Lyres on Coins

Having finally wrapped up work on some other projects, including wrapping up loose ends and what are hopefully the final revisions to those book manuscripts and chapters, I am excited to have turned my attention to really getting to work in a focused way on my open textbook (or as I prefer to call it, open text+musicbook) on the Bible and Music. I start, as the class I teach also does, with music behind and in the Bible, before focusing on reception and musical settings of biblical texts. One crucially important source of knowledge is in the form of inscriptions and coins. A while back Jim Davila drew attention to a page on a numismatics website about the depictions of lyres on coins. Jim also shared a fascinating article on how conservative coinage imagery is, with the result that there are a lot of similarities between the appearance of ancient and modern coins.

Of related musical interest:

Hanukkah Music in America

A Soundtrack of the Jewish People

The launch of the Lowell Milken Center for Music of the American Jewish Experience

A Singing Advent Calendar

Delvyn Case shared a recording of his setting of Psalm 57:

Kanye West has composed his first opera, exploring the story of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar.

Here are two modern Psalms of lament and rage from Wil Gafney:

Riot Psalm

Jonathan Price Was Murdered and This Won’t Be the Last Time

Also related to biblical and other ancient music:

Bookends : the first and the last psalms

A Magnificat We Might Not Want to Hear

Handel’s Messiah and the Secret of Advent

Darkness and Mystery: A New Advent Anthem

Rock of Ages: Jesus in Secular Pop Music, Part 1

Psalm 150 Like You’ve Never Heard it Before

A Response to a Recent Ponder Anew Post

The story in the Advent psalms and readings, Year B

Commentary on Psalm 35

Revelations of a Musical Concordance

Finding the Psalms in the Aleppo Codex

Negotiating Jewish Identity in The Gates of Justice (plus a research guide to The Gates of Justice)

Psalmii lui David, in lectura actorului Marcel Iures

The Bible Under the Joshua Tree

Hymns in the New Testament

Here is ballet music to the story of Salome by Akira Ifukube:

A new book explores the genre of Black Gospel in the eras of Soul and Hip-Hop:

Also of related interest:

A blog post on the setting of “Adam lay ybounden” by John Ireland, and another on an album of choral and organ music, A Celtic Prayer.

Here’s a radio show about an effort to preserve endangered Assyrian poetry

The Man of Many Riffs: The Odyssey in Heavy Metal Music

Interview with my colleague composer Frank Felice

Leonard Cohen on Christianity