Copts and Coptic Hymns
Interview with Dr Ragheb Moftah Habashy at his office in the Music Department of the Institute of Coptic StudiesShenouda Mamdouh - March 1991
Vocal versus Musical Instruments in Liturgical services
There was one temple in Jerusalem where musical instruments were in use, yet synagogues existing everywhere were not allowed to use musical instruments. With the beginnings of Christianity, the apostles chose for the church the rite of the synagogue. This rite was depending only on human voices. This was confirmed at the end of the second century by St Clement of Alexandria. Till A.D.100, all churches in the world used purely human voices. On Sundays, the king coming to church used to be escorted by the "water organ". This instrument was left 200 meters before entering the church as sign of respect to the vocal musical heritage of the church. This vocal tradition was kept by many traditional and oriental churches including the Copts and the Russians. I believe that the larynx is the best musical instrument. It is alive and directly related to the human soul and feelings.The cymbals that are used nowadays during services are a recent and wrong addition or development of the Naqûs that was used in older times (a small wooden bell bit from outside with a small stick). This was only used to keep the rhythm for all faithful to sing together. It is not adequate either to put harmony to Coptic hymns. Changing such an old tradition is a great danger one should avoid.
Older Sources of the Coptic Musical Heritage
Based on different national musical heritages, each church, in each land developed liturgical music. Likewise, drinking from the rich wells of Ancient Egypt, Copts developed their liturgical music. That's why we find different traditional music heritages with Ethiopians despite the binds of the two churches under the throne of Alexandria.In 300 B.C Valeron noted that Egyptian priests base their hymn singing on 7 different vowels which they called the "magic" vowels. The Alexandrian Philosopher Philo mentioned that early Christians took music from Egyptian and applied their Christian norms. We still keep in our musical heritage names of cities: the Atriby (sorrow) mode of the Holy week is attributed to the City of Atrib and the Singary mode is attributed to the city of Singâr.
Coptic Music has no relation to Arabic Music. Hymns where we hear Arabic influence are coming from later eras after A.D.640.
The sources of most Coptic Hymns are not known, yet the music of the hymn "O Monogenis" is attributed to St Athanasios. Referring to a manuscript at the Library of the Old Patriarchate, the music of some hymns sung on Bright Saturday was totally lost, yet most of the heritage as mentioned by Shams El-Reassa Ibn-Kabbar (A.D.1320) and Ibnel-Assal is still there.
Feeling disappointed when listening to hymns
Villoteau was one of the members of the French expedition sent to Egypt by Napoleon Bonaparte to write the "Description de l'Egypte". Villoteau asked a cantor to tell him a Coptic Hymn and you know the result was a nonsense Hallelujah of 3 pages which relates to nothing we know. Based on it, he judged that Coptic Music is not the descendant of Ancient Egyptian Music as he expected and the rest of the text was full of disgracing and insults. In fact, since ancient times, Egyptians used to hand down their skills to their disciples or children from generation to another as secret. To our days, this phenomenon was still happening: Cantors refuse to teach others great invaluable hymns even to the Theological Seminarians who should later become clerics! I did break this. I remember in 1950, a European scholar came to Egypt and wanted to copy part of the Liturgy, she asked a cantor who spent hours singing and she was writing, coming in, I found that he was singing her nonsense! Cantors are poorly paid and depend financially on the hymns they know that they wouldn't let anybody know them not to have concurrence. Now 200 years after what Villoteau wrote, the western world is giving great attention to the Coptic Music and it's value. You might know that the Library of the Congress in Washington DC (the greatest library in the world) received a full set of Coptic Music Transcriptions which in turn they made a copy of to Smith Sanion Museum. Mr James H. Billington the director of the Library said that the Coptic collection is the most important collection they have about Ancient Music.The key to enjoy Coptic music is have it's performer gifted, trained and spiritual. It is important also to understand and express the words he's singing. But since Coptic died long ago as living language and Coptic music performers are many times not gifted, the output is horrible and the congregations are complaining about Coptic Music. If I ask you to play the best piece ever that Beethoven composed, and then you play it wrong, would anybody enjoy it? It is obvious that the problem here is not in Beethoven's piece.
From 1927-36, we transcribed the whole musical heritage in 16 volumes with Ernest Newlandsmith and Cantor Mikhail Gerges El-Batanony, yet till now we didn't publish any of them. I tried some 30 years ago to teach the hymns using the musical note to students at the Theological Seminary. I brought a Greek Music teacher to teach them solfege but I failed. They came from different rural provinces in Egypt, they didn't have a single idea about that in addition to some other 22 topics that they had to study. The Copts work hard to keep their heritage yet they don't have references. That's why I spent all my life to provide those references. Now people should learn solfege and read this heritage. We have hymns, if they were sung by gifted voices of a spiritual person, they can break the rock. And we see other countries having 200-300 years old heritage, we see how much effort they spend to keep and analyze it. On the other hand, we have a heritage dating back to thousands of years and nobody keeps it.
Composing new hymns in Coptic Music
The Coptic church settled its rites for different occasions: 1) Advent and Nativity Feast 2) Epiphany 3) Great Lent 4) Holy week 5) Palm Sunday 6) Bright Saturday 7) Easter ...etc Each has it's hymns. Our church is 100% musical.Singing Hymns in a Translated Language
There is a great relation between language and music. Coptic Hymns were written to be sung only in Coptic. If they are sung in Arabic they loose 70% of their beauty. We have some hymns that are originally in Greek since this was the universal language in early times. And Coptic was all written in Greek till the second century when 7 demotic letters were added to the Greek alphabet. Greek texts go on well with Coptic music, and even some western language but Arabic is far from getting on with Coptic. Among the three liturgies used nowadays in the church, only St Basil is a bit influenced by Hebrew and Byzantine music but St Gregory and St Cyril are intact.At the beginning all our efforts targeted compiling hymns from the most trusted references, transcribing them and then recording them on records and audio tapes to be available large to the public. A scholar like Nabil Kamal Boutros asked to have his MA Thesis on Coptic Hymns but only one person in 65 years! If the musical notations were published much more studies might have been conducted.
Hans Hickmann said Coptic Music is not the descendant of Ancient Egyptian Music
Newlandsmith transcribed music from Cantor Mikhail Gerges El-Batanaony, then the Hungarian Margit Toth (disciple of Kodaly) worked hard on the Liturgy of St Basil. Hickmann just expressed a personal opinion. Of course the accuracy of transcription is important, but what is really lacking are the artists. Now we have a machine that transcribes directly hymns but we don't have someone like Cantor Mikhail Gerges El-Batanony.Is there any publicity about your work in Coptic churches
I withdrew my Audio Cassette from church bookstores. I would not allow this precious material to stand side by side with the nonsense music that is displayed there all the time. Looking for western church songs is a way of ruining our own heri.Children
Language is the key to the whole Coptic identity. You see the Spanish, keeping their language, they could send out invaders centuries after. But we lost our language and all culture. From early childhood, one should learn Coptic language. God granted children a wonderful memory of languages and new words. Now we are Arabs, we are not Copts. Teaching Coptic to our children, we will be Egyptian Copts.