by Wayne Lee Gay, Classical Music Critic

Music in Jerusalem at the time of Christ definitely did not sound like the soundtrack to Ben Hur or The Greatest Story Ever Told.

Instead, according to Ancient Echoes: Music From the Time of Jesus and Jerusalem's Second Temple, a new CD from the San Antonio Vocal Arts Ensemble, the music that Jesus and his contemporaries heard more closely resembled what you hear in the background at a Lebanese restaurant than the lavish film scores of Hollywood's religious epics.

Now, at a time of year when Christians and Jews alike are reminded of the roots of both religions in ancient Palestine, the disc offers an unusual opportunity to hear at least one take on what the music that Jesus and other Jews of his era heard at the temple and the synagogue and in the countryside.

Musicologists generally agree on what music of the past sounded like back to about A.D. 800, nearly a millennium after the music on this disc; using the little information available about music of that earlier era, this disc offers an educated -- and listener-friendly -- guess about the music.

Christopher Moroney, the artistic director of the seven-member San Antonio Vocal Arts Ensemble, had been driven by a desire since his teen-age years to at least speculate on what the music of the time of Christ sounded like.

"When I was a teen-ager, my mother and one of her friends kept talking about learning belly dancing," Moroney recalls. Hearing modern Middle Eastern music around the house inspired Moroney to wonder what the ancient music of the region sounded like.

The idea percolated in the back of Moroney's mind through the years; in the meantime, he studied piano and composition at the New England Conservatory and arranging at the Berklee College of Music, a renowned center for jazz studies in Boston.

With his wife, Covita, also a musician, he moved to San Antonio and eventually helped establish the San Antonio Vocal Arts Ensemble in 1989.

Through the years, early music projects came to dominate the ensemble's activities, resulting in three compact discs. The inspiration to finally go ahead with Ancient Echoes came when the Moroneys received a copy of Prayers of the Cosmos, featuring prayers from the time of Jesus in new translations from the Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus.

In reaching back to ancient times, musicians and scholars don't have much to work with -- there are no written scores and no detailed descriptions of instruments. References in the Bible give only vague clues -- we may read about a harp and see a harpist playing in an Assyrian relief, but the sound of the music and descriptions of it are long gone.

But while the instrumentation and possible harmonizations are lost, the melodies of the era survive. Early 20th-century musicologist Abraham Idelsohn's pioneering work in Jewish ethnomusicology revealed amazing similarities in traditional Hebrew chants used in widely separated parts of the world. Since these melodies were the same in regions that had not been in contact for centuries, it was reasonable to conclude the melodies had been maintained intact from their origin at the temple of Jerusalem, which was destroyed by Roman soldiers in A.D. 70, about 40 years after the time of Jesus.

Theodore W. Burgh, an anthromusicologist on the faculty at the University of Notre Dame, served as a consultant on the Ancient Echoes project.  "We can't say for sure what the instruments were like," Burgh admits. "But what San Antonio Vocal Arts Ensemble has done is believable. They present an interpretation based on what we know. Another group of musicians might come up with something completely different."

While the result bears little resemblance to the opulent sounds of Hollywood sword-and-sandal movies set in ancient Palestine, it's definitely interesting and, at times, moving. Colorful instrumentations mingle generously with emphatic, expressive singing.

Some musicologists might question the easy introduction of harmonies that  resemble modern Euro-American art and popular music; Moroney points out that images of musicians from the ancient world show them playing more than one note at a time and that there's a natural tendency to sing in harmony.

Will the project be of use to scholars? "I'd definitely use this in an ethnomusicology class," says Michael Meckna,, professor of music at Texas Christian University. "Conjecture is better than nothing."

Joseph Butler, who teaches music history courses at TCU that cover the ancient period, seconds the idea. "It's a serious effort, and reasonable from a historical viewpoint," Butler says. "I would certainly present it to a church music class."