Last night on Conan, one of the guys in the band was supposedly talking about the shofar. His example of traditional Jewish music was actually Axel F, but I couldn’t tell if he was just humming with his mouth near the horn or was actually doing something with the horn. It was hilarious either way, but I wondered if anyone actually knows anything about the shofar.
My understanding of the way horns work is that an unvalved horn can only play a major pentatonic scale, like a bugle. If you think of the traditional U.S. Army bugle calls, like Taps, there are only the notes ‘do’, ‘me’, ‘so’, and ‘do’. So theoretically a skilled shofarist should be able to belt out Taps or something like that, but not something involving the other notes of the diatonic scale, to say nothing of sharps or flats.
A few drinks helps, but sho far sho good.
The Jews have got to get with the program and put valves on that thing.
IIRC, a shofar has a very limited range; the main shofar calls are differentiated by length and rhythm, not notes (and the actual notes vary by shofar). I tried one a few times years ago and some were very hard to make work, while others could produce a satisfying blast with a minimum of effort.
The bugle was designed as a musical instrument, so it can play the notes more easily (it also has a mouthpiece, which helps). A shofar was designed for sheep to butt heads together. The bugle gives you much better control, whereas with a shofar, it’s a matter of pride if you can get any not out of it at all.
It might be possible with the right shofar and shofar player, but that
From talking to Jewish friends of mine about borrowing a shofar for a processional into court at an SCA event, I got the idea that blowing the shofar for anything other than the standardly prescribed event was about on the same level as using a baptismal font as a punch bowl.
Not to say you couldn’t do it, but when you’re following a religion where the great googly moogly has been known to smite people… I’d look elsewhere for my musical instruments…
Yeah, I’ve had at it a few times with 'em. You can’t do very much as far as tunes go. It’s not as much the lack of “holes” as it is the lack of mouthpiece. The idea of blowing the shofar is roughly the same as a trumpet. You do a sort of buzz/spit through your lips, which generates the sound waves. The shofar amplifies the waves and “filters” them in the sense that it reinforces coherency and overtones.
With a trumpet, you have a nice metal mouthpiece that’s symmetrical and designed specifically to fit human lips. With a shofar, you get a rough sort of hole. Not nearly as good.
Fun, though.
Not necessarily true that using a shofar outside of Yamim Noa’im (Days of Awe, the real Hebrew phrase for what is drearily translated as “High Holy Days”) is a no-no. My guess is that it’s not that bad. You’d get frowns from an ultra-religious rabbi if you used the shofar to play-act as a Hun, if that shofar had been prepared in a kosher manner.
Note that in strict Jewish tradition, no musical or sound instruments are used in religious services except for the shofar. If you’ve seen an organ and choir at a Reform service, that’s Reform only. The reason is that, after the destruction of the Temple, the rabbis felt that music was inappropriate for prayer. Jewish prayers are chanted rather than sung; the difference is that the chant helps you remember the prayer, not add any emotion (particularly happiness) to it.
;j