The post-Byzantine psaltic origin of the recent Serbian church chant (original) (raw)
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FONTES SLAVIAE ORTHODOXAE 1/2017, 2017
This paper explains the musical treatment of the hymnographic genres within the Serbian chanting practice. As it is known, the original Byzantine poetic structure written in verse-which was in perfect unity with the Byzantine chant concerning the rhythm and meter-was lost in Church-Slavonic translations. The Slavonic hymnography in prose inevitably caused modification of the music language, i.e. establishing of the new bond between the word and a tone. Accordingly, a creative practise of "tailoring" the church melodies to the structure and semantics of the particular hymnographic genre occurred within Serbian chanting practise. Eventually, many songs from the Octoechos, General Chanting, as well as certain songs of the Festal Chanting, gained the status of the "fixed" chants, the proof of which are the first Serbian chanting collections from the 19 th century written in staff notation. In these chants semantics and music are set in a specific manner and they represent a model by which the chanters govern themselves while singing other church hymns. Ideal unity of hymnography and music in the fixed chants is reflected in coinciding of textual and music phrases. Such an ideal balance contributes to the clear transmission of the hymnographic content to the faithful. However, sticheras, irmoses, troparions and kontakions which lack the ideal balance, may cause the hymnographic narration and, at some places, even the theological points to be incomprehensible and imprecise. To creative chanters it is an opportunity to "tailor", i.e. to reinterpret the chants in order to compensate for these imperfections. Such a creative interpretation is possible only by skilled chanters who, above all, thoroughly understand the meaning and structure of a particular hymnographic work. Amongst such chanters were some of the bishops and patriarchs of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Certain chants related to this problem are examined in this paper.
2020
During the course of my continuing research into the music of Serbia, it was drawn to my attention by my friend and colleague Professor Bogdan Djakovic that there were, in a certain choral archive in Belgrade, a number of adaptations of 16th-century Latin motets, with adaptations of the texts in Slavonic. Though intrigued, I was unable actually to pursue this enquiry until some years later, and should like to record here my gratitude to the present Director of the First Belgrade Choral Society, Svetlana Vilic, who generously granted me access to the archive and dispensed of her time in order to further my investigations. The scores in question include both sacred and secular music by composers including Marenzio and Monteverdi and, in particular, Palestrina. Their inclusion in the repertoire of the Society was the result of the training and initiative of the composer and conductor Kosta P. Manojlovic. What is interesting about this, apart from the fact that the liturgical works are ...