Re: ancient Sephardic melody

[NESKATAN <NESKATAN...>]

On page 69-70 of A.W. Binder's "Biblical Chant," he compares Ashkenazi and 
Sephardic melodies for singing Shirat haYam and states: "The melody...is said 
to be of very ancient origin.  These festive cadences were only used several 
times during the Jewish liturgical year and so were not tampered with, as was 
the trope which was used every Sabbath.  Its strong pentatonic character also 
points to its antiquity.  What leads us to believe that this trope is of 
ancient origin is the fact that it resembles so strongly the tune which 
Sephardic Jews use for the Chant of the 'Song of the Sea' every Sabbath.  
However, due to the fact that they sang it every Sabbath over the centuries it 
has assumed a rhythmical character as we know it today.  This same trope may 
also be found in the Torah reading of ancient Oriental communities now 
returning to the Land of Israel."

It sounds to me like Binder fell for Idelsohn's nationalism and ascribed to the 
"ancient" category any melodies that a Sephardic and an Ashkenazi community may 
share, thus trying to support Zionism with ethnomusicology.

Edwin Seroussi (Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue Music in Nineteenth-Century Reform 
Sources from Hamburg, 1995) has shown that far more recently than antiquity, a 
Portuguese Jewish community and a German Jewish community mingled to the point 
where the same melody might be heard in a synagogue of either minhag.  This is 
a more likely explanation.

It is important to note that 1) the melody-sharing went both ways and 2) the 
melodies Binder quotes are TOO similar to have diverged from a common source 
(the Temple) so long ago and survive with such remarkable similarity and 3) 
Binder was lumping Western Sephardim and "ancient Oriental communities" into 
the same category.  None of the Mizrahi synagogues I have been to sing anything 
like that melody.  I imagine it fits quite well into the Spanish/Portuguese 
service.

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