Pride of Place of Liturgical Chant vs other forms of Church Singing (original) (raw)

Preliminary reflections on studying the liturgical place of Byzantine and Slavonic melismatic chant

In Gerda Wolfram (ed.), Paleobyzantine Notations III: Acta of the Congress Held at Hernen Castle, The Netherlands, in March 2001 (Eastern Christian Studies 4; Leuven, Paris and Dudley, MA: Peeters), 147-55., 2004

Despite the prominence of melismatic chant in medieval sources of Greek and Slavonic liturgical music, to say nothing of its ubiquity in the received tradition of Byzantine chanting, it is only in recent times that significant progress has been made toward understanding its historical place within the services of the Byzantine rite. In the case of Byzantine chant, it would be fair to say that florid repertories were not addressed in any significant way until the latter half of the twentieth century, during which discussions of melismatic chants from the Asmatikon and Psaltikon led to increasingly thorough treatments of kalophonic works from the Paleologan and Post-Byzantine periods. The need to consolidate these recent gains, as well as the desire to correlate them with similar advances in the study of Slavonic repertories inspired the formation of a team of researchers (of which this writer is one) led by Christian Troelsgard and supported by INTAS to study melismatic chant in Russia and Byzantium from the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries. It is envisioned that this project will eventually produce a monograph of detailed case studies and comparative surveys of Greek and Slavonic repertories, providing thereby a more complete picture of how, where, when and by whom florid chants were sung. This will, in turn, provide new opportunities to heighten our understanding of the meaning and function of these chants within the context of Orthodox worship.

Congregational singing in the rus' liturgical traditions : An evaluation of its history

Logos, 2005

By means of original research into various liturgical and musical manuscripts, especially those pertaining to the East-Slavic Churches as found in the Hilandar Research Library and Resource Centre for Medieval Slavic Studies, the author demonstrates that the eclipse which congregational singing suffered among the East-Slavic Churches during the latter part of the second millennium was an inorganic development of an earlier tradition in which the lay people, aided by various "musical ministers" and led by the clergy, retained pride of place in singing the responses and participating actively in the eucharistic liturgies as well as the other services such as matins, vespers, and compline. This eclipse of lay congregational participation was brought about in part by the rise of choral ensembles, polyphonic arrangements, and increasingly vastly - and in some cases needlessly - complicated settings of liturgical chant, all of which required trained "specialists" whose...

The Seraphim above: Some Perspectives on the Theology of Orthodox Church Music

Religions, 2015

Some outstanding contributions notwithstanding, much recent scholarship in Western European languages concerning art and the sacred has been quite prolific but has generally avoided discussion of specifically liturgical music, a particular problem when dealing with the sacred music of the Orthodox Church. The present discussion aims at establishing some bases for furthering this discussion, drawing not only on recent commentators but especially commentary on the question of liturgical singing by the Fathers of the Church.

Liturgical Chant and Music in the Greek Orthodox Experience in America: Early European Origins

This paper represents part of the findings of research presently in progress on the traditional chant and music of the Greek Orthodox Churches in America. Specifically addressed in this paper are the early, European origins of the introduction of polyphony and instrumental accompaniment into some Greek Orthodox parishes followed by a short discussion of the implications and challenges social change has had on the sacred music and worship in the Greek Orthodox inheritance within the American experience in a post-modern world.

Workshop Byzantine Music (1): The current tradition of Orthodox Chant (1814-2018)

2018

This lecture aims simply an introduction into “Byzantine music” following a kind of archaeological approach. The first unit starts with the living tradition defined by the Neo-Byzantine reform of 1814 and the establishment of Chrysanthos’ New Method, when monodic church music and its oktoechos system was redefined by the distinction of four chant genres (troparic, heirmologic, sticheraric, and papadic), their tempo, and their mele. This lecture introduces to the common print editions of chant books (anthologies for Orthros and of the Divine Liturgies, the doxastaria, the two parts of the heirmologion, and the anastasimatarion or voskresnik). The notation reform will be less regarded as a simplification of the Middle Byzantine notation than as a creation of universal notation which was based on an oral tradition of the different performance styles (oktoechos, makamlar, traditional music of 2 different regions of the Mediterranean). It will also treat the printed anthologies of makam music (mismagia, a Greek corruption of the Ottoman divan called “mecmua”) and the New Method to transcribe makamlar as aspects of the oktoechos. The oral tradition of oktoechos performance will be presented by historical field recordings, including own fieldwork.