Preface

Catalan musician Jordi savall has demonstrated through numerous projects that historically informed performances of music from a broad diversity of times and places can recover and convey the spiritual vitality of culture and history in an exemplary manner. One of his most recent projects demonstrates this power of music movingly. He fulfilled a commission by the Cité de la Musique in Paris to produce a work on the three great monotheistic religions by creating Jerusalem, The City of Two Peaces: Heavenly Peace and Earthly Peace.¹ In two hybrid super audio CDs and an accompanying 435-page book whose text is offered in eight languages, the work presents a variety of music and texts spanning approximately 3,200 years.

Jerusalem follows a journey that opens with the sound of the shofars blasting down the walls of Jericho and moves through the complex history of the city to conclude with a "Dialogue of songs" that culminates in overlapping pleas for peace sung in Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and Ladino languages intoning an anonymous Mediterranean melody. One critic has aptly termed this and other projects completed by Savall "musico-historico-documentaries," although it is necessary to add immediately that the musical beauty and integrity of these projects as exemplified in successful concert performances remains their primary value.

Continuity and integrity extending through historical and cultural variability is essential to Jewish, Christian, and Islamic faiths and it is likely that it is because of his contributions to understanding such continuity through music that Savall was granted an honorary doctorate by the Catholic University of Louvain in 2001 (one among many of his cultural honors). Savall describes Jerusalem as "a multicultural fresco" (109), and the performance features musicians from Israel, Palestine, Greece, Syria, Armenia, Turkey, England, France, Spain, Italy, and Belgium in addition to Savall's ensembles, Hespèrion XXI and La Capella Reial De Catalunya. That we are currently moving into a period of global and multicultural richness is broadly evident—a glance at the roster of performers in the world's best symphony orchestras or of any major league baseball team, to name two great meritocracies, confirms such an observation. Savall advocates the importance of music in advancing the cause of mutual understanding and peace: "It's a cultural mission. Music is a special mission. We have to return to the spiritual mission and sympathy and empathy."²

The work is divided into seven sections. A prelude provides the musical portrayal of prophetic voices associated with Jerusalem offering promises of heavenly peace, as in a text from the Sibylline Oracles from the third century b.c.e. sung hauntingly in Greek to Aramaic music by Montserrat Figueras (Savall's wife): "The moon's beams shall appear / and suddenly, drops of blood from the stones shall fall to earth as a sign. / Then God, who dwells in heaven, / shall make an end of war." An Arab Sufi song sung to a text from the Quran and a song on the Cathar Gospel of Pseudo John from a twelfth-century manuscript provide further prophetic visions of heavenly peace.

Three chapters depict the Jewish city, the Christian city, and the Arab and Ottoman city. Savall offers versions of King David's Psalms 121, 122, and 137 drawing upon Jewish chant from Morocco performed by Israeli singer Lior Elmalch in an effort to conjecture what the ancient music might have sounded like, and further supplements this section with instrumental music to portray the Jewish city from the time of its founding to the destruction of the temple. The section on the Christian city begins with a "Hymn to the Virgin at the Foot of the Cross" in Greek and attributed to Emperor Leo VI (886–912) and includes three songs from the Crusades. The section on the Arab and Ottoman city includes improvisations on the Oud, a song based on Sura 17:1 on the ascension of the prophet Mohammed into heaven from the Mosque of the Rock, and a recitation in Turkish re-creating the legend of the dream of Suleyman the Magnificent (1520).

Jerusalem as a city of pilgrimage for Jews, Christians, and Muslims is...