But the ensemble's debut Oregon visit to Medford, Eugene and Portland is sponsored by the archdiocese of Portland and coincides with the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, so roughly two-thirds of the program will be drawn from earlier albums including "Guadalupe: Virgen de Los Indios" and "El Milagro de Guadalupe." The rest will be from "Ancient Echoes."
The seven musicians not only sing phonetically in many Semitic, European and indigenous Latin American languages, they also play many instruments.
For the Latin American part of the program, these include a log drum, stones, deer antlers, gourd shakers and rattles and a tall free-standing drum, all based on paintings made by Aztecs shortly after the Spanish conquest of 1519-21.
For the Middle Eastern part, they include harps, other stringed instruments, flutes, drums, cymbals and a shofar, or ram's horn.
These are either modern reproductions of first century instruments or traditional instruments, such as the oud, that have evolved over centuries.
"We're all musicians as well as singers," says artistic director Christopher Moroney, but some instruments were difficult to learn.
Moroney says his wife, Covita, a guitarist (and the group's manager), spent two years learning to play the oud before "Ancient Echoes" was recorded.
"And percussion was a huge element" on the learning curve, he adds.
Moroney says that his ensemble's Latin American repertoire comes mostly from the first century after the Spanish conquest, roughly 1530 to 1630. The Virgin Mary's apparition in 1531 at Tepeyac resonated with the Aztecs, who worshipped Tonantzin, called "our mother." The Aztecs not only recognized and accepted the Virgin of Guadalupe, now the patron saint of Mexico, but they also learned Gregorian chant, which apparently bore some resemblance to Aztec chants.
"They took to it immediately," Moroney says, and could be heard singing it in the streets after church.
From way up in the church hierarchy, however, the enthusiastic Aztecs seemed to be having entirely "too much fun" with the music, Moroney says, and church services seemed more like entertainment.
Eventually the pope cracked down, and after that the music became very European.
After recording "Native Angels" and its two Guadalupe albums, Moroney and other members of SAVAE turned to much older music from a more distant part of the world.
Reconstructing Middle Eastern music from the first century A.D. (or C.E., the Common Era, as Jewish historians reckon it), was way more difficult.
"There are no musical manuscripts from that time," Moroney says, "so all we could do was to put together various pieces of the puzzle and try to get an idea what it sounded like.
``We'll never really know."
Intrigued by a mystical translation of prayers in Aramaic, the language of Jesus' time, the Moroneys embarked on serious research into the music of that period.
For melodies, they relied on the early 20th century work of Abraham Idelsohn, a musicologist who collected and studied the songs of Jews from many countries who were settling in what was then Palestine.
``He found amazing similarities in their music,'' Moroney says. Jews from Spain, Iran, Turkey, Germany and other countries used the same tunes, especially in settings of texts from the Torah and Tanach (an acronym for the entire Hebrew Bible). Because these Jewish communities had long been isolated from each other, Moroney says, the musical similarities pointed to a common source.
In terms of language and pronunciation, the closest the Moroneys could get to that source was an Egyptian phonetics teacher who specialized in a Babylonian dialect that has been preserved by Iraqi Muslims and is still used in classical recitation of the Quran.
Babylonian Jews, who would have used this dialect, also maintained close ongoing ties with Jerusalem, and scholars believe that this is probably the best approximation of the dialect that would have been used in Jewish liturgy there.
The Moroneys spent "hundreds of hours" learning and applying this dialect to Torah texts in Hebrew and to Aramaic texts from the Peshitta, the Syriac New Testament.
For texts that had no music attached, Moroney borrowed and applied melodies and motifs recorded by Idelsohn.
The ensemble's performance at St. Paul Catholic Church on Saturday will be in two parts, starting with musical settings of texts in Nahuatl, Quechua, Spanish Latin and Latin American Spanish, Portuguese and West African. In many of these texts, the fusion and transformation of Aztec, Incan and Catholic beliefs in the Virgin of Guadalupe is evident.
The Middle Eastern portion of the program includes two metaphorical wedding songs, the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic (a chant in Dorian mode), the priestly blessing in Hebrew, and "Blessed are the peacemakers" (Matthew 5:9) from the Aramaic Peshitta.
Reviewing a concert of "Ancient Echoes" music for the San Antonio News-Express, Diane Windeler praised it as ``a beautifully crafted, compelling traversal of Jewish, Christian and Muslim material ... On every level it was an affecting revelatory experience.''
CONCERT PREVIEW
San Antonio Vocal Arts Ensemble singing and playing early Latin American and ancient Middle Eastern music
When: 8 p.m. Saturday, St. Paul Catholic Church, 1201 Satre St.
How much: $10 at the door
Other performances: 7 p.m. Friday at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Medford; 2 p.m. Dec. 12 at St. Mary's Cathedral in Portland
