Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia 9 March 2026
coptic music: notation of liturgical music
Michael Y. Henein Keywords: Notation of liturgical music; Arabic maqam; Cantor; Coptic chants; Coptic Church; Coptic Church–Liturgy; Coptic Orthodox Liturgy of St. Basil; Coptic singing; Coptic studies; Liturgics; Liturgical music; Music, Coptic; Music history; Musical instruments; Musicologists; Oral tradition of music.
Many ancient sacred music traditions, such as Greek, Syrian, or Ethiopian, had a kind of musical notation, so it would be reasonable to hypothesize that notation might also have existed in coptic music. The earliest profound development of Coptic music notation in our time was made by Ragheb Moftah, who solicited the task of notating Coptic music from non-Copts and non-Egyptians who were renowned musicians. Two important examples of these musicians were Ernest Newlandsmith and Margit Tóth (Moftah et al. 1991: 1742–1743b).
Newlandsmith’s objective was to document and preserve some of the Coptic hymns chanted by Mu’allim Mikhail al-Batanuni (Moftah et al. 1991: 1736b ff.; see also mikha’il jirjis, mu’allim). Tóth accomplished the notation of the St. Basil liturgy as chanted by a group of priests and chanters, and her notation was published as part of the liturgy’s formal publication in 1998 (Moftah et al. 1998).
1. Development of Coptic Music Notation Although scholars are still looking for fragments of the early Coptic music notations (Ménard 1952), their meaning can only be speculated, since changes in most orally transmitted music, over time, are unavoidable. This is particularly relevant in Egypt, where cultural changes from the Middle East would naturally have influenced indigenous Egyptian music. Nevertheless, a few Coptic manuscripts have been found with potential musical signs. The oldest document is a Christian hymn found in Oxyrhynchus (al-Bahnasa) (Kuhn 2014: 71) dating back to the third century. Additional manuscripts with points or lines above the texts can be seen in Manchester (P. Ryland Copt. 25–29) and Leiden (Insinger 41). Some scholars suggest that the colored points and circles of the Gulezyan manuscripts may indicate musical notation but there is no general agreement (Robertson 1993; Kuhn 2014: 73).
In his Catalogue of Coptic Manuscripts in the Collection of the John Rylands Library, Manchester (Crum and Crawford 1909: 14–15), Walter E. Crum reproduces a few tenth- and eleventh-century fragments that contain signs of a primitive notation. Some words contain from four to six acute accents set to a syllable, with the tonic accent suggesting a melismatic pattern. There are other accent marks—single, double, triple, and even quintuple—that represent the extent of what we know of the Greek ekphonetic notation. The dot appears above or below a note, alone or in conjunction with other signs. In addition, these fragments of lyrics, particularly the ones in the Greek language, include the circumflex accent and an S-shaped mark, which might be interpreted like the Latin oriscus (a sign for a particular sustained note). Some texts, next to the translated Coptic lyrics, in the Crum catalogue indicate which tone is to be used, that is, the tones adam and Watos, commonly used in the Coptic Church.
In contrast to the Coptic Church, Western musical notation was developed earlier in churches in various parts of Europe, including Spain and Italy. Many of the earliest music notations were for choral music, with the notes being typically indicated above the word or syllable of the sung text. The European church music of this period, known as plainchant or Gregorian chant, is named after Pope Gregory the Great (AD 590–604). However, exact pitches © Claremont Graduate University 1 Michael Henein, Coptic Music: Notation of Liturgical Music 9 March 2026 were still not specified at that time, only whether a note should be higher or lower than the previous one. This problem was solved by introducing horizontal lines to the music notation. A single line appeared initially, but before long, all plainchant was notated in churches and monasteries using a system based on a stave of four horizontal lines. This stave is usually attributed to the Italian Benedictine monk Guido of Arezzo (AD 991–1033). In “Micrologus,” a treatise on music notation, he also used the initial letters of a hymn to define musical pitches. These letters were ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la. In most countries, ut became do, and centuries later, with the addition of ti, the system came to be called the sol-fa notation, which was taught in many schools. Various rhythmic indications were introduced from about the thirteenth century (Karp 1973: 267).
More detailed information about the history of Coptic music notation can be found in Carolyn Ramzy’s chapter in The Coptic Christian Heritage (Ramzy 2014: 160–176) and summarized on the Library of Congress website (Ramzy n.d.).
2. Twentieth-Century Attempts to Notate Coptic Music Under the sponsorship of Ragheb Moftah, the English musicologist Ernest Newlandsmith spent ten years (1926–1936) notating Coptic chants, and eventually produced sixteen volumes of music, most of which are stored in the institute of coptic studies in Cairo, with copies in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. (Moftah 2006). Newlandsmith transcribed the chants using conventional Western notation, from live performances of the cantor Mikhail al-Batanuni, the most famous Coptic cantor of that era, as well as other cantors. Newlandsmith ignored most of the embellishments and instead described the difficulty of stripping the music of Turkish, Arabic, and other influences that he believed had crept in. In a lecture delivered at the University of Oxford on 21 May 1931, Newlandsmith said:
“It is true that I had to dig deep; for the original Egyptian element lies largely buried under an appalling debris of Arabic ornamentation. But after piercing through this unfortunate outer coat, the true Egyptian idiom has emerged. The music is not Arabic, Turkish, or Greek. It seems indeed impossible to doubt but that it is ancient Egyptian. Moreover, it is great music—grand, pathetic, noble, and deeply spiritual.”
(Newlandsmith 1931) In 1950 the second movement of recording Coptic music started, and René Ménard, a French Jesuit monk, wrote primarily theoretical tracts concerning the “problems” of Coptic music. In two articles, “La musique copte: problème insoluble?” (Ménard 1952) and “Une étape de l’art musical égyptien: la musique copte” (Ménard 1954), Ménard claimed that the Western notation system cannot indicate all the nuances of rhythm and expression in Coptic music. He suggested that certain ancient signs used in notating Gregorian chant, along with the modal identification system of the seventh century, might be considered for that task. Using this modal system Ménard formulated a theory of tonal organization in Coptic music. He denoted most of the melodies that are employed during the first “musical” part of the liturgy, from the opening of the Liturgy of St. Basil to the recitation of the Eucharist, as “minor modes,” whereas some of those sung in the Holy Pascha week he called “major modes.” Throughout his scholarship, Ménard, supported by the eminent German musicologist Hans Hickmann, constantly reiterated his belief that Coptic chant is a present-day living form of early Gregorian chant, a “living link between the past and the present” (Ménard 1953: 34–44).
Ilona Borsai and Margit Tóth, both educated in Hungary, were commissioned by Moftah to notate the Liturgy of St. Basil, which took three decades and was published in 1998. Borsai focused on the structure of the music, having recognized the importance of the embellishment used by various cantors (Borsai 1979: 5–27). On the other hand, Tóth paid Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia 2 Michael Henein, Coptic Music: Notation of Liturgical Music 9 March 2026 significant attention to the ornamentation, which made her notation highly complicated for even trained musicians, let alone inexperienced Coptic singers, to perform (Moftah et al. 1998; Dobszay 2000). Marian Robertson’s transcriptions (Moftah et al. 1991: 1722–1724), in contrast, are famous for being much simpler. Although she recognized the richness of the embellishments that had occupied Tóth, Robertson elected to remain with the simple pattern identification and recognition of its repetition in different hymns (Robertson 2001: 412). A number of musicians have recently attempted to notate different hymns and songs used in the Coptic Church, some from the St. Basil Liturgy and others from various other services and celebrations. One example is the catalogue of notated hymns by Fr. Abraam Georgy, who notated more than 2,000 pieces, based on the available audio recordings of different cantors.1 Fr.
Abraam Georgy claimed that his notation adhered to the principal skeleton of the hymns and ignored individualistic embellishments by the cantors. Joseph Khirey has succeeded in notating hymns of the Holy pascha using Western notation and published in a user-friendly book (Khirey 2024). Furthermore, Khirey used advanced music software to assist music learners in associating the respective notes to the chanted melody. Unfortunately, these activities are individualistic and hence carry significant limitations. Before discussing those limitations, we must highlight the nature of singing in the Middle East. Because of the significant lag in having viable notation systems, singers in many different cultures developed the habit of free improvisation. This culture invaded the Coptic Church and has now become a desirable goal on some occasions. With this in mind, one can list a number of limitations in notating Coptic music. The most important is the source of the hymns, which can vary significantly between cantors, and even when sung by the same cantor, because of the many varying embellishments they adopt. Transcribing those hymns, even by the same person, is likely to result in significantly different scores that would confuse a professional orchestra attempting to reproduce them. Ideally, transcribing hymns should be made by a cantor experienced in singing clear notes, which should help the musician to notate them. The second limitation arises from the musician notating the hymns.
An experienced musician who is also a singer may succeed in filtering out the embellishments and stick to the original skeleton of the hymn, whereas a musician who does not know the hymn is likely to notate all details including embellishments, as was the case with Margit Tóth and her notations in the St. Basil Liturgy music book. Perhaps a more structured approach involving different singers and various musical schools could guide toward more robust and critically researched notations of the current orally transmitted Coptic music.
In the early 1970s a Hazzat (sung notes) documentation was promoted in some Coptic institutions, led by the late Fr. Shenouda Anba Pishoy, then known as Deacon Salib el-Kess Dimetry. This method of note documentation involves inserting a few lines on the chanted vowels representing the musical notes. In a way the Hazzat transcription could be seen as a contemporary reproduction of the old Greek ones published in the Crum collection discussed above. Over time, people improvised upon this method and introduced long and short lines along with arrows and dots to help chanters discern upward and downward movements of the melisma (long chants of vowels). Some organizations have now standardized those lines and signs, having produced books for different seasonal services using this pattern. It must be said that such attempts only help deacons who already know the hymn well to have confidence in chanting it by looking at those signs, as just a reminder of different movements and the length of musical sentences. The Hazzat method, however, does not help a novice to read these lines and movements and make a melody out of them. Thus, he cannot sing a meaningful hymn from the first look, since those lines do not provide accurate pitch, time signals, rhythm, and so on, in contrast to the conventional musical stave with all its details (see Ramzy n.d.).
This significant limitation in teaching Coptic music strengthens the recommendation of using the conventional Western notation patterns for optimum chanting education.
Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia 3 Michael Henein, Coptic Music: Notation of Liturgical Music 9 March 2026 3. Developments in Coptic Notation in Europe The St. Kyrel Choir and Orchestra started their activities in Europe in 2007, with two groups of youth from the United Kingdom and Paris, supported by a small group from Alexandria, Egypt. They grew quickly in number, presenting concerts in many European countries including the United Kingdom, France, The Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, and Poland, and also in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Canada, and Egypt. These concerts included The Anointed Servant, The Creation, The Incarnation, Anastasis from Darkness to Light, Nystia, Theophania, and Parousia.
Such activities required accurate notation of hymns and biblical chants in order to guarantee harmonious performances between the choir and the orchestra. Similarly, the continuous entry of new choir members required intensive rehearsals to maintain accuracy and uniformity. Thus, the only means by which consistent music performance could be achieved was by writing the music using the Western notation style that is internationally accepted, taught, and practiced in Egypt and abroad.
Osama Fathy, the chief musician of the St. Kyrel Orchestra, was the master in notating the concerts and highlighting the unique patterns of specific pieces and their differences from conventional Western and Arabic music and scales (maqams). Furthermore, the continuous discussion of unique Coptic music patterns opened avenues not only for better understanding the relationship between the music and the lyrics of the hymns, but also to devise research projects for some choir members to find similar patterns in other commonly practiced hymns and chants in the Coptic worship services.
4. Benefits of Accurate Music Notation of Coptic Hymns As mentioned above, Coptic music is very rich in microtones that cannot be sung or notated using the Western style in isolation. Adopting a strategy of chanting the exact notations should lay a strong foundation for standardizing sung hymns and provide good unification between choirs and churches. Those accurately notated hymns could be the foundation for teaching Coptic hymnology in schools and other institutions, and consequently would help in converting the oral tradition into an established written tradition, hence resolving the problem of free improvisation. Accurate notation of Coptic hymns will also assist in easier playing of this microtone-rich music using instruments including violins, lutes, nays, and qanuns. It would also allow for academic music analysis, which would lead to a better understanding of the power of the hymns’ lyrics for choirs and congregations to enjoy and adopt in worship (Henein et al. 2020b; Henein 2022).
As part of my PhD thesis at Canterbury Christ Church University (Henein 2022), the St. Basil Liturgy music for both priest and congregation was accurately notated using Western scores in conjunction with Arabic microtones. This study demonstrated clearly the importance, feasibility, and benefits of simplifying the scores that had been produced by Raghib Moftah and Margit Tóth in 1998 which proved to be extremely difficult to play, even by the best professional musicians. The latter also suffered from the limitation of sudden drops in chanting pitches due to Mikhail al-Batanuni’s advanced age, which made it difficult for him to sustain a high pitch.
An example of the first two lines of Alleluia Fai Pepi (This is the day that the Lord has made…) by Moftah and Toth (on the top) compared with Salama and Henein (at the bottom). Note the difference of complexity between the two sets of scores, with the lower one easily sung and played by contemporary instruments.
Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia 4 Michael Henein, Coptic Music: Notation of Liturgical Music 9 March 2026 The same principle of simplifying the music notation was applied to all parts of the St. Basil Liturgy chanted by the priest (Henein et al. 2020b) and to the congregation responses (Henein et al. 2023), which enabled easy playing of the music with contemporary Eastern music instruments in order to match the vocal chanting of the St. Kyrel Choir, included in the thesis mentioned above. In addition to the justifiable simplicity of the notations, critical music analysis confirmed a number of important observations which should be incorporated in hymnology curricula taught at music institutes and schools.
Firstly, the dominating music scale (maqam) throughout most of the priest’s chanting is Huzam, which reflects the spirit of joy and happiness (Henein et al. 2020b). The same scale overwhelms most congregational responses despite various small deviations to other scales (Henein et al. 2023), whose objective seems to be to better describe the meaning of specific parts of a hymn and to emotionally or spiritually interact with it during prayers. Overall, the music analysis defined the chanted dominating scale (maqam) of individual prayers, which showed beautifully how the music draws a clear icon of the deep meaning of those prayers. It also helped to demonstrate that the St. Basil Liturgy according to the Coptic rites is musically made of seven sections and identified the specific music pattern characteristic for each of the seven sections. This musical structure sheds light on the liturgy’s meticulous musical design as well as the potential development of the composition of the currently practiced liturgy over the years. The music analysis also demonstrated objective evidence for a unique pattern of Coptic music in which more than one scale/maqam is sung in a very short time duration, one that could be as short as a few seconds. This finding confirms the significant difference between Coptic and Arabic music in both style and composition.
Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia 5 Michael Henein, Coptic Music: Notation of Liturgical Music 9 March 2026 Part of the above analysis addressed the potential Byzantine musical origin for the Greek responses chanted in the St. Basil Liturgy according to the Coptic tradition. These responses were recorded from the two traditions, notated, and compared. The analysis shows that the currently practiced Greek responses in the Coptic Church do not share their melodies with the Greek tradition, despite using the same lyrics (Henein et al. 2020a). This finding refutes the proposal that the origin of Coptic music is from Greek.
5. Conclusion Coptic music notation over the last century can be considered a series of experiments, with early attempts as trials and more recent ones allowing accurate scientific analysis. More rigorous work needs to be done toward standardization of a simplified yet accurate notation that can be considered an official documentation of this precious musical heritage.