Treated as a hymn rather than only as a recited liturgical response, Kaddish has attracted an unusually large body of independent musical setting, both within traditional synagogue cantorial music, where Ashkenazi and Sephardi communities have developed quite distinct melodic traditions for the different versions of the text, and within Western art music composed for the concert hall rather than for worship. The best known instance of the latter is Leonard Bernstein's Symphony No. 3, subtitled Kaddish, completed in 1963, which sets Aramaic and Hebrew text from the prayer within a large orchestral and choral symphonic work addressing themes of faith and doubt in the shadow of contemporary crisis, a use of the ancient doxology's text entirely outside its liturgical setting and intended for a general concert audience rather than a worshipping congregation.
This musical afterlife, moving from a text recited with a fixed and relatively constrained cantorial melody within the synagogue service into freely composed orchestral and choral settings intended for secular performance, distinguishes Kaddish's later reception from most of the other Jewish liturgical material in this atlas, and reflects the particular emotional resonance later composers and audiences have found in its use as a mourner's prayer, drawing on that association even when, as discussed elsewhere in this atlas under its entry as a formula, the Aramaic text itself makes no reference to death or grief at all, a tension between the text's actual content and its culturally accumulated emotional association that composers setting it to music have often deliberately foregrounded rather than resolved.