Customer Reviews

Ancient Echoes - Music from the time of Jesus and Jerusalem's Second Temple

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I've listened to a lot of Jewish music, but never anything quite like this! True, there is no way to prove that every note is accurate. When a person makes a photocopy of a picture and then makes a photocopy of the copy, etc. the picture degrades with each generation. No one claims that this hasn't happened. That is why the CD is called Ancient Echoes. That being said, this is one of the most exciting finds I've come across lately. I am a collector of antiquities. I specialize in early Christian roots. You can be sure I pounced on this! It more than matched my expectations.

The CD comes with ample liner notes (12 pages) that fully describe the project. Each trac is explained. The project is well researched.

I cannot recommend this CD highly enough.

When I first began to listen to the cd I wasn't sure what to expect, but after listening to the first song "Ashir Shirim", I was hooked & I knew the rest had to be good. With each song, I felt like dancing, kneeling & praying or meditating. The music is very ethereal,transporting you back into time & renews & refreshens the inner soul. What a blessing & inspiration! The more I listen to it, the more I yearn to hear it again! Each song is so unique & different from the next. I could not believe when reading the liner notes ,that like the guadalupe cd's, they sung & played the instruments in this new one. The instruments are so different & the rhythms difficult. And of course, the vocals....excellent! The research was also incredible. The studying of the languages comes through in their articulation, sounding very true to the languages spoken during that time. Then there is the compositions themselves...WOW... not enough can be said for the details given. SAVAE is wonderful on the Guadalupe cd's, but once again, with this cd, they have proven the talented musicianship it takes to be SAVAE.

I team teach an honors humanities class for 11th grade students. I incorporated music from this extraordinary CD into our study of the roots of western European music. The reaction was immediate and stupendous. This music has a primal beauty that cuts through the clatter of modern pop music. Many of the students asked where they could purchase a copy. My colleagues in the room were touched by it as well. SAVAE has created an invaluable educational tool as well as a marvelously crafted work of art. The sonorities alone make this worth purchasing. The balance between the instruments, spoken word and sung prose is impeccable. The musicianship is beyond reproach. If you want something that will become essential in your classroom, buy this CD. If you want something that will speak to you as an artist, buy this CD. If you want something that will move your soul, buy this CD.

I first heard selections from this CD on National Public Radio's Weekend Edition. The host had two members of SAVAE as guests on her show. I was mesmerized by the music and the extraordinary effort that SAVAE (San Antonio Vocal Arts Ensemble) put into understanding the music. It is a study of prayer, music and text that has survived from the Holy Land at the time of Christ. You will hear prayers sung and recited in Jesus' native language-Aramaic, chants based on material from the Dead Sea Scrolls and sacred music sung in the temples of Jerusalem.

A winning combination of Christian and Judaic scripture, and who can think of a time when we need it more?

SAVAE's founders invested years of study to learn about ancient music from Palestine/Israel. In addition, much time was devoted to mastering the pronounciation of ancient Hebrew and Aramaic. All of this research is explained in the CD liner notes, as well as on the group's web site: www.savae.org. SAVAE is first and foremost a musical ensemble dedicated to performing historically accurate ancient music. The seven SAVAE members are people of faith, which is personal and not an aspect of the group's work. Nonetheless, as is the case with much early music, the texts on SAVAE's CD are scripture from either the Hebrew Old Testament or the Aramaic New Testament. Questions about a link to Sufism seem to have arisen because we chose to use the translations of author and Biblical scholar Neil Douglas-Klotz PhD., who is also a Sufi teacher. Neil has spent the past 20 years studying and translating Jesus' words from Aramaic to English. SAVAE members and audiences alike have found his translations inspiring. The music itself has been reconstructed from ancient melodic themes as catalogued by Jewish musicologist A.Z. Idelsohn.
Covita & Christopher Moroney - SAVAE founders

This album is the best evocation I've heard yet of Middle Eastern music at the end of antiquity. Most of it deals with the folk music (liturgical and otherwise) of the ancient synagogues. SAVAE also takes certain Beatitudes from the Aramaic New Testament (Peshitta) version and one song text taken from the Dead Sea Scrolls and sets them to ancient folk melodies. The ensemble's artistry then transforms these humble and often tonally bizarre tunes into beautiful, accessible and fascinating art songs.

SAVAE granted me the opportunity to review "Ancient Echoes" before it was released, and I've heard the ensemble in three live concerts of this music since. One thing I still notice is that the synagogal scripture chants as such, however artfully performed, are almost always =detached= from the sense of the words -- especially in the case of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20). The medieval Babylonian Jewish wedding songs are notable exceptions to this rule of detachment. So are the three early "classical" works on the recording: the famous Song of Seikilos from ancient Greece, the medieval "Arabian Dance", and the two versions of the Priestly Blessing ("Bircath Cohenim [sic]") taken from Numbers 6:22-27 in the Hebrew Masoretic Text. The melody from the latter was deciphered from the Masoretic musical accentuation by the late Suzanne Haik-Vantoura and was taken from her own first recording, likewise sold on Amazon.com. In performance it is slightly ornamented to reflect the musical trends documented for the late Second Temple period, occuring even among the Levites. (I have waited twenty years to hear such a glorious rendition of Haik-Vantoura's Priestly Blessing; and I understand it's a favorite of the ensemble, the producers and the audiences alike.)

Artistically, I can hardly recommend this CD enough. My only caution is that one should not take the Sufi-inspired "translations" of the Aramaic Beatitudes by one Neil Douglas-Klotz (as found in the liner notes) too seriously. They seem to derive from the "root fallacy" -- that is, the belief (one common to many Westerners and Middle Easterners alike, if perhaps in different ways) that the meaning of a word consists in the sum of its parts. Such thinking leads the interpreter (as one may readily see) to conclusions which are completely the opposite of what the author of the Beatitudes intended to say.

Roberta Lewis-Barton from Grand Rapids, MI USA writes: WOW! I just saw this group in Cincinnati Ohio during a conference. They performed for 1,000 people in a beautiful cathedral. It was truly spiritual, transformative and amazing. If anything can bridge the seemingly expansive gap between world religions and cultures, this is the music that can - it is a GREAT unifier. The band members are as authentic as the music -- this Audio CD is WELL worth the time and effort to obtain it!

Listening to this CD is like being transported out of your comfortable suburban lifestyle and plunged through time and space back into the Holy Land. You can almost sniff the figs and dates and the offerings made to the temple, the goat tethered down to the barbecue heap, and the wailing of the holy priests as they make offerings to God, as Abraham was prepared to do to Isaac before he was stopped by a merciful Father. From the very first track you will feel viscerally that this was a very different world than ours, and yet the hunger for worship is strong in all cultures. The unusual instrumentation and play of voices may remind you of some of the modern Eurovision entries which depend of minor-key melodies and middle Eastern harmony, and then again listeners of an older generation who like pop music will realize that Cole Porter and other Broadway composers borrowed these Middle Eastern modalities for their more mournful or sensual numbers.

San Antonio has reason to be proud. It is one of the great multicultural capitals of our continent, and as such must have some psychic connection to the sprawling, multifaith and multi-culture world of old Jerusalem. You can hear the spirit in the impassioned play of voices, a mosaic of creeds and colors. Bewildering as some of the music may be at first, the longer you listen to a track like "Tubwayhun l'ahbvday sh'lama," you will soon be humming right along with the wonderful technicians of the Vocal Ensemble. So many of the tunes have the word "Tubwayhun" in them (it means "sacred," or "blessed by God") you may find yourself using this ancient word in your secular vocabulary. Say when somebody sneezes, where you might say "Gesundheit," now you will be saying, "God tubwayhun you."

I've been doing research on life in Biblical times, particularly the time of Christ, and came across a review of this CD on the web. I was skeptical that it could live up to the praise in the review, but ordered anyway. As a musician, I was impressed with the authentic use of period instruments and how well the music captures the culture and time. As a writer, I was inspired to continue researching the men and women who spoke these languages and heard this music. And finally, I was amazed at the beauty of the music and how well the composers have captured the text. If you love scripture, world music, or Jewish history you will love SAVAE's Ancient Echoes.

Lisa Van Allen, PhD
Author, Teacher, Worship Leader

I love this CD. I am a Catholic seminarian and I saw this CD many times in the music store and never picked it up but now I am glad that I have chosen it and listened to it. I love early music but hardly have anything before 1300. This music is amazing because you feel as if you are standing in the Temple with Jesus listening to the same music. The important thing is to remember however that this is an echo. An echo is a distorted although very close to the original sound. The music of the past is heard on this CD. This music helps to bridge the bond from yesterday into today and onward into tomorrow! Do not give up the chance to hear this CD of truly sacred music.
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit!