Schola Antiqua of Chicago

A lone voice echoes through Perimeter’s four-storey glass Atrium. It is the Adhan, the traditional rendition of the Muslim call to prayer, but here it is calling us to experience the sounds of medieval Jerusalem. Featuring Islamic chants, Christian chants in Georgian and Armenian, and a set of Sephardic songs, Schola Antiqua’s unique choral program uses music to erase the boundaries that divide us.

“Without narrative – and starting with an overlapping call of sacred sounds as might be heard in some hours at the Dung Gate, or Aleppo of a former decade, or in cities of North Africa, or Mumbai – we introduce some memories preserved in oral or written tradition from the peoples who inhabited or moved through medieval Jerusalem.” – Matthew Dean, Sounds of Jerusalem curator.