The music that holds it together
My musical formation happened in two traditions, in two places, in two languages. What I learned first, I learned in Egypt — the Coptic hymnody, the mode of the liturgy, the voice as the first instrument. What I learned next, I learned in California — a Western vocabulary of strings, brass, and jazz. What I learned last, and what holds the other two together, is the oud.
In Egypt
I grew up in Upper Egypt, in a Coptic family where the hymnody was heard before it was studied. I was ordained a chanter in the Coptic Orthodox Church — the first of the minor orders, and the office that consecrates the task of reading and chanting the Scriptures, the Synaxarium, and the hymnody of the liturgy aloud in the congregation’s hearing. I came to the office because I already knew some of the hymns. That was unusual — most boys are taught the hymns in order to be ordained. For me, the order was reversed: I had absorbed the repertoire by osmosis, in the rhythm of daily liturgy, and the ordination was the church’s recognition of something already there.
The formation is oral, inherited from cantor to student, and it is not principally musical. It is catechetical. To chant a text is to read it at the speed the tradition has decided is right for it, with the voice the tradition has decided is appropriate. The melody carries the meaning; the meaning carries the melody. This is the pedagogy I grew up inside, and it bears on the scholarship in a specific way: the manuscripts I study were not made to be read silently. They were made to be voiced. When I read them, I hear them.
In America
When my family moved from Upper Egypt to the Bay Area, I began what was effectively a second musical education — the formal Western one that had not been available to me in Egypt. Having moved to San Ramon, I started in my elementary school’s orchestra on violin in the fourth grade. In the sixth grade I moved to cello. From seventh grade onward the double bass was my main instrument, though I played cello for specific settings. The double bass allowed me to join the jazz band in middle school. By high school, not only was I playing bass, but I was also conducting the school orchestra.
In the summer of 2018, my family moved to the California Central Valley. During my time in Ripon High School, I also learned tuba and adjusted to the different discipline of concert band. The decade had given me more than a second musical vocabulary. It gave me a way to understand what music was in a culture that was not the one I had grown up in. The hymnody I had inherited was communal, liturgical, slow, and aural. What I encountered in America was written, individual, secular, and virtuosic. These are different things. A violin concerto and a Coptic Psali are not doing the same work. It took time to understand that they did not have to — that they could both be real, both be serious, and that I could live inside both.
What I could not yet do was find a single instrument that spoke both languages at once. That would come in the same summer of 2018.
The Oud
On July 8, 2018, my grandmother brought me an oud from Egypt. It was the instrument I had wanted, and had been, in ways I did not fully understand at the time, waiting for. The oud does what neither of my earlier two formations could do alone. It speaks the musical language of the Coptic hymnody I grew up inside, because the Coptic liturgical tradition has for centuries shared vocabulary with the wider Arab musical world. It also speaks the language of formal Western training — the precision, the classical discipline, the technical vocabulary of a concert instrument. On the oud, the two traditions that had felt incommensurable could be held in the same hands.
For the first year and a half, I worked on learning and absorbing the fundamentals: Arab classical repertoire, technique, and the ear training particular to the modal system. I had attempted to play Coptic hymns, albeit informally. In December 2019, I started an Instagram page called Coptic Oud, and began posting arrangements and performances of the Coptic liturgical repertoire on the instrument. The naming mattered. Coptic Oud was not a fusion, and not a crossover. It was the existing Coptic repertoire, carried by an instrument that belonged to the same musical world the repertoire had come from.
In 2020, the page exploded. What had started as an Instagram experiment from my bedroom reached a much wider audience than I had anticipated — Coptic at first, hungry for a tradition they loved presented in a form that felt contemporary without being diluted, and then further afield. From there the work spread onto Spotify, Apple Music, and the other streaming platforms.
The invitations followed in a sequence I did not anticipate. In 2021, on a trip to Egypt, the topic of my oud came up in a conversation between my father and his father of confession — the priest who was, that year, responsible for the Logos Youth Forum. He invited me personally. I attended the following year. On Wednesday, August 24, 2022, during His Holiness Pope Tawadros II’s weekly sermon at the Logos Center, I was given the chance to play before him. The piece was Just Like a Bird, a traditional Coptic melody. The sermon was broadcast on the official channels of the Coptic Church, which meant that what had begun in the four corners of a bedroom had reached, for one evening, the whole of the church. Later that same year, in December 2022, I was invited to play with the Seraphim Chorus at a Coptic church in New York.
In November of 2023, my close friend Danny invited me to join the small group he was putting together for the press preview of Africa and Byzantium, the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition that traced the long history of African Christianity — the Coptic tradition among them — as Byzantium knew it. We performed as a group from all over North America, and thus I coined a name to codify into existence the family I have come to call home away from home, The Coptic Chorus of North America. Our repertoire was four hymns from the Coptic Holy Week liturgy, arranged in paschal order: the entry into Jerusalem, the crucifixion, the burial, the harrowing of Hades, and the resurrection. Some of the texts are shared with the Byzantine rite; the music is strictly Coptic. The earliest written records of these hymns date to the fourteenth century, though the melodies almost certainly existed well before.
It was, to our knowledge, the first time Coptic chant had been prayerfully performed inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The hall that has long housed art and culture from across the world was for those moments given over to hymns from ours — the icons, manuscripts, and artifacts on display becoming a window through which the early centuries of our tradition were brought into the present.
Afterward, Archbishop Damianos, the abbot of the Monastery of St. Catherine in Sinai, told Danny and me that what we had done was not really a performance. It was, in his words, a spiritual prayer that we all felt. That is the thing I carry from that day. What we offered was what the tradition calls λειτουργια — the work of the people before God, a small participation in the Divine beauty we behold at the altar every day. The Met made explicit what Coptic Oud had been pointing at without my knowing: that the music, the text, the liturgy, the scholarship, and the dissertation I was soon to begin — are all the same offering.
Each of those invitations arrived at a doorstep I had not been knocking on. Each step was also filled with doubt and worry that I would not be equal to the moment. What I can say, looking back, is that I was carried by divine grace — by something other than my own plans and effort, whenever it was time to be carried. Coptic Oud became pivotal to who I am. It was the practice in which I found myself as a Coptic American — the place where the two sides of my formation stopped being separate worlds and began to speak to each other.
In 2024, I entered my doctoral program at Claremont Graduate University. For the first time, the music and the scholarship began to meet each other.
The Same Negotiation
On reflection, the oud is not an adjacent practice to the scholarly work I do. It is the same work in a different register. My dissertation is on the Copto-Arabic Synaxarium — a set of liturgical texts that exist at the precise hinge where Coptic Christianity, in its ancient indigenous language, began to speak Arabic. The manuscripts I study contain both languages, often on the same page, in the same sentence, in uneasy and generative coexistence. The tradition was negotiating its own identity — Coptic and Arabic, native and borrowed, continuous and translated — in ink.
That is exactly what happens on the oud. The Coptic hymnody and the Arab musical tradition have been conversing with each other for centuries — not always comfortably, not always intentionally, but continuously. When I play, I am doing at the level of sound what the scribes of these manuscripts were doing at the level of text. The negotiation of Coptic and Arabic is not incidental to who I am. It is who I am. And it turns out that the studying of that negotiation, from inside a doctoral program at Claremont, and the performing of that negotiation, on the strings of an instrument my grandmother carried across the Atlantic to give me — are the same thing.
Looking back — the chanter ordination as a boy, the Bay Area orchestra rooms, my grandmother’s oud, the invitations that came without my asking for them, and now the dissertation that is about to make explicit what the music has been doing implicitly for years — I do not see a series of accidents. Each stage was preparing me for what I did not yet know was coming.
Listen
A practice session moves through three registers: classical training from the Western curriculum, then pieces by classical Arab composers, then applying what has been practiced to the Coptic hymnody I already carry in memory. Recordings from that practice are available on the platforms below.
The Coptic Hymnal I compiled, drawing on the repertoire of the Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt and the diaspora, is in print for chanters and parishes. See Publications.