The music of Anton Webern was considered revolutionary partly because it employed devices in the first half of the 20th century that had not been utilized since the 16th. Webern had written his doctoral dissertation on Heinrich Isaac and was conversant with the compositional styles of the late Medieval period. For him, voice leading in parallel fifths was second nature; he had a very different perspective from that of his contemporaries on what was acceptable and what was not.

A similar kind of stylistic controversy was the centerpiece of the highly enjoyable “Chant Wars,” mounted Sunday evening at the Metropolitan Museum. Two a cappella vocal quartets, Dialogos and Sequentia, joined forces to present core musical examples of the ninth-century dust-up between differing factions of chant in Charlemagne’s empire. The key issue was whether Roman tradition or Carolingian innovation should achieve primacy. Charlemagne, who had his own political agenda, favored the Roman, stating, in surprisingly 21st-century terms, “Between the stream and its source, where is the purest water to be found?” His argument rose and fell on the concept of authenticity.

Sunday’s concert emphasized less the bellicosity of the struggle than its vocal diversity; rather than stage a mere battle of the bands, the two groups often sang together or provided the background for solos in various styles. Presenting this event at the Temple of Dendur also put the entire matter into perspective. In this airplane hangar of a building, where the acoustics are particularly unforgiving for an individual singer, the music of a religious choir is quite magical, often floating around for several seconds in the high rafters before making a secondary descent. This is definitely the place for spiritual music of overtonal complexity. I would love to hear a gamelan orchestra there someday.

The two groups began with antiphonal Gregorian chant, offering several examples of each style before drifting into the adjunct worlds of Germanic and Frankish chant. In “Ad dominum dum tribularer,” they presented the use of the tremolo as an ornament, putting me in mind of the vibrato controversy of our own era. In “In convertendo dominus,” we were treated to a throaty and extremely florid style of expression that seemed to point the way to the ornamentation of the bel canto era. And in “Gallican antiphons,” we had the early version of four-part harmony that didn’t sound too different from a turn-of-the-last century barbershop quartet.

Each of these pieces was lovingly performed. A strange drifting from the sacred to the profane and back again gave us an opportunity to luxuriate in asceticism. The crowd never seemed to make up its collective mind as to whether or not to applaud between numbers, tentatively doing so at the outset and increasing in adulation as the evening progressed. I opted to be silent except at the end of each half.

The leader of Dialogos, alto Katarina Livljanic, added another dimension to the proceedings. Not only did she conduct her four charges and occasionally round them out as a quintet, she also performed as a solo singer. Her impressive rendition of “Domine, exaudiorationem meam,” with its extended melisma, was especially ear catching. Benjamin Bagby directed Sequentia as one of the singers, but the program notes might have been remiss in not identifying the other individuals in the two groups as solo artists. Perhaps the two choruses prefer the anonymity that this music engenders.

In the Germanic section, we were exposed to yet another style, a sort of Sprechstimme wherein many of the vocal lines morph into spoken-word monologue. The overall impression was one of gruffness; as John the Deacon observed in his biography of Pope Gregory, the Teutons, with “their brilliant, thunderous voices could not correctly render the Roman musical sweetness.”

The partisans in this arcane war may be long gone, but their struggle for ultimate beauty is as timely as today’s headlines and as timeless as art itself. Besides, these issues haven’t been explicated in such depth in New York since “Pippin” closed.