La musique de la Bible révélée: Psaume 122 - 01

Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura, LA MUSIQUE DE LA BIBLE REVELEE, Harmonia Mundi France, HMA 190989.

I still remember when I first heard this Psalm on the original LP. I was charmed then and I remain charmed to this day. If only the baritone and bass singers had the clarity of voice that the tenor solo had! It took me several years before I heard Chanticleer perform this text and some two decades more before I heard the Colombian group SHOFAR perform it. All three performances will be featured on YouTube in good time.

Psalms 122 is one of those texts that not only illustrates King David's style as a singer-songwriter, but which employs the "Royal Hebrew" developing during David's and Solomon's time -- a dialect of Hebrew which has evidence of Northern Hebrew and Phoenician influence coupled with Judean Hebrew. This is what we would expect of the dialect developing then and there. Indeed David seems to have written this Psalm from the point of view of a Northern Israelite, not someone from the House of Judah as he himself was; the idioms employed point to this.

For more information on Haïk-Vantoura's thesis, see the following Web site and its internal links:

http://www.rakkav.com/biblemusic/

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Music

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