Roman, Byzantine and Arab Influences on Coptic Traditional Liturgical Music and the Importance of Microtonal Inflections

Abstract

Traditional Coptic music is composed of liturgical chants sung homophonically by men. Its first musical notations date only from the nineteenth century. Music cultures do not exist in isolation but tend to adapt to their surroundings. Hence often even some folkloristic elements can be found in them. Copts prefer to seek their identity in the pharaonic past. However, stylistically musicologists of the nineteenth/twentieth century were colored in their vision of this, for them unknown, mysterious music, by their own time in their efforts to bring it within the scope of their understanding. In this article I want to draw attention to the influences of the three most important music cultures that have surrounded Egypt for such a long time, both in the past and partly still today.

http://dx.doi.org/10.5913/jcscs.2020.49876213