Re: Influence of Jewish music on Christian chant

[Robert Cohen <rlcm17...>]

A couple of small footnoted comments (as it were) below; sorry if confusing. 
  (I don't know how to put comments in red, or something!)

>From: Eliott Kahn <Elkahn (at) JTSA(dot)EDU>
>Reply-To: jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org
>To: World music from a Jewish slant <jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org>
>Subject: Re: Influence of Jewish on Christian chant
>Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2000 20:19:41 -0500

Edith Gerson-Kiwi in "Migrations and Mutations
>of the
>Music in East and West" (1980) gives a musical example on p.55 with
>enormous similarities between a Gregorian "Dixit Dominus" (Ps.109) and a
>Yemenite version of  Psalm 122. As Idelsohn had, Gerson-Kiwi finds
>similarities in the modal and narrow melodic contours of Eastern Jewish
>melodies and Gregorian chant. The Yemenite tradition was supposed to
>be  particular free of foreign influences, because the Jewish people
>remained in Southern Arabia for 2,000 years before emigrating to Israel.

My (correct?) recollection is that it was exactly these similarities 
(between some Yemenite music and Gregorian chant) that led Idelsohn to infer 
the likelihood of a common source--else how could Yemenite music, preserved 
within such an insular tradition, have borrowed from Christian chant--or 
vice versa, for that matter?  Hypothesized explanation:  They independently 
derived from the common source of Temple chant:  source music for Yemenite 
as for other Jews; inspirational model for early Christians--many of whom 
(esp. in Jerusalem) went to "Temple" (as well as to what many Reform Jews 
call "Temple"--i.e., synagogue).


>And also because Jewish liturgical tradition had an enormous influence on
>the early Christian liturgy.

Not to mention (aside from the superb examples adduced by Eliott) the Lord's 
Prayer, which is virtually entirely derived from (conflated) Jewish sources.

I thank Eliott for his scholarship -- Robert Cohen
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