Das Goyenthum in der Musik

The Jerusalem Post reports that a Bnei Barak NGO, the Guardians of Sanctity and Education is formulating a series of guidelines to "add transparency to the delineation between acceptable or 'kosher' Jewish music and forbidden or 'treif' music." Senior member Mordechai Bloi that "Bach or Beethoven, music with class" is kosher. The treif list includes:

• 2-4 beats
• rock and disco
• 'improper' use of bass, guitar, and saxophone
• profaning sacred texts
• mixing of milk and meat instruments
  

In response to a growing number of Haredi pop-style musical acts, the ultra-est of the ultra-Orthodox declare: "We want to protect ourselves from what we see as negative foreign influences. We are trying to maintain our own authentic music styles...stay(ing) loyal to our roots."

Compare to 1850, Richard Wagner wrote:
The Jews could never take possession of this art, until that was to be exposed in it which they now demonstrably have brought to light— its inner incapacity for life. So long as the separate art of Music had a real organic life-need in it, down to the epochs of Mozart and Beethoven, there was nowhere to be found a Jew composer: it was impossible for an element entirely foreign to that living organism to take part in the formative stages of that life. Only when a body's inner death is manifest, do outside elements win the power of lodgment in it—yet merely to destroy it. Then indeed that body's flesh dissolves into a swarming colony of insect-life: but who, in looking on that body's self would hold it still for living?"