Ethiopian tradition tells that the deacon Yared, in the Aksum of the sixth century, was carried in spirit to heaven, heard the song of the angels, and returned to teach it to the church; the emperor Gebre Meskel, the story adds, was so transported listening that his spear pierced Yared's foot and neither man noticed. The attribution is tradition rather than documented history, but what it explains is real and extraordinary: the zema, the chant system of the Ethiopian church, with its three modes, ge'ez, ezl and araray, its own notation of interlinear signs developed to fix the melodies, and its great books, above all the Deggua, the antiphonary for the year ascribed to Yared himself.
The chant is the possession of the debtera, a learned order of cantors who are neither priests nor deacons, whose training in the church schools takes decades and covers chant, poetry and sacred dance. At the high feasts the debtera perform the aquaquam, the slow liturgical dance with prayer staff and sistrum to the beat of the kebero drum, a form of worship the church traces to David dancing before the Ark and which exists nowhere else in Christendom with such fullness. UNESCO and the musicological world have treated the zema as one of the great independent chant traditions of the world, a judgment the church would accept while stating the origin differently: that the music was heard, not composed.