Songs Before the Cataclysm

SOME OF THE WORLD’S oldest spiritual music has been recorded, and thus preserved—just in time—thanks to a punk-rock drummer/photographer.

The ancient city of Aleppo, Syria, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and considered one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. Since 2012, when the Syrian civil war moved in to the area, Aleppo has been ravaged by fighting, and many of its inhabitants killed or made refugees.

Several years before the war began, Jason Hamacher embarked on an accidental odyssey to capture the sights and sounds of Aleppo, not knowing he might be the last to do so before the Old City, the historic city center, was destroyed.

Hamacher moved to Washington, D.C., in his teens and spent his high school years exploring a dual identity that would stick: Christian and son of a Southern Baptist preacher, and drummer in D.C.’s vibrant hardcore punk scene. Since 1993, he has recorded and toured with Frodus, Decahedron, Battery, and Regents. When he found himself between bands in 2005, he and some fellow musician friends who were also Christian vowed to search for new sounds in old spiritual music.

On a cell phone with bad reception, one of the friends told him to check out Serbian chant. Hamacher misheard it as Syrian before the call dropped. That triggered a memory of a book he’d read a few years earlier, William Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain, which recounted tales of the oldest existing Christian chant in a church in Syria. Hamacher contacted Dalrymple to ask where he might find recordings of these chants. The author responded that none were available, but suggested that the musician visit Aleppo to hear it for himself, supplying specific instructions to give to a taxi driver in order to reach the right church.

Hamacher wasn’t ready to take off for Syria yet. Instead, he found an email address for the Syrian Orthodox Church and wrote to explain what he was seeking. The email turned out to belong to the office of the archbishop in the U.S., who was intrigued by Hamacher’s interest and invited him to New York for a discussion. Hamacher was game, though a bit intimidated by the formality of his host’s office.

“I was Googling ‘how to address an archbishop,’” he says. “I didn’t want to offend anyone. These are the people who voted on the New Testament!”

The U.S. archbishop could not help him, though. He confirmed that recordings of these ancient chants did not exist. Something clicked then for Hamacher. “I said, wait, you mean there really is no recording? Well, then, do you want me to make one?”

With support from the archbishop, Hamacher set out on what he calls his “crash course” in Syrian and Orthodox culture. He was hosted in the home of the archbishop of Aleppo, Mar Gregorios Yohanna Ibrahim, who introduced him to people throughout the city as well as those who came to call. One morning the people who sought out Archbishop Ibrahim ranged from a struggling widow in need of financial support to a British journalist wanting an interview to Prince Michael of Greece, who stopped by to say hello while visiting Aleppo.

“The archbishop turned to me and said, ‘Jason, this is Prince Michael. Tell him what you’re doing here.’ Again, what do you say to someone like that?” Hamacher invited the prince and his wife to accompany him to hear a choir perform later that night. They accepted, and seemed to enjoy their evening.

“One of the things I learned is that just honestly engaging with someone is how all of this happened,” he recalls, years after his evening with royalty. “It was ‘this is the idea—are you in?’ Everyone, for the most part, has been in.”

HAMACHER, IN PARTICULAR, has been all in. Between 2006 and 2010, he made multiple trips to Syria. Sometimes he concentrated on photography, shooting pictures in holy sites around the Old City and of the Citadel of Aleppo, a structure perched on a hill where Abraham is believed to have milked his flock of sheep. He undertook a project for the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale University to capture video footage of liturgical practices. He recorded chant traditions of the Syrian Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, and Assyrian/Chaldean Christian communities.

In what turned out to be his last trip to Aleppo in 2010, Hamacher realized he had no recordings of Islamic chanting. In particular, he wanted to capture recordings of Sufi chants, a mystical expression of Islam. Hamacher asked a Syrian Muslim friend who played violin if he knew where to find such a performance. The friend laughed and explained that most such Sufi performances were less than authentic.

“There are a lot of people doing that music as cultural entrepreneurs, as someone called it. ‘You want to hear Sufi stuff? Okay, I’ll learn it, I’ll dress up and get paid to play it.’ People were kind of doing it like cover bands. It’s great that you’re playing a John Cougar Mellencamp song, but it’s way better to see John Cougar Mellencamp play it.”

Fortunately the violinist knew the real deal. His great-grandfather had been a sheik in a Sufi order that produced the most famous singers in the Arab world. The friend took Hamacher to meet with men between the ages of 17 and 50, who were gathered at a 500-year-old building next to a mosque. Several stood outside smoking and joking around. Two younger men chased and kicked each other like schoolboys at recess. Hamacher wondered if this group could coalesce into singers worth recording. They retreated inside, donned white robes, formed a circle, and began to produce a cappella tones that reverberated with reverence and history. His misgivings disappeared.

“After they finished, I asked one of the guys, Fawaz—he was the oldest of the group—what did I just hear? His direct response was, ‘This is how we fight terrorism.’”

In 2014, Hamacher released a CD of these recordings, Nawa: Ancient Sufi Invocations & Forgotten Songs from Aleppo, an album that became Volume 1 in a projected series, Sacred Voices of Syria. (Volume 2, Forty Martyrs: Armenian Chanting from Aleppo, is due out in  April.) Although he had been working on these projects for years, he needed some convincing to make the recordings public.

“Once the war got really involved, I stopped working on everything. I just stopped. Because I did not want to feel like I was capitalizing on the destruction of the country. I didn’t want to do anything that could be misconstrued as taking advantage of people who housed me for so long.” His personal connection with Syria hit especially hard in 2013 when he learned that Archbishop Ibrahim, his gracious host, had been kidnapped while returning to Aleppo with the Greek Orthodox archbishop. Their driver was killed and both men taken; their whereabouts remain unknown.

Friends began to ask him if Aleppo was really the violent, devastated place being shown on television. That wasn’t the Aleppo he knew. He realized he needed to circulate this music to wider audiences. “American consciousness was being exposed to Syria only through violence. I wanted to say, yeah, this is happening, but let me show you what else it’s like.”

The punk ethic Hamacher has always taken to heart is to blaze your own trail. But this was a trail he never intended to set off on. “Someone said, oh, this is great, you get to live your dream. This was not my dream. I didn’t dream of [making these recordings]. I just thought it was ludicrous that it hadn’t been done before.”

When in Syria, Hamacher had been surprised that people did not define themselves by their religion. “There was just one example after another of a pluralism there that I didn’t know existed.” He was also surprised at how encounters with Orthodox Christianity strengthened his own faith. Growing up in a Southern Baptist culture, he absorbed a message that high liturgy churches—Roman Catholic, Orthodox—were suspect, and most likely not practicing the right kind of Christian faith.

“Going to an Orthodox church, I realized it’s the same basic format as a Baptist church. There’s a procession, Bible readings, songs at the beginning. I felt far more connected to my faith through those experiences. Everyone’s location has, for the most part, defined the way their faith has been practiced. There are eight different forms of chants in the Syrian Orthodox church, based around villages where they originally were sung. Just like there’s East Coast hip-hop and West Coast hip-hop.”