Musicology Colloquium

Musicology Colloquium
“Coptic Chant: Transcribing the Clash of East and West,” by Dr. Mena Mark Hanna, Dramaturg at Houston Grand Opera.
4:00 p.m., Room 1131

The music of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt is undeniably very ancient; it has been suggested that the general corpus of chants in the Coptic Church have been preserved and practiced for over a millennium as an oral tradition. Understanding this music can help resolve some of the paramount questions facing musicology today: the nature, consistency, and constancy of oral traditions, and the circumstances under which early Christian music developed. In order to investigate such questions, further study and transcription of this music is urgent.

In my research of Coptic Chant, I endeavour to combine the rigors of specific analytic research methods adopted from Byzantine chant study, with ethnomusicological concerns, such as the imposition of Western musical constructs on Coptic music through transcription and how this oral tradition is taught and maintained. This lecture will aim to provide a detailed account of the history of Coptic chant transcription into Western notation in the 20th century, recounting an initial intellectual foray into what I hope to be my continual investigation of this music.

Mena Mark Hanna, DPhil, is dramaturg at Houston Grand Opera. Recent publications include articles in the Oxonian Review of Books, Coptica Theologia, and Ex Tempore Journal of Music. As a composer, Dr. Hanna has had premieres at the Abbaye de Royaumont, Asnières-sur-Oise, France; Institute for Contemporary Art, London, England; Festival Acanthes, Metz, France; the 92nd Street Y, New York, NY; the Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Darmstadt, Germany; and the Festival degli due mondi, Spoleto, Italy. He is the recipient of the Marshall Scholarship, the Surinach Commission Award, the BMI Young Composer Award, the John Lowell Osgood Dissertation Prize, and Merton College’s Prize Scholarship. Dr. Hanna holds a DPhil from Oxford University.