Music of the gods

I’m going to a won­der­ful con­cert tomor­row night per­formed by friends of mine from Sydney, Kim and Heather. They are eth­nomusico­lo­gists fas­cin­ated with spir­itual ancient music. They were com­mis­sioned to recre­ate the orches­tra of the second temple from 79CE and they had this luth­ier in Israel build these instru­ments accord­ing to the spe­cific­a­tions in the bible (plus 20% to the ratio because humans got bigger). And then they set ancient texts to recon­struc­ted ancient tunes and they’ll play these tomor­row with some ses­sion musos from bands like Xenos! who play tra­di­tional Greek music and have a feel for the middle east­ern wind instru­ments. It’s called the Temple Pro­ject and I’m just blown away that I’m actu­ally going to get to hear this stuff. (Actu­ally, I’m not sure tomor­row’s con­cert is actu­ally Temple Pro­ject stuff. Kim said he hoped it would be when I spoke to him last month and I forgot to con­firm today that it would be. If not, it will be some­thing equally mind-blow­ing, I’m sure.)

From the site:

“The musical pro­cess for The Temple Pro­ject will be informed com­pos­i­tion. A recon­struc­tion is depend­ent on know­ing exactly what some­thing looked and soun­ded like, which is not pos­sible with ancient Jewish music. The fas­cin­at­ing real­isa­tion of French com­poser and researcher Suz­anne Haik-Van­toura into provid­ing a decod­ing method for the Tiberian (Mas­oretic) school of nota­tion will be used on some pieces. Haik-Van­toura makes an emphatic though not wholly con­vin­cing case for her real­isa­tion (based on the T’amin – small signs writ­ten below and above the text), as a true recon­struc­tion of the music of the time. The first example of this is in the Codex of the Proph­ets writ­ten in 895 C.E. by Moses Ben Asher. Van­toura believes that the Mas­oretes were the cus­todi­ans of a writ­ten and chironic (ges­ture based) music tra­di­tion, who pre­served its writ­ing, fear­ing that it would be lost for ever in the chan­ging medi­eval world. She cites early sources who believe the nota­tion was des­cen­ded from Moses’ rev­el­a­tions at Mount Sinai. (Haik-Van­toura, 1991, p. 46).