir Hu and Ki Lo Naeh, from the comments.

I'm not especially musical, but the tunes are actually quite similar to modern versions I've heard. They do sound a bit renaissancey, though.

Pro tip: you can sing "kadesh, urchatz" to the tune of Greensleeves! Try it!
posted by Joe in Australia at 9:14 PM on April 9, 2014

Dude, you can sing EVERYTHING to the tune of Greensleeves.

At camp (ah, Jewish kids at camp, important formative experience) we discovered, conversely, that "Adon Olam" (a prayer heard every week during Jewish Shabbat services) can be sung to any tune. "Greensleeves" happened, of course, then "O Tanenbaum" and "Silent Night" (that last one stuck--it was kind of sweet). The theme from "Gilligan's Island" didn't quite work but it was close enough for us. Someone made us stop when we got to the Star Wars theme.
posted by gillyflower at 10:01 AM on April 10, 2014