This week I was in Washington DC and decided that I wanted to have a morning prayer service to start my day.  After a Google search, I settled upon going to the Adas Israel synagogue, which was a short Metro ride from my hotel.  Now, mind you, I grew up Reform Jewish, where there was no morning weekday prayer... that was a "Conservative" thing to do.  But the older I get, the more curious I am about liturgy, and the more I am interested in what happens every day.   About a month ago I started becoming more familiar with the daily evening and morning services.  There are prayers in there that you never see on typical weekdays or the high holidays.  They are wonderful.

However, since the prayers were new to me, I didn't know from reading them by myself whether -- or how -- they were rendered in group worship.  Would they be read silently? Sung?  Read aloud?  The answer is "mostly sung."  We mostly sang for 45 minutes.  Very cool.  Being there gave me a window on something that I had not experienced before, and an appreciation of those intrepid souls who schlep to synagogue on a weekday in the hope that there will be a minyan. You need a minimum of 10 people in order to say certain prayers.

What really knocked me out was the chanting of the daily psalms.  It was much more like Gregorian chant than I had ever realized.  Joel Cohen and Eric Werner have been for decades comparing Jewish and Christian chant traditions, so the basic idea that they were related was familiar, and of course Christian chant developed from Jewish practice.  But at this synagogue in DC, with about 15 of us chanting (and my scrambling to keep up with the Hebrew), I had the very clear sense that I was part of something very, very old, with tunes that could be thousands of years old, very simple melodic contours.  I am sure that it won't be very hard to figure out roughly how old those tunes really are.

My friend Peter Saltzman has written piano pieces and vocal music based on the contours of Jewish chant -- not the virtuosic stuff of a Berlin Synagogue or of Max Janowski of blessed memory -- but rather the everyday chant and the weekly Torah blessings.   I also heard on NPR today a story about the civil rights movement, and they played a clip of a group of African-American singers singing "Which side are you on?"  I had only ever heard Pete Seeger sing that song.  When I heard the NPR clip, it sure sounded a lot like some of those tunes in synagogue the other day.

I wonder if, in our sound-sanitized world, we have forgotten just how disjointed, and non-"perfect", and time-delayed, and non-synched up most of human beings' group musical utterances may have been over the generations and millenia.  We will never really know.  But I suspect what I heard in DC that morning may hold a kernel of what most of it has been.