Schola Antiqua: Sounds of Jerusalem
Amid a sold-out audience at the Cloisters Museum's Fuentidueña Chapel last weekend, I took my seat just moments before the concert began. I didn’t have time even to open Schola Antiqua’s printed program before the crowd settled.
A lone singer stood up. Allah is the greatest … hasten to prayer, he chanted in his native Arabic, with a tenor of mindfulness rather than performance and a volume less forceful than one expects from a professional vocalist. It was the same tenor and volume of private prayer, as if the audience had not been there at all.
I have heard the adhan before, and this was a traditional rendition of the Muslim call to prayer. But the setting made the experience novel, as we were situated not in a contemporary Middle Eastern village but in a reconstituted medieval Christian chapel in upper Manhattan. The Egyptian-American singer in this remnant of a Christian edifice was from a Muslim background, and the New York audience contained many Jews. For whom then was this call? Were we to join in prayer?
What happened next was an utter surprise. And I’m glad I didn’t have time to see it in the program beforehand. Now another lone voice began, seemingly at a random moment during the recitation of the adhan: this was a female voice, one whose professional performative power was immediately evident, though restrained now for the sake of balance. When Israel went out from Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of strange language…, she intoned in Hebrew, cantillating Psalm 114 according to a melody preserved from medieval Istanbul.
The Israeli chant did seem to emerge out of the Egyptian one, as the psalm says, but my trained ear could not figure out the tonal relationship. Then within seconds, her line of chant intersected with his in stark dissonance. At first, she seemed to be in the same key as him, but now I wasn’t sure. Did they make a mistake? Or was it not a modern key at all, but a medieval musical mode? The two prayers continued to converge and diverge, with moments of harmony but passing tones of undeniable dissonance – two ancient melodies, each with its own integrity, overlayed like waves with both constructive and destructive interference.
Behind these two singers that faced the audience stood two small circles of singers, groups of four men and two women, at the back of the chapel’s apse. They had seemed not to be a part of this opening piece, but now they too joined the call, in sounds familiar to Western ears. Hail, Saint Hilarion…pray that we might be adorned with lilies, they sang in Latin, adding Christian chant, in a familiar mode, to these Muslim and Jewish prayers. The Christian tradition was louder, more formal, and tonally dominant. And though the Muslim and Jewish voices were central on the stage, the Christian voices – marginalized and enclosed on themselves – nonetheless emerged on top.
The three chants continued, and the listener could choose either to focus attention on the self-contained beauty of each one or to relax one’s ears and let the entire soundscape in. Traditions handed down within linear historical successions were now handed off around a circle: unpredictable harmonies and dissonances, unanticipated cadences from one religion’s prayer to the other’s.
When the chants faded back to silence, I opened the printed program. This musical tapestry was titled simply, “The Call.”
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