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.
