22 Sep 2006 0821H

Byzantine liturgical songs in Arabic

What with the prevalence of Arabesque musical themes throughout television and movies these days, I thought it might be interesting to start looking into the origins of this stuff. A few years back when Sting had his orientalist hit, Desert Rose, he brought in this famous rai artist, Cheb Mami, to sing backup vocals (which was much better than Sting!) and that led me into the vast world of Arabic music in all its diversity. Since then I’ve been a big fan of this type of music, which to my ears — my Western-trained ears — evokes this tremendous, ancient sense of distance: longing, sadness, separation, loss, beauty.

Here you’ll find a page of what I think are Middle Eastern Greek Orthodox, or Melkite liturgical songs sung in Arabic, by (I believe) Sister Marie Keyrouz of the Order of the Sisters of Basil in Lebanon. My interest in this music was reinvoked partly inspired by that memorable, almost historically unprecedented part of Pope John Paul II’s funeral, where the patriarchs and metropolitans of the Eastern Churches came forward to sing the Office of the Dead, just a really powerful part of the memorial. For a moment there, you could almost feel that the Church was whole again. . . just for a moment.

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