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52-minute documentary film
written by Yves Touati
directed by Emmanuel Chouraqui

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Following a musical and spiritual journey through the centuries, MUSICA SANCTA (*) invites us to discover the wealth of Christian liturgies of Israel’s monasteries.

The journey begins at the dawn of the 4th century with the first Christian communities (Syriac, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian, etc) and ends with the new charismatic or traditional communities more recently established in the present day Holy Land.

This investigation, conceived as a form of revisited cultural pilgrimage, serves a double purpose :

• to discover the wealth and the diversity of these monasteries;
• to present their history and through it, to understand the evolution of Eastern Christian liturgical music and make it known to the public at large.

All monasteries are located in the Holy Land.
These Eastern Christian liturgical musical forms developed between the 4th and 8th centuries, and it may be through them that the music of the Jerusalem Temple became extended into the western Gregorian chant.

After a brief incursion into the history of the region’s monastic music and of its colourings, we will visit in detail four communities established in Jerusalem or its surroundings.

Three of them are part of ancient history, going back to Christianity’s first centuries :

• The St Marc Syriac monastery in Jerusalem, where mass is still held in Aramaic, the language spoken in the time of Jesus;
• The St Jacques monastery of the Armenian Patriarchate, also in Jerusalem;
• The Debre Gannet Ethiopien monastery in Jerusalem.

More recently, Western Christian communities have been established in the Holy Land ; most of them essentially from the end of the 19th century on.
Among these communities we will discover more specifically :

• The Abou Gosh monastery located in the vicinity of Jerusalem and restored by French Benedictine monks.

Yves Touati, musicologist and producer of the Musica Sancta collection, will serve as a guide in this journey through time and space.

"My starting idea was that Eastern monastic chants, some of them dating back to the third century, carried with them elements of the Jerusalem Temple’s music. How so? Through those who are called ,wrongly so for that matter, Judeo-Christians. In fact they were Jews who believed and followed Jesus’s messianism but without breaking away from the Jewish community. It was the latter which outlawed them, at the dawn of the 2nd century, that is to say some 70 years after the death of Christ.

During the centuries that followed, these groups found refuge in the first Eastern Christian communities, mainly the Syriac one which to this day still uses Aramaic as its liturgical tongue. Did they keep part of the Jerusalem Temple’s music and so influence the first Christian liturgies? Such was my impression after a few years of research. To try and back up this theory, with the help of a computer I looked for the points that were common to all Christian liturgies of the East, those that had developed in the area where Christ lived. My first observation was that all this music uses a scale of 22 notes -- 22 is also the exact number of letters composing the Hebrew alphabet, and surely this is no coincidence. Twenty-two notes also means that the smallest interval is a quarter tone, whereas in western music it is half a tone. The second point common to all Eastern Christian liturgies is « bi-phony », meaning that one can chant two different notes at the same time.

Polyphony, that is three different notes chanted simultaneously, will appear only much later and in Europe this time, with Flemish polyphony appearing in the second half of the 12 th century..."