Georgian Church Music

I don't know about you, but my library is rather thin on works devoted to Georgian and related musical traditions. Those interested in such histories will be sure to snatch up copies of Svetlana Kujumdzieva's new book, The Hymnographic Book of Tropologion: Sources, Liturgy and Chant Repertory (Routledge, 2017), 194pp.

About this book we are told:

The Tropologion is considered the earliest known extant chant book from the early Christian world which was in use until the twelfth century. The study of this book is still in its infancy. It has generally been believed that the book has survived in Georgian translation under the name ‘ladgari’ but similar books have been discovered in Greek, Syriac and Armenian. All the copies clearly show that the spread and the use of the book were much greater than we had previously assumed and the Georgian ladgari is only one of its many versions.

The study of these issues unquestionably confirms the earliest stage of the compilation of the book, in Jerusalem or its environs, and shows its uninterrupted development from Jerusalem to the Stoudios monastery, the most important monastery of Constantinople. Over time many new pieces and new authors were added to the Tropologion. It is almost certain that it was the Stoudios school of poet-composers that divided the content of the Tropologion and compiled separate collections of books, each one containing a major liturgical cycle. In the beginning all of the volumes kept the old title but in the tenth century the copies of the book were renamed, probably according to the liturgical repertory included, and by the thirteenth century the title ‘Tropologion’ is no longer found in the Greek sources as it became superfluous, and fell out of use.

Transcendence and Transition in Sacred Music

With chapters on the Orthodox musician Arvo Part (about whom see my interview with Peter Bouteneff) and one on the revival of chant on Mt. Athos, this book will belong in every library with an interest in the diverse musical traditions of the Christian East: Jeffers Engelhardt and Philip Bohlman, eds., Resounding Transcendence: Transitions in Music, Religion, and Ritual (Oxford University Press, 2016), 304pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Resounding Transcendence is a pathbreaking set of ethnographic and historical essays by leading scholars exploring the ways sacred music effects cultural, political, and religious transitions in the contemporary world. With chapters covering Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Buddhist practices in East and Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, North America, the Caribbean, North Africa, and Europe, the volume establishes the theoretical and methodological foundations for music scholarship to engage in current debates about modern religion and secular epistemologies. It also transforms those debates through sophisticated, nuanced treatments of sound and music - ubiquitous elements of ritual and religion often glossed over in other disciplines.

Resounding Transcendence confronts the relationship of sound, divinity, and religious practice in diverse post-secular contexts. By examining the immanence of transcendence in specific social and historical contexts and rethinking the reified nature of "religion" and "world religions," these authors examine the dynamics of difference and transition within and between sacred musical practices. The work in this volume transitions between traditional spaces of sacred musical practice and emerging public spaces for popular religious performance; between the transformative experience of ritual and the sacred musical affordances of media technologies; between the charisma of individual performers and the power of the marketplace; and between the making of authenticity and hybridity in religious repertoires and practices. Broad in scope, rich in ethnographic and historical detail, and theoretically ambitious, Resounding Transcendence is an essential contribution to the study of music and religion.

Greek Orthodox Music in Ottoman Istanbul

For the Greeks, Ottomans, and musicians in your life: Indiana University Press is set to release today, January 2nd, a new study that you will want to order as a continuing celebration of Christmas, or perhaps a pre-Theophany gift. In any event, it is a welcome study in an area that has long cried out for more research: Orthodox music in all its diversity. 

Merih Erol, Greek Orthodox Music in Ottoman Istanbul: Nation and Community in the Era of Reform (IU Press, 2016), 288pp.

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.

Peter Bouteneff on Arvo Part

I have had a chance to interview Peter Bouteneff about his recent book to which I drew attention earlier. Bouteneff, a professor at St. Vladimir's Seminary in Crestwood, New York, is the author of such works as Sweeter Than Honey: Orthodox Thinking on Dogma And Truth and Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives. Here are his thoughts on his latest work.

AD: Tell us about your background
 

My first degree was in music – I studied jazz and ethnomusicology at New England Conservatory in the early 80’s. After travels far and wide, including a 2-year sojourn in Japan, I ended up at St. Vladimir’s Seminary, and then at Oxford for further theological studies. I spent five years in Geneva with the Faith and Order Commission of the WCC, and I’ve been teaching at St. Vladimir’s since 2000.

AD: What led to the writing of this book, Arvo Pärt: Out of Silence?

I first met the composer in 1990 and have been smitten by his music ever since. In 2011, my colleague Nicholas Reeves and I conceived of what would become The Arvo Pärt Project at St. Vladimir’s Seminary. That was a massive, all-consuming undertaking that led to concerts at Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and to the composer’s first New York appearance in 30 years. But the Project had always had a more reflective and theological dimension in mind as well. Once the concerts were over, I could devote attention to the book, which I’d been thinking about for the better part of a year. I also had several important conversations with Arvo and Nora Pärt that fed the book at crucial moments.

AD: For those not familiar with Pärt, give us a brief sketch of the man

Owing to at least three factors (his shyness and love of quiet, his beard, and commentators’ apparent need to Orientalize and exoticize him) he has this reputation for being “a monkish recluse.” He is indeed shy, but can be very animated, witty, whimsical, fun, and quite serious too. And comfortable with silence. As the world’s most-performed living composer, he is resigned to his fame, and to the effect of his music on people. Somehow he remains completely humble.

AD: You mention your first exposure to his music while you were a doctoral student at Oxford. Tell us about his Passio and your reaction to it. 

Well, I kind of describe that experience at the outset of the book, but that concert represented a turning point of my life. The book also concludes with a walk-through of that same composition, as a way of summarizing several of my recurring themes.

AD: In your introduction, you quote Pärt himself as saying that to understand his musical philosophy, one needs to turn to the Church Fathers. Are there specifically “patristic” influences on his music that you have detected, or was this a short-hand way of referring more generally to the influence of Orthodoxy on his music and life? 

The latter, for sure. But much of my book is concerned with proposing connections between Pärt’s music and certain scriptural, patristic, liturgical, and ascetical themes in the Orthodox tradition. I never claim that the composer drew on these very same sources, or consciously constructed his music on the themes as I construe them. I’m “just putting it out there,” as it were. I’ll be interested to see if my proposed connections resonate with other listeners. And with Pärt himself.

AD: In your “methodology” section, you take considerable pains to differentiate between causation and correlation when assessing the relationship between Orthodoxy and Pärt’s music. Why is it important to make these distinctions? 

Ah yes – I was just making that point, and I’m glad you notice it! It’s partly because Pärt himself is never explicit about the direct theological/spiritual sources of his music’s inner life. In fact I’m not at all sure that he has pondered the theological connections very fully. It’s more an organic, intuitive process for him. So it would be crazy-pretentious of me to presume that I’d unlocked the hidden key to his work.

AD: I confess that, as my late grandmother used to say, I cannot carry a tune in a bucket. For musical innocents such as myself, where should we start in seeking to appreciate Pärt’s music? If you were stranded on the proverbial island and could only have 3 of his compositions with you, which would you choose and why? 

You’re forcing me to choose from a treasury of riches, but let me try. The first might be Für Alina, the short, unassuming but haunting piano work with which he emerged from his eight-year compositional deadlock into his tintinnabuli style.

The second might be his Passio (the St. John Passion). This is a 70-minute immersive experience that is best experienced with close attention, following the text.

Third, Adam's Lament, to witness what he does with the text of St. Silouan of Mt. Athos, setting it within a widely ranging palette of tonalities.

AD: You reflect a great deal—as your title suggests—on the role of silence in Pärt’s music. If you were to speculate a bit, do you think the huge interest in Pärt today has to do precisely with how little silence we have in our world of endless twittering and texting?

Absolutely. A great many listeners speak about his music as a refuge, giving them space to create or think.

AD: The third and final section of your book uses a phrase I first read in Schmemann many years ago: “bright sadness.” How does that notion help us to understand Pärt’s music?

It’s become a common feature of stories about Pärt – people notice this strangely “dual” quality to his music, describing it in terms of “loss and hope,” “suffering and consolation,” “zero and one,” “frailty and stability.” Pärt even adds “human and divine,” as well as “sin and forgiveness.” It’s something that listeners simply intuit, with remarkable consistency. But there is a technical feature in his music, a rule that he consistently deploys, that is at the root of that binary. Read the book to learn more…

AD: Sum up your hopes for this book, and tell us who especially should read it

My hopes: to reach a broad audience, a-religious, religious, and in-between. To bring any listener into a deeper engagement with Pärt’s music. To explore the relationship between the music’s broad, near-universal reach, and its particular roots in Orthodoxy. To yield insights into the relationship between theology and art.

AD: Having finished the book, what are you at work on now—what is the next project?

After a few long-promised essays on theological topics, I’m planning a short book on how to understand oneself as “a sinner” without going crazy with either pride or self-hatred.

Out of Silence

I just received in the mail a new book whose author I know somewhat and whom I have arranged to interview in the coming days: Peter C. Bouteneff, Arvo Pärt: Out of Silence (St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2015), 231pp. I'm excited to read this book and even more to hear from Peter, not least because I know nothing about music and have long admired people who not only understand music but can also play it, a skill I still hope to develop some day. (I take consolation from the fact that my late paternal grandmother had a cousin who, at the age of 80, decided one day she too wanted to learn how to play piano, and set about doing precisely that. She then spent most of the next decade or so of her life driving around southern Ontario to play music "for the old folks" in nursing homes!)

About this book the publisher tells us:

Listeners often speak of a certain mystery in the way that Arvo Pärt evokes spirituality through his music, but no one has taken a sustained, close look at how he achieves this. Arvo Pärt: Out of Silence examines the powerful interplay between Pärt s music and the composer s own deep roots in the Orthodox Christian faith a relationship that has born much creative fruit and won the hearts of countless listeners across the globe.

Orthodoxy in Estonia

Overshadowed as it is by its hulking and often hegemonic neighbor to the East, and more recently by the conflict in Ukraine, the country of Estonia rarely captures the attention of the world, or even of most of the world's scholars. And yet there is a significant Orthodox population there which has been little studied, at least recently and in English. In particular, Orthodoxy in Estonia, to the extent it is known at all, is likely known through its most famous musical spokesman, Avro Part (on whom see this collaborative initiative between him and St. Vladimir's Seminary, organized by Peter Bouteneff). But in December some of that will change with a new study, Jeffers Engelhardt, Singing the Right Way: Orthodox Christians and Secular Enchantment in Estonia (Oxford UP, 2014), 304pp.

About this book we are told:

Singing the Right Way enters the world of Orthodox Christianity in Estonia to explore musical style in worship, cultural identity, and social imagination. Through both ethnographic and historical chapters, author Jeffers Engelhardt reveals how Orthodox Estonians give voice to the religious absolute in secular society. Based on a decade of fieldwork, Singing the Right Way traces the sounds of Orthodoxy in Estonia through the Russian Empire, interwar national independence, the Soviet-era, and post-Soviet integration into the European Union. Approaching Orthodoxy through local understandings of correct practice and correct belief, Engelhardt shows how religious knowledge, national identity, and social transformation illuminate how to "sing the right way" and thereby realize the fullness of Estonians' Orthodox Christian faith in context of everyday, secular surroundings. Singing the Right Way is an innovative model of how the musical poetics of contemporary religious forms are rooted in both consistent sacred tradition and contingent secular experience. This landmark study is sure to be an essential text for scholars studying the ethnomusicology of religion.