The Easter koinonikon in the style of Rossano (original) (raw)

2022, Series Musicologica Balcanica

The unknown Italian contribution to Byzantine chant as registered world heritage The so-called Byzantine chant has been recently registered as intangible world heritage. Although the living tradition of monodic Orthodox chant still exists in great diversity in many countries of the Balkans, Central, and Northeastern Europe (within and without the Patriarchate of Moscow) and the Orient which is worth to be honoured and protected by such a title, there are some ideological problems provided by its ahistorical definition as "Byzantine chant", because such a definition raises many open questions about the exact relationship between each of the local traditions in question and the role of Byzantine music during the past until 1453, and afterwards (whether defined as post-Byzantine or otherwise). In order to illustrate these problems, I chose the example high melismatic chant of the Byzantine cathedral rite which is particularly well documented in Italy, although within the medium of the "wrong" notation. The Easter koinonikon has not only survived in various notation systems like in GR-KA Ms. 8, ff.36v-37v (Slavic and Greek kondakarian notation, Old and Middle Byzantine notation etc.), it was also written several times in the kontakarion-asmatikon of Messina, a particular book form only known from the scriptorium of the Archimandritate SS. Salvatore which organised the whole proper cycle of psaltic and choir chant together. I would like to introduce into this almost unknown variety of Italo-Byzantine and local variants of the well-known koinonikon asmatikon (I-ME Cod. mess. gr. 129, f.114v) of southern Italy, and then return to the difficult question, inasmuch it has become part of the living tradition of Orthodox chant.

A BYZANTINE CHANT CΟLLECTION FROM SICILY. A Cοllaboration between Cοpenhagen and Piana degli Albanesi (Palermo)

Kulturstudier, 2016

The aim of this paper is to give an account of the collaboration between a collector of the Byzantine chant tradition of Piana degli Albanesi (Palermo) in Sicily, fr. Bartolomeo Di Salvo, and the editorial board of the Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae, i.e. an institution under the aegis of the University of Copenhagen. Bartolomeo Di Salvo (1916-1986), a Catholic monk of Byzantine Rite, gathered between 1950-1960 the most complete collection of this late-medieval and still living musical tradition, handed down over the last five centuries only by means of the oral transmission. In the same decade, fr. Di Salvo got in contact with the MMB, and eventually they agreed to publish the critical edition of this collection. After more than fifty years, the updated and revised version of the edition of this meaningful collection is finally being published by the MMB.

Chants of the Byzantine rite in Sicily: historical transcriptions and contemporary studies

2020

To the memory of His Excellency Sotir Ferrara, Bishop Emeritus of Piana degli Albanesi of blessed memory (5 December 1937 – 25 November 2017). The publication of fr. Bartolomeo Di Salvo’s “Chants of the Byzantine Rite” as a Subsidium of the Danish editorial series Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae (2016) is an outstanding piece of evidence of the presence, survival, and development of Byzantine chant on the fringes of the Byzantine Empire. For the first time, this volume offers transcriptions of the full repertoire of orally transmitted hymns for the celebration of the Byzantine Rite in Sicily. This chant tradition has been cultivated by the Albanian-speaking minority in Sicily since their ancestors arrived as refugees from the Balkans in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Hence, chanting was performed without musical notation until around 1900, when local connoisseurs of the tradition started to write down a selection of the melodies in staff notation. Bearing such a background in mind, this paper offers a introductory description of the melodic and modal organisation of the repertoire, as well as a discussion of some of the challenges entailed in the analysis of an oral liturgical chant tradition developed and handed down to the present day. Clavibus unitis, no. 4/2020 (ISSN 1803-7747)

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.

Byzantine Chant in the New World

This talk is being presented on the heels of the release of a two new publications in the Metropolis of Portland of the Divine Liturgy in English in Byzantine notation and the Service of the Great Vigil of Pascha (and subsequent simplified editions in Western notation for our emerging mission communities). This edition is not simply another re-transcription of the Seattle Liturgy Book will prayerfully represent an adaptation of the classical Patriarchal and Athonite repertoire into the English language or at least a small part of it. It is my hope in giving this talk that I can give some insights as to Byzantine musical history (and hysteria) as well as the Metropolis Cathedral's methodology and practice, as it presents in many ways a departure from what has been accepted as norms and conventional wisdom of the recent past. Byzantine chant in English-a cultural history While understood as originating from hymns in the Greek language, the Byzantine musical tradition has been successfully transplanted into not only Arabic and Syriac languages, but also into the southern Slavic Orthodox nations of Serbia, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Romania, not only using the received Chrysanthine notational reforms, but also as the received classical style of singing. It seems only natural that Byzantine chant with its traditional style, theory and notation should be not only taught, but chanted in worship in our native English language here in the New World.

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