Deggua of St Yared

Ethiopian tradition gives its chant a founding legend of great beauty. Yared, a deacon of sixth century Aksum, was a poor student until, watching a caterpillar persist up a tree, he returned to his books, and in time three birds from paradise appeared to him and carried him to the heavenly Jerusalem, where he learned the song of the angels.

Returning, he sang before the ark of Zion, and Ethiopia had its chant. The legend's most loved scene has him singing before Emperor Gebre Meskel, both so rapt that the emperor's spear, resting point down, pierced Yared's foot and neither noticed until the song ended, whereupon the emperor offered any reward and Yared asked leave to retire to the wilderness to pray. Beneath the legend stands a real tradition.

The corpus ascribed to Yared, above all the Deggua, the great antiphonary, orders chants across the liturgical year in three modes, ge'ez, the plain first mode, ezl, the grave mode of fasts and funerals, and araray, the brighter mode of feasts, which the tradition reads as figures of the Trinity. Yared is venerated as a saint of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, patron of its music, and the church has never ceased to sing what it believes he brought back, making the Deggua one of Christianity's oldest continuously performed chant repertoires.

The Deggua is a working liturgical library. Its chants, in Ge'ez, cover the Sundays and feasts of the Ethiopian year, with companion volumes serving the fasts and the Divine Office, and its transmission is a living educational system. Boys enter church schools and progress through years of study, memorizing text, learning the three modes, and finally mastering the notation, the melekket, a system of interlinear signs developed within the tradition in which letters drawn from Ge'ez words cue whole melodic formulas, one of Africa's indigenous musical notations.

The masters of this learning, the debteras, are a distinct order of cantor scholars, neither priests nor laymen, who perform the chant with sistrum rattles, prayer staffs and the slow liturgical movement called aquaquam, so that the great services unfold as sung, swayed theology, drum, rattle and antiphon together. Scholarship reached the tradition in earnest in the late twentieth century, when Kay Kaufman Shelemay and Peter Jeffery published a multi volume anthology of Ethiopian Christian liturgical chant, transcribing and analyzing the system and its history, and manuscript digitization projects now preserve Deggua copies scattered through Ethiopia's monasteries. The tradition they document is not a survival but a practice, sung through the night at every major feast wherever the Ethiopian and Eritrean churches gather.