Music Education’s Connection to Ancient Bible Music Education-part 2

Music Education’s Connection to Ancient Bible Music Education-part 2

            Current scholarship especially in the area of archeology have caused some musicians to believe that perhaps the knowledge of how to notate Scripture came later when Abraham made his journey from Ur of the Chaldees to the Promise Land.  Maps of his journey show that he passed by the City of Ugarit where the music written in Cuneiform symbols was found.  Modern Assyriologists such as Anne D. Kilmer et. al. have deciphered this music which is in a major key with half steps between the 3^rd and 4^th and the 7^th and 8^th degrees of the scale.  When one looks at Kilmer’s transcriptions the music is amazingly like the music of the Occident.

             Music historians like Grout et. al.  are beginning to admit that music knowledge and hence, music education could have begun with the Babylonians in Syria, “The Babylonians used their names for intervals to create the earliest known musical notation.  The oldest complete piece, from ca. 1400-1250 B.C.E., is on a tablet shown in figure 1.5 that was found at Ugarit, a merchant city-state on the Syrian coast. Scholars have proposed possible transcriptions fir the music, but the notation is too poorly understood to be read with confidence.”  A History of Western Music by J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Grout, Claude V. Palisca. pp. 8-9.   Note that Grout and his associates state that this notation is too poorly preserved to be reliable, but they do not present any evidence that would refute the deciphering and findings of Dr. Kilmer.