Music (Sacred)

DIMITRI CONOMOS

The liturgical rites celebrated in Orthodox churches originate principally in three loci: the worship of the primitive Christian church; the desert and urban monastic prayer of the East; and the elaborate imperial services in the great Byzantine city cathedrals. Choral music constituted a component (of varying importance) at each major stage in the development of Eastern Christian ceremony.

The Byzantine musical tradition of monophonic plainchant prevailed for over 1,000 years in all Eastern churches irrespective of liturgical language or juris­diction. For a long period, moreover, a clear distinction was made between musi­cal renditions of psalmody (singing the Davidic Psalter) and of hymnody (settings of non-scriptural religious verse, usually by named poets). Both genres appear in nota­tion (neumes) after the 9th century, at which time they exhibit a predilection for anonymous musical settings, of no fixed rhythm, built out of little, age-old twists and turns of melody (conventional melodic formulas) that were active in the communal memory and had been used for generations, long before the invention of musical neumes. Each “new” tune, therefore, was rarely unique and innovative. Rather, it was a modification of some preexisting fragments produced by nameless musical craftsmen who were content to work within the traditional melodic parameters of what had been transmitted vocally.

This ultra-conservative approach to composition is abundantly found in medieval hymn texts whose verses are musi­cally amplified by single-stranded tunes, unfettered by contrapuntal voices or accompanying instruments. Their rhythm is free and unregulated: there are no divi­sions that fashion predictable metrical units. Musical style is directly influenced by liturgical requirements and by the solemnity of the occasion. Simple, syllabic chants (one note per syllable) were assigned to the faithful worshippers while trained choirs (usually two, located to the right and left of the sanctuary screen) and soloists (choir directors, the Protopsaltes and Lampadarios) were accorded more elabo­rate settings. Whatever the style, the chants are systematically assigned to the eight ecclesiastical modes (or tones) which, from about the 8th century, provided the compositional framework for eastern musi­cal practices. Research has demonstrated that, for all practical purposes, this Oktoechos, as the system is known, was the same for Latins, Greeks, and Slavs in the Middle Ages. Each modal setting is charac­terized by the deployment of a restricted set of melodic formulas, peculiar to the mode, that constitute the substance of the chant. Although these formulas are arranged in many different combinations and patterns, most of the phrases of any given chant are nevertheless reducible to one or another of this small number of melodic fragments. This procedure may, more or less, be com­pared with that employed by the unnamed icon painters and mosaicists, who con­stantly recreated the same narrow repertory of pictorial subjects while adding relatively modest personalizing touches each time.

The emergence of a written notation in the 8th and 9th centuries had a direct and negative impact on the ancient tradition of congregational singing. The neumes could only be read and interpreted by trained musicians and they, in turn, demanded complex settings whose profiles conformed to their virtuosic tastes. Nota­tion became a means of artistic experiment, since it gave composers a way to try out new musical ideas, letting them ponder their novelties and circulate them for others to examine and compare.

Thus, by the 13th century in the Greek­speaking orbit, and around 300 years later in the Slav world, there is a notable shift from the restrained early practices and styles of the early church to the emergence of uninhibited, highly ornate stylizations. The latter, championed on the Holy Mountain and in Constantinople by St. John Koukouzeles (ca. 1300) and other Paleologan composers, is characterized by a marked expansion both of music and of text. Traditional chants were lengthened in three ways: by giving many notes (melismas) to the individual syllables of the hymn texts; by interpolating new words and phrases in preexisting texts (tropes), thereby providing opportunities for composers to add more original music; and by inserting long passages of nonsense syllables set to music into preexisting chants – vocalizations such as te-re-re, to-ro-ro, ti-ri-ri, and so on. These are usually known as teretismata (comparable to the Russian anenayki of later times), and for the past 600 years they have come to occupy a key musical position in monastic vigil services, especially on the Holy Mountain.

With the Latin occupation of Byzantium’s chief religious and cultural centers (1204–61) and the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, church musicians in late medieval times were, depending on their location, exposed to the art of polyphony of the Latin Church and/or the suave, alluring sounds of Ottoman court music. Both spe­cies became integrated – in one way or another – in Orthodox Church music at large. In Greece, imitations of western styles infiltrated Crete and the Ionian islands, while on Mount Athos polyphonic music (especially before 1917) was heard in the ubiquitous Russian monastic settlements. As for the Anatolian tradition, among the Orthodox under Islamic rule (today’s Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania, Romania, and the Middle East), the serpentine exoti­cism of Arabo-Persian melody – undergirded by a drone (ison) – infiltrated chant perfor­mance practice and its ethos. It is this latter tradition which, more or less, prevails today, not only in these countries but also in the lands to which their populations have migrated.

In the 20th century the proliferation of diverse musical styles within the monophonic and polyphonic genres has, through printed anthologies and electrical recordings, affected radically the sacred music heard in the worldwide Orthodox Church. During the Soviet period, Russian obikhod-style choral polyphony all but eradicated the received chant traditions of Georgia, Armenia, and Carpatho-Russia, but currently there is a trend to revive the Znamenny, Iberian, and Ruthenian chant repertories. In much the same way, new polyphonic composi­tions by Orthodox composers, especially in America, England, Finland, and Estonia, have received wide acceptance. New settings of the Psalms from Mount Athos, the music of which has taken an independent stylistic path, have recently earned popularity in monasteries and many parishes throughout the Orthodox world.

SEE ALSO: Kathisma; Kontakion; Ode; Oktoechos; Troparion

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Conomos, D. (1984) Byzantine Hymnography and Byzantine Chant. New York: Harper Collins. Strunk, O. (1977) Essays on Music in the Byzantine World. New York: W. W. Norton.

Wellesz, E. (1961) A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.