Religious Expression in Music and Dance

Leonhard Clemens

Abstract

Music and dance were integral elements of Roman and Greek religious expression. The same is true for Judaism and Christianity. Nevertheless, the extant sources reflect adaption and adoption along with rejection and avoidance. Ancient authors assume that music is a powerful tool for the propagation of religious ideas. Some ancient Christian texts identify the use of musical instruments as a typical religious expression of polytheistic Rome. Hence, they reject the performance of music with instruments or at least certain instruments within their groups. An outright ban on musical instruments is a much younger phenomenon in rabbinic Judaism. In both Judaism and Christianity, a strong current of poetic creativity begins in the fourth century. These poetic efforts led to the compilation of a broad repertoire of religious, also liturgical music and poetry. The extant data do not allow an accurate reconstruction of the shape of musical performances in Antiquity. While the first Jewish text with musical notes only dates from the Middle Ages, a Christian papyrus from Oxyrhynchos with standard Greek notation suggests that (at least in that Egyptian town) Christian musicians knew and used their contemporary polytheistic neighbor's ways to write and apparently also to perform Christian hymns. If one wants to regard this isolated bit of evidence as more representative for an ancient Christian (and perhaps Jewish) approach to musical performances, it follows that Christian music closely resembled its Greco-Roman cognate. Meaningful differences could only be encoded in the texts.