- Aug 27, 2014
- 13,565
- 13,722
- Country
- United States
- Faith
- Oriental Orthodox
- Marital Status
- Private
Consider this something of a follow up to my previous thread on the octoechos. Like that one, this is not heavy on the theology part of Traditional Theology, but I do want to compare different church traditions and see how they relate to each other, so this is probably the best place to do it.
So yesterday I was searching for examples of Syriac Orthodox chant on YouTube and kept being given results that were in the Syriac language, but not from the Syriac Orthodox Church in particular. That's not terribly surprising in itself, but one aspect of it is: when watching the following video, I noticed that in the comments a viewer and the uploader had a little discussion about how prototypically "Maronite" (as in Maronite Catholic, i.e., not Syriac Orthodox, Malankara Syriac Orthodox, Nestorian, etc.) the chant sounds.
It occurred to me as I was listening to it that, yes, the chant does sound very Maronite! I can hear it too, and I don't speak any form of either Syriac or its modern derivatives (e.g., Turoyo, 'Assyrian' Neo-Aramaic, etc.), and neither do the Maronites themselves, having lost their traditional language several centuries ago to Arabic (though some are trying to revive it among a small group of Maronites in Israel).
So, we all recognize the above as Maronite, but the question is why? Maronites and Syriac Orthodox both use what is broadly termed 'Western Syriac' (which is distinguishable immediately even if you don't speak it by certain vowel and consonant patterns it has relative to the 'Eastern'/Nestorian pronunciation: W: malfono/E: malpana, W: shafiro/E: shapira, W: 'ito/E: 'ita, etc.), so it can't be a case of "those people over there talk funny", and they both organize their chant around the same octoechos system.
The Syriac Orthodox chant is pretty different than the above. I couldn't find Psalm 145 being chanted by the Syriac Orthodox, but here's Psalm 91:
This might make some people think "Well, they just have different melodies, so of course they sound different", and that's true so far as it goes. There are several traditions of Syriac Orthodox chant in particular; from what I've read the main ones are in Iraq (represented by the school of Takrit, now used in Mosul since there aren't any Syriac Orthodox Christians in Takrit anymore), which is the 'Eastern' tradition ('Eastern' in the sense of being within the Persian rather than Byzantine empire, cf. the Assyrian Church of the 'East'), and that of Mardin (Tur 'Abdin, in what is now Turkey), which is the 'Western' tradition which makes up most of what you'll find in the diaspora, though there also exist other traditions related to India, to Diyarbakir and Kharput (both in Turkey), and to those formerly from Edessa who are now in Aleppo. (All info from the ever-useful Syriac Orthodox Resources page on the Beth Gazo.)
Here's the thing about that, though: this distinction between Maronites and Syriac Orthodox remains even when they sing hymns and songs in Arabic.
Compare HG Mor Dionysius Behnam Jajjawi (former Syriac Orthodox metropolitan of Lebanon, of thrice-blessed memory) singing a Syriac patriotic song in Arabic to the above Psalm 91 recording:
And now compare the Syriac Maronite chant of Psalm 145 to Wadih El Safi (famous Maronite chanter and also secular singer, who was actually Syriac himself and sang some pop songs in the Western dialect back in the 1970s) singing the old Maronite Arabic hymn to the Virgin Mary "Salatoki Maana":
I actually showed the HG Mor Dionysius video to an older (raised pre-Lebanese Civil War) Maronite acquaintance I had years ago when I first noticed this phenomenon among Syriac Orthodox whereby they tend to keep their accent even when singing in different languages (the new thing for me in this thread is I hadn't realized that the same was true of the Maronites, since I don't travel in Maronite circles anymore), and he replied something like "This makes me sad. We (Maronites) used to have priests who could chant Arabic like it was Syriac like this man, but not anymore." At the time I didn't think "Oh, he means they used to chant in a manner more akin to the Syriac Orthodox", because I didn't know enough about the differences between the different Syriac groups (this was before I converted to Oriental Orthodoxy), but I've since read some pretty compelling sources (Iraqi historian Matti Moosa, for one) that argued that, in their origin (before they embraced monothelitism, which cut them off from both the Chalcedonians and the non-Chalcedonians), the Maronites themselves were probably a distinct section of the Syriac Orthodox Church, in which case that would be expected or at least make sense. (That's a historical and theological claim I don't want to make this thread be about, though.)
So there's clearly something having to do with what I've called in the thread title the 'church accent' of these people, whereby even though they're using the same language, and even the same dialect of the same language, and they organize their chants around the same eight-tone system, etc., they're clearly recognizable to each other and even to people like me as being of one confession and not the other. (NB: this whole dichotomy gets messed up by the Syriac Indians, because although they usually speak the same native language -- Malayalam, which is the dominant language of the Indian state of Kerala in which the vast majority of them are found -- in their case the Indian Orthodox sometimes use the 'Eastern' or 'Nestorian' pronunciation of Syriac, since the St. Thomas Christians of India were under the ACOE from some indeterminate point in the past up until the Coonan Cross Oath in 1653, when they refused to submit to RC ecclesiastical dominance and some of them instead came into union with the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch. So with Syriac Indians you'd have to ask who their bishop is, rather than which dialect of Syriac they're using, since you'll have some who will use Western and some who'll use Eastern, and they tend to have interference from the same first language, e.g., pronouncing the "th" sound found in many Syriac words as "s".)
At first I thought to myself that this is a peculiarity of the Syriac churches due to their wide geographic distribution and fragmentation among various different traditions and sects (and there are even more than these; there are also the formerly Nestorian Assyrians in places like Russia and Georgia who over time converted to Eastern Orthodoxy after becoming citizens of the Russian Empire following the Treaty of Turkmenchay that concluded the Russo-Persian War in 1828, who have adapted their chant to the Byzantine chant forms of those churches, and of course the Nestorians proper who are somewhat different than either the Maronites or the Syriac Orthodox, though as you might guess probably sound closest to the 'Eastern' Takriti/Moslawi Syriacs, since they're in the same historical area), but then I thought: I don't know that to be the case. Now that the Nubian Orthodox churches in what is now Sudan have been gone for many centuries, we don't have sister Coptic-using Orthodox churches to compare my own tradition to (the Coptic Catholics won't do here because the Vatican opened up a school in the 18th century to train Coptic priests which deliberately introduced 'proper' Greek-derived pronunciation to its students, and the Coptic Orthodox Church itself later underwent a pronunciation reform also modeled on Greek in the 1850s for various reasons, so there's no grounds to expect them to be any different from one another by now), and I don't know any Armenians who could compare the Armenian Catholic chant to the Armenian Apostolic chant to see if anything's different. I would guess they probably sound very similar or the same, however, since the Armenian Apostolic Church itself went through distinct periods of Latin influence in the context of the Crusades, and the Armenian Catholic Church has only existed as its own thing since 1742 anyway.
But there are certainly Greek-using Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholics who could do a similar comparison, and we could all do the same regarding English (though that's a bit messy, because then you get into how much that sounds different in a given chant form is really due to interference from a first language, akin to the Malayalam/Syriac example of the Indians above, and how much is the preservation of unique, church-specific forms of chanting; it's probably better to stick to examples that don't come from the world's current dominant international language).
So what do any of you Greek-using people say, or any others who could make a similar comparison using their own languages: are there forms of chant that make you say "Oh, this person is obviously Antiochian Orthodox", or "Oh, this person is obviously Albanian Orthodox" (or for that matter Eastern Catholic, if there are such differences) or whatever, even when you're all using Greek? Are there specific 'church accents' for you guys, too? Or do you have a better way you'd describe this phenomenon other than 'church accent'? Maybe 'register'? It almost sounds like the Syriac Orthodox sing in a different register, i.e., it's overall much 'sharper' sounding than the Maronite chant, even taking into account movement up and down the scale in both cases. (And the particular Syriac Orthodox recitation I found is actually much more subdued in that regard than some other chants I could have chosen were I not focusing on psalms so as to compare like with like.)
So yesterday I was searching for examples of Syriac Orthodox chant on YouTube and kept being given results that were in the Syriac language, but not from the Syriac Orthodox Church in particular. That's not terribly surprising in itself, but one aspect of it is: when watching the following video, I noticed that in the comments a viewer and the uploader had a little discussion about how prototypically "Maronite" (as in Maronite Catholic, i.e., not Syriac Orthodox, Malankara Syriac Orthodox, Nestorian, etc.) the chant sounds.
It occurred to me as I was listening to it that, yes, the chant does sound very Maronite! I can hear it too, and I don't speak any form of either Syriac or its modern derivatives (e.g., Turoyo, 'Assyrian' Neo-Aramaic, etc.), and neither do the Maronites themselves, having lost their traditional language several centuries ago to Arabic (though some are trying to revive it among a small group of Maronites in Israel).
So, we all recognize the above as Maronite, but the question is why? Maronites and Syriac Orthodox both use what is broadly termed 'Western Syriac' (which is distinguishable immediately even if you don't speak it by certain vowel and consonant patterns it has relative to the 'Eastern'/Nestorian pronunciation: W: malfono/E: malpana, W: shafiro/E: shapira, W: 'ito/E: 'ita, etc.), so it can't be a case of "those people over there talk funny", and they both organize their chant around the same octoechos system.
The Syriac Orthodox chant is pretty different than the above. I couldn't find Psalm 145 being chanted by the Syriac Orthodox, but here's Psalm 91:
This might make some people think "Well, they just have different melodies, so of course they sound different", and that's true so far as it goes. There are several traditions of Syriac Orthodox chant in particular; from what I've read the main ones are in Iraq (represented by the school of Takrit, now used in Mosul since there aren't any Syriac Orthodox Christians in Takrit anymore), which is the 'Eastern' tradition ('Eastern' in the sense of being within the Persian rather than Byzantine empire, cf. the Assyrian Church of the 'East'), and that of Mardin (Tur 'Abdin, in what is now Turkey), which is the 'Western' tradition which makes up most of what you'll find in the diaspora, though there also exist other traditions related to India, to Diyarbakir and Kharput (both in Turkey), and to those formerly from Edessa who are now in Aleppo. (All info from the ever-useful Syriac Orthodox Resources page on the Beth Gazo.)
Here's the thing about that, though: this distinction between Maronites and Syriac Orthodox remains even when they sing hymns and songs in Arabic.
Compare HG Mor Dionysius Behnam Jajjawi (former Syriac Orthodox metropolitan of Lebanon, of thrice-blessed memory) singing a Syriac patriotic song in Arabic to the above Psalm 91 recording:
And now compare the Syriac Maronite chant of Psalm 145 to Wadih El Safi (famous Maronite chanter and also secular singer, who was actually Syriac himself and sang some pop songs in the Western dialect back in the 1970s) singing the old Maronite Arabic hymn to the Virgin Mary "Salatoki Maana":
I actually showed the HG Mor Dionysius video to an older (raised pre-Lebanese Civil War) Maronite acquaintance I had years ago when I first noticed this phenomenon among Syriac Orthodox whereby they tend to keep their accent even when singing in different languages (the new thing for me in this thread is I hadn't realized that the same was true of the Maronites, since I don't travel in Maronite circles anymore), and he replied something like "This makes me sad. We (Maronites) used to have priests who could chant Arabic like it was Syriac like this man, but not anymore." At the time I didn't think "Oh, he means they used to chant in a manner more akin to the Syriac Orthodox", because I didn't know enough about the differences between the different Syriac groups (this was before I converted to Oriental Orthodoxy), but I've since read some pretty compelling sources (Iraqi historian Matti Moosa, for one) that argued that, in their origin (before they embraced monothelitism, which cut them off from both the Chalcedonians and the non-Chalcedonians), the Maronites themselves were probably a distinct section of the Syriac Orthodox Church, in which case that would be expected or at least make sense. (That's a historical and theological claim I don't want to make this thread be about, though.)
So there's clearly something having to do with what I've called in the thread title the 'church accent' of these people, whereby even though they're using the same language, and even the same dialect of the same language, and they organize their chants around the same eight-tone system, etc., they're clearly recognizable to each other and even to people like me as being of one confession and not the other. (NB: this whole dichotomy gets messed up by the Syriac Indians, because although they usually speak the same native language -- Malayalam, which is the dominant language of the Indian state of Kerala in which the vast majority of them are found -- in their case the Indian Orthodox sometimes use the 'Eastern' or 'Nestorian' pronunciation of Syriac, since the St. Thomas Christians of India were under the ACOE from some indeterminate point in the past up until the Coonan Cross Oath in 1653, when they refused to submit to RC ecclesiastical dominance and some of them instead came into union with the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch. So with Syriac Indians you'd have to ask who their bishop is, rather than which dialect of Syriac they're using, since you'll have some who will use Western and some who'll use Eastern, and they tend to have interference from the same first language, e.g., pronouncing the "th" sound found in many Syriac words as "s".)
At first I thought to myself that this is a peculiarity of the Syriac churches due to their wide geographic distribution and fragmentation among various different traditions and sects (and there are even more than these; there are also the formerly Nestorian Assyrians in places like Russia and Georgia who over time converted to Eastern Orthodoxy after becoming citizens of the Russian Empire following the Treaty of Turkmenchay that concluded the Russo-Persian War in 1828, who have adapted their chant to the Byzantine chant forms of those churches, and of course the Nestorians proper who are somewhat different than either the Maronites or the Syriac Orthodox, though as you might guess probably sound closest to the 'Eastern' Takriti/Moslawi Syriacs, since they're in the same historical area), but then I thought: I don't know that to be the case. Now that the Nubian Orthodox churches in what is now Sudan have been gone for many centuries, we don't have sister Coptic-using Orthodox churches to compare my own tradition to (the Coptic Catholics won't do here because the Vatican opened up a school in the 18th century to train Coptic priests which deliberately introduced 'proper' Greek-derived pronunciation to its students, and the Coptic Orthodox Church itself later underwent a pronunciation reform also modeled on Greek in the 1850s for various reasons, so there's no grounds to expect them to be any different from one another by now), and I don't know any Armenians who could compare the Armenian Catholic chant to the Armenian Apostolic chant to see if anything's different. I would guess they probably sound very similar or the same, however, since the Armenian Apostolic Church itself went through distinct periods of Latin influence in the context of the Crusades, and the Armenian Catholic Church has only existed as its own thing since 1742 anyway.
But there are certainly Greek-using Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholics who could do a similar comparison, and we could all do the same regarding English (though that's a bit messy, because then you get into how much that sounds different in a given chant form is really due to interference from a first language, akin to the Malayalam/Syriac example of the Indians above, and how much is the preservation of unique, church-specific forms of chanting; it's probably better to stick to examples that don't come from the world's current dominant international language).
So what do any of you Greek-using people say, or any others who could make a similar comparison using their own languages: are there forms of chant that make you say "Oh, this person is obviously Antiochian Orthodox", or "Oh, this person is obviously Albanian Orthodox" (or for that matter Eastern Catholic, if there are such differences) or whatever, even when you're all using Greek? Are there specific 'church accents' for you guys, too? Or do you have a better way you'd describe this phenomenon other than 'church accent'? Maybe 'register'? It almost sounds like the Syriac Orthodox sing in a different register, i.e., it's overall much 'sharper' sounding than the Maronite chant, even taking into account movement up and down the scale in both cases. (And the particular Syriac Orthodox recitation I found is actually much more subdued in that regard than some other chants I could have chosen were I not focusing on psalms so as to compare like with like.)
