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Searching for Ancient Sounds
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Hartford Advocate, Searching for Ancient Sounds >>
Searching for Ancient Sounds
A new recording by a Texas-based vocal group aims to make music from the time of Jesus
by John Adamian
The spiritual grandeur of the Temple ... the earthy simplicity of a caravan campfire ... the refined formality of Herod's court. The music on Ancient Echoes hopes to capture the atmosphere of these contrasting settings that existed in Israel/Palestine 2,000 years ago.
Recreating anything associated with the Second Temple of Jerusalem is a touchy endeavor. The Second Temple was built on the site of the Temple of Solomon in the sixth century B.C. and it was destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. To many believers, the rebuilding of the temple will mark the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, but there is the complication of the Al-Aqsa Mosque which happens to stand on the site where many believe the temple was built, on the Temple Mount.
In fact, recent attempts by Israeli authorities to excavate tunnels near and beneath the mosque have caused outrage in the Muslim world. So, understandably, talk of rebuilding the temple gets people of all faiths very worked up, in different ways. While it's not likely to satisfy those yearning to enact scripture, a new recording draws on linguistic and musicological research in an attempt to authentically recreate the sound of the Second Temple of Jerusalem.
Ancient Echoes, the new recording by SAVAE, the San Antonio Vocal Arts Ensemble, draws on the work of Abraham Idelsohn, an early-20th century musicologist who worked in then-Palestine to document the music of Jews who were arriving there from around the world. The group's founders, Christopher and Covita Moroney, worked to piece together a musical and linguistic understanding that would aid them in their quest to dust off songs and singing from thousands of years back. They immersed themselves in the study of Aramaic -- Jesus' native tongue. They chanted in Arabic with a sheik from the West Bank. They studied with an Egyptian phonetics expert who specializes in a Babylonian dialect in the classical recitation of the Koran, a dialect thought to have strong connections to ancient Hebrew.
The music is for a variety of settings. There are wedding songs, like "Ashir shirim," sung in Hebrew and based on melodies collected by Idelsohn, complete with the festive and vaguely menacing ululations that can be heard at weddings in the Middle East today -- whether Jesus and his disciples heard such music at Cana is another question.
Other pieces are composed by Christopher Moroney, with melodies based on ancient modes and texts from sections of the Bible or the Dead Sea Scrolls. Following the westward spread of Christianity, the "Song of Seikilos" is a Greek song from the first century A.D. For those who can't ever remember what comes between "Thou Shalt Not Kill" and "Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Wife," the group has offered some help by setting a version of the Ten Commandments to song. According to the liner notes, another song based on Psalm 114 (When Israel Set Forth From Egypt) uses a melody that was preserved separately by Jews and Christians, as a Sephardic chant in Hebrew and a Catholic one in Latin.
Considering current events, SAVAE's setting of an Aramaic version of Jesus' saying known by many as "blessed are the peacemakers," seems especially fitting this Easter and Passover season.
The seven-piece group plays reproductions of instruments thought to have been used 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem as well as modern Middle-Eastern instruments with unknown origins. The group uses the oud, grandfather to the lute and the guitar; the one-stringed fiddle called a rabbabah; as well as hand drums, cymbals, flutes and harps.
While the music is a long way from the stereotyped phrases that often stand as a sign for "music of the Holy Land" in movies, the instrumental pieces lack the ecstatic drive that one expects from devotional music.
And if one is to assume that the vocal timbres heard in the religious and popular music of the Middle East today have something to do with what might have been in the air 2,000 years ago, the purity of tone of the singing is slightly off the mark too. But when you're talking about music this old, it's really anyone's educated guess as to how it sounded.
SAVAE has a past record of rooting around in the history books searching for long-lost music to revive. Their recording Guadalupe, Virgen de los Indios was based on 500-year-old manuscripts found in the attic of a Guatemalan church.
Scholars have speculated about the connection between music performed at the time of Jesus and how it might have shaped early Christian church music and Western music in general. Many European musical ideas about harmony, the physical relationships of pitch and the emotional and utilitarian functions of certain modes were derived from the Greeks. But the connection between ancient musical practice and the songs and melodies of the Jewish diaspora have been difficult to explore.
What is known about the music of the Second Temple is that the rituals of temple were accompanied by groups of musicians known as levites who would play instruments and sing a psalm that was specific to each day of the week. Members of SAVAE studied up on first-hand accounts of temple music written by first-century historian Flavius Josephus. But in the absence of recordings, the challenge of accurately recreating past performance practices is pretty significant. Imagine traveling to the year 3000 and giving someone a drum set, guitars, bass, horns and the lyrics to "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" and expecting them to come even remotely close to what James Brown sounds like. Even with every academic description of what funk and soul is, it would still be nearly impossible.
It's doubtful that anyone will ever know with any certainty what music really sounded like 2,000 years ago, but the effort to imagine sounds that have long gone silent could change the way we hear things and conceive of the past in years to come. 04/10/03 >> go there
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