Polyphonic Arrangement of Coptic Hymns?

cyril

غلغوثا ( مايسترو بيشوى عوض ) ( Gholghosa ( Bishoy awad:

cyril

cyril

Loose, remit, and forgive us, O God, our iniquities which we have committed willingly and which we have committed unwillingly, which we have committed knowingly and which we have committed unknowingly; the hidden and the manifest, O Lord, remit for us.


http://tasbeha.org/hymn_library/view/193
From the Liturgy of St Gregory

minasoliman

Wow...it almost sounds natural...especially Golgotha...where can I hear the rest of this?

Remnkemi

What does "sound natural" mean? To me it doesn't sound natural at all. It sounds foreign, which automatically makes it unnatural.

The main question is why? Polyphonic hymns are completely foreign to Egyptian music (both Christian and Islamic). Taking a monophonal or antiphonal hymn and recreating it as polyphonic implies that the monophonal/antiphonal composition was lacking. If this is the case, one needs to prove it first (at least acknowledge the reason for this identity shifting). 

It is completely unnatural to drastically change musical identity like this. Of course, many modern songs are given different renditions, for example, country to rap, for commercial profit. But for ecclesiastical usage? It's a bad idea. 

It's no different than taking Amazing Grace and recreating it as an Charismatic, evangelical, concert song. It's not the same song. Take a look for yourself at this moderately conservative rendition () then take a look at a more liberal rendition () and finally take a look at an extremely liberal rendition (). Now tell me if the any of these renditions are the same as the original version. Is there actually any legitimate reason to musically recreate Amazing Grace into something it is not other than personal preference for the original version? 

I understand this Bishoy Awad was simply using personal musical creativity to present Coptic hymns in a different light. This is admirable. But when personal preference and personal creativity leads to a discussion on the benefit of new renditions (as seen on other threads), with the implication that it is better than what we have now, then personal creativity and modernity becomes a tool for the devil. 

Just like the Amazing Grace re-renditions, these Coptic hymn renditions, to me, seems like a strange blend of modernity mixed with a musical preference for polyphonic Eastern Orthodox musical style. (Even the clothing and facial expressions hint at modernity.) Why don't we just make Bol Evol or Golgotha in Plagal 4th or Tune 3 and drop our current descriptions of Adam/Batos hymns (and of course, drop the white tonias too)? At least if we do this, we'll no longer be using "antiquated" or "inferior" hymns/terminology and inferior musical transmission (because the whole world knows if it ain't written down, it's superstitious folk music).

And like all "modern" performances of "hymns" today in the Coptic Church, we have to add emotionally charged pictures in the background to keep people attentive. This is especially true for Arabic "madeyah" trending in most churches during the liturgy . Give it another 5 years or so, and we will only accept Coptic music videos from a future Coptic MTV to be used in church. Long gone are the days when the words and context of the hymn with minimal musical accompaniment was the only important characteristic of ecclesiastical performance. There is a reason why nearly all the Church fathers banned musical instruments from ecclesiastical usage. I wonder what they would say about emotionally charged video and picture backgrounds for Orthodox praise?

minasoliman

I'm not commenting on the video. Just the audio. We don't have any audio proof of how hymns were chanted except what is handed down. But since polyphonic is an ancient chant, one wonders if perhaps there has been Coptic hymns that might have been chanted in that manner. That is what I meant when I said "natural." It sounds like it fits as if it was an ancient rendition, not a modern remix. Of course I'm not musically adept, so what do I know. I can chant, but I know nothing of musical theory and all that jazz (pun intended).

cyril

Remnkemi said:

Why don't we just make Bol Evol or Golgotha in Plagal 4th or Tune 3 and drop our current descriptions of Adam/Batos hymns (and of course, drop the white tonias too)?

That's a rather good idea. Let's raise the liturgical bar and make things beautiful again.

:P

Remnkemi said:

And like all "modern" performances of "hymns" today in the Coptic Church, we have to add emotionally charged pictures in the background to keep people attentive. This is especially true for Arabic "madeyah" trending in most churches during the liturgy

The emotionally charged pictures are a strange trend it's true. I've seen them in Coptic Churches in North America, Europe and Egypt and the middle East, the 'evangelical' influenced as well as the die hard 'traditionalist' ones.

ophadece

@Remenkimi,
Thanks very much for your comments and explanation on different aspects of modernisation in the church.
can you now see how big tv screens, laptops, iPad and the like, and HDMI connections are doing to the liturgy and the Church?
oujai khan ebshois

Remnkemi

Cyril, I hope you realize that when I said " Why don't we just make Bol Evol or Golgotha in Plagal 4th or Tune 3 and drop our current descriptions of Adam/Batos hymns (and of course, drop the white tonias too)? At least if we do this, we'll no longer be using "antiquated" or "inferior" hymns/terminology and inferior musical transmission (because the whole world knows if it ain't written down, it's superstitious folk music).", I was being extremely facetious and sarcastic. It is not only stupid to change our Coptic hymns to Byzantine style music, our description of musical terms and our use of liturgical vestments, it is actually impossible without dismissing our own heritage. When a EO says Plagal 4th it means something very specific musically. Throwing it into Coptic hymns, will dismiss the Coptic music of the hymn in its entirety. You can't want it Coptic AND EO because it will become NEITHER Coptic nor EO.

And it would not be raising the bar at all. It would be loosing your identity. I'll give you an example from archeology. When the Europeans came to Egypt to identify and "study" ancient Egyptian monuments and heritage, they came with their ethnocentric superiority complex. In a frontispiece from "Description de l'Egypt" which shows the "landscape" of Egypt as all Pharaonic monuments (no Coptic building, no Islamic buildings, no Bedouins, nothing but Pharaonic). They simply erased thousands of years of Coptic, Arab, Islamic heritage because their imperialism only wanted a Pharaonic Egypt. Around the border of this landscape is a Roman figure with spear (mimicking Apollo or Alexander the Great) with Napoleon's face chasing after the Mamelukes. Here we see an overt example of ethnocentricity that is actually a lie. The picture implies the Napoleon expedition liberated Egypt from Islamic and Coptic filth. (This is also actually written in the Book). Another example is the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. It's founder put a plaque honoring heroes of Egyptology. These are 6 Franks, 5 Britons, 4 German, 3 Italians, a Dutch, a Dane, and a Swede. Not a single Egyptian on the list. In another statue of the museum, an Egyptian women is portrayed as how the Europeans saw Egyptian women (with revealing female anatomy). They threw on the name of an Egyptian Khedive in Latin which no Egyptian can read. (All of this is Donald Reid's "Whose Pharaohs?" pp. 2-6) This is what happens when you throw out your identity. It is stolen by someone else who portrays it whatever way he wants - which is always factually wrong or extremely insulting. That is not raising the bar. 

Remnkemi

minasoliman said:

I'm not commenting on the video. Just the audio. We don't have any audio proof of how hymns were chanted except what is handed down. But since polyphonic is an ancient chant, one wonders if perhaps there has been Coptic hymns that might have been chanted in that manner. That is what I meant when I said "natural." It sounds like it fits as if it was an ancient rendition, not a modern remix. Of course I'm not musically adept, so what do I know. I can chant, but I know nothing of musical theory and all that jazz (pun intended).

Absence of evidence is not evidence. One can wonder all they want if Coptic hymns may have been polyphonic. But there is absolutely no evidence. In fact, the scant evidence we have of musical transcription and musical heritage shows a completely unique heritage not found anywhere else. In fact, when the EO, Eastern Catholics and Melkites continued in Egypt, they mostly adopted Byzantine chant from Constantinople and Jerusalem. Had polyphonic music existed in Egypt, there would be no need to adopt Byzantine chant and terminology. 

And for the record, Byzantine chant is not as ancient as most people think. Byzantine manuscripts date to the 12th-15th centuries. Some evidence is found in John Damascus and Andrew of Crete in the 10th-11th century. Conversely, while we can only tell for sure what Coptic music sounded like since the 19th century because of Ragheb Moftah's work, but we have manuscript evidence of terminology and practice from the 10th-14th centuries. So Byzantine chant is not any more ancient than Coptic music. Coptic music's monophonic and antiphonal style we have now is as "natural" as polyphonic Byzantine music. 

Given the fact that the audio in these renditions are a polyphonic based on Coptic monophonic originals which never found anywhere in antiquity, there is nothing we can call it except a "modern mix". 

dumbegyptian1

Just throwing my two cents in here about music history if anyone is interested.  Mononphonic chant is far older than polyphonic chant.  The oldest existing evidence we have for Western polyphony is from the 10th century.

minasoliman

Thank you!  I stand corrected :)

katanikhoros

While it may be true that monophony is older than polyphony it does not rule out the case that Coptic hymnology was ever chanted polyphonically. Remenkimi is right, we don't have musical notation and therefore we don't know. 

Before we ask ourselves whether polyphony can be adapted to Coptic music, one must answer whether Coptic music is allowed to evolve at all (as it already has very likely done). We already have seen examples of popular renditions of hymns evolve and overelaborate on notes over the past century.

It is also a known fact that Byzantine music was originally monophonic and then developed to become polyphonic. This does not take away from the original spirit but actually enriches it, if done in a proper way.

While I admire Bishoy's creative endeavour I fear that he has taken the western route of harmonizing our hymnology rather than seek to do it from an Eastern musical perspective, the one our hymnology was born in. We have examples of Arabic Byzantine hymns with eastern scales similar to those used by Coptic Music, that have employed harmony without sounding any less Eastern.

While much of our hymns are very Egyptian in style, many others are Greek/Byzantine (early form of it) influenced. So do we invite polyphony to enrich the music, or do we outright condemn it because it wasn't there when we first heard the hymns? That's the question we should be asking, is it okay for our hymns to evolve or should they remain virtually the same as they've been since musical notation and recording equipment were introduced to Coptic hymnology in the 20th century?

Remnkemi

"It is also a known fact that Byzantine music was originally monophonic and then developed to become polyphonic."

Katanikhoros or anyone else, please provide some evidence or reference for this claim. I don't think Byzantine music was monophonic at any point.

"This does not take away from the original spirit but actually enriches it, if done in a proper way."

This all depends on what you mean by "enriches it" and what a "proper way" is. These subjective terms are somewhat misleading. Without clear definitions, one can easily argue that polyphonic music negatively impacts liturgical praise. (The example I gave before applies. Polyphonic music, at least to me, distracts from the words of the praise and subverts it to musical accompaniment.) 

"We have examples of Arabic Byzantine hymns with eastern scales similar to those used by Coptic Music, that have employed harmony without sounding any less Eastern."

Even if we use Arabic Byzantine scales (which are not very different than EO scale) or Arabic Islamic scales (which are still very different than Coptic music), we are still using a foreign system on Coptic music. It becomes a question of why bother in the first place. The fact that one must "harmonize" Coptic music in itself implies an inadequacy or an inferiority of Coptic music.

"While much of our hymns are very Egyptian in style, many others are Greek/Byzantine (early form of it) influenced."

I assume you mean Greek hymns like Christos Aneste, Ton synanarkhon, E pantheons. All of these hymns are still monophonic in the Coptic Church. If anything, Coptic music style influenced the Greek hymns, not the other way around.

"So do we invite polyphony to enrich the music, or do we outright condemn it because it wasn't there when we first heard the hymns?"

It is not a matter of our personal preference, or how we first heard the hymns. It is a matter of the sociopolitical forces of ethnomusical development. Social musicologists have questioned whether music is a reflection of the society or if music is a catalyst that changes the society. The examples of Amazing Grace I showed above is a reflection or a time stamp of the evolution of contemporary evangelical music. In an American, liberal society, this is welcomed. But in a conservative Orthodox society, it is often resisted for many sociopolitical reasons. Coptic music should evolve IF IT IS DONE ORGANICALLY for the right sociopolitical reasons. Changing Coptic music so we sound more like the EO, Catholic, or modern opera is a bad sociopolitical reason. Changing Coptic music because it reflects a changing Coptic diaspora that wants to retain ancient practices of spirituality to improve the spirituality of Copts in a new geopolitical environment is a good sociopolitical reason. 

This assumes of course that the that the good reason isn't a cover screen for the bad reason...which is clearly the problem we have now. Whether it is the so-called Coptic "missionary" movement, or the so-called "reform" of the Sunday School curriculum, or the so-called "need" to abandon the Coptic language to address the pastoral needs of the diaspora (good reason), the ulterior, hidden reason behind these calls to change has always been personal preference (don't want to learn the Coptic language, don't want to hear Coptic hymns, don't want to hear melismatic hymns, don't want to learn theology, don't like Coptic music over guitars, drums, Christian country, Christian rap, Christian rock, Christian heavy metal, and now polyphonic Byzantine chant, etc). 

katanikhoros

Polyphony being incorporated after chant has already been established in its basic melodic line: https://www.academia.edu/447148/Some_Aspects_of_the_Polyphonic_Treatment_of_Byzantine_Chant_in_the_Orthodox_Church_in_Europe

Original Byzantine hymnology in earliest written form are plainchant like Gregorian music originally was, but was adopted to allow for base notes, and different keys: http://www.asbm.goarch.org/articles/early-christian-and-byzantine-music-history-and-performance/

What I mean by enrich is that different voices are allowed at the same moment to sing at different levels of key. It brings a variety of different pitches that follow the same basic melodic line. So while it has a subjective connotation to it I also mean it in a practical sense.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to change the essential nature of Coptic music to fit any other church chant. When people are against polyphony, their argument is usually that it doesn't work for eastern music (like Arabic), which Coptic hymnology is a part of (and yes it does share many scales with other middle eastern musical genres with its own slight modifications, I know that because I play an instrument and know a little bit about music theory). 

The point I was making is that EO Arabic Byzantine chant is very eastern sounding, but it was able (and I am simply showing you how it is a possibility) to adapt polyphony to the music to enrich it with variation. I am not arguing for harmony, I am simply showing you that it is possible without betraying the original spirit to adapt it (which unfortunately I think Beshoy has westernized the sound of our hymnology).

No the Byzantine influence is in our liturgy (from Fraction to Confession) and Gregorian introduction to the Anaphora (E-Aghapi) and probably a number of other hymns from the past.  

God Bless

Zoxsasi

God bless Bishoy Awad

I've never actually seen this fellow in Church, despite also being from Paris. I'd have thought he'd have been a deacon.

Vol Evol is indeed a beautiful hymn. Its lovely to hear the westernised accents when they chant this. Isn't it?