This article is an ethnomusicological investigation of mode and emotion. It addresses connections between musical modality and emotionality by studying a musical phenomenon in the chant of the Syrian Orthodox Church of Antioch. The article proposes that a certain construct in Syriac chant, locally known as ḣ asho, lies at the intersection of emotionality, spirituality, musicality and knowledge, and mediates multilayered modalities of being and song. Focusing on Passion Week modal practices and on the ethnic overtones of ḣ uzn as religious emotion, this article studies the emotional power of music in terms of its aesthetics of affection. In doing so, the article proposes an understanding of music based on an emotionally inscribed economy of aesthetics.

As a monophonic song type originating in early Aramaic Christianity, chant in the Syriac-speaking church has long fascinated music scholars. This continuously practised Levantine tradition is little understood, despite the increasingly global presence of Suryanis who strive to maintain their liturgical tradition at home and in the diaspora. Owing to multiple waves of migration, Aramaic Christians are increasingly present in Europe and the Americas. The historical home of this autochthonous population remains, however, Mesopotamia and the Eastern Mediterranean, although in steady and rapid decline. The current severity of the decline of these local communities is unprecedented in modem history due to the violent expansion of military–religious extremism under the guise of the Islamic State (IS), which has expelled Christians from large swaths of Iraq and Syria since June 2014. The long-term effects of such adverse circumstances remain unclear, but developments since 2003 have spurred attention to the cultures and musics of East Christian communities, necessitating a reassessment of the relationship between scholarship and these musical traditions.

For Urfalli Suryanis, an ethno-religious migrant community from Turkish Urfa/Edessa, chant is of paramount importance. Using Syriac, the fugitive Christians who escaped post-WWI persecution continue to practise this ancient oral musical tradition in their new home in Syria. This minority group has a communally agreed conception of identity that should be understood in its proper set of terms. Their conception of Suryaniness may best be seen through particular chants from the Edessan school of Syriac chant they practice in St. George’s Syrian Orthodox Church of Aleppo. Focusing on an example from Great Lent, this chapter traces the local terms of an Urfalli Suryaniness that is believed, lived, constructed, and performed, around a unique blessing. The chapter contextualizes expressions of Suryaniness in the local terms of being and belonging, where the Suryani ideal is manifested in the combination of demographic existence and a performative reconstructive process that relates to faith, place, time, history, memory, and language.

Sense and Sadness is a story of the living practice of Syriac chant in Aleppo, Syria. To understand and explain this oral tradition, the book puts forward the concept of the emotional economy of music aesthetics, an economy in which the emotional and the aesthetic interrelate in mutually indicative ways. The book is based on observing chant practice in the Syrian Orthodox Church in contemporary contexts in the Middle East and beyond, while keeping as its nexus of analysis the Edessan chant of St. George’s Church of Hayy al-Suryan and focusing on Passion Week. It examines written sources on the music of Syriac chant in light of ethnographic analysis, thus combining various modes of knowledge on this problematic subject. This historically informed reading of an early Christian liturgical tradition reveals contemporary modes of significance in the dynamic social and political surroundings of a community that endures exile after exile. The book thus places the music, and its subject(s), in a global context the only stable element of which is uncertainty. The first of the book’s four parts addresses issues of contextuality, such as geographic and temporal situationality, along with musical complexity in conceptions of modality. The second and third parts address overlapping modes of knowledge and value, respectively, in the musical ecclesiastical enterprise. The final part brings together the book’s subthemes. Spirituality, ethnic religiosity, authority, and value-based forms of identification and sociality are brought to bear on analyzing ḥasho: the mode, emotion, and time of commemorating divine suffering and human sadness.

This chapter scrutinizes conceptions of modality in relation to emotionality and aesthetics by addressing written forms of knowledge on the eight ecclesiastical modes in Syriac chant. It begins by presenting basic terms in existing discourses on the subject, then it examines a number of written sources (touching on issues relevant to orientalism and European musicology). The chapter develops a critical narrative on the concept of mode in three ways. First, it extracts from written tracts on the subject information that corresponds with the author’s ethnographic observation of living practice. Second, it dissects the concept of mode in Syriac music scholarship by tracking its sources and employment. Third, it brings to light the significance of perception and experience as they coincide in inherited knowledge in this aural tradition. In showing at once the presence and the absence of physical and metaphysical thinking in these writings, the chapter brings the notion of spirituality to the study of emotion and the aesthetic.