https://youtu.be/_wZEgsVj0h4Hashem MalakhWhen I first heard the Shearith Israel choir sing this piece over 40 years ago, I was struck by two things. First, how beautifully they sang it - it is really a mark of consummate professionalism when a chorus can sing in unison so flawlessly. And secondly, although it was a melody that I had been familiar with from my childhood in London, there was something arrestingly different about it. The caesura dividing the clauses in each of the verses (the Atnach) was on the fifth rather than the second note of the scale, evoking a medieval and almost Gregorian provenance.That got me thinking. Did Shearith Israel, in fact, have in its possession an artifact lost to the rest of Sephardi Jewry? Could it be that this treatment of Psalms 92 and 93, unique to West 70th Street in the Borough of Manhattan, was indeed an authentic musical heirloom of the Iberian Catholic pre-expulsion experience? Or was it, more prosaically, the invention - albeit an inspired one - of a 20th century transcriber of the congregational music? (There’s a Dan Brown novel in there, somewhere).As much as part of me wanted to believe the former of those two postulations, it would seem that most musicological evidence sadly points to the verity of the latter. The matter is not closed, however; and I am open to hearing evidence to the contrary.On a technical note, this performance of Hashem Malakh concludes in the piece’s original minor key. This is in contrast to the New York choral rendering which ends with a transition to the major. The New York practice was probably an innovation introduced to serve as a musical segue to the Hazzan’s singing of the Kaddish that follows, which is almost invariably set in a major key.Please sharePhoto Credit: Manhattan Sideways (http://sideways.nyc)