Cambridge welcomes Lebanese choirs for unique musical collaboration

Choirs from two Lebanese universities will join fellow students from St Catharine's College next week in a series of performances designed to fuse the musical traditions of East and West.

The initiative, which was set up by the Cambridge College, is not just an unusual musical collaboration, but a chance for two sets of students whose worlds are a far cry from one another to work together.

Many of the visiting choristers, from the American University of Beirut and the University of Balamand in Tripoli, experienced first-hand the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, while only last month the entire Balamand campus had to be shut down amid renewed violence between the Lebanese army and the Al-Qaeda-linked organization, Fatah al-Islam.

Over the course of three free concerts in Cambridge, Ely Cathedral and Oxford, they and the St Catharine's choir will perform a mixture of Western Baroque music and Arabic chant. The aim is to draw out the common origins of these two different strands of traditional choral music by bringing the choirs' distinctive vocal styles to each.

The project is the brainchild of St Catharine's Director of Music, Dr Edward Wickham, who is a frequent visitor to Lebanon and has worked there with student choirs on a number of occasions.

“This is a rare and precious opportunity for our students to experience from the inside something of the richness of Middle Eastern musical traditions,” he said. “At the same time, it is a chance to meet and work with students from a troubled country with which we are only familiar from dramatic news reports. Their experiences are vastly different from those of our own students and for some it is the first time they have been able to leave Lebanon, let alone travel as far as Britain.”

The programme, entitled “Quadduson: Sacred Songs from East and West”, is a blend of movements from Dieterich Buxtehude's cantata cycle Membra Jesu Nostri and Byzantine, Marronite and Gregorian chant.

In the build-up to the event, the St Catharine's students will be learning the principles of Arabic chant, in particular the “Ison” – the drone which hums underneath the central melody. The Lebanese choristers will also have chance to practice the English tradition. By putting them side by side, the two choirs will try to tease out the similarities and see how easily each tradition adapts to coping with the other.

In total, about 45 choristers (both Christian and Muslim) will be taking part in the experiment.

“Testing the similarities between these styles is not something that has really been done before on such a scale,” Dr Wickham added. “There is a common ancestry within this type of music that goes right back to the birth of Christianity, if not before. To an untrained ear, Arabic chant sounds rather like a Muslim call to prayer, but in fact it is Christian music based on the same principles as Western tradition, which has grown and developed in an entirely different way”.

The schedule for the three concerts is:

Wednesday, 27 June, 7.30pm – Merton College Chapel, Merton St, Oxford.

Thursday 28 June, 1.10 pm - Ely Cathedral, Ely, Cambs.

Saturday 30 June, 6.00 pm - St Catharine's College Chapel, Trumpington St, Cambridge.

Admission to all the performances is free, although there will be a retiring collection. Tickets can be reserved by Emailing music@caths.cam.ac.uk