{"id":314613,"date":"2026-10-26T15:52:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-26T15:52:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/314613\/"},"modified":"2026-10-26T15:52:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-26T15:52:09","slug":"on-the-sublime-bethlehem-%d8%a8%d9%8a%d8%aa-%d9%84%d8%ad%d9%85-walls-in-time-and-space-fall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/314613\/","title":{"rendered":"On the sublime BETHLEHEM \u0628\u064a\u062a \u0644\u062d\u0645, walls in time and space fall"},"content":{"rendered":"

The exquisite collaboration of Lawrence Sammour, Sary Moussa, and Abed Kobeissy, Bethlehem, is released this month. And it has become a rich sanctuary, a shared space that refuses erasure or fragmentation. It also refuses to obey the boundaries of colonialism and occupation, weaving together what was pulled apart, as taut and resonant as the strings of the buzuq.<\/p>\n

Maybe that\u2019s the first thing to say. Bethlehem sounds close and live \u2014 like you\u2019ve positioned your head, craned precisely, in the center of a stage performance. But the work was born in impossibility. In this world of wars and occupations and passports and visas, the music community is a labyrinth of inequity. The Palestinian artists can\u2019t join the Lebanese artists. Our supposedly modern age has restrictions a contemporary of the Council of Nicaea\u00a0would likely find baffling.<\/p>\n

The first live performances were played remotely, as I covered here at the time. When the musicians gathered for a performance at Le Guess Who? in Utrecht, they were meeting for the first time. <\/p>\n

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So you can trace Bethlehem through its iterations. On side A of the album, Sary Moussa and Abed Kobeissy recorded themselves in the West Bank. Lawrence Sammour, the Church of the Nativity\u2019s choir director since 1970, recorded in Bethlehem at Wonder Cabinet with the help of Ibrahim Owais and Yousef Anastas, in the heart of the occupied West Bank, Palestine. <\/p>\n

Side B takes you to Beirut\u2019s Dar El Nimer<\/a>, a space shuttered this year by the ongoing war, as recorded by Beirut sound luminary Joy Moughanni. And other parts are taken from downtown\u2019s wonderful Metro Al-Madina, recorded during the Beirut & Beyond International Music Festival. (Despite the ongoing Israeli targeting of its airport and the threat that the country will break into pieces internally, it seems Lebanon defiantly looks out to the world, returning our gaze back.)<\/p>\n

Bethlehem oscillates between delicate, solemnly intimate moments and sonorous expanses like \u201cKhatima II \u062e\u064e\u0627\u062a\u0650\u0645\u064e\u0629 \u0662\u201d which crests and swells like the sea. It\u2019s hard not to choke up, unsettling tones of the instrumentalists and the power and mournfulness of Lawrence Sammour\u2019s voice \u2014 a moment in time, an inflection point in genocide, but an eternal pain.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s significant that this work is not \u201ctraditional\u201d in a narrow sense. Quivering electronic textures and drones, stuttering delays, repeat and co-mingle with liturgical hymns. The end of one is the beginning of the other, and all back again. The hymn melodies unfold into more dissonant, ringing tones, extending the traditional modal structures into some expanded language. It holds some special meaning for me, having grown up in the Orthodox church on the other side of the ocean, because this folds my own musical experience between childhood and adult life. It\u2019s a song of innocence and experience, but in counterpoint. And the liturgical fragments sound not just as I remember them, but as I feel remembering them. I don\u2019t want to take my own privilege for granted for even a moment. I can talk to family members who I think belong in the Church of the Nativity far more than I do who can\u2019t set foot there.<\/p>\n

But I appreciate that the text uses the word communion. Our moment in history demands we come to terms with that concept \u2014 not in the Christian sense, or any sectarian sense, but begging the question of what space our music creates, and how it can be shared.<\/p>\n

Elias and Yousef Anastas just won the 2026 Berlin Art Prize; they\u2019re the architects of Wonder Cabinet, where portions of this were recorded (and where Radio alHara broadcasts). They spoke at some length about what materials and stone mean, but also about architecture as activity. Maybe it\u2019s a spirit that\u2019s sometimes absent in this capital of fortress Europe \u2014 the idea that spaces are meant to invite others in. Bethlehem is that kind of space, down to its recording and narrative in this form \u2014 you feel you inhabit it from the inside.<\/p>\n

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The Church of the Nativity, for its part, can be home to Catholic, Armenian Apostolic, Coptic, Syriac (not to be confused with Syrian \u2014 don\u2019t ask), and Ethiopian rite. Open the door, and you look into a mosque. I\u2019ll spare you the complexity of the notion of communion in the various splinters of Christianity, but it\u2019s open. As it happens, my Kreuzberg studio for the moment opens up to one of Berlin\u2019s larger mosques. I hear tones and even Arabic language I grew up hearing. It\u2019s open, in fact; you can walk in. But the music connects us, too. My grandmother used to go to synagogues with her friends, and could follow along singing just as easily as she did the Orthodox liturgy (or \u201cIn The Garden,\u201d which she sang loudly while doing laundry, though I think that was the influence of Perry Como). <\/p>\n

We need more than just the stones; we need these spaces to share emotional reality, to be held. <\/p>\n

So it\u2019s fitting to see this example a few days after talking to Abed about sending beats out of Gaza<\/a>. I always thought that the one reason I don\u2019t mind being alone making music was that if you\u2019re making music, even feeling music, you\u2019re never alone.<\/p>\n

Bethlehem is out now on vinyl and digital on Montreal\u2019s Constellation Records.<\/p>\n

BETHLEHEM \u0628\u064a\u062a \u0644\u062d\u0645 by BETHLEHEM \u0628\u064a\u062a \u0644\u062d\u0645 [Lawrence Sammour, Sary Moussa & Abed Kobeissy]<\/a><\/p>\n

At top: album cover image by Elias Anastas. Other photos by the author; Bethlehem, May 2024; Church of the Nativity and Wonder Cabinet.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.wondercabinet.space<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/radioalhara.net<\/a><\/p>\n

More: https:\/\/www.architecturelab.net\/wonder-cabinet-aau-anastas<\/a><\/p>\n

\t Tags: Abed Kobeissy<\/a>, artists<\/a>, Beirut<\/a>, Bethlehem<\/a>, drones<\/a>, experimental<\/a>, hymns<\/a>, inspiration<\/a>, Lawrence sammour<\/a>, Lebanon<\/a>, Palestine<\/a>, recording<\/a>, Sary Moussa<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The exquisite collaboration of Lawrence Sammour, Sary Moussa, and Abed Kobeissy, Bethlehem, is released this month. And it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":314614,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[128306,19296,128307,153,155,154,30569,128308,128309,48733,128310,2808,3766,62801,128311],"class_list":["post-314613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bethlehem","tag-abed-kobeissy","tag-artists","tag-beirut","tag-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem-headlines","tag-bethlehem-news","tag-drones","tag-experimental","tag-hymns","tag-inspiration","tag-lawrence-sammour","tag-lebanon","tag-palestine","tag-recording","tag-sary-moussa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=314613"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314613\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/314614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=314613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=314613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=314613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}