My scholarly activity is concerned with musical aspects of ancient Judaism and early Christianity up to around 400 CE.
This is a complex and fascinating subject requiring an interdisciplinary approach drawing on history, biblical studies, liturgiology, language studies and ethnomusicology as well as musicology itself.
The primary sources are almost exclusively literary. They include, on the Jewish side, the Hebrew Bible (and its early translations into Greek and Latin), its apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, rabbinic writings and early works of Jewish history and philosophy. On the Christian side, the primary sources include the New Testament and its apocrypha, patristic writings, gnostic literature, early histories of the church and the canons (regulations) promulgated by various early church councils and synods. There is a unique musical survival from the late third century CE: a papyrus fragment of a Christian hymn with Greek text and Greek musical notation, the Oxyrhynchus hymn (named after the place of its discovery in 1918). This is in fact the earliest extant example of a Christian text with musical notation.
The source material is typically discontinuous in both time and place; it is rarely sufficient to supply a chain of evidence that is historically convincing. Making sense of the evidence is therefore by no means a simple matter. In the past, many writers who have discussed elements of the subject have been tempted to fill the evidential gaps with suppositions or constructions of their own invention. Some of those suppositions and constructions have become part of the lore of music history.
An aspect of the subject which has attracted particular interest is the extent to which the musical traditions of ancient Judaism were taken over by the earliest Christians. These latter, being mostly Jews by birth or adoption, would have been part of Jewish life generally and would have experienced Jewish worship at the synagogues and the Jerusalem Temple. It has become part of the received wisdom of music history that early Christian chant descended directly from the ancient Jewish chant employed by those first Christians, the Christianized Jews.
However, a close reading of the sources has convinced me that the matter is not so simple; in fact it is impossible to demonstrate a historical musical continuity from ancient Judaism to early Christianity. In addition, while the liturgical song of first-century Judaism would naturally have been part of the musical milieu of the earliest Christians, it is likely that as Christianity spread beyond the confines of Homeland and Diaspora Judaism, which it did very early in its history, non-Jewish musical idioms also found a place in Christian worship at an early date. There is evidence to suggest that this was so.
It is important to be true to the sources, pointing out what they cannot tell us as well as what they can. This has been my main concern in all I have written so far, and is a guiding principle in my book Music in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity published by Ashgate Publishing in April 2011 (details at http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409409076), and reissued in paperback, unchanged, by Routledge in August 2016. By pointing out what cannot be known at present, as well as what can, I have hoped to establish a more nuanced approach to the available evidence, and thereby illuminate areas where further research is needed.
For a list of my published work, visit Published work in the navigation panel on the bar above.