The Earliest Christian Chant Repertory Recovered: The Georgian Witnesses to Jerusalem Chant

Abstract

From the fourth to the twelfth century, the city of Jerusalem had its own liturgical rite and chant repertory, which used the Greek language. Until recently, however, very little was known about this tradition because hardly any medieval manuscripts of it survived. But the Greek texts were translated into Georgian when the church of Georgia adopted the rite of Jerusalem as its own, and critical editions of these translations, made from tenth-century manuscripts, have recently been published. The translations show that the chant repertory of Jerusalem exercised much influence on the other medieval chant repertories in Greek, Syriac, Armenian, and Latin. When texts from Jerusalem survive in these other traditions, they tend to be set to melodies that are consistent with the modal assignments and neumes of the Georgian sources. This suggests that the features these melodies share do go back in some way to the lost melodies that were once sung in Jerusalem itself.