Zema, the Chant, and the Signs Above the Words

Zema, the Ge'ez word for the chant of the Ethiopian and Eritrean churches, begins with this letter. It is not a single style. The tradition divides its music into three modes, ge'ez, ezl and araray, and the mode is chosen by the day and the occasion rather than by the singer.

The chant carries a notation of its own. Small signs called melekket are written above the words of a liturgical text, and each one stands for a whole melodic formula rather than for a single pitch. That means the notation is not readable as music by anyone who has not already learned the formulas by ear, which is a different arrangement from Western staff notation and a common one in liturgical chant traditions. Kay Kaufman Shelemay and Peter Jeffery's anthology of Ethiopian Christian liturgical chant sets out how the system works and how it is taught.

The training is long. A cantor spends years in the traditional church schools learning the repertory, the notation, and the poetic form called qene, and the schools are organised into stages that a student passes through in sequence. A liturgical manuscript therefore carries two systems of marks at once, the fidel and the melekket, and reading only the first tells a visitor what is being said and nothing about how.