108 Early Christian and Byzantine Music History and Performance

8/9/2019 108 Early Christian and Byzantine Music History and Performance

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Early Christian and Byzantine music: history and performance

Written by Dr Dimitri Conomos

I would like to divide this rather general presentation into two distinct, though interrelated, parts.

The first is essentially historical: an overview, without too many details, of the information we

have about early Christian and Byzantine music-making and its performance. The second is

more reflective and subjective. It has to do with today's legacy and the understanding of music

in worship through the lens of Orthodox spirituality.

I. Historical sketch

Now for the first millennium of Christianity, we have no direct information about sacred melody.

There are no musical manuscripts; there was no need of a notation since the tunes were the

property of all the believers and were well known. On the basis of indirect evidence, I suggest

that the origins of early Christian chant lie partly in the music of Jewish domestic ritual

celebrations (there was no music in the liturgy of the early Synagogue and in the Temple music

was only used to accompany the ritual of sacrifice) and partly in Syriac musical practices, both

of which shared in the cultural milieu of the Hellenistic Orient.

One may well ask: Why were the liturgical texts sung at all? The answer to this question is not

unique to the Christian Church. Nearly all religions have built their services around the

communal repetition of sacred texts not silentrepetition, but soundedrepetition, through

which the holy words could be heard, mouthed and absorbed by all. And for such "sounded

repetition", singing has seemed more natural than speaking. Apart from the tediousness and

sheer ugliness of communal speaking, the rhythm of song even when it is a comparatively

free rhythm keeps everyone together and allows for audibility. And the melody of song helps

people to remember the words.

It was, in fact, the monastic population that produced the first and finest hymnographers and

musicians Romanos the Melodist, John Damascene, Andrew of Crete, and Theodore the

Studite. And it was the monastic population that also produced the inventors of a sophisticated

musical notation which enabled scribes to preserve, in hand-written codices, the elegant

musical practices of the medieval East. There was, of course, some early monastic opposition

to music. But this does not mean that the monks did not chant. Their rejection was of worldly

music, musical exhibitionism and the singing of non-scriptural refrains and chants.

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Broadly speaking, however, there is a conspicuous indifference to Church music in the literature

from Byzantium before about the year 1000. After all, there was very little to remark upon. In

those days, no one went to Church with the idea of hearing a good choir or of listening to

so-and-so's latest musical setting of the psalms and canticles. Rather the faithful knew that they

themselves would be involved in some sort of musical activity and this was singing of a kindthat, naturally enough, was relatively uncomplicated, simple to learn, easy to follow,

straight-forward, and direct. There were no special effects and definitely no attempts were made

to have the music evoke a particular kind of atmosphere or theatricality.

Now do we know how medieval Byzantine music may have sounded? A careful juggling of fact,

inference, and conjecture can certainly point us in the right direction to answering this question.

Already we have come to realise that Byzantine music adhered to the early Christian tradition of

being a purely sung, or vocal, music, without instruments and having a style that consisted ofmelody alone, without accompaniment. This monophonicmusic is frequently called plainchant

and it has no fixed rhythm. There were no notes to record it until after the 9th century. St Isidore

of Seville in the 7th century lamented the fact that the sounds of music vanished and there was

no way of writing them down. Only towards the end of the first millennium was it felt that the

singers' fragile memories were not adequately conserving the sacred melodies that something

was done to fix the plainchants in writing. An elementary notation was devised, using little

strokes, curves and dots called neumes to produce a rough graph of the ups and downs of the

melody. The early neumesdid not

show specific notes, thus they could not teach an unknown melody to a singer who had never

heard it before. But they could remind a singer who already knew a melody of how it went. Bythe 12th century the neumes evolved to a point where they represented specific notes and even

directed the manner of singing.

The introduction of neume notation in the 9th century had both positive and negative effects for

plainchant. On the positive side, it meant that an authoritative version of a plainchant melody

could be transmitted, without alteration or deterioration, to other singers in distant places that

were unfamiliar with the tradition. On the negative side, it meant that plainchant melodies had in

effect become fixed once and for all. What do I mean by this?

During the first nine centuries of Christianity, the Byzantine musical tradition of plainchant

managed to keep alive a certain improvisatory fervour that was also manifest in the spontaneity

of prayers and rituals in the early Christian liturgy. Now, with some strokes of a 9th-century pen,

the plainchant melodies were caught in a rigid stylisation. They became as if embalmed and

their stylistic profiles conformed to 9th-century and eventually, later, tastes. The old chants that

originated as "sung prayers" were henceforth crystallised "art-objects". Yet once the neume

notation was available to Byzantine Church musicians, it was impossible to ignore itscapabilities. And soon the notation became a force for artistic experiment, since it gave

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composers a way to try out new musical ideas, letting them ponder their novelties and circulate

them for others to examine and compare.

Thus, with a supply of graphic devices both to enshrine the ancient melodies and to record new

compositions, the Byzantine musician embraces the art of composing. To begin with, this art

meant something a little different from what it does today. It was not just a matter of thinking up

fresh and novel sound combinations and putting personal inspiration on display. Certainly the

sacred texts were given a musical dress that was designed to enhance their expression. But

this was accomplished largely without injecting the human creative personality.

Most early Byzantine composers were content to practise their craft anonymously in the serviceof the Church. Their names are unknown, and in their musical techniques a similar

impersonality prevails. The early chants tend to be built out of little twists and turns of melody

that everyone had heard and used for generations. The word composingactually means putting

things together, and that was essentially what the Byzantine composers did. They arranged,

adjusted and stylised from a fund of age-old melodic bits and phrases that were active in the

communal memory. Therefore, when a "new" melody was created, it was often not entirely fresh

and original. More frequently it was a refinement of some existing strains. It is for this reason I

said earlier that impersonality prevails not only in anonymity but also in musical techniques.

Actually, a fairly recent instance of this same ancient procedure may be observed in a new

Greek service that was "put together" ("com-posed") in the early 1980s on Mt Athos in honour of

America's first Orthodox saint, Herman of Alaska. St Herman was among the humble Russian

monks who arrived in Alaska in 1794, and since his death in 1837 he has been venerated by

the Aleuts, among whom he preached the Gospel and among whom he died. He was officially

canonised in the USA in 1970, and since then his cult has spread worldwide. The Athonite

monk who composed this remarkably beautiful new service did precisely what his medieval

counterparts would have done he selected, as models, pre-existing hymnody of other saints

whose lives and labours resembled those of St Herman namely, a monastic vocation, amissionary zeal equal to that of the apostles, an ascetic struggler, a paradigm of humility and

virtue, a worker of miracles. The composer then skilfully re-arranged and modified the melodies

so that they would fit the new text which he himself had written.

The Church Music of Ancient Rus

Did St Cyril and St Methodius transmit not only Greek liturgical texts to the Slavs, but also the

melodies that went with them? We can never be absolutely certain Slavonic music books

from ninth century simply do not exist but in general the circumstantial evidence would seemto support such a conclusion. The new Christian culture of the early Slavs was largely an

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imitation of the social, political and religious structures in Byzantium. Architecture, iconography,

liturgy, ceremonial, and imperial institutions had their prototypes in the Greek East. Surely, one

could argue, the same would apply to music.

Secondly, if we look at the Slavonic hymn texts, we see immediately that they are almost

always word for word translations of the Greek. And where the Greek tradition arranges the

hymns in a particular order and in a particular mode,{footnote}'Mode' is the term given to each

of the eight musical patterns that provided the framework for medieval Church music. They are

also commonly known today as 'tones'.{/footnote} the Slavonic tradition normally follows suit.

Furthermore, philologists like Roman Jakobson have brought to light remarkable examples that

demonstrate how, at times, the Slavonic translators were indeed successful in reproducing,

approximating, or imitating the syllabicism occasionally even the accentuation of the

Greek originals. To preserve the Greek meter in the Slavonic translations creates idealconditions for adapting the early Greek melodies virtually unchanged. Otherwise, what possible

motivation could there have been for this slavish imitation?

Finally, there are the music manuscripts themselves. If we can demonstrate that the Slavs used

the same notation as the Greeks, there can be little doubt that they used the same melodies.

Nineteenth-century Russian music scholars were aware of the existence of marked parallels

between Greek and Slavonic musical usages. In the first decade of this century, Anton

Preobrazhenskii found evidence which he believed proved the Byzantine origin of Old Russiannotation, and his findings have been confirmed by subsequent scholarship.

However, in spite of all of this impressive evidence, I am not entirely convinced. For it is one

thing to contend that, by virtue of their arrangement and graphic resemblance, the neumes used

by the first Orthodox Slavs were adopted from the early Byzantine notational systems, and quite

another to deduce that those same Slavs sang Byzantine hymn tunes. I think the possibility

exists that the ancient Russian chants may have constituted an independent musical response

to the liturgical translations from Byzantium. Let me explain why I say this. In the earliestRussian chant books, the Kondakaria of the 12th and 13th centuries, there is preserved a

unique repertory of kontakia. In textual and liturgical respects they are very close to the Greek.

The modes agree and the system of neumes is definitely borrowed from the Byzantine host

tradition. But the musicof these Slavonic kontakia is totally unrelated to the earliest known

Greek examples. Are these melodies independent Slavonic creations or are they recensions of

lost Byzantine exemplars?

Even in repertories where the evidence of actual musical borrowing is much more apparent such as in the Koinonika (Communion chants) the medieval Russian musicians often adapt

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the Byzantine melodies to the translated texts in idiosyncratic ways. In Russian hands, the

Byzantine neumes behave in ways quite unfamiliar from Byzantium. And one neume, the

stopitsa, is an entirely original invention.

For example, it is normal for Greek composers to give musical importance to the accented

syllables in a text. But often the Russian arranger, working with the same melody on a text with

equivalent accents to the Greek, chooses an apparently irregular alternative. He gives musical

attention intentionallyit would seem to unaccentedsyllables. Such curiosities in these chants

have raised important questions for the philologist interested in the fundamental problems of

accentuation in Old Church Slavonic. For the musicologist it gives evidence of a new approach,

a refinement, or a mannerism unique to the Russian musical genius.

The Performance of Byzantine Chant

Let us now turn to actual performance practice. When speaking of medieval Byzantine chant,

one must be reminded first, that not everything that was sung was written down in notes and

secondly, not everything that was written in notes was sung as written. To begin with, musical

notation was simply a device, a graphic tool, invented to preserve a melody that was relatively

new, relatively complex, and relatively difficult to sing from memory. Familiar items were not

recorded but left to communal memory and to oral tradition. Furthermore, sacred chants,

whether from the Latin West or the Greek East, were never meant to be rigidly or mechanically

duplicated at each performance. A chanter's approach to the music could be compared with thatof a jazz musician's approach to a vocal or instrumental line. In both cases, improvisation was

the hallmark of the style. In both cases the skill and experience of the performer affected the

musical rendition. The inscribing of a chant melody in a manuscript was, in the first instance,

one man's application at one moment of a musical gloss on a traditional melody.

The Desert and the City

Byzantine liturgical music did not come about in a cultural vacuum. It has its origins in the desert

and in the city: in the primitive psalmody of the early Egyptian and Palestinian desertcommunities that arose in the 4th to 6th centuries, and in urban centres with their cathedral

liturgies full of music and ceremonial. It is this mixed musical tradition that we have inherited

today a mixture of the desert and the city. In both traditions that of the desert and that of

the city the Old Testament Book of Psalms (the Psalter) first regulated the musical flow of the

services. It was the manner in which this book was used that identified whether a service

followed the monastic or the secular urban pattern.

In the desert monasteries psalms were sung by a soloist who intoned the verses slowly and in a

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loud voice. The monks were seated on the ground or on small stools because they were

weakened by fasts and other austerities. They listened and meditated in their hearts on the

words which they heard. The monks gave little thought to precisely which psalms were being

used they were little concerned, for example, with choosing texts that made specific

reference to the time of the day; that is, psalms appropriate to the morning or ones appropriateto the evening. Since the primary purpose of the monastic services was meditation, the psalms

were sung in a meditative way and in numerical order. The desert monastic office as a whole

was marked by its lack of ceremony.

But in the secular cathedrals the psalms were not rendered in numerical order; rather, they

consisted of appropriatepsalms that were selected for their specificreference to the hour of the

day or for their subject matter which suited the spirit of the occasion for the service. The urban

services also included meaningful ceremonies such as the lighting of the lamps and the offeringof incense. Moreover, a great deal of emphasis was placed on active congregational

participation. The psalms were not sung by a soloist totally alone but in a responsorial or

antiphonal manner in which congregational groups sang a refrain after the psalm verses. The

idea was to have everyone involved in an effort of common celebration: there was no place here

for individual contemplation.

II. Liturgical Music and Orthodox Spirituality

Is there a message for today in all of this? How applicable is the musical aesthetic of themedieval East to the current liturgical and ecclesiastical circumstances of the twenty-first

century?

Whichever style we choose to adopt monophonic or polyphonic there are, I believe, three

fundamental concepts in Orthodox spirituality that can be made to apply to our Church music:

1. asceticism2. holiness

3. apatheia, or 'passionlessness'

1. Asceticism is the call for self-denial, self-dissatisfaction; and the constant yearning for

improvement through hard work and energetic application. Throughout the year, but particularly

during Great Lent, the Church impresses upon us the great blessings that are ours through

increased prayer, prostrations, fasting, and charitable works. The Church singer has a sacred

profession, and this sanctity requires a determination of character, a strong faith, great modesty,

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and a high sense of integrity. To be a Church singer in an Orthodox Church is to respond to a

calling, to a vocation it demands purity, sureness of faith and conviction. How hypocritical it is

for singers, who transmit in melody the dogmas of the Church, to feel that they deserve

congratulations and gratitude for performing before a captive audience: as if they were doing

the congregation a favour. How much worse if those singers felt that they ought to be paid forthe job of praising God with their God-given vocal chords as if the Church were

commissioning entertainers.

Here is where the ascetic task of self-denial is clearly applicable we must convert the familiar

image of the liturgical performer-musician to an image of someone who promotes the Christian

attribute of self-denial of putting oneself in the background, of thanking God for the privilege

of allowing one to sing in the services. Singers should follow instructions from the director and

from the priest in all humility, putting aside any notions of self-gratification, and the imposition ofone's likes and dislikes.

Liturgical art is, at the same time, both discipline and freedom; and to accept this duality is to be

an Orthodox churchman in the truest sense of the word. To be an ascetic is to be in the world

but not of it to tame the world in oneself to be a participant in the Truth.

The best music teachers are those that teach by example the example of one's life, the

example of one's attitude in Church. This also involves a participation in the sacramental life of

the Church. The teacher must not be shy to point out mistakes, even to reveal another's

insufficiencies. The student must be willing to listen with humility and with a sense of eagerness

to learn and to improve.

The ways of the world ought to be alien to the Church artist. We must never sell ourselves; we

must not make Church music a career; we must have no ambition. We must not advertise orexhibit ourselves. Such is the asceticism of the Church; and this is what it means to be true to

the holiness of our vocation.

2. And what is meant by the holinessof our vocation? "Holiness" is my second basic concept. I

firmly believe that today this means freeing Church music from the heavy burden of centuries of

decadence and secularism. Holiness means otherness, sacredness, apartness not the

common or the ordinary but the unique, the particular, the uncontaminated.

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Musical art has become separated from the teaching of the Church separated from the liturgy

itself - because the understanding of what it means for the world to become transfigured has

been lost. The musical transparency revealing the inner light of the Kingdom has been replaced

by heavy, human and shimmering sound musical gloss full of cheap sentimentality.

We must also be warned against a frequent tendency in contemporary Church music for it to be

mechanical and imitation for the sake of imitation. Blind copying is incapable of giving life to the

hymn or of calling the faithful to prayer.

3. The third concept, that of apatheia or passionlessness, can be applied to two aspects of

music: (a) the composition itself; (b) the performance.

Needless to say, musical settings ought not to be seen as ends in themselves. They ought not

to call attention to themselves or have special effects. The aim of melody is to add a special

dimension to the text to make it more audible and available for reflection. In this way, music

becomes one with the text a selfless ally of it. In this way, too, music shares in the

passionlessness that in Orthodox spirituality is seen as an avenue to purity of mind and body.

This ideal of passionlessness is perhaps most reflected in the best Orthodox iconography

where the saint is painted in colours and shapes that transcend everything that is fleshy,

sensuous, and cosmetic.

The most appropriate Christian music is monophonic plainchant. It does nothave to be

Byzantine chant, or Old Believer, or Old Slavonic or Coptic chant; and ideally it should not be

polyphonic. Why do I say this?

Personally, I do not believe that there is anything intrinsically "unorthodox" about polyphonic

music. And, of course, there are many kinds of polyphony, just as there are many types of

monophony. Singing an ison against a melody is already a polyphonic musical gesture.

My preference for monophony that is, single-line or horizontal melody is more practicalthan it is aesthetic. It's usually easy to sing, easy to learn, and easy to remember. The chanters

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can readily match their note to the celebrant's without worrying whether it's too high for the

sopranos or too low for the basses. This style of music is ideal for congregational singing and

one never has to worry about going flat. And the liturgy ceases to be interrupted by the

annoying arpeggio humming of the conductor before the beginning of every troparion.

Polyphonic music, on the other hand, is by its very nature more complex, denser, and more

difficult. In order for it to be done well both musically and liturgically one has to

concentrate. The music demands a lot of attention attention that could better be given

elsewhere during a divine service. This is not horizontal but vertical music it depends on the

interplay of consonance and dissonance that is, musical tension and release to arouse our

senses and to draw our attention to the excellence (or its lack) of the composition.

Nothing in our Church should belong to the realm of fashion neither the vestments of the

clergy, nor the icons, nor the music. Fashion implies style, and style is governed by the principle

of built-in obsolescence. What is nice today will not always be nice tomorrow. The Church

should never foster mediocrity.

The Church, because She is the Holy Reality of God, must be above current or past trends. In

1913, Alexander Kastalsky wrote: "I should like to have music that could be heard nowhereexcept in a Church, and which would be as distinct from secular music as Church vestments are

from the dress of the laity."

This does not mean that Church art is fossilised. Music, together with iconography, do and must

change since they serve a vital function in a living culture. Sacred music and painting of the 6th

century differed markedly from that of the 8th century and those of the 10th, 12th and 14th

century were each different one from the other. Our Divine Liturgy is not that which was

arranged by St Basil or St John Chrysostom.

Change and adaptation in Church art are the inevitable and perfectly reasonable by-products of

an organic and growing faith. But they must always operate within parameters that do not

obscure or invalidate the intention of that art. That is why our icons cannot reasonably be

painted in modern abstract designs; nor can the colours, posture or features be the objects of

individual fancy. Similarly, sacred music has certain formal principles. It, too, cannot be written

in modern, jazz, or folk styles. Neither can it deliberately be the product of personal inspiration.

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Monophonic music serves the liturgy perfectly well. Unlike polyphony the music of fashion in

the Baroque, Classical and Romantic periods simple chant melodies can be tailored to follow

the text, to amplify its meaning and rhetoric, to give it an appropriate musical dress.

But even monophonic music can be made inappropriate if the singers engage in vocal display

with dominating voices, unnecessary exaggerations, poor phrasing and unclear diction. As

transmitters of the sacred texts, the vocalists must edify the chant by singing well, singing

together, and by praying the hymn.

Some working criteria

1. Liturgical chant must maintain a symbiotic relationship between the music and the text. Thetext is to be enhanced by the musical element but the music should not have an independent

existence from the words. All of the elements of melody: contour, phrasing, rhythm, form, are to

reflect the poetic patterns inherent in the text.

2. Where polyphony is the local tradition, the musical texture should be homophonic and

homorhythmic, not contrapuntal. That is, everyone should be singing the same words and

syllables at the same time in order to preserve intelligibility and avoid confusion. This also

preserves the structural symbiosis between word and tone.

Where monophony is the local tradition, the musical texture should avoid extended melismas,

extreme ranges, and the intrusion of meaningless syllables that distort the sense of the hymn.

3. With regard to expression, true liturgical singing should be self-effacing and objective. The

sacred words must speak for themselves without the intervention of subjective, personalinterpretation. Dramatic renditions and theatricality are out of place in the liturgy.

4. Within the limitations articulated above, sacred music nevertheless can use artistic means to

differentiate between festal and ferial liturgical occasions, to colour words and to draw contrasts

and parallels between cognitive meanings in the texts. In this way music can carry or highlight

the theological meaning of the hymns.

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{footnotes/}

NOTE: This is a slightly modified version of a lecture originally given at the St Sergius OrthodoxInstitute, Paris, in 1997. Published on Monachos.net, February 2003.

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108 Early Christian and Byzantine Music History and Performance