Haaretz on the piyyut

A NICE ARTICLE ON THE PIYYUT in Haaretz:

Orthodox, secular Jews keep ancient poems alive in singing groups across Israel

If the piyyutim are so ancient, and are shared by Jews from many cultures, how come the piyyut is now a species in danger of extinction?

By Noam Ben-Zeev Tags: Jewish World

There is a musical genre that exists in the twilight zone between the sacred and the secular, sung by both religious people and total atheists, by men as well as women. Its words are similar to prayer but are not prayer. It is not sung by professional singers, because it does not belong to the popular and commercial world, nor is it sung by cantors, because it is not limited to the world of the synagogue. Its text is poetic and uses high Hebrew, but this text has no right to exist without the melody. And the opposite is also true - its music, with its complex melodic and scalar structure and, frequently, exalted beauty, is meaningless without the words.

And another wonder: Here, it is permissible to adapt a new text to the lovely melody, and also various melodies are often adapted to the same text. In this genre there are ancient thousand-year-old works, as well as new ones. In order to sing them well you have to study for many years, and at the same time their validity does not come from expert performers but from the works' acceptance by the audience because, in spite of their complexity, they effectively belong to the audience, whose members learn them from one another, without notes and without recordings. And the experts, who are called paytanim, know how to improvise on the audience's melodies, to adorn them, to trill them freely, but the basic notes are set and precise, and if anyone makes a mistake another singer will immediately correct him.

This highly contradictory genre is the piyyut, or liturgical poem. ...

Some piyyutim are a lot older than a thousand years. The piyyut has been an important poetic genre in Judaism since the end of late antiquity. For more information see the Piyyut article in the Jewish Virtual Library. And more PaleoJudaica posts on piyyutim are here and here.