With One Voice and One Heart: Orthodox Chant as a Tool of Resistance for Middle Eastern Christians

In a 2021 interview, celebrated Lebanese Byzantine chanter Ribale Wehbe said of her success, “I have been listening to Oriental songs and chants since I was in my mother’s womb. She’s a teacher, she loves kids, and this is how she raised us: with her beautiful voice.”[1] Wehbe’s sentiment echoes strongly throughout the Orthodox world, where tradition, identity, and theology is disseminated primarily through oral transmission. Through its liturgical services, the Church, typically depicted as a feminine, motherly figure, nurtures the souls of believers in a sonic caress. It stands to reason that the voice of the Church would be a woman’s. Why, then, are women's voices noticeably absent from Orthodox liturgical spaces? 

In this paper, I seek to explore the role of Orthodox liturgical music in preserving the religious and cultural identity of Middle Eastern Orthodox Christians in a context of minoritization. I will discuss oral tradition as representative of an intergenerational, ancestral bond holding Orthodox communities together across time and space, allowing them to resist assimilation into the dominant cultures of Islamic society and Western Christendom. I will highlight non-standardization and embodiment as two aspects of chanting that enable this resistance throughout times of persecution. Further, I will emphasize the role of women in the successful transmission of oral traditions, advocating for the increased accessibility and visibility of women in Orthodox liturgical music. I will conclude by discussing enduring barriers to women’s participation in chant and highlight contemporary efforts by Coptic and Greek Orthodox women to overcome them.

While attempts to standardize notation for Byzantine and Coptic chant have had some success in preserving the auditory experience in written form, these efforts hold little relevance for the average chanter. As only a negligible minority of chanters are trained to read such notation, chanting relies primarily on auditory transmission between individuals. As opposed to conformity to a standardized system, this method encourages robust local variation between regions and stylistic innovation to suit the vocal capabilities of each chanter. During periods of political oppression and ecclesiastical dysfunction, these variations enable the continued survival of the tradition, as it is dispersed throughout the polity rather than held within a centralized authority. Likewise, non-standardization subverts clerical hierarchy, providing a rare access point for women’s contributions to the development of liturgical practice. 

As an embodied practice, chanting enables the mobility of Orthodox identity across time and space, as it is linked to the body of each individual worshipper rather than to a sacred object, authority figure, or consecrated space. When those objects, figures, and spaces are made inaccessible by violence, forced migration, religious suppression, etc., the voice of the body of Christ endures. This holds particular relevance for preserving Orthodox identity between homeland and diaspora. Further, by barring women’s participation in this embodied practice, women’s bodies are consequently dislocated from the worship itself, making them reliant upon male figures as a screen through which their experience of worship must be filtered. 

Moving beyond a theoretical analysis, I will conclude this paper by addressing the theological justifications and systematic barriers barring women from representation in liturgical music. Finally, I will highlight initiatives by Coptic and Greek Orthodox women to expand access to chanting, such as the “Coptic Women Sing” project, spearheaded by Mariam Youssef, and the St. Kassiani Byzantine Choir of the Greek Archdiocesan School of Byzantine Music, organized by the nuns of All Saints Monastery. 

[1] Ribale Wehbe, “Lebanese Female Chanter Ribale Wehbé: There is nothing more beautiful than to know how to praise God,” by Basilica.ro, OrthodoxTimes.com, November 3, 2021.