Ragheb Moftah الدكتور راغب حبشي مفتاح · who wrote down and recorded the chant, 1898-2001

For more than seventy years one layman gave his fortune and his life to keeping the hymns of the Coptic Church. Ragheb Moftah had the hymns written down in staff notation, recorded the whole tradition in the voice of Muʿallim Mikhail al-Batanuni and of the singers who learned from him, and headed the music department of the Institute of Coptic Studies for nearly half a century. When he reposed, al-Kirāza called him “رائد الموسيقى والألحان القبطية,” the pioneer of Coptic music and hymns.¹ Pope Shenouda III said at his funeral that the Church owed him “all that we have learned and received of the hymns.”²

Family and youth

He was born in Cairo in 1898, into a family that had served the Church for generations. Ragheb Habashi Moftah was born in Cairo on 21 December 1898.³⁴ Pope Shenouda III said he had lived in three centuries: a childhood at the end of the nineteenth, the whole of the twentieth, and his repose at the start of the twenty-first. The family, the patriarch said, was known for learning and faith since the days of Peter VII and Cyril IV; among its members were Butrus Moftah and ʿIryan Moftah, and some of them headed the Great School of St. Mark and taught Coptic there.⁵ ʿIryan Moftah, the teacher of Coptic who helped Abuna Takla, was his great-uncle.⁶ His father, Habashi Moftah, raised twenty-one orphans in his house besides his own nine children, and his elder sister Farida founded the first Coptic orphanage for girls in 1912.⁷

He nearly did not live. As a baby he caught typhus in the epidemic that struck Cairo at the end of the 1890s, and his mother, Labiba, stayed at his bedside for six months.⁸

He was sent to Germany to study agriculture, and came back with the Church’s music. He passed his baccalaureate in 1918 and went to a German university to study agriculture; he had inherited a great deal of farmland from his father, and perhaps meant to manage it. “But God wanted to invest him,” the patriarch said: in Europe he began to study Coptic history, the hymns and their music, and they took up more of his time than farming.⁹ He stayed four years. He went often to the opera, where Wagner’s Ring delighted him, and once spent a whole week at the Passion Play that a village in Bavaria stages every ten years.¹⁰ He told Michel Badie that the family he grew up in drew him to love his Church, its hymns and its rites, and that he came to see their spiritual depth and “ففكرت في ضرورة الإبقاء عليها” (so I thought it necessary to preserve them).¹¹ In 1985 he put it in his own words: “أدركت منذ شبابي المبكر العمق الروحي الذي تفيض به موسيقى كنيستنا القبطية، وأخذت أفكر جدياً في خير طريقة للحفاظ عليها مدى الزمن” (from my early youth I sensed the spiritual depth that overflows from the music of our Coptic Church, and I began to think seriously of the best way to keep it for all time).¹² His niece Laurence Moftah adds that British missionaries in Egypt called the Coptic chant “decadent,” and that he resolved to save it before it went the way of the Coptic language.¹³ At a hundred he told the story his own way. A circle of educated reformers who called themselves the Renaissance Group wanted to change every rite and hymn of the Church, which they called “the old, the extinct.” “I did not agree with this theory at all,” he said. “I told them that this Church of ours is the Church of the Fathers, and its rites are from the early centuries.” He saw that if Western scholars of music spoke for the hymns, “their words will be a strong wave” against those who were strangling them, and that is why he went to the Royal Academy of Music in London.¹⁴ In 1996 he gave a reason closer to home. The Copts, he said, had once sung the hymns of the Church at their weddings and their funerals and on every occasion of their lives, and most of them had known Coptic; cinema, radio and television had made them forget, “ولذلك أنا في الحقيقة وهبت حياتي للحفاظ على تراث الآباء والأجداد” (and so, in truth, I gave my life to preserving the heritage of the fathers and forefathers).¹⁵

To him it was the most moving music in the world. “No other music however classical can compare with the ‘pathos’ of the music of the Coptic Church,” he wrote, “nor with the tremendous power it has on the human soul and the passion it awakens in it.” He asked his listeners to imagine themselves in one of the old churches, among “clouds of incense and echoes of chants,” where the music “will cause you to forget completely all worldly things, since this music is entirely divested of every earthly sensation.”¹⁶ It was the music of Egypt itself: “every country composed its own ecclesiastical music in accordance with its particular knowledge and taste of music,” and the Copts, “the direct descendants of the Ancient Egyptians,” had kept theirs.¹⁷ In 1976 he called it “the oldest music which still survives from the Ancient World up to the present day.”¹⁸

The notation

He brought an English musician to Cairo to write the hymns down. Ernest Newlandsmith, a professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London, came through Cairo in 1926 on his way to the Holy Land, and Moftah asked him to stay and write the hymns down.¹⁹ On 5 May 1927, in Cairo, the two men signed an agreement: Newlandsmith would compile “a book on Ancient Egyptian Music,” and Moftah, acting “on behalf of the Committee of the Music of the Coptic Church,” would supply the singers and interpreters he needed.²⁰ Moftah sent back his signed copy from his houseboat, the dahabiya Zinat al-Bahrayn at Garden City: “I did sign it with great pleasure, and with many thanks for the kind work to be done by you to the valuable Music of the Coptic Church.”²¹ Moftah paid for everything, Pope Shenouda said, both for Newlandsmith, who lived in his house, and for the cantor who sang to him.²² He bought a grand piano, and the two men worked on Moftah’s houseboat on the Nile.²³

Newlandsmith saw what was at stake. The ancient music of the Church, he wrote in an appeal for support, “is gradually becoming lost. As sung in most of the Churches today it is in a state of chaos & confusion.” Moftah, “assisted by the leading Church singers,” meant “to regain the authentic tradition & set it down in a book,” so that there would be “not only a Standard Work of reference, but also a true & uniform method of singing.” And of Moftah himself: “My life has been devoted to religious music, but I do not remember ever before to have met with such devotion & zeal for the welfare of the Church as that shown by Mr. Moftah.”²⁴

First he looked for the right cantor. In his own account, the work began early in the winter of 1928 with a survey of the leading cantors of the whole country, of whom “كان أبرزهم وأقدرهم المرحوم المعلم ميخائيل جرجس البتانوني” (the most outstanding and the ablest was the late Muʿallim Mikhail Girgis al-Batanuni). Newlandsmith began with the Liturgy of St. Basil and wrote it down a second and a third time, until the way of singing and of writing it had settled; each summer he went home to England and made the fair copy.²⁵ How Muʿallim Mikhail was chosen, and what the sessions on the houseboat were like, is told on his page.

The work came in seasons. Illness kept Newlandsmith in England at the end of 1927, and early in 1928 Moftah was recovering from an operation;²⁶ Newlandsmith reached Cairo again in December 1928.²⁷ In the winter of 1929–30 he worked for twelve weeks, first at Abu Shaqouq and then in Cairo, with “Mr. Michael”: three hours a day of “singing & transcribing,” two in the morning and one in the afternoon.²⁸ A second season followed at Heliopolis from January to March 1933,²⁹ and after that he went on by post from England.³⁰ “The work on the Coptic Music has begun 1928 & was finished 1933,” Moftah wrote in 1936, “there is still some repetition to be done. This work is the committing down to paper of the Liturgies & hymns sung in the Coptic Church from the times of early Christianity till now & was ever handed orally from generation to generation.”³¹ By 1934 Newlandsmith counted sixteen bound volumes, two of them his own pieces for piano and violin on Coptic themes.³²

He took Coptic music to the English universities. In 1931 he went to England with Newlandsmith and they gave three lectures, at Oxford, Cambridge and London; the Egyptologist Aylward Blackman and the Coptic scholar W. E. Crum came to hear the one at Oxford.³³ Moftah remembered another listener: “The one at Oxford was attended by Einstein, the German philosopher,” he said in 1998,³⁴ as he had told an interviewer in 1996.³⁵ Every seat was taken, and people stood outside.³⁶ His niece read in the British papers of 1931 that Newlandsmith gave his lectures in a blue robe with a girdle, like a friar.³⁷ The campaign opened at Kingsway Hall in London on Sunday 26 April and went on to the University Church at Oxford and to Caius College, Cambridge; Moftah stayed in England through April and May.³⁸³⁹ That summer he went on to Paris to look for Coptic manuscripts in the Bibliothèque nationale; the Coptic scholar O. H. E. Burmester guided him, copied hymns for him from a manuscript in London, and passed on W. E. Crum’s thanks for his help.⁴⁰ In that lecture Newlandsmith called the music “إرجاع لروح داود في العصر الحاضر” (a return of the spirit of David in our own day).⁴¹

In 1932 he showed the music to Europe’s musicians in Cairo. The Egyptian government invited twenty-nine musicians from Germany, Austria, France, England, Hungary and elsewhere to a congress on Oriental music, and invited Moftah to represent Coptic music. Béla Bartók was among the guests, and so was Egon Wellesz, who had deciphered the old Byzantine notation. At their request Moftah arranged a liturgy at the Hanging Church in Old Cairo, celebrated by Fr. Murqus Shenouda with Muʿallim Mikhail singing the responses and hymns. Wellesz said he had never in his life been so moved by the singing of prayers and hymns.⁴² The congress also made the first recordings of Coptic chant.⁴³ Bartók and Moftah kept up a correspondence for years afterwards.⁴⁴

In 1933 Newlandsmith lectured in Heliopolis. On 18 March 1933 he spoke at the Palace Hotel, Heliopolis, with the hymns sung by a choir out of sight, and Moftah gave the opening speech as the man “at whose initiative the original researches were made.”⁴⁵

The hard years did not stop him. By the mid-1930s the money had run short and the work had enemies. “I have so exhausted myself beyond any limits,” he wrote to Newlandsmith in May 1934. “I stood everything even insults all was made so difficult I am still on the bar & shall still continue my efforts, perhaps all this difficulty made in every possible way means much success.” Times were bad in Egypt, there had been “propaganda made against this work,” and, he added, “this work is in all higher than the artistic understanding standard of the people here.”⁴⁶ That November he wrote that he “had to work day & night” to raise what was owed.⁴⁷ He already saw where the answer lay: he had begun training a choir at the Clerical College, “the only way to introduce the coptic music, in order to get the support of the people,” and he told Newlandsmith not to exhaust himself with big lectures in London but to come back so that they could “do it here slowly.”⁴⁸

Illness ended the collaboration. In 1935 Moftah raised money from “friends who like to help the Coptic Music,” booked Newlandsmith a passage from Marseille and arranged a room for him at Mataria, trusting, as he wrote, that “his Grace & Mercy will help us to work from time to time in the Coptic Music.” That winter Newlandsmith fell seriously ill, and he never came back to Egypt. “Humbly I may mention it is I who mostly supported this work,” Moftah wrote afterwards, “& my means are now not at all as before.”⁴⁹⁵⁰ Sixty years later, asked which part of his life’s work had made him happiest, he named the years with Newlandsmith: a time, as his niece put it and he agreed, when he was wholly at ease, with full trust between them.⁵¹

The recordings

He then set out to record the tradition, and to teach it. In 1940 he formed a choir of students of the Clerical College and of deacons with good voices, with two more choirs of university men and university women. In 1945 he opened two centers, one in Old Cairo to hand on the hymns to cantors and deacons, and one near Bab al-Hadid where senior cantors came to have their hymns confirmed. Mikhail al-Batanuni “gave there the essence of his heart,” and dozens of senior cantors learned from him there, each paid twenty piasters for his fare.⁵² Moftah bought his recording machines in the late 1930s and recorded in his own studios at Bab al-Hadid and in Old Cairo until 1954.⁵³

When Mikhail’s voice failed, he found younger voices. As the cantor grew old his throat could no longer sing beautifully, though his memory was as exact as ever, and Moftah searched for singers with fine voices who could take the hymns from him and sing them well. He recorded both: Mikhail himself, and those who had learned from him.⁵⁴ In 1958 he said that the Liturgy of St. Gregory was “going to be lost unless I did record it several times from Mlm. Mikhail who was the only one to have known it complete.”⁵⁵

He would not let a single wrong turn stand. If he heard one ornament out of place, Pope Shenouda said, he had the whole hymn recorded again from the beginning, many times if need be, so as to hand it on pure. At the Institute he worked with a music engineer and a sound engineer and supervised every recording himself, and he recorded on discs because they last longer than cassettes.⁵⁶ He held that the human throat is the best of instruments, so the recordings are of the voice alone; the cymbals (daff) and the triangle are there only to keep the melody in order, and must never cover the voice of the cantor.⁵⁷ The music, he wrote, “must, also, be strictly unaccompanied, because the vocal chords, are the only instrument which can truly render the real character and special expression of this music.”⁵⁸ His sound engineer from 1964, Salib Bastawros, remembered that if anyone sang out of tune or a wrong note, Moftah had the chant repeated until it was perfect, and the singers were not allowed above a certain pitch.⁵⁹ A recording, he explained, is more exact than a cantor: asked to sing a hymn a second and a third time, a cantor sometimes changes it a little, “but the recording, however often you repeat it, is the same.”⁶⁰ In the old service books he found the naqus but never the daff,⁶¹ and even the naqus, once used very sparingly, had spread over time, “وده غلط” (and that is a mistake); he was writing an article to say so.⁶²

The Institute of Coptic Studies

In 1954 his work found a home. He was one of the founders of the Higher Institute of Coptic Studies in Cairo, with Aziz Suryal Atiya, Sami Gabra and Murad Kamil, and when it opened in 1955 he became head of its department of music and hymns, moving to the Institute the beginnings of the studio he had set up at the church of the Virgin, Qasriyyat al-Rihan, in Old Cairo.⁶³ He held the post from 1954 until he reposed, and never asked for a title or a salary for it.⁶⁴ The students of the Clerical College had their lessons in the hymns every day in his office there, and every summer he took them to a study camp at Abu Qir, near Alexandria. Their teachers included Muʿallim Tawfiq of Dayr al-Muharraq, Muʿallim Ṣadiq ʿAttallah and Muʿallim Farag ʿAbd al-Masih, and later Muʿallim Ibrahim Ayad.⁶⁵ From about 1956 he recorded there on discs, since there were no tapes yet, with equipment like a radio station’s; later the World Council of Churches gave the department costly recording machines. The first discs were the responses of the Liturgy of St. Basil, sung by Muʿallim Mikhail; then came his pupil Muʿallim Ṣadiq and many others, and Bishop Gregorios recorded the spoken introductions. In all there were seven records for Holy Week, six for the Liturgy of St. Basil and three each for Christmas and Easter; the Liturgy of St. Gregory followed.⁶⁶ What the department recorded and how it shaped the singing of the whole Church is told in the Institute of Coptic Studies.

He trained the choirs himself. When the Institute opened he had five choirs from the Clerical College, among them a choir of women. He chose the students “who were musically gifted,” and lessons began in all the rooms of the Institute at a quarter past seven in the morning; he came in early from his home at the Pyramids to be with them.⁶⁷

He sat in on the lessons to the end. Michel Badie, who first met him in the summer of 1978, found him at Abu Qir sitting among the students in complete silence, following how the cantors sang and taught; sometimes he objected sharply to the way a hymn was sung and gave his directions, and when the lesson was over he went to the cantor, patted him on the shoulder and talked with him about Muʿallim Mikhail.⁶⁸

Two patriarchs were his friends. He had known Pope Kyrillos VI since 1936, when the future patriarch was a monk of the Baramus Monastery.⁶⁹ Pope Shenouda III he had known since the patriarch, as Nazir Gayed, was a student and then a teacher; he often came to Moftah’s house, and he came to see him on the night before he entered the monastery. Moftah called it a friendship for life: each was a faithful friend to the other. At Christmas and Easter he sat first with the patriarch in his residence, then went into the cathedral with him and stood by the sanctuary with his choir.⁷⁰ Among his closest friends he named Bishop Gregorios, Newlandsmith, Murqus Pasha Sumaykah and his brother ʿAbdallah, and Antun Sidhom.⁷¹

The Liturgy in notation

Two women finished the score he had begun with Newlandsmith. Newlandsmith had written down the outline of the melodies but not their ornaments. At the end of 1969 Moftah brought the Hungarian ethnomusicologist Margit Tóth to Cairo to write down the ornaments; the American Martha Roy later joined the work, and together they took down the whole Liturgy of St. Basil.⁷² Tóth had studied Coptic for a year at the University of Budapest before she came,⁷³ and had first transcribed Coptic melodies from Hungary in the 1960s, by correspondence with Moftah.⁷⁴ Before they met she had written him a few lines on “the deep spirituality in the Coptic Music,” and he answered that he “appreciated very much the soul which wrote these few lines, which united us in god as if we have been living together all life through.”⁷⁵ She arrived in Cairo on 21 November 1970 and lived in the Moftahs’ home.⁷⁶⁷⁷ In 1972 Moftah wrote to her that “the chant of the coptic liturgy is a solemn drama involving three participants: celebrant, deacon, congregation (choir),” so the notation must follow the exact order of the rite, and he planned the book in parallel columns of music, Coptic, English and Arabic.⁷⁸ In 1975 the Institute gave her a scholarship to come back for six months,⁷⁹ and in 1976 Moftah appealed to UNESCO to help publish the work, “after efforts which took more than forty years.”⁸⁰ In 1985 al-Kirāza announced that the department was printing the music of the hymns “لأول مرة في تاريخ الكنيسة” (for the first time in the history of the Church).⁸¹

He signed the contract for it in a hospital bed. In July 1996 the American University in Cairo Press agreed to publish the score. Pope Shenouda had the contract drawn up before him and guaranteed the whole cost of printing; on Friday 26 July he took the publisher, Tóth, Roy and Laurence Moftah to Victoria Hospital in Alexandria, where Moftah lay ill, and Moftah signed it in his presence.⁸²⁸³ The book came out in 1998: about 700 large pages, more than 550 of them music, with the text in Coptic, English and Arabic. Under the contract the Church keeps the rights.⁸⁴

The choir abroad

He took the choir to sing in Europe. In the summer of 1989, at the invitation of a music institute in Berlin, he took the students of the Clerical College to Germany;⁸⁵ they recorded hymns for Berlin radio and television, and he lectured on Coptic music at the Coptic monastery at Kröffelbach.⁸⁶ It was the first time, Mina Badie wrote, that the German public heard Coptic church music.⁸⁷ On the long bus journey to Berlin he stopped to buy the students food and drink at his own cost, and would not go to rest until he knew they were all in bed.⁸⁸ The choir sang in Germany again in November 1995,⁸⁹ and in the summer of 1998 it went to France and then to Germany under his direction, led by the cantor Ibrahim Ayad.⁹⁰

The Library of Congress

The Library of Congress saved his oldest tapes. In 1993 he wrote that he had recordings of Muʿallim Mikhail more than seventy years old, made on paper tape that had outlived its life and was no longer made. The Library of Congress, which still had machines that could play it, transferred and restored the tapes at its own cost, and in thanks he gave the Library everything he had produced, on cassette and on reel. He had been “يائساً وحزيناً” (in despair and grief) over those tapes, he wrote; he took no money for the gift, “بل تقاضيت أكبر فرحة في حياتي” (but received the greatest joy of my life): that this art of the Church would last through time.⁹¹ He gave the collection between 1991 and 2001,⁹² and under his agreement with the Librarian of Congress, James Billington, it is to be open to every member of the Coptic Church and to scholars everywhere.⁹³ Putting the tapes in order fell to Marian Robertson-Wilson, music editor of the Coptic Encyclopedia, who had gone to Cairo in 1984 to meet “that devout Copt who devoted his life to preserving his venerable musical tradition” and had studied the recordings he gave her. When the Library’s Music Division called on her in 1992, it had copied 31 of his crumbling paper reels onto 25 cassettes but could neither identify the chants nor put them in order. She identified them as the Liturgy of St. Basil and the hymns of the seasons, published a guide to them in 1997, and with the sound engineer Kenny Hodges set them in the order of the liturgy on 21 CDs, with a revised guide in 2005.⁹⁴ In 1994 the chief of the Library’s Music Division, James Pruett, wrote to him that it “will undoubtedly prove to be the world’s greatest collection of such material, a monument to your unequalled achievement in this field.”⁹⁵

In 1995 the Library honored him. Billington held a celebration for him, “وتكريم الألحان القبطية في شخصه” (and to honor the Coptic hymns in his person), and said that the collection Moftah had given was the most important and the oldest collection of ancient music in the Library.⁹⁶

Honors

The Church made him a doctor. On 7 January 1984, the eve of Christmas, Pope Shenouda III, as head of the board of the Institute of Coptic Studies, gave him an honorary doctorate “تقديراً لمجهوداته الصادقة في الحفاظ على تراث الموسيقى القبطية” (in recognition of his sincere efforts to preserve the heritage of Coptic music).⁹⁷

At a hundred the patriarch told him he had outlived them all. On 21 December 1998 his hundredth birthday was kept in the hall of St. Mark at Anba Ruways, with Pope Shenouda, twelve metropolitans and bishops, the professors of the Institute, Margit Tóth, a representative of the American University and hundreds of the faithful; the choir of the Institute and the Clerical College sang under Muʿallim Ibrahim Ayad. The patriarch named Copts who had lived to ninety or a little more, among them Aziz Suryal Atiya, and told him: “ولكنك فقتهم جميعاً” (but you have surpassed them all). He presented the first printed copies of the Liturgy of St. Basil, and a committee printed Moftah’s own memoir, Dhikrayātī maʿa al-alḥān al-qibṭiyya (My memories of the Coptic hymns).⁹⁸ The patriarch gave him a cross of pure gold.⁹⁹

His repose

He kept his ear and his memory to the end. In his last years his sight was weak and his back bent, but his ear for music and his memory never aged, and at a hundred and two he was still talking to the patriarch about recording the Liturgies of St. Gregory and St. Cyril in notation.¹⁰⁰ About a month before his repose he asked to be moved from al-Hayat Hospital to Victoria Hospital in Alexandria; the patriarch sent him in his own car, visited him and anointed him with the holy oil, and told his wife, Mary, that he would bear all the costs of his treatment.¹⁰¹

He reposed on 18 June 2001, in his 103rd year. He had been ill with hardening of the arteries, among other things, and reposed on Monday 18 June. Pope Shenouda prayed over him at St. Mark’s Cathedral with many metropolitans and bishops and gave the sermon, and the president of the American University in Cairo and some of its professors came to the funeral with many priests and his pupils.¹⁰² The prayers began at four in the afternoon of the same day.¹⁰³ “I do not know how I can enter the department of music and hymns,” the patriarch said, “without Dr. Ragheb in it.”¹⁰⁴

After him

His assistants carried the work on. In 2002 Michel Badie ʿAbd al-Malik, one of his assistants and a man he trusted, was made head of the department.¹⁰⁵ The department’s courses for lovers of church hymns were given in his name, at the Dr. Ragheb Moftah Center.¹⁰⁶ In 2005 Laurence Moftah gave the patriarch twenty-one CDs of Muʿallim Mikhail’s recordings with their notation, and he passed them to the department.¹⁰⁷ In October 2008 a team from Hanover and Berlin came to Cairo to agree on copying the department’s reels, which go back to 1954, onto CD, and found the tapes still in good condition.¹⁰⁸

He thought of himself as a servant. His niece, who worked with him from 1978 to 2001, writes that he gave away most of his inheritance and lived for decades in poverty for the sake of the music, and described himself as a simple servant of the Coptic Orthodox Church whose duty it was to save it.¹⁰⁹ He had once owned about a hundred and fifty feddans of land: “I sold them all, one after the other.”¹¹⁰ “كان الهدف الكبير بتاعي الحفاظ على تراث الموسيقى القبطية الكنسية، فكنت أضحي أي شيء خاص بيّ في سبيل إنجاز هذا الشيء المهم” (my great aim was to preserve the heritage of the music of the Coptic Church, so I would give up anything of my own to accomplish this important thing), he told an interviewer.¹¹¹ He prayed at the Hanging Church in Old Cairo, “عشان فيها روحانية وكنيسة قديمة” (because it has spirituality, and it is an old church).¹¹² “Please remember,” he once wrote, “that I have given my life and all my means to this work.”¹¹³ Asked at a hundred whether it mattered that so few could read the notation, he answered: “All I want is to preserve the Church’s hymns.” And asked which hymn was closest to his heart, he said amid laughter that it was a very hard question: “They are all beautiful. Every hymn has its own goal and its place in the rites of the Church.”¹¹⁴ Asked what he wished for the generations to come, he said that what had lived for so many centuries must remain forever.¹¹⁵ His last instruction to her, on 8 June 2001, was: “Make sure that the Coptic Music heritage will be made available to our Coptic Orthodox Churches worldwide, its people, and scholars.”¹¹⁶

Photographs

Notes

1. al-Kirāza 2001, Moftah’s repose, p. 1, tr. ours. ↩
2. Shenouda III, al-Kirāza 2001, p. 10, tr. ours. ↩
3. Badie, al-Kirāza 1998, p. 17. ↩
4. Library of Congress, Moftah finding aid, p. 3. ↩
5. Shenouda III, al-Kirāza 2001, p. 9. ↩
6. Ramzy, “A Musical Inheritance”, para. 3. ↩
7. L. Moftah, “Destined to Live”, paras. 3, 13. ↩
8. L. Moftah, “Destined to Live”, paras. 1, 11. ↩
9. Shenouda III, al-Kirāza 2001, p. 9, tr. ours. ↩
10. Stock, interviews with Moftah, 1996-97, part 1, 39:30-43:00. ↩
11. Badie, al-Kirāza 2001, p. 11, tr. ours. ↩
12. Moftah, al-Kirāza 1985, pp. 9-11, tr. ours. ↩
13. L. Moftah, “Ragheb Moftah and Coptic Music”, sec. I. ↩
14. Moftah, interview, 1999, tr. HCOC. ↩
15. Stock, interviews with Moftah, 1996-97, part 1, 7:40-9:30 and 17:50-20:00, tr. ours. ↩
16. L. Moftah, “Ragheb Moftah and Coptic Music”, sec. III. ↩
17. L. Moftah, “Ragheb Moftah and Coptic Music”, sec. IV. ↩
18. Moftah papers, Library of Congress, Moftah, draft letter, 2 February 1976, ihas.200155688. ↩
19. L. Moftah, “Scholars of Music”, “Professor Ernest Newlandsmith”. ↩
20. Moftah papers, Library of Congress, agreement of 5 May 1927, ihas.200155832. ↩
21. Moftah papers, Library of Congress, Moftah to Newlandsmith, 5 May 1927, ihas.200155689. ↩
22. Shenouda III, al-Kirāza 2001, p. 10. ↩
23. L. Moftah, “Scholars of Music”, “Professor Ernest Newlandsmith”. ↩
24. Moftah papers, Library of Congress, Newlandsmith, appeal, [ca. 1930s], ihas.200155790. ↩
25. Moftah, al-Kirāza 1985, pp. 9-11, tr. ours. ↩
26. Moftah papers, Library of Congress, Newlandsmith to Moftah, 27 December 1927 and 18 February 1928, ihas.200155708, ihas.200155709. ↩
27. Moftah papers, Library of Congress, Newlandsmith to Moftah, 19 December 1928, ihas.200155711. ↩
28. Moftah papers, Library of Congress, Newlandsmith to Moftah, 17 November and 24 December 1929, ihas.200155725, ihas.200155729. ↩
29. Moftah papers, Library of Congress, Newlandsmith to Moftah, 14 January and 15 February 1933, ihas.200155754, ihas.200155756. ↩
30. Moftah papers, Library of Congress, Newlandsmith to Moftah, 17 July 1933, ihas.200155765. ↩
31. Moftah papers, Library of Congress, Moftah to Wordsworth, [1936], ihas.200155687. ↩
32. Moftah papers, Library of Congress, Newlandsmith to Moftah, [1934], ihas.200155770. ↩
33. Badie, al-Kirāza 1998, p. 17. ↩
34. Kamel, film on Moftah, 1998, 24:15-24:30. ↩
35. Stock, interviews with Moftah, 1996-97, part 1, 15:20-16:00. ↩
36. Kamel, film on Moftah, 1998, 25:42-26:00. ↩
37. Stock, interviews with Moftah, 1996-97, part 4, 27:50-28:30. ↩
38. Moftah papers, Library of Congress, Newlandsmith to Moftah, 11 April and 8 May 1931, ihas.200155734, ihas.200155741. ↩
39. Moftah papers, Library of Congress, Newlandsmith, press notice, [March 1933], ihas.200155787. ↩
40. Moftah papers, Library of Congress, Burmester to Moftah, 8 and 13 July 1931, ihas.200155673, ihas.200155674. ↩
41. Badie, al-Kirāza 2002, pp. 9-11, tr. ours. ↩
42. Badie, al-Kirāza 1998, p. 17. ↩
43. Roy 1992, pp. 37-39, paras. 4-5. ↩
44. L. Moftah, “Ragheb Moftah and Coptic Music”, sec. II. ↩
45. Moftah papers, Library of Congress, Newlandsmith, press notice, [March 1933], ihas.200155787. ↩
46. Moftah papers, Library of Congress, Moftah to Newlandsmith, 14 May 1934, ihas.200155693. ↩
47. Moftah papers, Library of Congress, Moftah to Newlandsmith, 15 November 1934, ihas.200155694. ↩
48. Moftah papers, Library of Congress, Moftah to Newlandsmith, draft, [1933], ihas.200155768. ↩
49. Moftah papers, Library of Congress, Moftah to Wordsworth and Edick, 10 October 1935, ihas.200155686. ↩
50. Moftah papers, Library of Congress, Moftah to Wordsworth, [1936], ihas.200155687. ↩
51. Stock, interviews with Moftah, 1996-97, part 3, 44:00-47:00. ↩
52. Badie, al-Kirāza 1998, p. 17, tr. ours. ↩
53. L. Moftah, “Scholars of Music”, “Engineer Saleeb Bastawros”; “Audio Recording Equipment”. ↩
54. Shenouda III, al-Kirāza 2001, p. 10. ↩
55. Moftah 1958, Part II. ↩
56. Shenouda III, al-Kirāza 2001, p. 10. ↩
57. al-Kirāza 1999, Moftah’s centenary, p. 6. ↩
58. L. Moftah, “Ragheb Moftah and Coptic Music”, sec. V. ↩
59. L. Moftah, “Scholars of Music”, “Engineer Saleeb Bastawros”. ↩
60. Stock, interviews with Moftah, 1996-97, part 2, 20:40-21:20, tr. ours. ↩
61. Kamel, film on Moftah, 1998, 31:21-31:45. ↩
62. Stock, interviews with Moftah, 1996-97, part 4, 23:50-24:30, tr. ours. ↩
63. Badie, al-Kirāza 1998, p. 17. ↩
64. L. Moftah, “Ragheb Moftah and Coptic Music”, sec. II. ↩
65. Shenouda III, al-Kirāza 2001, p. 10. ↩
66. Kamel, film on Moftah, 1998, 19:06-22:54. ↩
67. Moftah, interview, 1999, tr. HCOC. ↩
68. Badie, al-Kirāza 2001, p. 11. ↩
69. Kamel, film on Moftah, 1998, 29:06-29:21. ↩
70. Stock, interviews with Moftah, 1996-97, part 4, 7:00-14:00. ↩
71. Kamel, film on Moftah, 1998, 29:24-29:45. ↩
72. Badie, al-Kirāza 2002, pp. 9-11. ↩
73. Badie, al-Kirāza 1998, pp. 17-18. ↩
74. L. Moftah, “Scholars of Music”, “Margit Tóth”. ↩
75. Moftah papers, Library of Congress, Moftah to Tóth, 11 July 1970, ihas.200155696. ↩
76. Moftah papers, Library of Congress, Tóth to Moftah, 25 October 1970, ihas.200155792. ↩
77. Moftah papers, Library of Congress, Moftah to Tóth, 2 January 1975, ihas.200155701. ↩
78. Moftah papers, Library of Congress, Moftah to Tóth, 17 May 1972, ihas.200155698. ↩
79. Moftah papers, Library of Congress, Moftah to Tóth, 2 January 1975, ihas.200155701. ↩
80. Moftah papers, Library of Congress, Moftah, draft letter, 2 February 1976, ihas.200155688. ↩
81. al-Kirāza 1985, notice, p. 10. ↩
82. Badie, al-Kirāza 2002, pp. 9-11. ↩
83. al-Kirāza 1996, the contract, p. 2. ↩
84. Badie, al-Kirāza 1998, p. 17. ↩
85. Badie, al-Kirāza 2001, p. 11. ↩
86. al-Kirāza 1989, Berlin, p. 2. ↩
87. Badie, al-Kirāza 1998, pp. 17-18. ↩
88. Badie, al-Kirāza 2001, p. 11. ↩
89. al-Kirāza 1995, Germany, p. 4. ↩
90. al-Kirāza 1998, France and Germany, p. 3. ↩
91. Moftah, al-Kirāza 1993, p. 18, tr. ours. ↩
92. Library of Congress, Moftah finding aid, p. 5. ↩
93. L. Moftah, “Scholars of Music”, “Master Cantor Mikhail al-Batanouni’s Project”. ↩
94. Robertson-Wilson, “How I Became Interested in Coptic Music”, “Later Years” and Ramzy’s postscript. ↩
95. Moftah papers, Library of Congress, Pruett to Moftah, 28 December 1994, ihas.200155683. ↩
96. al-Kirāza 1995, Library of Congress, p. 4, tr. ours. ↩
97. Badie, al-Kirāza 1998, pp. 17-18, tr. ours. ↩
98. al-Kirāza 1999, Moftah’s centenary, pp. 5-6, tr. ours. ↩
99. Badie, al-Kirāza 2001, p. 11. ↩
100. Shenouda III, al-Kirāza 2001, p. 10. ↩
101. Badie, al-Kirāza 2001, p. 11. ↩
102. al-Kirāza 2001, Moftah’s repose, p. 1. ↩
103. Badie, al-Kirāza 2001, p. 11. ↩
104. Shenouda III, al-Kirāza 2001, pp. 10-11, tr. ours. ↩
105. al-Kirāza 2002, the department, p. 4. ↩
106. al-Kirāza 2004, notice, p. 8. ↩
107. al-Kirāza 2005, Mikhail’s recordings, p. 5. ↩
108. al-Kirāza 2008, the digital project, p. 11. ↩
109. L. Moftah, “Ragheb Moftah and Coptic Music”, sec. II. ↩
110. Kamel, film on Moftah, 1998, 16:54-17:03. ↩
111. Stock, interviews with Moftah, 1996-97, part 3, 32:00-32:40, tr. ours. ↩
112. Stock, interviews with Moftah, 1996-97, part 3, 26:00-26:40, tr. ours. ↩
113. Moftah papers, Library of Congress, Moftah to Tóth, [ca. 1974], ihas.200155702. ↩
114. Moftah, interview, 1999, tr. HCOC. ↩
115. Stock, interviews with Moftah, 1996-97, part 4, 31:00-31:40, tr. ours. ↩
116. L. Moftah, “My Memories of My Uncle”, “My Involvement in the Project of the Coptic Music Heritage”. ↩

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