The invention of the phonograph toward the end of the nineteenth century brought music to the forefront of folk-song scholarship, hitherto focused almost entirely on lyrics. Transformed into sound objects, the oral musical traditions, could be collected, stored, and subjected to sustained scholarly scrutiny. Musics are collected in the southeastern Mediterranean, west of the Jordan River, known variously as Eretz Yisrael, Israel, Palestine, and the Holy Land. This chapter focuses on the different ways in which collectors of traditional music have negotiated specific artistic and scholarly interests and agendas with competing ideologies of nationalism in four large scale music recording and archiving projects based in and around Jerusalem. In the utopian vision, spiritual renewal, attained through the creation of a society based on Jewish cultural and ethical values, was the primary goal of Zionism, and a prerequisite for political emancipation.