The religious choral music of Salamon Rossi: A brief window of Jewish artistic freedom in Renaissance Italy

Beginning with the destruction of the holy Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 C.E., the music of the Jewish synagogue was restricted to monophonic, a cappllea chant. In the year 1622, however, Salamon Rossi of Mantua, Italy composed and published a collection of Hebrew polyphonic motets which broke with that tradition. The environment---musical, social, political, and religious---that enabled Rossi to create "The Songs of Solomon" at this particular time in history is the subject of this paper.;Research on this subject was conducted through books, articles, and interviews on the topics of Jewish music and history, the Italian Renaissance and the music of that period, Rossi and Mantua, and the method of music analysis known as macro analysis. Research was also carried out at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.