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The cantors and the oral tradition how the hymns were handed down by ear

For most of its history the Coptic Church kept its music in people, not in books. Its books give the words, and name the melody each hymn is sung to, but no notation of the melodies exists: they have passed “from one person to another, from one generation to the next, by oral teaching and rote learning.”1 The people who kept them were the cantors, in Arabic the ʿarif, “one who knows,” or the muʿallim, “teacher,” employed and trained by the Church “to be responsible for the correct delivery of the hymns and responses in all the services.”2 This page follows them from the first sources to the cantors of today, when the hymns are sung less by one cantor than by a choir of deacons who are asked to sing as one voice. The history of the music itself is told in a history of Coptic music.

The singers of the early Church

From its first centuries the Church in Egypt set some of its people apart to sing. The Canons of Athanasius, a church order of the fourth or fifth century, count the singers among the seven orders of the church, with the readers and doorkeepers, and give them a double duty: to sing nothing but the Psalms, and to “teach others without grudging to sing, that God may make His dwelling in the whole people.”3 The two duties, to sing the service rightly and to hand it on, are the cantor’s still.

The singer was blessed, not ordained. In Cairo in 1672 Vansleb saw a chanter, “qu’ils appellent Psalmodiste” (whom they call a psalmodist), prostrate himself before the bishop, who read three prayers over him; for the first chanter the bishop prayed “afin qu’il devienne un de vos grands Chantres, comme étoit David” (that he may become one of your great chanters, as David was).4 Butler, two centuries later, found that the singer was signed with the cross and blessed by the bishop, “of course without imposition of hands.”5 The Coptic Encyclopedia gives the old prayer “Over One Who Shall Be Made a Singer,” which asks God to “illumine him for rendering sweetly Thy holy words.”6 In 1992 the Holy Synod judged that “يستحسن أن يرسم العرفاء إبصلتسين ويلبسوا التونية” (it is better that the cantors be ordained psaltoi and wear the tunic).7

Learning by ear

Very little is known about the cantors before 1850, as both the Coptic Encyclopedia and the Library of Congress say.89 What is known is how the hymns were learned. A Coptic child learned to read in the kuttab, the church school, “principally run by the church cantor, or ‘arif, who taught the children the church liturgies.”10 Lane, in Cairo in the 1830s, found that few could “do more than repeat what they have committed to memory, of the Scriptures and Liturgy.”11 The teaching, the Encyclopedia judges, “must have been very strict and rigid, as it is today”; the German musicologist Hans Hickmann believed the music was “purposely not transcribed lest it fall into the wrong hands.”12 Marian Robertson-Wilson describes the rule as the cantors kept it: “the melodies were carefully taught with no change allowed,” but “Tradition allowed the singer to embellish these melodies, each in his own way.”13

Most cantors were blind. The Encyclopedia explains the custom by “the popular belief dating from ancient times that the sensitivity of eyesight was transferred from the eyes of a blind person to his ears.”14 Moftah said in 1958 that “the Coptic Church still chooses it’s cantors among blinds.”15 A blind cantor carried the whole year’s services in his memory. Hickmann believed that the hand movements a cantor uses to lead his singers were a system of chironomy going back to the Fourth Dynasty of the pharaohs; Moftah held that each cantor’s gestures were “strictly individual,” and they seem to mark the rhythm more than the pitch.16

Abuna Takla

The line of cantors that the Church follows today begins in the 1850s. Patriarch Cyril IV found that “the music and texts had often been rendered incorrectly by untrained and/or careless cantors,” and made “a blind young man who was teaching in the school adjacent to the patriarchal Church of Saint Mark,” with “a good voice and keen ear,” teacher of the melodies: Takla (المعلم تكلا).17 He traveled through Egypt and took up the soundest form of each hymn he found, published The Services of the Deacon in 1859 with ʿIryan Girgis Moftah, and passed the whole repertoire to seven pupils.1819 Read more about Abuna Takla.

Muʿallim Mikhail al-Batanuni

The cantor through whom most of the tradition reached the recordings was a blind boy from Cairo. Mikhail Girgis al-Batanuni (المعلم ميخائيل جرجس البتانوني) was born in 1873, learned the hymns from two of Takla’s pupils, became cantor of the patriarchal cathedral in 1891 and teacher of the hymns at the Clerical College in 1893.2021 From 1928 he sang the hymns for Ernest Newlandsmith’s notation, which by 1936 filled fifteen volumes; Ragheb Moftah, who worked beside him for forty years, never saw him forget a hymn.22 He reposed on 18 April 1957, the Great Cantor of St. Mark’s Cathedral.23 Read more about Muʿallim Mikhail.

A newspaper photograph of a crowd of men in a room, a bearded priest in a black cap and a blind man in dark glasses and a tarbush at its center, with an Arabic caption beneath
The deacons and cantors chosen to record the hymns, with Muʿallim Mikhail and Fr. Murqus of Maṭay at their center, as the Arabic caption reads.A press clipping. Posted by Coptic Treasures on Flickr.

His pupils

Mikhail taught a great many cantors. His pupils attended his classes of religious cantors, “some of them blind like himself.”24 From 1893 he taught the hymns at the Clerical College, where the Church trained its priests.25 The Coptic Encyclopedia names among the cantors and deacons he taught Muʿallim Tawfiq Yusuf of Dayr al-Muharraq, Muʿallim Ṣadiq ʿAttallah and Dr. Yusuf Manṣur, “and many others in the churches of Cairo and the provinces,” acknowledged in their day “as the experts for the liturgical services and correct rendering of hymns.”26 Ramzy adds Muʿallim Fahim Girgis and Muʿallim Farag ʿAbd al-Masih.27 Laurence Moftah calls them the second generation: “Fahim Girgis Rizk (b. 1910-d. 1999), Sadiq Attallah (b. 1918-d. 2001), Farag Abdel-Messih (b. 1921-d. 2000), and others.”28

Four men seated at a table covered with flowers, in an office
Ragheb Moftah’s ninetieth birthday at the Institute of Coptic Studies, 21 December 1988. From left, as the Library of Congress names them: the cantor Ṣadiq ʿAttallah, Hany Kamel, Ragheb Moftah and the sound engineer Salib Bastawros.Courtesy of Laurence Moftah; Library of Congress, Music Division.

The pupils did not all sing like their teacher. Mikhail’s own recordings are plain. Ramzy, who studied them, writes that “the most widely celebrated muʿallim Sadik Attalah, sang in a richly ornamented and improvisatory style,” that Farag ʿAbd al-Masih “enjoyed a few ornaments, but certainly not as much as his colleague,” and that Ibrahim Ayad “sings in an especially ornate and improvisatory style.”29 It was Ṣadiq ʿAttallah’s Liturgy of St. Basil that the Institute issued in 1968.30 On this site you can hear Ṣadiq ʿAttallah, Farag ʿAbd al-Masih, Fahim Girgis and Tawfiq Yusuf.

A choir of deacons in white and red vestments sings at a microphone while two men sit before them with their backs to the camera
Ragheb Moftah and the cantor Farag ʿAbd al-Masih during a recording session at the Institute of Coptic Studies, 2001.Library of Congress, Music Division, Ragheb Moftah Collection.
A faded sepia photograph of three men seated in front and two standing behind them, the man in the center in dark glasses and a tarbush with a cane
Seated in the front row, from left, Muʿallim Fahim, Muʿallim Mikhail, in dark glasses and a tarbush, and Muʿallim Ṣadiq ʿAttallah, with two men standing behind them.From Facebook.
A man in a dark suit and tie holds a small microphone in a church, with men in suits and shirts around him and a camera at the right edge
The cantor Ṣadiq ʿAttallah, with the small microphone, and the cantor Ibrahim Ayad to his right.From Facebook.

The cantors of the twentieth century

These are the cantors who carried Mikhail’s hymns through the twentieth century, as far as the sources tell us. The ones the sources say most about have a page of their own.

Tawfiq Yusuf (المعلم توفيق يوسف المحرقي), 1917-2005, was the blind cantor of Dayr al-Muharraq for seventy years. He learned from Mikhail when the monastery brought him from Cairo, last in 1952, and taught Moftah’s choir for a month every year from 1952 to 1998.31 In 1975 Moftah named him one of only two cantors who still knew the great تى أوى أن هيكانوس, which takes fifty minutes to sing.32 His life.

Fahim Girgis Rizk (المعلم فهيم جرجس رزق), 1910-1999, studied with Mikhail from 1922 to 1925, was cantor of the Coptic church at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem from 1937 to 1948, and then for half a century cantor of St. Mark’s Church in Azbakiyya, where Cyril VI and Shenouda III gave him their new priests to teach the liturgy.33 His life.

Ṣadiq ʿAttallah (المعلم صادق عطا الله), 1918-2001, learned the hymns from Mikhail at the Clerical College, graduated in 1936 and taught there until he was sixty-one. After Mikhail’s repose Moftah chose him to record the liturgies of St. Basil and St. Gregory for the Institute.34 His life.

Farag ʿAbd al-Masih (المعلم فرج عبد المسيح), 1921-2000, was a pupil of Mikhail, a teacher of the hymns at the Clerical College and one of the teachers of Moftah’s choir.353637 In 1991 he directed the Didymus Institute for cantors, then in Shubra; the Coptic Encyclopedia calls him “Muʿallim Faraj.”38 He reposed on 11 April 2000, the day Pope Shenouda III proposed him for a committee of three cantors to unify the hymns.39

Habib Hanna al-Mirahim (المعلم حبيب حنا الميراهم), 1908-1981, blind from the age of seven, learned the hymns from Mikhail at the Clerical College and from 1933 was cantor of the Church of the Virgin at Muharram Bek in Alexandria, where he taught generations of its deacons.40 His life.

Naṣif ʿAbd al-Masih (المعلم نصيف عبد المسيح) was, with Tawfiq Yusuf, one of the two cantors who in 1975 still knew the great تى أوى أن هيكانوس, and he taught Moftah’s choir with him.4142

Kamel Bakhoum al-Masʿudi (المرتل كامل باخوم المسعودي), 1906-1998, was born near Sohag and grew up at the church of St. George in Old Cairo, where his father served. An eye disease left him partly blind as a boy; he studied at the Clerical College and with Mikhail, and was cantor of St. Mark’s in Shubra for twenty-seven years. His biographer says he was the first to think of founding a league of cantors, and that he once taught the hymns to fourteen societies at the same time.43

Yusuf Habib Yusuf (المرتل يوسف حبيب يوسف), born in 1909, learned the hymns from Mikhail at the Great Coptic School and, in Alexandria, from Habib al-Mirahim for more than thirty years. He served as cantor in each of the churches Fr. Bishoy Kamel founded, and wrote more than a hundred books on the saints and the rites.44

Naeem Hanna Boulos (المعلم نعيم حنا بولس), born in 1926 and raised in Cairo, studied at the Clerical College, taught at the monks’ school at Helwan and then at Port Said, and about 1963 became cantor of St. George’s church at Sporting in Alexandria, where he served beside Fr. Bishoy Kamel for eighteen years.45

Wissa Attia (المعلم ويصا عطية) is known to us only by his recordings, among them the annual liturgy, Kiahk, Holy Week, the Resurrection and Pentecost, some of them sung with the oud.46

Ibrahim Ayad (المعلم إبراهيم عياد) taught Moftah’s choir with Tawfiq Yusuf and became, Pope Shenouda III said in 2001, one of its best-known teachers.4748 The Hymns Guide hosts his recordings for the Nativity, Great Lent, Lazarus Saturday, Palm Sunday and Kiahk.49

Every region its own way

Before recordings, each church sang as its cantor sang. Nicholas Ragheb, who studied how the hymns are handed down today, puts it plainly: “Historically, each church would model its style of recitation after the style of their local mu‘allim,” and this, with most Egyptians living their lives in one place, “led to the development of distinctive local and regional styles of recitation.” He adds that “regional variation in hymn performance has always been accepted as part of the tradition of Coptic hymnody.”50 Robertson-Wilson says the same of earlier times: communities “were separated with little constant contact one with another, so that each region developed its own local tradition for performing these melodies.”51

The regions left their names on the melodies. Some hymns are labelled Beheiri, from the north of Egypt, some Saʿidi, from the south, and some Maṣri, from the middle of the country.52 The Good Friday melody Idribi may be named after Atribi, near Sohag, and Sinjari after Sinjar, near Rosetta.53 In the fourteenth century Ibn Kabar already reported “certain local variations in the order and choice” of the melodies.54 Today, Ragheb notes, the Trisagion is sung one way in Alexandria and another in Cairo, and “variation also exists within recognized regional stylistic groups.”55

Upper Egypt kept its own teachers, and took from Cairo too. Tawfiq Yusuf learned the hymns at Dayr al-Muharraq from the monks, among them “القمص ديمتري، والراهب جورجيوس، والقمص داود” (Fr. Dimitri, the monk Georgios and Fr. Dawud), and from Muʿallim Aghabius in Sohag; then the monastery brought Mikhail al-Batanuni from Cairo to teach him the great hymns, and Tawfiq passed rare hymns in his turn to the cantors of Cairo.56 In 1991 the Coptic Encyclopedia found the Didymus Institute in Shubra, “under the direction of Muʿallim Faraj,” that is, Farag ʿAbd al-Masih.57 The Church now trains its cantors at two branches of the Didymus Institute, one in Shubra in Cairo and one at the monastery of al-Muharraq.58

One way for the whole Church

The recordings made one way of singing the reference for all. Choosing Mikhail, Ragheb writes, “essentially canonized this particular cantor as the primary historical representation of Coptic hymnody,” and gave authority to his style and to “what many consider to be a regional Cairean style of cantillation.”59 In 1990 the Church said so in its own magazine. A notice in al-Kirāza announced the Institute’s cassettes:

حرصاً على سلامة الألحان، وتوحيداً لها فى جميع الكنائس، وفى جميع الإيبارشيات، وخوفاً من أن يقوم البعض بتسجيل ألحان حسب استلامه الخاص، وقد ينتشر ذلك بالتداول، بينما يقوم البعض بتسجيل نفس الألحان بطريقة أخرى، لذلك: حفاظاً للتراث الكنسى، أصدر قسم الألحان بمعهد الدراسات القبطية مجموعة من الكاسيتات، من أصول ترجع إلى المعلم ميخائيل جرجس.

Out of care for the soundness of the hymns, and to unify them in all the churches and all the dioceses, and for fear that some would record hymns as they themselves received them, which might spread as copies passed from hand to hand, while others recorded the same hymns another way: therefore, to preserve the Church’s heritage, the hymns section of the Institute of Coptic Studies has issued a set of cassettes from originals going back to Muʿallim Mikhail Girgis.60

The set covered the liturgies of St. Basil and St. Gregory, Holy Week, the evening and midnight praises, the feasts of the Nativity and the Resurrection, the marriage service, the praises of the Virgin and the hymns of the patriarch.61

About forty young men, most in white shirts, gathered around an older man in a white suit
Ragheb Moftah with members of the Coptic choir training to chant the hymns at Abu Kir, near Alexandria, about the 1960s.Courtesy of Laurence Moftah; Library of Congress, Music Division.

The Church’s leaders saw it as saving the hymns. At Moftah’s hundredth birthday in 1998, Pope Shenouda III asked what would have become of the hymns without him: “There have been many who chant the Coptic alhan, each with their own way. Many of these cantors are prone to tagwid [improvisation]…. Ustaz Ragheb Moftah has come to yizbit [to fix/to fasten/to anchor] the alhan in the church in a scientific, sound way.”62 The Holy Synod has since ruled that no one may “تغيير ألفاظ الصلوات الطقسية، أو إضافة جديد إليها” (change the words of the liturgical prayers or add anything new to them) without its approval,63 and in November 2014 its hymns subcommittee reported that it had agreed on “مصادر موحدة” (unified sources) for the hymns of the month of Kiyahk.64 In June 2017 it decided that no recording of the hymns is to be accepted as a reference “الا الصادر من لجنة الطقوس من المجمع المقدس” (except those issued by the Rites Committee of the Holy Synod).65

Scholars have also counted the cost. Ramzy writes that the recordings became “new archetypes of ‘correct’ singing,” and that singers now “emulate a similar homogeneous” and “less-melismatic singing style”;66 she saw a studio session in which, “any time the sound engineer heard an extra embellishment, he stopped the singers.”67 In her view the effort to purify the chant also cut away the “heterophony, improvisation, and the melismas of oral tradition.”68 Ragheb observes that cassettes sold at church bookshops from the 1970s, and then the internet, including this site, moved the authority over how a hymn is sung from the local cantor to a small canon of famous recorded voices.69 Both things are true: the Church gained one way of singing that its people share in Egypt and abroad, and some of the older variety of the regions is heard less than it was.

The cantors today

The cantor is still at the front of the church, but his place has changed. Ramzy writes that blind cantors are still “visible at the front of many churches in Egypt,” but that their role has been largely taken over by recordings of older singers and, in the churches abroad, by head deacons; that cantors have gained standing since Moftah’s work; and that there is “a growing number of singers who are not blind.”70 The Church confers the title of muʿallim only on graduates of the Didymus Institute’s five- to six-year course.71

A row of deacons in white vestments with red stoles stands at microphones, with an elderly man in a dark suit among them
Ragheb Moftah with the choir of deacons at Christmas 1997, the cantor Ibrahim Ayad to his right.Photograph by Emad Nassry, courtesy of Laurence Moftah; Library of Congress, Music Division.

The best known of them is Muʿallim Ibrahim Ayad, who is not blind and is “the Great Cantor of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Cairo.”72 A graduate of the Didymus Institute who went on to the Clerical College, he was chosen by Pope Shenouda III as his own cantor and serves Pope Tawadros II in the same way.73 His way of singing became a model, informally among those who learned from him and more officially when he became a professor of the hymns at the Institute of Coptic Studies.74

A crowd of men follows a coffin carried through a churchyard; one of them holds a cymbal
The cantor Ibrahim Ayad, holding the cymbals, leads Ragheb Moftah’s funeral procession into St. Mark’s Cathedral, Cairo, 18 June 2001.Library of Congress, Music Division, Ragheb Moftah Collection.

One voice

The hymns now belong to a choir of deacons, not to one man. For most of the Church’s history few people knew the hymns, and the cantor sang them for everyone. In the twentieth century that changed. Ragheb Moftah, Pope Shenouda III remembered, stopped recording single singers and formed a choir of Clerical College students who sang the hymns “together with one voice, agreed and harmonious, without a false note.”75 The churches filled with deacons: on a single day in 1958 so many boys were made readers at the Church of the Virgin at Muharram Bek in Alexandria that they sat on the floor of the church hall to learn the hymns from its cantor.76 When al-Kirāza asked in 1997 who leads the responses and the prayers of the people, it answered: the muʿallim, “the cantor or the ʿarif,” or the team of deacons.77

In a choir, the singer is meant to disappear into the whole. In 1989 Bishop Benjamin asked that deacons be tested before their ordination in the hymns of their rank, and taught them together:

يُدرّس لهم بصورة جماعية لكل مرحلة يسام منها شمامسة، كخورس أو جماعة يذوب فيها الفرد، ولا تحارب به الذات بصور متعددة فى الصوت أو جودة الأداء.

Let them be taught together, at every stage at which deacons are ordained, as a choir or a community in which the individual melts away, so that the self is not tempted through it, in its many forms, by the voice or the quality of the singing.78

The Church’s magazine said the same for decades. A column of 1980 wondered at the deacon who sings in a band of deacons “without letting his voice yield to theirs,” and raises it over his colleagues until they raise theirs to cover him and it all turns to noise: “The singing of a hymn in church needs spirituality and humility. What matters in a hymn is not the loudness of the voice, but how far it moves people spiritually, and how far it is joined from the heart to God, as a prayer. And a group needs harmony and unity.”79 Pope Shenouda III, writing in 1990 on how to behave in church, asked that the hymns and responses be “in harmony, as though one voice… so that no one’s voice rises above another’s, and no one’s response or way differs from another’s”; a deacon who finds that his way differs from the rest “should keep silent, or follow them.”80 In 1997 the magazine put it again: “all as though one voice and one tune; no voice rises above another, none stands apart, and no one prays in his own way, as though in private meditation.”81 And an account in 1999 of how Pope Shenouda III rebuilt the order of deacons lists among their rules that they chant the hymns “in one ordered voice, no voice rising above the others or standing out.”82

The cantor’s gift is now the choir’s. The great cantors on this page kept the hymns alive when few others knew them, and they are remembered by name. What they handed down is now sung by choirs of deacons, and the Church asks each of them to sing it as one voice: not to be heard above the others, but to pray with them.

Listen to them. The recordings on this site carry the voices of this line of cantors and their pupils: Ibrahim Ayad, Farag ʿAbd al-Masih, Ṣadiq ʿAttallah, Tawfiq Yusuf, Fahim Girgis, Gad Lewis, Zaher Andrawis, and the choir of the Higher Institute of Coptic Studies. Where your own church sings a hymn differently, the advice on the Coptic letters holds for the melodies too: follow your church, in the spirit of unity.

Notes

  1. Moftah, Robertson, Roy and Tóth, “Music, Coptic”, vol. 6, “The Oral Tradition”. ↩
  2. Moftah, Robertson, Roy and Tóth, “Music, Coptic”, vol. 6, “Cantors, Their Role and Musical Training”. ↩
  3. Canons of Athanasius, pp. xiv, 20, 39. ↩
  4. Vansleb 1677, pp. 180-181. ↩
  5. Butler 1884, p. 322. ↩
  6. Moftah, Robertson, Roy and Tóth, “Music, Coptic”, vol. 6, “Cantors, Their Role and Musical Training”. ↩
  7. Synodal Decisions under Shenouda III, p. 152, session of 13 June 1992, tr. ours. ↩
  8. Moftah, Robertson, Roy and Tóth, “Music, Coptic”, vol. 6, “Cantors, Their Role and Musical Training”. ↩
  9. Ramzy, “A Musical Inheritance”, para. 1. ↩
  10. Nasim, “Education, Coptic”, vol. 3, pp. 931-933. ↩
  11. Lane, p. 318. ↩
  12. Moftah, Robertson, Roy and Tóth, “Music, Coptic”, vol. 6, “The Oral Tradition”. ↩
  13. Robertson-Wilson 2008, “Brief Description,” para. 2. ↩
  14. Moftah, Robertson, Roy and Tóth, “Music, Coptic”, vol. 6, “Cantors, Their Role and Musical Training”. ↩
  15. Moftah 1958, Part I. ↩
  16. Moftah, Robertson, Roy and Tóth, “Music, Coptic”, vol. 6, “The Oral Tradition”. ↩
  17. Moftah, Robertson, Roy and Tóth, “Music, Coptic”, vol. 6, “Cantors, Their Role and Musical Training”. ↩
  18. Moftah, al-Kirāza 1975, no. 2, pp. 4-5. ↩
  19. Moftah, Robertson, Roy and Tóth, “Music, Coptic”, vol. 6, “Cantors, Their Role and Musical Training”. ↩
  20. Nasim 1958, pp. 70-71. ↩
  21. Moftah, al-Kirāza 1975, no. 2, pp. 4-5. ↩
  22. Moftah, al-Kirāza 1975, no. 3, pp. 8-9; no. 4, p. 5. ↩
  23. Musique arabe 1992, “Les hommes”, pp. 361-386, para. 84. ↩
  24. Nasim, “Mikhāʾīl Jirjis”, vol. 5, pp. 1629-1630. ↩
  25. Nasim 1958, p. 70. ↩
  26. Moftah, Robertson, Roy and Tóth, “Music, Coptic”, vol. 6, “Cantors, Their Role and Musical Training”. ↩
  27. Ramzy, “A Musical Inheritance”, para. 5. ↩
  28. L. Moftah, “Scholars of Music”, para. 34. ↩
  29. Ramzy 2015, p. 78. ↩
  30. Moftah, Robertson, Roy and Tóth, “Music, Coptic”, vol. 6, Bibliography: Recordings. ↩
  31. al-Kirāza 2005, “Intiqāl kabīr murattilī al-kanīsa”, pp. 18-19. ↩
  32. Moftah, al-Kirāza 1975, no. 3, p. 8. ↩
  33. Badie, al-Kirāza, 1 Feb. 2008, p. 17. ↩
  34. Badie, al-Kirāza, 21 Mar. 2008, p. 14. ↩
  35. Ramzy, “A Musical Inheritance”, para. 5. ↩
  36. Shenouda III, al-Kirāza 2001, p. 10. ↩
  37. L. Moftah, “Scholars of Music”, para. 34. ↩
  38. Moftah, Robertson, Roy and Tóth, “Music, Coptic”, vol. 6, “Cantors, Their Role and Musical Training”. ↩
  39. al-Kirāza 2000, p. 4. ↩
  40. Badie, al-Kirāza, 14 Dec. 2007, p. 11. ↩
  41. Moftah, al-Kirāza 1975, no. 3, p. 8. ↩
  42. al-Kirāza 2005, “Intiqāl kabīr murattilī al-kanīsa”, p. 18. ↩
  43. Badie, al-Kirāza, 12 Oct. 2007, p. 15. ↩
  44. Badie, al-Kirāza, 18 Jan. 2008, p. 16. ↩
  45. Hymns Guide, Naeem Hanna, biography. ↩
  46. Hymns Guide, Wissa Attia, recordings. ↩
  47. al-Kirāza 2005, “Intiqāl kabīr murattilī al-kanīsa”, p. 18. ↩
  48. Shenouda III, al-Kirāza 2001, p. 10. ↩
  49. Hymns Guide, Ibrahim Ayad, recordings. ↩
  50. Ragheb 2019, p. 248. ↩
  51. Robertson-Wilson 2008, “Brief Description,” para. 2. ↩
  52. Moftah, Robertson, Roy and Tóth, “Music, Coptic”, vol. 6, “Melody, Its Relation to Different Languages”. ↩
  53. Moftah, Robertson, Roy and Tóth, “Music, Coptic”, vol. 6, “Description of the Corpus”. ↩
  54. Moftah, Robertson, Roy and Tóth, “Music, Coptic”, vol. 6, “History: After the Arab Conquest”. ↩
  55. Ragheb 2019, p. 133. ↩
  56. Karas al-Muḥarraqī, tr. ours. ↩
  57. Moftah, Robertson, Roy and Tóth, “Music, Coptic”, vol. 6, “Cantors, Their Role and Musical Training”. ↩
  58. Ragheb 2019, p. 234. ↩
  59. Ragheb 2019, p. 214. ↩
  60. al-Kirāza 1990, p. 18, tr. ours. ↩
  61. al-Kirāza 1990, p. 18. ↩
  62. Ramzy 2014, pp. 72-73, Ramzy’s translation. ↩
  63. Synodal Decisions under Shenouda III, p. 153, session of 5 June 1993, tr. ours. ↩
  64. Holy Synod, November 2014, recommendation 9, tr. ours. ↩
  65. Holy Synod, June 2017, decision 5, tr. ours. ↩
  66. Ramzy 2014, p. 34. ↩
  67. Ramzy 2014, p. 51. ↩
  68. Ramzy 2014, p. 77. ↩
  69. Ragheb 2019, pp. 248-249. ↩
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  82. al-Kirāza 1999, “Iʿādat bināʾ al-khidma al-shamāsiyya”, p. 11, tr. ours. ↩

Sources

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