Following the tragic destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem, the entire musical legacy of the Temple, both vocal and instrumental, seemed to be forever lost. However, the Masoretic scribes preserved (along with the biblical consonantal text itself) an ancient "reading tradition" dating back (according to themselves) to the Second Temple Era; and beginning about 1,200 years ago, they painstakingly copied that tradition out in exacting detail. The Masoretic Text is still the oldest complete copy of the Hebrew Bible that we have.

Part of the "reading tradition" the Masoretes preserved was a series of "accents" ("Te Amim"), which occur throughout the entire Tanakh (Torah, Nevi'im and Ketuvim) in two systems. The Masoretes did not understand the meaning or the monumental significance of these accents, and for centuries, there have been countless theories as to what their original meaning was.

Most theories have started from the assumption that they were to emphasize precise points of grammar in the text. Leaving aside all these debates, Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura concentrated solely on finding a musical meaning of these "accents".

Through countless experiments and a laborious process of irrefutable verification (using the Hebrew verbal phrase structure itself as her "Rosetta Stone"), she finally realized that all these symbols represent musical tones: the 7 degrees of a heptatonic scale, or else ornaments of one to three notes! The accents, were, in fact transcriptions of hand gestures - which formed the ancient musical notation system of cheironomy, whereby a specific hand gesture represented a specific change in the pitch of a melody.

This presentation features Haik-Vantoura's original 1976 recording on volume 2 of her album, "La Musique De La Bible Revelee", of her reconstruction of what could well be the original 3000 year old biblical music, once sang to Psalm 19:

http://www.worldcat.org/title/musique...

The specific musical mode Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura's claimed to identify as the original ancient musical mode of this psalm, is similar to the natural minor mode.

For full details, please see my website blog:

http://www.ancientlyre.com/the_origin...

I am regrettably but a humble Levite descendant, not a trained musicologist, so if anyone would like to contact me to add to my blog, particularly in the way of adding well informed, critical arguments against Haik Vantoura's discovery, this would be most welcome, in my aim of offering a more balanced exposure of Haik Vantoura's work:

Many thanks!

The astonishing significance of Haik Vantoura's musical accomplishment , if true, is that not only does Haik Vantoura reveal to us such magnificent music of such incredible spiritual worth, but in doing so, she also revealed to us the only surviving example so far known, of the world's complete art music - written maybe 1000 years earlier than the 2000 year old ancient Greek 'Skolion of Seikilos'; the only other piece of written music from antiquity to have survived completely intact, in its complete, original form...