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The cantors

Abuna Takla المعلم تكلا (القس تكلا) · teacher of the hymns under Cyril IV, mid-nineteenth century

The line of cantors that the Church follows today begins with Takla. Patriarch Cyril IV, in the 1850s, found that “the music and texts had often been rendered incorrectly by untrained and/or careless cantors,” and looked for a master who could teach others. He found “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,” and made him teacher of the melodies.1

The school of the patriarchate

Ragheb Moftah heard about Takla from his own father. In 1975 Moftah wrote that Takla had taught the kuttab attached to the patriarchal church, where the sons of leading families learned, until Cyril IV founded the Great Coptic School; then the patriarch moved the pupils there and made Takla its teacher of hymns. Moftah’s father, who had been a pupil in that kuttab, told him so.2

Collecting the hymns

He went through the country looking for the soundest form of each melody. Moftah writes that by Takla’s time the hymns had decayed and were sung with many variants, and that Cyril IV backed him with every means he had: Takla traveled the length and breadth of Egypt, and any melody he found sound and well built in a town or district he took up, until he had gathered in their best form all the hymns of the rite that Abu al-Barakat ibn Kabar had listed about 1320.3 Carolyn Ramzy describes the same work: “much like a contemporary folklorist,” Takla “traveled between Upper and Lower Egypt, gathering and memorizing these hymns.”4 Magdalena Kuhn adds that he collected old folk songs as well as church chants, and that his search let him compose liturgical melodies himself; Moftah, she writes, held that these are still the basis of the Church’s traditional melodies.5

He also fixed how the hymns were said. He “corrected the pronunciation of the language, demanding proper enunciation and delivery of the hymns,” and in 1859 published The Services of the Deacon “with the help of Deacon ʿIryān Jirjis Muftāḥ, teacher of Coptic in the Patriarchal College.”6 ʿIryān was the great-uncle of Ragheb Moftah,7 and the reform of the pronunciation is told in how the reading was reformed. At the patriarch’s direction he also put into that book four Greek hymns, translated into Coptic, which are still sung at the Nativity and the Resurrection to their Greek melodies and are called Yunani, “Greek.”8 Moftah names some of them: with the approval of Cyril IV, Takla brought a few short old Greek hymns into the Coptic repertoire, among them تون سينا, تولبسس and أى بارثينوس, and that he wrote, with a French musician whose name the Arabic gives as جرو, a book on music of which Moftah could never find a copy.9

His own songs

Takla composed as well as collected. The Coptic Encyclopedia says that he sang Coptic songs of his own in the homes of leading families, and that a patriotic song he presented to the Khedive earned him the title of Bey.10 Moftah names the Khedive as Ismaʿil, says the anthem was in Coptic and “in the very character and spirit of Coptic music,” and adds that Mikhail al-Batanuni sang it for him: it took about twelve minutes. Takla’s Coptic songs, he writes, were sung often in the houses of the Moftah family and others.11

Priest, and teacher of seven

The sources disagree on his ordination. The Coptic Encyclopedia says: “Later, this teacher was ordained a deacon, Abuna Takla by name,” though Abuna, “our father,” is the title of a priest.12 Moftah writes that Cyril IV ordained him a priest of the cathedral and then made him its head, and calls him “al-Qiss Takla” in his later years.13

He passed the whole repertoire to seven students. No source we have found names all seven. Three names appear: Abuna Murqus of Maṭay (المعلم مرقس) and Muʿallim Armanyus (المعلم أرمانيوس), named by the Coptic Encyclopedia and by Moftah,1415 and Muʿallim Ṣalib (المعلم صليب), whom Sulayman Nasim and the 2007 biography of Mikhail in al-Kirāza name with Armanyus as Mikhail’s teachers.1617 Moftah says the seven “received all the hymns from him and mastered them completely”; some stayed in Cairo and others went to towns such as Tanta and Damanhur. Mikhail al-Batanuni learned from two of them. Moftah adds, with great regret, that Takla suffered some mental disturbance in his last days, which he put down to the intensity of his artistic feeling.18 Mikhail’s life is told on his own page.

Notes

  1. Moftah, Robertson, Roy and Tóth, “Music, Coptic”, vol. 6, “Cantors, Their Role and Musical Training”. ↩
  2. Moftah, al-Kirāza 1975, no. 2, p. 4. ↩
  3. Moftah, al-Kirāza 1975, no. 2, p. 4. ↩
  4. Ramzy, “A Musical Inheritance”, paras. 2-3. ↩
  5. Kuhn, “Coptic Melodies”, “Introduction”. ↩
  6. Moftah, Robertson, Roy and Tóth, “Music, Coptic”, vol. 6, “Cantors, Their Role and Musical Training”. ↩
  7. Ramzy, “A Musical Inheritance”, para. 3. ↩
  8. Moftah, Robertson, Roy and Tóth, “Music, Coptic”, vol. 6, “Cantors, Their Role and Musical Training”. ↩
  9. Moftah, al-Kirāza 1975, no. 2, p. 4. ↩
  10. Moftah, Robertson, Roy and Tóth, “Music, Coptic”, vol. 6, “Cantors, Their Role and Musical Training”. ↩
  11. Moftah, al-Kirāza 1975, no. 2, p. 4, tr. ours. ↩
  12. Moftah, Robertson, Roy and Tóth, “Music, Coptic”, vol. 6, “Cantors, Their Role and Musical Training”. ↩
  13. Moftah, al-Kirāza 1975, no. 2, p. 4. ↩
  14. Moftah, Robertson, Roy and Tóth, “Music, Coptic”, vol. 6, “Cantors, Their Role and Musical Training”. ↩
  15. Moftah, al-Kirāza 1975, no. 2, p. 4. ↩
  16. Nasim 1958, p. 71. ↩
  17. al-Kirāza 2007, “al-Muʿallim Mīkhāʾīl”, p. 18. ↩
  18. Moftah, al-Kirāza 1975, no. 2, pp. 4-5. ↩

Sources

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