Jordi Savall's Jerusalem Project
MAGAZINE ARTICLE
In spite of its long and violent history, Jerusalem has been known through the ages as “city of peace”. When offered the daunting job of capturing its complex history in music, early music superstar Jordi Savall was quick to accept – but how did he do it? Find out in this article Limelight Magazine published in 2014.
It is hard to think of a city with a past more savage than Jerusalem’s. A cursory read-through of the city’s history books reveals political strife of every conceivable kind: sieges, sackings, rebellions, and foreign conquests. For much of its 5,000-odd years of recorded history, Jerusalem has been destroyed twice, besieged 23 times, attacked 52 times, and captured and recaptured 44 times. Its significance as a holy site for the world’s three major monotheistic religions has made it a bloody battleground for princes, popes and pashas eager to claim it in God’s name. Considering the city’s long history of carnage and instability, it might strike you as a rather unfortunate irony that the name Jerusalem – in Hebrew, Yerushalayim – contains the same semitic root (s-l-m) as the word shalom (peace). Over the years, linguists with a knack for public relations have made use of this consonantal correlation to reconstruct the original meaning of Jerusalem variously as city of peace, abode of peace and vision of peace. Yet you’d be hard-pressed to deny that, in the case of Jerusalem, etymology has failed to operate as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It may seem counter-intuitive, then, to take Jerusalem’s rather feeble claim as a city of peace as the basis for a large-scale artistic endeavour – but that is, in effect, what composer and gambist Jordi Savall has done with his Jerusalem: A city of two peaces. The project, as ambitious an undertaking as the word-renowned early-music maestro has ever attempted, uses yet another of Jerusalem’s etymologies – city of two peaces – as the premise for a musical exploration of the city’s profound significance for three major world faiths. “The city’s Hebrew name is a clear metaphorical reference to both ‘heavenly peace’ and ‘earthly peace’,” stipulates Savall. “The heavenly peace was proclaimed and promised by the prophets, and the earthly peace is one sought after by political leaders who have governed the city over the 5,000 years of its recorded history.” Weaving together a spellbinding selection of multiconfessional musical vignettes, Savall’s Jerusalem purveys 3,000 years of Jerusalem’s history as a, firstly, Jewish, then Christian and Islamic city. Musically rendered texts holy to these three faiths intertwine to create an aural chronology of a city that, throughout much of its existence, has embodied humanity at its very best and worst: tolerance and hatred, beauty and horror, religious conflict and interfaith dialogue, human flaws and spiritual enlightenment. And throughout the two hours of the show’s duration, Savall and his collaborators – various artists he rounded up from the Levant, the Maghreb and the Caucasus, as well as members of his own group La Capella Reial de Catalunya – blast out their life-affirming message: this elusive peace so extolled by the prophets may not be completely beyond our grasp after all, and music may just be a key to its attainment.
The Jerusalem project had its genesis in 2007, when the Catalan maestro, well-known in classical music circles for his erudite and highly sensitive interpretations of renaissance and baroque works, was approached by the Cité de la Musique in Paris with a rather enticing proposal. “We were invited…to prepare a new project based on a series of concerts on the theme of the three major monotheistic religions,” Savall says. “After thinking it over for a few days, we realized that Jerusalem could provide the ideal subject, one which afforded us the opportunity to a create a powerful and beautiful evocation of both the grandeur and the folly that make up the history of a city, with all the complex problems of a place which, even today, continues to mark the limits and weaknesses of our civilization.”
It’s easy to see why Jerusalem appeared so ideally suited to Savall’s goal. Adored and glorified by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike, Jerusalem is the holy city par excellence. It might not unjustly be dubbed a monotheistic hotspot; a confluence of Abrahamic spiritual energy without parallel anywhere in the world. Its streets and squares are bejeweled with an implausible array of holy sites and points of pilgrimage, from mosques, churches and synagogues, to madrasas, shrines, temples and monasteries. Its skyline is littered with minarets, domes and spires, and its streets pullulate constantly with habited monks, wimpled nuns, and orthodox Jews sporting top hats and those funky, long locks of curly hair. Sit any rabbi, priest or imam down and casually bring up Jerusalem, and you’ll likely get a solemn soliloquy on its ineffable beauty and its supreme holiness. For Jews, it is the city of King David, Solomon’s temple and the Wailing Wall. For Christians, it’s where Jesus was crucified, died and rose to heaven, the city of the Holy Sepulchre and the Via Dolorosa. For Muslims, it’s Al-Quds (The Holy), the site of prophet Mohammed’s Night of Ascension and erstwhile kibla (direction of prayer). Though an avowedly irreligious, even Savall was struck by Jerusalem’s unique brand of spiritual je-ne-sais-quoi. Presumably speaking metaphysically as well as literally, he remarks, “Jerusalem is a city that makes you feel you are very close to the heavens because the clouds, they are very close. The city is in a high space, and you feel in a very different situation than anywhere else in the world."
So we can agree that Jerusalem provides a solid thematic foundation for Savall’s work on the major Abrahamic faiths. But for Savall and his (now deceased) wife and collaborator, soprano Monserrat Figueras, this artistic choice was but a tiny, albeit crucial first step in what would become an epic mission. Now that they’d found their thematic connecting thread, they had to go about the pesky business of determining what material to employ, and who would help them put it together. How were they going to bring to life – musically – thousands of years of political intrigues, violent usurpations, bloody skirmishes, and religious caffuffles? Clearly, musical items would have to be selected carefully, and they would need to cross cultural and religious, as well as chronological boundaries. In order to accurately depict Jerusalem’s epic history and centrality as a site of religious power, Savall and Figuerras would need to draw upon Jewish, Christian and Muslim resources, and delve deep into the mysterious sounds of the city’s ancient past. But where would they begin to look? How would they find these sounds? The answers to these questions lay – as you would clearly expect – with a French diplomat, a ram’s horn, and a medieval Icleandic monk.
Reconstructing ancient music is a painstaking process at the best of times. A piece of medieval musical parchment can look like complete gobbledegook to a modern musician. Its notes – or neumes, as they’re technically known – bare only a rudimentary resemblance to our contemporary crotchets and quavers, so decoding their musical meaning is somewhat akin to reconstructing the phonetics of a long dead script like cuneiform or hieroglyphics; a job requiring a scholar’s savvy and a philologist’s patience. And that’s when you have the notes available to you - a rare luxury if dealing with music written before the ninth century, when Western neumonic notation is generally seen to have first arisen, or music hailing from beyond the boarders of the West, where it has never been reliably notated, and generally transmitted orally from one generation to the next. Here, scholarly investigation and academic know-how only get you so far. Direct engagement with historical sources is critical – but what happens when those sources don’t exist? How were Savall and Figueras going to resurrect music that was lost in a millenary mire of undocumented history? “We knew when we started this project,” Savall asserts, “that it would be essential for us to find musicians working in the area of Jerusalem that had maintained a direct link with some of these ancient musical traditions. That would be of vital importance if we were going to bring music to life that had been, for thousands of years, diffused through the oral, not written medium.” Sounds logical enough – but where was a viola da gamba player who’d spent his entire career specialising in Western renaissance repertoire going to find such musicians? Surely this would require more than just a casual trawl through Savall’s list of Facebook friends…
Enter the Jerusalem’s French Consul. “The consul knew many musicians in Jerusalem,” Savall underscores. “He offered to organize a party for me at the French embassy, and invited a number of prominent musicians representing diverse musical traditions – Armenians, Palestianians and Israelis – each leaders in their art. It really kick-started the process, providing us with many of the contacts we needed.” In the ensuing weeks and months, Savall met many of the figures that would become his co-players, including: Palestinian Sufi Group, Al-Darwish, Israeli singer, Lior Elmalich, Iraqi oud player, Omar Bashid, and soloists, Driss El Maloumi, Gaguik Mouradian, Dimitri Psonis. “We also met a musician from Southern Morocco, who’d kept alive a thousand-year tradition that sounded a bit like flamenco.” Through these highly competent musical specialists, Savall now had direct access to informed interpretations of Ancient Jewish and Islamic scripture, and made full use of this in the Jerusalem project. In Part Two of the work, entited Jerusalem, The Jewish City, an excerpt from Psalm 137 is intoned; a soulful lament of the destruction of the Temple, and exile of the Jewish people. In Part 6, called Jerusalem, Arab City and Ottoman City, Mohammed’s Ascension into Heaven from the Temple Mount is poignantly presented through its Koranic depiction in Sura 17:1.
“And then we also drew great inspiration from the city itself,” emphasized Savall. “We walked through the streets, and heard music everywhere – from the Muezzin’s call to prayer to chants emanating from Greek and Armenian orthodox monasteries. All of this music reflects an uninterrupted, age-old tradition.” Savall’s great Eureka moment, though, came with the discovery of a little-known, but charismatic instrument, the Jewish Shofar. Resembling a modern-day bugle, the shofar is an ancient instrument still used today in Jewish religious rituals. “When we were in Jerusalem, we saw the old trumpets of Abraham, called Shofars,” recalls Savall. “These are made with ram horns, and have been made in the same way for the last 2,000 years ago – nothing has changed.” Savall knew, when he stumbled upon the Shofar, that we had found a crucial link with Jerusalem’s ancient musical past. “We felt it was one of the most ancient instruments still extant,” Savall speculates, “And it must have played a crucial role in ancient battles”.
Ever the scholar, Savall wasn’t content to rest on the laurels of his extensive fieldwork, and immediately took to the academic sources, where he saw his hypothesis confirmed. “We read the account given by one Abbot Nicholas of Thingeyrar of the Benedictine monastery of Thingeyrar, in Iceland,” Savall relates. “Abbot Nicholas travelled to the Holy Land four or six years after the composition of the Crusader song Chevalier mult estes guaritz (dated 1146), where he found the trumpets of Jericho and the shofars.”
A profoundly moving and mystical epic, Savall’s Jerusalem: A city of two peaces plays as sweeping musical overview of Jerusalem’s 3,000 years of history, and a testament to its majesty and importance. Yet Savall’s Jerusalem is far more than mere chronicle, it is a proposal for peace. Palestinians and Israelis, Christians and Muslims come together to realize this grand project and, for a utopian instant, their differences give way to a common cause: music. “This project is a symbolic gesture, and symbolic gestures are very important,” Savall asserts. “Music can serve as a tool for intercultural dialogue, it offers us the possibility to build bridges.”
Let this be the legacy of Savall’s Jerusalem project, then. The peace Jerusalem has historically stood for in word, but never achieved in fact, is closer to reality than we assume, and music proves it. Let politicians everywhere take note.
