Ms. Amy Hogg: So today we have Chadi Karam with us, and he is the chanter at St. George Antiochian Church in Cicero, Illinois. He is also a composer who has been composing hymns for the Antiochian Archdiocese.

Mr. Richard Barrett: Welcome, Chadi! Great to have you here.

Mr. Chadi Karam: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Ms. Hogg: So can you tell us a little bit about how you started chanting?

Mr. Karam: Sure. So I started at a small parish back home in Lebanon. My hometown has 13 Orthodox churches, and it’s only 100% Orthodox. [Laughter] There are some people from the outside of the town, but mostly Orthodox. So anyway, around when I was twelve years old, I joined the choir, and I was amazed by how some old chanters use those books, and they were reading from them. All what I could see in the books are symbols and broken letters that I could not put together in any way, but what they were singing, it made sense to me. Once I asked what that was, and I was told that it was called Byzantine music. So I started learning hymns by memorizing hymns in order just to chant with our people, with the other chanters at the choir stand. And back then, probably it was in the early ‘90s, there was no formal Byzantine music schools back home. The only thing that was available were recordings of Fr. Nicholas Malek. Basically, [they] were just recordings of what Mitri el-Murr composed. When I showed interest in Byzantine music, someone gifted me the Anastasimatarion of Mitri el-Murr. Luckily, Fr. Nicholas Malek recorded most of the hymns from that book. So I bought the tapes, and I started listening and learning, and at the same time trying to decode the symbols and see what each symbol is doing.

We had an old chanter that used to have a grocery store, so I used to go there and ask him questions. I learned a little bit about those symbols, but the most important thing that made me learn Byzantine music is when I was challenged by my friend, Joseph Yazbeck, who is the director and the one who established SEM, the choir of Mount Lebanon. He was at a more advanced level, just because he used to live in Beirut, and he had contact with some of the chanters in Beirut, like Fr. Romanos Gibran. So anyway, he had a wealth of knowledge about Byzantine music compared to me. So I started asking him questions, and we used to meet whenever he came to the village. By the way, he is from my hometown originally, but he lived—grew up and lived in Beirut.

So he started challenging me by giving me some Greek tapes, mainly for Vasilikos, Theodoros Vasilikos, and asked me to write down the music and adapt them to Arabic.

Ms. Hogg: Oh wow.

Mr. Karam: This is how it started, the whole thing started.

Ms. Hogg: So were these things that Mitri el-Murr hadn’t composed in Arabic?

Mr. Karam: Yes, but just to introduce more variety of hymns, of the same hymns. Probably… I’m not sure if this was the reason, but the style of Vasilikos was so appealing back then. So we wanted to adapt some of the hymns that he used to chant, mainly for Stanitsas, Karamanis.

Ms. Hogg: So were you still in high school when you were doing this?

Mr. Karam: Yes.

Ms. Hogg: Wow.

Mr. Karam: High school, early college.

Mr. Barrett: And this is the book you were talking about, the el-Murr Anastasimatarion?

Mr. Karam: Correct.

Mr. Barrett: el-Qiyamiyyat?

Mr. Karam: Qiyamiyyat, yes. And I started with the doxastika for the Praises. I learned those, and I mainly was trying to focus on how each of the symbols was working. I had no idea about when the tone changed or anything like that until later. First I mastered how to read the neumes, and then I started asking questions about the scales and the tones. And what helped also is most of these tones are used in the secular music, in the Arabic secular music, which— Those tones translate to maqams, the Tone 1, the Bayati Maqam, and so on. So this helped me a lot, figuring out the tones and figuring out how each tone sounds.

Mr. Barrett: And there are— I know you alluded to this earlier, but there are kind of unique challenges with Byzantine notation and Arabic, because the notation is going in one direction, but the language is written in another direction.

Mr. Karam: Correct.

Mr. Barrett: So there is something interesting you have to do while reading it.

Mr. Karam: Right, and this is one of the challenges that I faced when I first started. Then it was explained to me that because the music goes from left to right, they had to write the Arabic from left to right and break it down that way. That’s why it was not making sense to me, because when I first started, I tried to read the Arabic from the right to the left, and it didn’t work.

Mr. Barrett: Right, but the individual syllables are still written from right to left, but they’re arranged left to right.

Mr. Karam: Correct.

Ms. Hogg: [Laughter] Wow. So how long did it take you to feel like you could really read it fluently?

Mr. Karam: Probably four years? Probably four years of constant practice and work. Then, later on, I joined the choir of the Archdiocese of Tripoli, led by Fr. Nicholas Malek, and he accepted me in his choir although I didn’t have a formal degree from the school of music that started later, after I started learning the Byzantine music. But I started with them and I learned a lot from them. That lasted for probably… from five years or six years. And then I moved to Beirut to do my master’s at the American University of Beirut, and I started meeting and chanting with SEM. I also taught Byzantine music at one— I think it was level three, if I’m not mistaken, for a whole year, I think. And then I came to the States.

Ms. Hogg: You said “Sam”: I don’t know who Sam it.

Mr. Karam: SEM, the School of Ecclesiastic Music.

Ms. Hogg: Oh, sorry, I thought you said “Sam”!

Mr. Karam: The Mount Lebanon music choir, SEM. SEM, yes.

Ms. Hogg: Wow!

Mr. Barrett: So what year was that when you came to the States?

Mr. Karam: It was late November 2004.

Mr. Barrett: Okay.

Ms. Hogg: So going to the American school for your master’s, was that in English?

Mr. Karam: Yes.

Ms. Hogg: And had you already studied English?

Mr. Karam: Yes. Originally I was French-educated. The college was French, purely French.

Ms. Hogg: Oh wow.

Mr. Karam: And then I had to take English classes and take English tests in order to get into the program at the American University of Beirut. And I still had to take one English class before— while doing the master’s. Then I came to the States in 2004 for my PhD. I joined the University of Illinois in Chicago and graduated in 2010.

Mr. Barrett: Just out of curiosity, what’s your area of study?

Mr. Karam: It is medical physiology and biophysics.

Mr. Barrett: Okay.

Ms. Hogg: So while you were teaching—and it wasn’t at SEM; it was the school in Tripoli?

Mr. Karam: No, I taught at SEM.

Ms. Hogg: Okay, so while you were teaching at SEM, were you also doing some composing still?

Mr. Karam: Mostly adaptation. Mostly adaptation, but at one point I had to compose the whole service for St. Nektarios in Arabic. That was my first personal composition in Arabic. Other than that, it was mostly adaptations. And also there is— It’s called here Sunday school, but back home it’s like the youth movement. They also have some kind of spiritual songs that we used to do. So these were available on tapes, and I had to write them down in music in order to teach also at Sunday schools. So that also was one of the things that helped me with Byzantine music—not orthography, because for some reason we did not pay attention to orthography back home. And still I can see some compositions from back home that had a lot of mistakes, but this is the way they do it; I don’t understand why.

Ms. Hogg: Can you tell us a little bit more about all the compositions available in Arabic? So, Mitri el-Murr, he did the Anastasimatarion?

Mr. Karam: Yeah, he did a bunch of books, the Menaion, but not all the feasts, like selection from main feasts for the Lord and the Virgin Mary, and some I think for Peter and Paul and St. George, not all the saints. So not a lot is available for everyday from the Menaion. There is the Anastasimatarion. There is the Liturgy, Divine Liturgy book; the Holy Week book and Pascha; and there is the one for the Triodion. I think that’s it.

Ms. Hogg: So it is a similar corpus of compositions as to what we have in English now, or is it more or less?

Mr. Karam: I’m not sure, but mostly yes.

Ms. Hogg: Okay. And in Arabic, you only have one translation, is that right? [Laughter]

Mr. Karam: Correct. Well, let me say that there are some trials now to make the current translation smoother and more understandable, and these are done by Fr. Nicholas Malek and the monk of the Monastery of Hamatoura. This is mainly related to metered hymns. Mitri el-Murr and his son did meter some of the hymns, but they were not that successful, especially with his son. But now what Fr. Nicholas Malek is doing is amazing. He applies— He changes the hymn in order to fit the meter exactly and poetically. And what’s amazing about it is the Arabic is smoother than the original translation. He doesn’t change anything; he just shuffles the sentences and the words in order to make it smoother and fit the meter. Probably he changes one or two words in one hymn, but in general he doesn’t change the whole thing. I asked him about it, and he said that it was done on purpose: he doesn’t want to change the original translation, but he wanted to make it smoother and more understandable by shuffling the sentences or probably changing one or two words at the beginning or the end or the middle of the hymn just to make it fit to the meter. But he’s doing an amazing job.

Ms. Hogg: Cool! So how much Arabic and English do you chant at your church? What’s the split?

Mr. Karam: It’s 50/50.

Ms. Hogg: Oh wow.

Mr. Karam: 50/50 during Matins. During Liturgy it’s 100% English.

Mr. Barrett: And how did you get involved in composing for the Antiochian Archdiocese?

Mr. Karam: That’s a good question. The only reason— Well, it’s not the only reason. It started when I came to the States. There was nothing— Or I didn’t know that there was some available stuff or Byzantine music. All what I heard was some of the chanters in our church chanting music that sounded Byzantine but it’s not Byzantine. When I asked about it, I was told that it was done by Kazan. So I asked about some Byzantine adaptation of this music, and there was nothing available, or at least nobody knew if there was anything available.

So I started working, and my first composition was the Pascha service, because I came in November, close to Christmas, Nativity, and then the next big feast was Pascha, and there was nothing available. At that time, I started working on Pascha. I produced the whole service [where] I was locally. And then of course I composed the way I used to compose in Lebanon. At that time, I was introduced to the Divine Liturgy Project by Fr. Ephraim from St. Anthony, so I started reading his work, and I also found a few mistakes here and there, and I used to send him emails about these typos. One day I recorded my Pascha service, and I sent it to him; I mailed it to him. Then he wrote me back and he asked me— he told me that I broke some of the formulaic rules here and there, but he liked the way I chanted. Then he asked me to chant the cherubic hymns that he produced. That’s how my recordings got on his website, the first five or six cherubic hymns. And then I got busy with my PhD, and I told him that I couldn’t do it any more, especially that I didn’t have the right tools to do the recordings, and time was lacking. So I told him that I couldn’t do it any more, but if it happened and I did it, I would send it to him.

Then he told me about his workshop, about using the formulas and how to put together the formulas in order to compose. So I started using this, and my first attempt was with the post-gospel hymns that are now posted on the website. He corrected them for me, and then I did “All Creation Rejoices in Thee” in the eight tones, and then he corrected this as well. And then I did Simonospetra triple-meter doxology, with the doxa of the holy Fathers, and I sent them to him. He gave me his feedback, and that was it. He was like: I don’t have time… He was about to leave the monastery probably, to go somewhere else, and it stopped there. I started on my own. Of course, my friend, Fr. John El Massih, was aware of my work, and also Chris Holwey, who was the choir director at St. George, Cicero. So we all came together, and we started talking. Fr. John asked me to send him [my] composition, because he was the head of the Byzantine Music Committee, to see if anything needs to be adjusted, just for him to review everything. After he reviewed everything, we uploaded everything on the website, and we started meeting probably once a week or once a month, and we decided what hymns are needed. This is how I started working with them. Now everything I compose, of course, we discuss if it is needed or not—sometimes we don’t; I just compose stuff—and I send it to them for review, just to get feedback, especially when it comes to accented syllables versus non-accented syllables, and stuff like that. And we still do that.

Ms. Hogg: So after you compose it, you send it to them for feedback.

Mr. Karam: Correct.

Ms. Hogg: I know that your compositions are on the Sacred Music Library, but I don’t feel like there’s a way to get notified when new compositions go up. Is there?

Mr. Karam: No, unfortunately, except that I have an email list that I send my composition to people that ask me to, for the music. Every time I do something new, I just email it to them, and sometimes I post it on Facebook.

Ms. Hogg: So on your personal—?

Mr. Karam: Yeah, but there is no notification from the Sacred Music Library. Sometimes Chris puts a note in the right column of the website, but, I mean, that website is not user-friendly, to be honest with you; I hate to go there. [Laughter] But they are working on a different platform, that’s similar to what St. Anthony has, but until now I don’t know about the progress of the full project, but it’s happening sooner or later.

Ms. Hogg: And typically you’re using Holy Transfiguration Monastery translations, is that right?

Mr. Karam: Correct. Yeah, mainly for the metered hymns. I’m not sure about this, but it seems that the Archdiocese is moving towards adopting the HTM translation for everything, not at once but because some people are so attached to the Nassar-Kazan stuff… But it’s happening slowly.

Mr. Barrett: Sure.

Mr. Karam: Yeah, and this is one thing that bugs me all the time is the many English translations that are being used currently in a country that speaks only English. It is a challenge, and it bothers me a lot just because— [Sigh] I mean, there are many people that are using different compositions, but unfortunately we cannot use them because they are not approved by the Archdiocese. I cannot use them in my church because our priest prints out the whole service for the people to follow, and he wants me to use whatever is in the booklet, nothing else, so people don’t get lost. That’s why I cannot use music from anyone else unless it is by HTM or Nassar.

Ms. Hogg: So the resurrectional hymns are generally Nassar, is that right?

Mr. Karam: Correct. And this is one of the things that I was told, that there are some hymns that are engraved in people’s mind and heart. [Sigh] And the Sacred Music Department doesn’t want to get rid of them. Those resurrectional troparia is one of them; the other one is “Christ is Risen.” That’s why, if you look at my Paschal composition, I kept the Nassar translation and did not use HTM for “Christ is Risen,” only this hymn. The other one, I think, “O Lord, I have cried,” and “Let everything that have breath praise the Lord”: yeah, so these are not to be changed, at least for now.

Ms. Hogg: Yeah. So what about “Lord, I have cried” and the stichera? Are you using your own compositions with the Nassar?

Mr. Karam: I am not. If anything, I will either improvise or use St. Anthony’s for now.

Ms. Hogg: Oh, okay. So you can use St. Anthony’s for some things.

Mr. Karam: If it is HTM, yes.

Ms. Hogg: Oh, okay.

Mr. Karam: Because I guess our psalter is from HTM; whatever we use is from HTM, so I think it is approved. So whatever— I think Fr. Ephraim used HTM for these, right? I don’t remember.

Mr. Barrett: Yeah, I believe that’s right.

Mr. Karam: So the psalter that we use is the HTM one for everything, even for the six [psalms] of the matins, and everything else is from HTM.

Ms. Hogg: Yeah, except for our church, we pull out the Nassar book to read the psalms from. [Laughter]

Mr. Karam: Yeah.

Mr. Barrett: Is HTM starting to come into greater use for Holy Week as well, or…?

Mr. Karam: [Laughter] This is a good question. You know, my plan was— After Pascha of last year, my plan was to compose everything for Holy Week from HTM, but until now I don’t see that there is direction from the Archdiocese to adopt HTM 100% or not. That’s why I stopped, but I did finish the third Bridegroom service. I’m not sure; it’s going to be out soon, or published on the website.

Mr. Barrett: And you have a Kassiani, you have a “Let all mortal flesh keep silence” for Holy Saturday, you have a “Give me this Stranger” for— Yeah. And that’s all HTM?

Mr. Karam: Not “Give me this Stranger”; it’s Nassar’s.

Mr. Barrett: Okay, that’s right.

Mr. Karam: And “Let all mortal flesh” is Nassar’s as well.

Mr. Barrett: Okay.

Mr. Karam: But the rest of the Holy Friday service, the vespers—not the vespers—the Lamentations service is from HTM. The Pascha is from HTM; Palm Sunday and Lazarus Saturday are from HTM. And now I finalized the third Bridegroom service from HTM. And just last night I finished the Pentecost, from HTM.

Mr. Barrett: Congratulations!

Mr. Karam: Thank you!

Ms. Hogg: That concludes the first part of our interview with chanter and composer Chadi Karam. Join us next time to hear more about his past compositions, his upcoming projects, and to learn about the difference between analytical and classical compositions.