Jonathan Miller beautiful post about Jewish chanting in Washington D.C. that talks about the similarities between Jewish chant and Gregorian chant:What really knocked me out was the chanting of the daily psalms. It was much more like Gregorian chant than I had ever realized. Joel Cohen and Eric Werner have been for decades comparing Jewish and Christian chant traditions, so the basic idea that they were related was familiar, and of course Christian chant developed from Jewish practice. But at this synagogue in DC, with about 15 of us chanting (and my scrambling to keep up with the Hebrew), I had the very clear sense that I was part of something very, very old, with tunes that could be thousands of years old, very simple melodic contours. I am sure that it won't be very hard to figure out roughly how old those tunes really are.
Read the whole post here.
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