A Byzantine Monastic Office

Of all the Eastern liturgical traditions, the Byzantine of course continues to command the greatest scholarly attention in part because it has the greatest number of faithful today--to say nothing of its historical-political prominence as the ritual tradition of empire. Scholarly attention has long focused heavily on the history of the Byzantine eucharistic liturgies, though more recent scholarship has been focusing on funerals, baptismal, and other rites, including monastic offices as in this book set for release later this month: Jeffrey C. Anderson, A Byzantine Monastic Office, A.D. 1105 (Catholic University of America Press, 2016), 368pp.

About this book we are told:

This book centers on a Greek text that was likely compiled in Constantinople, in 1105, for use in one of the monasteries located there. The book consists of a liturgical psalter, containing the fixed structure (the ordinary) in both the Greek original and in English translation, as well as a description of the hours themselves. The extensive commentary explains the development of the divine office, and the particular history of the translated manuscript, while brief notes clarify and explain, in a way suitable for non-liturgists, the more-technical aspects of the divine office.

Based on a single dated manuscript, the book presents the first, full example of the daily structure of monastic hours as they were celebrated at a time when services had reached a degree of maturity. The book, by presenting the ordinary of the office, compliments recent work on the propers of the office, and thus helps to complete our picture of the medieval monastic office in Byzantium.

Italo-Albanian Chant

There are certain groups, even within the often maddeningly confused world of Eastern Christianity, that are especially small and therefore acutely prone to being overlooked. The Italo-Albanians are arguably in this category. But at least one part of their heritage will no longer be so obscure, thanks to the publication next month of Bartolomeo di Salvo, Girolamo Garofalo, and Christian Troelsgård, eds., Chants of the Byzantine Rite: The Italo-Albanian Tradition in Sicily: Canti Ecclesiastici della Tradizione Italo-Albanese in Sicilia (Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae, Subsidia) (Museum Tusculanum Press 2016), 288pp.

About this book we are told:

This book presents for the first time the complete chant repertory of an orally transmitted collection of church hymns for the celebration of the Byzantine Rite in Sicily. Cultivated by Albanian-speaking minorities since their ancestors arrived in Sicily in the late fifteenth century, this repertory was transcribed by Bartolomeo di Salvo, a Basilian monk from the monastery of Grottaferrata, and is presented here in English, Italian, and Greek.

By the Rivers of Byzantium We Sat and Wept as We Thought of....Greek Orthodox Hymns?

At long last we have, in the last decade, been seeing more scholarly works on Eastern Christian music. Set for release the first of next year is a promising new study that will further our understanding not just of Eastern Orthodox music and liturgics, but also of Orthodox-Muslim relations in the sunset of the Ottoman Empire: Merih Erol, Greek Orthodox Music in Ottoman Istanbul: Nation and Community in the Era of Reform (Indiana University Press, 2016), 278pp.

About this book we are told:

During the late Ottoman period (1856–1922), a time of contestation about imperial policy toward minority groups, music helped the Ottoman Greeks in Istanbul define themselves as a distinct cultural group. A part of the largest non-Muslim minority within a multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire, the Greek Orthodox educated elite engaged in heated discussions about their cultural identity, Byzantine heritage, and prospects for the future, at the heart of which were debates about the place of traditional liturgical music in a community that was confronting modernity and westernization. Merih Erol draws on archival evidence from ecclesiastical and lay sources dealing with understandings of Byzantine music and history, forms of religious chanting, the life stories of individual cantors, and other popular and scholarly sources of the period. Audio examples keyed to the text are available online.

Developments in Byzantine Chant

Interest in the musical patrimony of the Christian East continues to grow. Last year I noted an ethnomusicological study which Richard Barrett skillfully reviewed for the print edition of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies. He will also be reviewing a new collection just out from Peeters: G. Wolfram et al, eds., Tradition and Innovation in Late- and Postbyzantine Liturgical Chant II: Proceedings of the Congress held at Hernen Castle, the Netherlands, 30 October - 3 November 2008 (Peeters, 2013), xxiv+328pp.

About this collection we are told by the publishers:

What is the relation between the Greek ecclesiastical chant traditions of today and Byzantine chant? That question can only be answered through a meticulous study of the transmission and transformation of both the melodies, the genres, and the whole musical culture of Late Byzantium and the subsequent centuries. This book presents a handful of studies focussing on both the development of new musical styles, such as the ornamented Kalofonia ('Beautiful sound'), and on the education of the cantors, the psaltai. The role of the master cantors, the maïstores, their teachings, treatises, traditions, innovations, compositions, and the various modes of interpretation (exegesis) are among the topics covered by this collection of papers, written by specialist scholars of Byzantine chant history.

Byzantine Music on Mount Athos

Mount Athos, as I noted last year (see here and here), continues to occupy a very considerable place in what could be called the Eastern Christian imaginary. I have just received a new work from Scarecrow Press (an imprint of Rowman and Littlefield), the thirteenth volume in their Europea: Ethnomusicologies and Modernities series.  In this new book, a Danish ethnomusicologist takes a look at the musical revival on the holy mountain: Tore Tvarn Lind, The Past is Always Present: The Revival of the Byzantine Musical Tradition at Mount Athos (Europea: Ethnomusicologies and Modernities) (Scarecrow Press, 2012), 224pp.

About this book, the publisher tells us:

In The Past Is Always Present, Tore Tvarnø Lind examines the musical revival of Greek Orthodox chant at the monastery of Vatopaidi within the monastic society of Mount Athos, Greece. In particular, Lind focuses on the musical activities at the monastery and the meaning of the past in the monks' efforts at improving their musical performance practice through an emphasis on tradition.

Based on a decade of intense fieldwork and extensive interviews with members of Athos' monastic community, Lind covers a vast array of topics. From musical notation and the Greek oral tradition to CD covers and music production, the tension between tradition and modernity in the musical activity of the Athonite community raises a clear challenge to the quest to bring together Orthodox spirituality and quietude with musical production. The Past Is Always Present addresses all of these matters by focusing on the significance and meaning of the local chanting style. As Lind argues, Byzantine chant cannot be fully grasped in musicological terms alone, outside the context of prayer. Yet because chant is fundamentally a way of communicating with God, the sound generated must be exactly right, pushing issues of music notation, theory, and performance practice to the forefront.

Byzantine chant, Lind ultimately argues, is a modern phenomenon as the monastic communities of Mount Athos negotiate with the realities of modern Orthodox identity in Greece. By reporting on the musical revival activities of this remarkable community through the topics of notation, musical theory, drone-singing, and spiritual silence, Lind looks at the ways in which Athonite heritage is shaped, touching upon the Byzantine chant's contemporary relationship with practice of pilgrimage and the phenomenon of religious tourism.

Offering unique insights into the monastic culture at Mount Athos, The Past Is Always Present is for those especially interested in sacred music, past and present Greek culture, monastic life, religious tourism, and the fields of ethnomusicology and anthropology.

This book also includes a CD with fifteen pieces on it, including several plagal chants from the Divine Liturgy and all-night vigil. We are having this expertly reviewed later this year for Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, to which you will want to subscribe here. 

Repositories of Byzantine Chant in Greek Libraries

Anyone who knows anything about the study of Eastern liturgics, especially Eastern liturgical music, knows that the state of the discipline is woefully behind comparable Western studies, and there is enormous work to be done even in such seemingly simple (but in fact hugely difficult) tasks as actually finding out what manuscripts are still extant and where. Along comes a new volume from Ashgate to assist in this task: Diana H. Touliatos-Miles, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Musical Manuscript Collection of the National Library of Greece (Ashgate, 2010), 654pp.

About this book, the publisher tells us:

The National Library of Greece (Ethnike Bibliothike tes Ellados) is one of the richest depositories of Byzantine musical manuscripts and is surpassed by its holdings in Greece only by the multitude of manuscripts found in the monasteries of Mount Athos. In spite of being such a rich archive, the National Library has never published a catalogue of its musical manuscripts - not all of which are Byzantine or Greek. It is the purpose of this catalogue to recover or, in some instances, to present for the first time the repertory of the musical sources of the library.This project has been twelve years in the making for Professor Diane Touliatos, involving the discovery and detailed cataloguing of all 241 Western, Ancient Greek, and Byzantine music manuscripts. Not all of these are from Athens or modern Greece, but also encompass Turkey, the Balkans, Italy, Cyprus, and parts of Western Europe. This variety underlines the importance of the catalogue for identifying composers, music and performance practice of different locales.The catalogue includes a detailed listing of the contents as written in the original language as well as the titles of compositions (and/or incipits) with composers, modal signatures, other attributions and information on performance practice. Each manuscript entry includes a commentary in English indicating important highlights and its significance. There is a substantive English checklist that summarizes the contents of each manuscript for non-Greek readers. A bibliography follows containing pertinent citations where the manuscript has been used in references. There is also a glossary that defines terms for the non-specialist. Examples of some of the manuscripts will be photographically displayed.The catalogue will enlighten musicologists and Byzantinists of the rich and varied holdings of some of the most important musical manuscripts in existence, and stimulate more interest and investigation of these sources. As such, it will fill a major gap in the bibliography of Byzantine chant and other musical studies.