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Sample Track 1:
"Ashir Shirim (I Will Sing Songs to God)" from Ancient Echoes
Sample Track 2:
"Rannanu (Sing with Joy)" from Ancient Echoes
Sample Track 3:
"Abwoon (O Father-Mother of the Cosmos) [The Aramaic Lord's Prayer]" from Ancient Echoes
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Ancient Echoes
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CD Review

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American Record Guide, CD Review >>

Ancient Echoes From the Time of Jesus & Jerusalem's Second Temple San Antonio Vocal Arts Ensemble/ Christopher Moroney World Library 2348-72 minutes (800-621-5197)

Efforts to recover or reconstruct the devotional music of the ancient Jewish world have had several important scholarly proponents. One was Abraham Z Idelsohn, who collected and published melodies and materials he traced in surviving Jewish traditions. Another has been Suzanne Haik-Ventoura, who produced a large body of "decipherments" of ancient Hebrew chants, which she published under the title La Musique de la Bible Revelee-several recordings came of that. (I know of five: one for Harmonia Mundi, issued in 1976 and re-issued on CD as 190989; one made for LP in 1979 by Erato; and three issued on CD on the Alienor label: 1041, 1045, and 1051 made in 1986 and 1991 with Esther Lamandier.)

To these venturers we now add Christopher Moroney, who has prepared this program with his group of six other singers and players. Addressing less the Hebrew world of the Old Testament, he attempts more broadly to evoke the Judeo-Mediterranean world at the turn from BC to AD. Of his 16 selections, eight reflect Hebraic liturgical traditions (including the intonation of the Ten Commandments and two wedding songs), partly as filtered through Christian reception. In Aramaic we have two versions of the Lord's Prayer and four of the Beatitudes. And we are given one textually irrelevant ancient Greek survival (the celebrated Hymn of Seikilos) and an Arab dance. Moroney uses two of Haik-Ventoura's decipherings and five of the transcriptions that Idelsohn derived from Babylonian-Jewish sources. But six of the items are frankly identified as "composed by" Moroney himself, on the basis of regional and folk traditions. Moroney is also responsible for the scorings and instrumentations, sometimes with a generosity akin to Haik-Ventoura's more ambitious conceptions.

The results are interesting and at many points quite lovely. Moroney and his San Antonio group have heretofore been identified with exploring the early music of Latin America, but they have clearly worked hard at mastering language skills and playing techniques required for this material. They cannot escape a certain feeling of Middle-Eastern hootchy-kootch here and there, and some of the percussion touches seem needless. But the arsenal of some 18 or so exotic regional or traditional instruments is mostly used with good taste and sensitivity.

Of course, these performances cannot pretend to duplicate the actual musical sounds of 2000 years ago; they are no more than highly speculative recreations. But a great deal of honest care has gone into the program, and an elaborate 12-page booklet gives careful notes on each selection, along with texts and translations.

 03/01/04
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