Music, or the musical object, has been approached in scholarship on culture in a number of ways. For example, music has been seen as “exhausted commodity,” in some cases, or as “cultural waste,” in others, especially in terms of the configuration and reconfiguration of nationalistic traits and their material expressions. While building on such conceptions of music as cultural artifact, this paper explores the cultural-material value of music in traditions that are otherwise considered as intangible cultural heritage (both, within and outside UNESCO’s definition of intangible heritage). In light of important ongoing conversations about material expressions of culture, the transience of culturality, and the imminence of shifts wrought by inter-culturality, I ask in this paper: What about cultures that have maintained a precarious connection between the material and the transcendent? Or, to be more precise in the case of religious minorities in the Middle East, what about musical cultures the existence of which has been marked by an intricate balance between the sacred and the secular? To address this question I consider examples from Christian musical traditions to interrogate the categories of cultural materiality and intangibility, on the one hand, in relation to one another, and on the other hand, in relation to categories of the sacred and the secular. I maintain that the case of Christian minorities in the Middle East (and specifically Syria) should shed new light on the interplay between these seemingly distinct modes of cultural and nationalistic expression. In the wider sense, addressing this question would helpfully nuance ongoing debates on pressing issues in the Middle East, not least among which is the survival of its cultural fabric, which is exemplified by religious minorities and their shifting modes of existence under the massive waves of conflict and migration that are destabilizing the region as never before.