Notes

St. Thomas the Apostle at Mangesh, Kurdistan (autonomous region), Iraq

With this video, we inaugurate the third phase of the Aramaic Project. In this phase, we plan to post as much information as possible from the Chaldean Catholic Church of Babylon. Historically and liturgically, the Syro Malabar Church and the Chaldean Catholic Church are intimately connected. That connection, however, is seldom a part of the daily discourse among the members of the two churches. Both churches claim the St. Thomas tradition. The content of this video reinforces that awareness of the shared apostolic faith. Both churches use the same anaphora of Addai and Mari. Most of the chant texts are the same, but the melodies are different. We plan to collect as many melodies as possible for future researchers for comparative studies. Our introduction to the current status of the Chaldean Catholic Church is the result of a short-lived sojourn of Joseph Thekkedath Puthenkudy, in Mosul, Iraq. Joseph used his time in Iraq to get as much information as possible. But for Joseph, communication on the current musical status of these churches would not have been available to the Aramaic Project audience because the emotional distance between the two churches is longer than the geographical distance. We hope that Ethnomusicology departments in Western universities will make use of these materials for research.

Joseph J. Palackal, CMI
New York
1 March 2020