[HANASHIR:11234] Re: Interfaith Music Festival

[Judah Cohen <jcohen...>]

While it is fine for the Interfaith festival organizing committee to
continue thinking this way about the relationship between the Jewish and
Christian chants, know that it is based on highly speculative (and generally
faulty) scholarship from the 1950s and 1960s that has since been quietly
discredited in academic circles.  (Read Eric Werner's *The Sacred Bridge*
for example: it's a monument to Jewish Music scholarship, but it's based on
deeply problematic evidence and reasoning and almost never used today among
Jewish music scholars.)   What's interesting, though, is that this kind of
"scholarship" was aimed precisely at the same issue you're dealing with
right now:  it was intended to "prove" a deep relationship between Jews and
Christians in order to help the two groups coexist and interact in the
present day.  So I'd recommend that you do just that--sing something you're
familiar with, emphasizing the present ties more than the past ties; and if
it sounds ancient, then so much the better.  This, after all, is what you're
looking to do in the first place, right?

Good luck!
Judah Cohen.





The organizing committee has discovered that the origin of the music sung in
today¹s Christian worship services came from what they described to me as
?the ancient Hebrew chanting of the cantors¹. (They specifically mentioned
the ?amen¹s and the halleluyah¹s.)



In light of this research, they have asked me to open the program by
chanting one of our ancient prayers. My first thought was Bar¹chu since it
is the call to worship, my second thought was V¹ahavta since the English
translation is read in the worship services of faiths other than our own?.