Byzantine church music

                         Palm sunday, First ichos.

In the past, it has not been easy for scholars to guess the origins of Byzantine music. Because of the iconoclasm in the eighth and ninth centuries, the illustrated music books were all destroyed.

Notation changed in the tenth century and we can read the notation from the twelfth century on. This is not to say that until the tenth century the music sounded different than it does today. In fact, it has been shown of the Akáthistos hymn that the notation (because noted so differently in the 24 stanzas) served only as a mnemonic aid and thus the singers knew the melody anyway.

It is now generally known that Byzantine and Western music, Gregorian chant, share the same roots (Palestine, Syria and even Persian), but that at the same time Byzantine influences on Western music can be pointed at, especially in the areas where East and West bordered on each other as in Italy. From the fact that Charlemagne ordered Byzantine hymns to be translated into Latin after listening among Greeks in Paris, it can be inferred that this music did not sound very eastern to his ears, so it was also sung according to intelligible scales.

The apostles and the first Christians still went to the evening prayers of the temple in Jerusalem, and from the synagogues of the Jews they brought the institution of cantors and responsories (alternating chants) to their first church services, as well as the singing of the psalms, hymns and the so-called spiritual chants, consisting mainly of the Hallelujahs.

Palestine with its holy places and Syria were the center of early Christianity. The nun Aetheria went there as a pilgrim in 385. It is in itself a miracle that the Byzantine Empire, with its classical and Hellenistic tradition, adopted Christian music from outer Middle Eastern regions. It is a fallacy to think that Byzantine church music was derived from ancient Greek music. a) True, the language was Greek, b) there were 8 ichoi, which would correspond to the 8 Ancient Greek modes, and c) the early theorists relied mostly on Plato and his school - but a) there is a tremendous amount of early Byzantine poetry translated from Syriac, b) the ichos consists rather of melodic phrases as in all Middle Eastern countries up to India with its ragas, and has no kinship with the mode which was first and foremost a scale, and c) by the end of the twelfth century Byzantine music was no longer a mathematical science in anything like antiquity, but was only taught as singing in practice.

The early church, with the apostle Paul, vehemently opposed drama and pagan games. Even chanting was abandoned in desert monasteries such as St. Catherine's Monastery in Sinai until the fifth century. And making hymns yourself was at first rejected because that way heresy might once creep in. Later, the hymn poet was given the task of rendering in intention the angelic song in heaven, just as an icon painter has only the transcendent as his model when he paints a Christ or a saint. But sects such as Gnostics had such success with their hymns that the great melode Ephraim the Syrian (+ 373) was compelled to provide Christian text to the melodies and verse footings of Gnostic hymns by Bardanesus.

Some of the hymns from the liturgy are venerable in their age: Ti Ypermacho dates from 626 by the hand of Patriarch Sergius, the Cherubim song was first sung at the dedication of the Agia Sofia in 574. The troparion “O monogenís Yiós” is said to be by Justinian (535), “I Parthenos símeron” by Romanós Melodós, and Basil the Great (4th century) mentions Fos Ilarón as very old (2nd century?).

The following poetic forms have successively flourished:

1) the shortest, the troparion, of especially Auxentius (4th century)
2) the kondakion, such as the Akáthistos hymn of Romanós (early 6th century)
3) the canon, such as by Andrew of Crete (660-740), John Damaskenus (671-748), and Theodoros Studites (759-826).

After the iconoclasm, a second Golden Age in Byzantine art began, but because of the immense quantity of hymns, the church forbade the addition of new hymns in the liturgy in the eleventh century. From then on, the artistic activity of the monks focused on the embellishment of music. The originally simple structure of the Byzantine melodies changed in the thirteenth century to melismatic and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to a style full of ornaments and the words became unrecognizable by coloratures. The composers, called Melourgoí and Máistores, were Ioannis Glykís, Manouíl Chrysafis, Theódoulos Hieromónachos, Ioannis Koukouzelis and Ioannis Lampadários. But all listened to rigid rules, even when Byzantine church music after the fall of the empire was influenced by the scales and musical formulas of the Turkish overlords.