Syriac Chant

Syriac Christianity produced its theology in verse before it produced it in prose, and the man who fixed that habit was Ephrem, a deacon at Nisibis and later at Edessa, who died in 373. His characteristic form is the madrasha, a stanzaic hymn with a refrain, written to be sung rather than read, and used to argue. Ephrem's hymns take positions against Bardaisan, Marcion and Mani, and they do it in metre, on the reasonable assumption that a congregation will remember what it has sung.

The madrasha is built on syllable count rather than on the long and short quantities of Greek or Latin verse, which means the metre is audible to any speaker and does not require training to follow. Each hymn is headed in the manuscripts by the opening words of another hymn, which names the melody it is to be sung to. There are several dozen such melody models in the surviving headings, and the system assumes that a singer already knows them, because nothing in the manuscript records the tune itself.

That assumption is the tradition's great strength and its great vulnerability. It allowed an enormous body of hymnody to be written down cheaply, without a notation, and carried for sixteen centuries by ear. It also means that where the oral chain broke, as it did in places under Ottoman rule and again in the twentieth century, the words survive with no way back to the music. What is sung now is not, and cannot be shown to be, what Ephrem heard.

Syriac Christianity split along the christological arguments of the fifth century, and its chant split with it. The West Syriac churches, which today include the Syriac Orthodox, the Syriac Catholic, the Maronite and the Syro-Malankara, order their melodies in the Beth Gazo, the treasury of chants, a repertory of melody models distributed across eight modes that rotate week by week through the year. The East Syriac churches, the Assyrian Church of the East, the Chaldean Catholic Church and the Syro-Malabar Church, order their office through the Hudra, the cycle, with its own repertory and its own way of assigning tunes.

Calling these two dialects of a single tradition understates the distance. They share a language, a founding poet and a set of forms, and they diverge in the melodies themselves, in the assignment of modes and in the shape of the office those melodies fill. Someone trained in one does not simply sing the other, which is why the atlas records the churches on either side of the divide as holding the same tradition differently rather than as holding the same thing.

The geography is wider than the name suggests. The Church of the East carried its chant along the trade routes as far as Central Asia and China, and its surviving eastern extension is on the Malabar coast of India, where East Syriac chant is still sung in Kerala. The proportion actually sung in Syriac now varies sharply: some communities keep it almost entirely, while others have moved much of the office into Arabic, Malayalam or English, keeping the melodies and changing the words they carry.