I was listening to Glenn Beck's program on Friday where he chatted with a rabbi.
To paraphrase...
Glenn: "When I went to the synagogue I heard the singing which I can only describe as Gregorian chant..." Rabbi: "Yes, Glenn. This is the tradition of the Levites that has been passed down through the ages...
I thought that perhaps this would be a "Eureka!" moment for Glenn. No such luck...
Glenn: "And I thought, boy, it must make the Jews so angry to have their traditions perverted."
And I thought...
.
Jewish converts tend to feel very comfortable with traditional Catholic liturgy, unlike many Protestant converts.
Speaking about perverting someone else’s traditions, Glenn, why don’t you give us our New Testament back?
My response:
I'm just delighted that the Catholic Church preserved the Jewish Books that the Jews post-100 AD.
And this resulted in Hanukkah!
And Levitical chanting is another Jewish tradition treasured by traditional Catholics (so far) in the Gregorian Chant ---
There's been some (fairly) recent research on this. Eric Werner, a Jewish composer and musicologist, and a refugee from Hitler's Germany, evaluated evidence that Gregorian Chant was based on the cantillation of the Jewish synagogue.
In the late 50's he published "The Sacred Bridge," in which he presented the evidence that Gregorian chant was indeed a direct descendant of Jewish synagogue music. (He later published an updated second edition with more data).
His points are:
- New Testament scholarship recognizes the Jewishness of Jesus and the respect for Jewish law and ritual esp. by the early church of James and his followers (in Jerusalem). One can reasonably infer a certain continuity in basics of cantillation practices among the Jews in the first century AD would have been transferred to the early Christian Church.
- There's the unique nature of the Old and New Testaments, and Christian ritual which had no counterpart in Pagan Hellenism. The intonation of Jewish liturgical music is determined by the structure of the sentence and its logical meaning. The music and its notation are not autonomous: they are always tied closely to the text.
- The opening and closing tones of Jewish cantillation and Gregorian chant follow simple basic rising and falling patterns. Syllabic (one word one note) patterns are used throughout the service, but are punctuated with ornamented melismas (what jazz musicians would call improvs) at the most solemn moments in the service. In both Jewish and Christian worship, female singers did not participate and there were no instruments until the rise of polyphony in the early middle ages (like, around the time of Charlemagne.)
- There's the notation of Jewish cantillation and the "neumes" or signs of early Gregorian chant before the adoption of staff. They both started as visual "graphs" from hand gestures which, within a living oral musical tradition, give an understanding of musical phrases, as opposed to individual notes. This system is still in use in Jewish synagogues around the world.
- Plus, Werner's book has charts of almost identical pieces of Gregorian chant with synagogue melodies.
Since then, researchers have done comparative histories of chant in the Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Slavic/Russian Orthodox, Syrian, Armenian, Ge'ez (Ethiopian) and other traditions.
It is really a fascinating study on the validity and continuity of oral tradition. You can hear some of this on the CD "The Sacred Bridge," (Boston Camerata?) It swings between Latin and Hebrew, Gregorian chant and synagogue cantillation. Some of the melodies are identical!