The Ancient Music of the Psalms

Where is the ancient music of the Psalms? Over the last decade, I’ve sought to answer that question, building on the work of the great 20th-century musicologists—Marcelle Duchesne-Guillemin, Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura, Hans Hickmann, and Ernest McClain—as well as on equally-great contemporaries like Leon Crickmore, Richard Dumbrill, and Ann Kilmer. You’ll find some of my writings on the subject in scholarly papers and articles, and in my book, The Songs of Ascents (2015).

You’ll find some of my transcriptions below. They are all based on the te’amim of the Aleppo Codex text, as found online at AleppoCodex.org and at mgketer.org. Some of these transcriptions of the ancient music of the Psalms include English translation; others are in Hebrew only. Most of them include indications of the te’amim of the text. You can find all of Psalms 120 to 134 in The Songs of Ascents.

Feel free to sing them with your friends or in your church or synagogue. Three slashes above a note signify a vocal shake, linked with the revia ta’am. People sometimes ask me if I will publish the 150 Psalms in a single volume. The answer is that this means thousands of hours’ work, and I can’t see any way to that right now.