Geoffrey Clarfield has a wonderful article in the National Post today about 20th century scholarship that reinforces an ancient supposition that Gregorian chant grows out of Jewish cantillation.
Clarfield provides a great account of the core argument, but we do need to remember that the idea of a connection between Jewish and Christian chant is hardly a 20th century one. In fact, in the 20th century and even very recently, many people tried to debunk the idea, with the hope of severing the attachment of Catholics to chant. Even today, we read flippant comments to the effect that Gregorian chant is mostly a 19th-century innovation. If it is just another form of art music, why bother with it?
What Clarfield shows is that the chant is integral to Christian worship as it evolved from the Jewish tradition. He is also right to draw attention to the parallels between various forms of chant. The discovery of the relationship between the present chant and the singing of the early Church is yet another case in which the tradition knew more than the scholars, and the best scholars end up discovering the truth of tradition.
This oral tradition of synagogue cantillation has survived unbroken among the Jewish people for more than 2,000 years and still flourishes today. Over the centuries communities in Spain, Eastern Europe and as far away as Iraq, Persia, Yemen and Uzbekistan have developed their own unique styles of cantillation. One would think that after 2,000 years there would be no more “family resemblance” of a musical nature among these traditions. But there is.
At the start of the 20th century, communities from all over the Islamic and Western world began immigrating to the land of Israel, which had become a mandated protectorate of Great Britain after the First World War. A European-born Jewish musicologist by the name of Idelsohn made it his life’s work to record and compare the full range of cantillation of these newly ingathered communities of Jews in their homeland. Apart from the great service of musical preservation that he carried out for the Jewish people, and for the national archives of the future state of Israel, he also conducted the first comparative studies. He found that despite the relative historical separation and isolation of Jewish Diaspora communities, much of their traditional repertoires had similar melodic motives, especially when chanting the Psalms.
In 1938, a young Jew by the name of Eric Werner was allowed to come to New York as a refugee from Hitler’s Germany. He was by then already a well-known musician and composer and one of Europe’s finest musicologists. During that acme of European anti-Semitism, he asked himself a most counter-intuitive question. Was Gregorian Chant based on the cantillation of the Jewish synagogue?
He spent more than a decade trying to answer that question. In 1959 he published his landmark study on the relations between Jewish cantillation and Gregorian chant. It was called The Sacred Bridge and in it he argued that Gregorian chant was indeed a direct descendant of Jewish synagogue music. He never discovered a definitive medieval or early Christian text that bluntly announced that Christian cantillation was based on Jewish cantillation, but that is not how new religions develop. They adopt and adapt, and the evidence for adoption is circumstantial and comparative.
The Sacred Bridge was published in 1959. In 1974 Werner published an updated second edition with more data.
There are significant challenges to the possibility. We know Christianity was also influenced by mystery religions in some sacramental practices. We also know that in the Pauline communities, people were already composing original texts in praise of Christ. And then you have the development of antipathy toward Jews, if not Judaism in Later New Testament works, especially the writings of John.
It's possible that Jewish Christians like Paul brought Temple and synagogue music with them from Palestine. Or that the diaspora communities overrun with followers of Jesus would have supplied an artistic foundation.
Consider the heritage of chant in the following four centuries of western music: plainsong to Anglican chant to travelling colonial singing masters to southern shape note music to black spirituals to blues to jazz to gospel. I can trace that heritage as I hear the developments in american music, but I also know that the connection from chant to Gospel music has seen significant contributions from non-sacred sources and even greater shifts as music transferred to different cultures.
That said, I'll be interested to read what Christopher Page has to say.
This is an amateur question for the chantologists among the group:
If this is the case (and I think it is), why does Gregorian Chant not sound more like Jewish cantillation? (and Orthodox chant, and Muslim chant, for that matter?)
My unschooled suspicion is that the reconstructors of chant were unable or unwilling to make Western liturgical music sound so… foreign?… exotic?
Am I way off base, here?
Interestingly:
I've mentioned this before, but-
I heard Scott T. zoom through long melismatic passage a few times when I was in his class (he was basically singing it to himself on fast-forward to find his bearings). It's amazing how immediately one can hear the connection to Eastern (Jewish and Muslim) chant when the stately flow of even pulses is replaced with muezzen-like yodelling.
Todd! Page came! I'm thrilled. Prepare for many hours of engagement!
Anyone who hears Old Roman and Beneventian chant can here the connection to traditions that are clearly very eastern Mediterranean. Granted, Ensemble Organum's version of Old Roman and Beneventian may be a bit aesthetic, yet the connection is still clear.
I don't think John has antipathy to Jews. He sees Christianity as transfigured Judaism. All of his gospel is about Our Lord at Jewish Holy days, tranfiguring the meaning of those days. It is Luke-Acts that sees Christianity replacing Judaism, and Matthew as fulfilling Judaism. So none of the Gospels, and certainly not Paul, have antipathy to Jews.
"It's possible that Jewish Christians like Paul brought Temple and synagogue music with them from Palestine. Or that the diaspora communities overrun with followers of Jesus would have supplied an artistic foundation."
This I think is a common conception, especially trendy in the liturgical theology that was popular in the 70's and 80's.
I find it interesting, though that neither the Mishna or Talmuds (early Rabbinic sources) mention chanting in the synagogue. In fact, even the 8th c. rabbinic tractate "Sopherim" warns people who are living according to the Sinai Covenant not to chant the psalms daily because they recall the temple sacrifice!
What this seems to suggest is that the chanting of the psalms in the Jewish tradition always accompanied temple sacrifice. It was not something that was done in the synagogue, or in the Jewish home for several hundreds of years following the destruction of the second temple.
So early Christian chant, so it would seem, grew out of the practices of temple sacrifice, naturally, since Christ's sacrifice made present in the liturgy was the fulfillment of this Jewish practice.
Adam, I'm not sure I'm following you. Like you I would be a doubter on music accompanying the spread of the first century Gospel. Yet you seem to be suggesting the opposite in your last paragraph above. Early Christians who experienced Temple worship would have been in the extreme minority by the late first century.
It's a charming idea that chant evolved from Jewish liturgical music. But it strikes me as more likely that it developed in parallel locations in present-day Western Europe long after Jewish influence in early Christianity faded. Christians have been always willing to adapt pagan traditions and Christianize them. Is it far-fetched to think that chant has some roots in pagan or popular music?
"Early Christians who experienced Temple worship would have been in the extreme minority by the late first century."
Since the temple was destroyed in 70AD I would tend to agree with you!
The Jewish tradition, though, as it is recorded in historical documents suggests that the chanting of the psalms was something that accompanied temple sacrifice only before the Christian era. Being that Christ's sacrifice for the Jews that followed him was a fulfillment of the temple sacrifice it doesn't seem to be too unreasonable to think that much of the temple ritual would carry over into Christian worship. There is a great deal of historical data that suggests this.
"Is it far-fetched to think that chant has some roots in pagan or popular music?"
Yes, I think it is. And I base this on my study of the historical sources.
I've read Eric Werner's book and found it very interesting. If I remember right, however, a lot of his scholarship has been called into serious question. For instance, the connection between the earlier versions of Mass IX Sanctus and an the Alenu melody: the Alenu was introduced into synagogue worship well after the Christian community had separated itself from the Jewish community. Anyhow, does anyone know more about this? Paul Weber
"Is it far-fetched to think that chant has some roots in pagan or popular music?
Yes, I think it is. And I base this on my study of the historical sources."
And yet aren't there numerous examples of music from non-sacred sources being utilized for sacred music in the later Middle Ages? Whole Masses based on secular tunes? Why wouldn't we expect some of this heritage in an earlier and less rigorous age?
This is a completely different topic, Todd. Conjecture is fine, but it's probably better to stay rooted in the evidence given in factual data.
The early Christians, like the Jews, were very careful to keep their Faith pure especially of any taint of Paganism, which would include music. Catholics today could surely learn from them.
It is interesting that many despise the Middle Ages and anything litugical about them, so I find Todd's claim that some Masses were based on secular tunes interesting. However, we are talking about almost 1000 years of many different types of ages duing that time, and every age has its perversions. In any case. does the term "secular" really apply to the times before the Enlightenment in the way we understand that term today?
Dom Saulnier has some interesting things to say about cantillation and how through time it became ornamented to become chant based on the 3 mother-modes of Do, Re, and Mi. The Gregorian repertoire as we have it today has many vestiges of this cantillation, and Dom Saulnier does a nice job of tracing these in his book on the Modes.
Wow. Just when you think that Peter Jeffery (and others) had put this leaky and baseless theory to rest, its corpse rises from the grave, reanimated by an equally weird claim that attempts "to debunk the idea" are somehow related to "the hope of severing the attachment of Catholics to chant." Considering the date of the oldest written chant sources, it is simply playing fast and loose with history to "prove" any such connection: even the author of the article quoted here admits that the evidence, such as it (or is not), is "circumstantial." Surely we who love chant and want to see it reinstated to its place in Catholic liturgy do not have to resort to this sort of fanciful speculation to make the point.
Charles, I guess you have decided. However, Christopher Page and David Hiley in their new books discuss evidence in all directions and consider it a subtle and difficult issue. You should drop an email to both of these two masters and tell them to stop wasting their time since the issue is already settled in your mind.
Here is David Hiley, in his Cambridge Introduction to Gregorian Chant (2009): "The earliest Christians were Jews, and it has often been speculated that musical elements of Jewish ritual were perpetuated in early Christian worship. While this may indeed have been the case, it is very difficult to demonstrate with concrete examples. If one could point to a particular melody or melodic pattern, used for a similar text (allowing for the difference of language) in a parallel ritual situation in the two religious traditions, all with a reasonable claim to date back to the first three or four centuries AD, one would feel to be on firm ground. But such examples are practically non-existent."
What does Page say about it in The Christian West and Its Singers?
I don't mean to say that such a connection is impossible, but why obsess over what is widely recognized as a historical dead end without any evidence? You do not do the music any favors by obscuring it with pseudo-historical esoterica.
But Hiley also says "it would be foolish to deny the possibility that singing in Christian worship drew upon tones and patterns sung by the Jews."
I'm as curious about this issue as anyone, but so many older writers have drawn a connection that I suspect, as I said, that the tradition knows more than the science.
This really strikes me as an angels dancing on heads of pins kind of question. As I wrote above, it's not impossible, but to perpetuate the idea as a fact, on the basis of a faulty book, seems irresponsible at best.