Among the oldest texts found on this recording (and therefore the ones having the greatest interest for our subject) are Psalm 114 (also featured on "Ancient Echoes" by SAVAE -- only here, the Jewish version is ascribed to the Ashkenazim), Psalm 137 (as transmitted by the Sephardim), and certain synagogue chants transcribed by the proselyte Obadiah the Norman (fl. 12th century) into medieval Christian notation. The latter music is important because it has close parallels in how the Masorah and the early reader's manuals interpreted the te`amim in the musical sense.

On this recording, Psalm 114 is compared directly with the parallel Latin Gregorian chant of the same Psalm. Of this track, Mr. Cohen writes: "This melodic fragment is in all probability the oldest music on this, or anyone else's compact disc! Preserved independently of each other in separate medieval European traditions, these two psalm-tones -- Christian and Jewish -- are nearly identical, and must therefore have a common, pre-Christian source. We can thus date this recitation formula from (at the latest) the period just preceding the exile of 70 A.D. In all likelihood, this is the music that the historic Jesus knew."

But as musicologist Israel Adler has noted, the structure of the synagogue liturgy makes a direct connection with that of the Temple "unreasonable". So even given Mr. Cohen's inference regarding the age of this melody, it is not a melody that comes from the Temple, but from the synagogue. It is "folk music", not "art music" as is the considerably more cheerful melody restituted for this Psalm by Haïk-Vantoura.

Whatever its age and origin, this track is not the oldest recorded music on CD. Leaving aside the LP, cassette, CD and MIDI versions of the Song of Ugarit (as reconstructed by various scholars), that honor undoubtedly belongs to the excerpts from the Torah as given on Haïk-Vantoura's recordings.