Marilyn Accaoui Leignel

Marilyn ACCAOUI LEIGNEL, Singer, Musicologist, Composer, Designer and Poet, specialized in the Ancient Sacred Modal Musical Traditions of the Levant, is ordained 1st woman reader/cantor by Archbishop George Khodr (Lebanon) who says that her voice is "one of the most beautiful treasures of the Middle East". She participated along with a small group of cantors in the creation of the SEM choir of the Orthodox Christian Diocese of Mount Lebanon.

Her artistic passion is part of a tireless mystical search nourished by the quest for eternal love and beauty. She specialized in graphic arts as well as in musical arts and musicology of the sacred traditions of the ancient Levantine East. She also cultivated a passion for ancient languages, history and theology.

She writes poetry on divine/courtly love, which she sets to music, and leads voice and improvisation workshops on modal and Rumi (Byzantine) musical theories of the ancient East. She has worked with musicologists, university professors, musicians, artists and people from all walks of life to bring modal musical theory closer to practice.

In 2011, she composed the music, poetry and songs for a documentary film (Sderot, Last Exit by Osvalde Lewat) dedicated to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and to Jerusalem.

For a little less than two decades, she has been undertaking with a musicological and linguistic approach a work of adaptation of Rumi (Byzantine) music to the French language, whilst taking into account the inflection of phonology, prosody and syntactic structure of this language.

She is the first artist to have adapted the drone of Rumi (Byzantine) chant to Syriac sacred music, Aramaic, Old Roman and Sufi musical tradition.

In Africa (Comoros and Senegal), to simplify the approach to musical composition, she has made local artists as well as young audiences work on the verbal rhythm and implicit musicality of the texts of leading poets of the French language from the XIVth to the XIXth century.

"Queen of Sheba/Saba" is the nickname she was given during the presentation of her concert in Besançon at the festival of "Summer Evenings 2012" at the end of a modal music workshop that she animated. A nickname that comes from the fact that she created the mode "Saba Malika" in the repertoire of oriental music already rich, as part of her research in musicology and her work on an experimental scale.

She has given concerts in Asia, Africa and Europe in several festivals. She sang in Russia in Saint Petersburg with the choirmaster and conductor of MusicAeterna Theodore Currentzis. During the filming of a clip for Easter, she composed live in Aramaic (the language of Christ), the Easter troparion "Christ is risen from the dead", and sang the same troparion in Arabic in the traditional melody. She also improvised/composed live for twenty-four minutes a live Byzantine chant on the verse "Who maketh His angels spirits, and His ministers a flame of fire" at the end of these concerts.

At the Monastery of Godoncourt, she led in July 2022 a series of seminars/workshops "Du Souffle et De La Voix" on the theory, history, spirituality and aesthetics of the interpretation of Rumi (Byzantine) chant (which she prefers to call "Rumi chant" to situate it in its Levantine Semitic roots), the theory of modality with students from the Georges-ENESCU University of the Arts.

Her work, based on the hermeneutics of improvisation and live composition, triggers unprecedented musical encounters with accomplished artists in their disciplines. The objective of the musical game is the magic of the unprecedented encounters of living musical traditions, and the breath of renewal that is part of the deconstruction and reconstruction from well-defined melodic patterns, in sacred and secular repertoires, in ancient and modern languages (Chanting: Rumi (Byzantine), Syriac, Aramaic, Old Roman, Sufi / Classical Levantine XIX century, Jazz, Blues).

According to her: "The very slow rhythm of my concerts and chants is part of a spiritual modal musical aesthetic/ethos that I install by "slow improvisational cantillations" at the beginning or at the end of the chants, original idea and practice that I initiated and that I called the singing technique "Hesychia Impromari Variations in the tradition of Rumi1 singing". This method aims to bring the audience into a hesychast pathos (peace/calm/silence), in order to go beyond the temporal space to reach the fullness of the Logos, the Word, Christ God". She is at the origin of the Rumi (Byzantine) musical project Hesychia, which she organizes to support the restoration of the Orthodox Monastery of Godoncourt under the patronage of the Romanian Orthodox Metropolis of Western and Southern Europe.

She is part of the quartet l'Oiseau de Feu. She suggests an unpublished version of the oldest musical score engraved on a tablet in cuneiform script of a 3500-year-old hymn. She travels through time in the ancient languages, Phoenician, Syriac, Aramaic, Arabic, ancient Greek, Latin, Romanian, Coptic, Slavic, Persian, French, English, Turkish, German, to understand musicology in the light of anthropological, historical and linguistic phenomena deciphering a forgotten ancient past hidden away in the civilizational antiquity of Canaanite Phoenicia and linking it to a living present. Currently in Madagascar, she initiates “en première” many workshops/conferences focused on the art of singing, Rumi (Byzantine) music, typikon, history and theology within a young Malagasy Orthodox church wishing to enter the heart of the ancestral tradition of Orthodoxy.

• 1Title name/ method Copyright Marilyn LEIGNEL