PROGRAMME

ENSEMBLE ORGANUM

Marcel Pérès: voice

Jean Etienne Langianni, Ahmed Saher, Antoine Sicot, Frédéric Tavernier, Luc Terrieux: voice

Byzantine Chant, Old Roman Chant and Samaa Moroccan (sufi)

The sung word in Christianity and Islam
Church of Rome Chant, Byzantium Chant, Moroccan sufi and mozarab chant

I
The Call to Prayer (Mozarabic chant)
Per gloriam nominis tui Christe, filius dei vivi
For the glory of Thy name, Christ, Son of the living God.

Muslim Call to Prayer
Allaho akbar
God is great

II
Alleluia: Beatus homo (Mozarabic chant)
Blessed is the man who Thou hast instructed
Kam laka mine ni'matine alaya
I owe Thee, Lord, all thanks

III
In omnem terram exivit sonus eorum
His voices will resound through all the earth
Tahya bikom kolou ardine
Thou givest life to the earth

IV
Hymns from the 9th Ode for Pentecost
O thou who in virginity gavest birth to the Son of God

V
In splendoribus sanctorum (Old Roman chant)
In the splendour of the saints, before the morning star shone, in the womb I begot thee

VI
Alleluia: De profundis clamavi ad te Domine (Mozarabic chant)
Ya mane ida kolto ya mawlaya labani
From the depths, O Lord, have I cried unto Thee
O Lord, Thou hearest my invocations

VII
In memoria eterna erit Justus (Mozarabic chant)
Homo al jibalo.
The just man will be held in eternal memory
Faith will be lifted up like the mountains

VIII
Epistle for the Sunday after Pentecost (Byzantine chant)
The holy martyrs fought for justice with the offering of their blood

IX
Paschal Kyrie (Old Roman chant)

X
Beatitudes in the 1st mode (Byzantine chant)
By his transgression, Satan expelled Adam from Paradise; by the Cross, Christ has pardoned him

Alleluia : Videant pauperes (Mozarabic chant)

Tarakto baba arraja (Moroccan samaa)
Let the poor see and be saved.
I knocked at the door of forgiveness, and turned again to hope. 

Synopsis

The purpose of this concert is to make tangible the fundamental organic unity of the art of cantilation behind the three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

The reading of sacred texts sung is a characteristic common to the practice of all religions. The repertoires, which over the centuries have built the spiritual heritage of humanity, are either amplifications of different reading techniques, or elements to punctuate the space between two readings. This program connects four directories, Old Roman and Mozarabic chant, Old Byzantine chant, and the Moroccan Samaa. The Samaa (Arabic word which means religious listening) is a repertoire still in use in most Muslim countries, but in Morocco an original version of this repertoire is well preserved. This repertoire has gradually formed during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in mystical brotherhoods composed by men who gathered to sing poems, extolling their feelings of piety and feeding their religious reflection. Al Andalus seems to have been the place where this vast repertoire drew most of his texts and especially his music.

Mozarabic chant is the old of Christian song in Spain during the Muslim administration. There were several Mozarabic repertoires. The Mozarabic liturgy has stabilized over the sixth and seventh centuries, but its origins were much older. It was an expression of religious culture developed in North Africa from the second century and whose sphere of influence extended to the south of Gaul with the bishop of Arles as representing a certain authority theological. Musically, the song of the fifteenth century Mozarabic is very close to the Moroccan Samaa.

The Byzantine chant, is a dynamic living repertoire in the Orthodox Church, and therefore as such has always been a source of creation over the centuries. But in some of his songs, some very old dating, back to the early days of Christianity, are still in use.

The old Roman chant, whose origins date back to late antiquity, was the singing of the great Roman basilicas until the thirteenth century. The year 1999 has providentially offered the opportunity to realize an old dream: to revive the Mozarabic chant of the fifteenth century, with Moroccan singers educated in the tradition of Samaa. At our first meeting in 1998 in Casablanca, I began to sing excerpts from the Mozarabic chant and they instantly began to answer to me, singing songs from their repertoire. Spontaneously was established a musical dialogue. Beyond language, religion and time, we were talking about the same thing with the same accents, same intonation, understanding each other’s. We had the same kind of experiment many years ago, in 1985, with Lycourgos Angelopoulos, director of the Byzantine Choir of Greece, when we began to study the common origins of Byzantine chant and of old Roman chant. The audition presented here tonight reflects these experiences.

We have selected Mozarabic, Roman and Greek songs which present musical analogies with Samaa, as well as lyrics that resonate with Sufi poetry. Their alternating built a similar path than the one practiced in Muslim brotherhoods’ ceremonies. Alternating of songs groups - with a strong scansion - and recitatives in which, naturally, different singers will respond by making arise from a sentence from their memory, or stanza of a poem that will gradually build a spiritual journey, which the master of ceremonies, with appropriates interventions, leads towards the direction he feels the need be.

This concert is designed as a prayer vigil, where people meet, share and live in the act of singing the same experience. Even if the language and the mediators are different, through music reborn the echo of the original cultural unity, which was the ferment of Christian and Muslim civilizations, in the continuity of the worship, sung the Temple of Jerusalem.

Every religion, and within them, each stream, unfolds within a time which is own. First condition for dialogue and meeting is open to the time of the other. No medium, better than song, can fulfil this function and thus open the way for understanding the genetic codes of the spiritual.

Marcel Pérès