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Byzantine Music Culture

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ByZantine Music culture
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What is known today as Byzantine music has been developed and refined for over two millennia. With its earliest roots going back to Pythagoras' philosophy on the division of chords, its latest and final revision took place in 1881 in the city of Istanbul; the city still referred to by the practitioners of this complex art by its more ancient name of Constantinople. For the purposes of this essay, the name Constantinople will refer to the city up to and including the present day. To provide for a clearer understanding of the theory of Byzantine music, the process of the development of Byzantine music as it is known today will be divided into two eras. We will call these two eras pre-Byzantine, and Byzantine periods of musical development. The pre-Byzantine part of the essay will cover developments made before the foundation of Constantinople. This period includes everything before c. 330 C.E. The Byzantine period will include all of the advancements made after the founding of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire. Every refinement made up to the present day, the most important dates being the simplification of the notation in 1821 by John Koukouzeles and the great council of 1881, will be included in this period, but not, unfortunately in the essay.

Although there is a very significant part played by notational theory on the development of Byzantine music theory and Hymnography, the scope of this essay does not allow for us to delve into this connection too deeply. It is therefore necessary to attempt to separate these two arts as much as we can and focus on the strict Hymnographical and theoretical part of the development.

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Pre-Byzantine
The date of 330 is an important date to end this period because the adoption of a practice of toleration of Christianity by the Roman Empire, under Constantine the Great, encouraged the growth of Christianity as a religion. Thus, for the first time, Christians could worship as they chose. This ending of repression allowed for a great increase of musical and theological advancement by Christians, although original musical creativity in the Western sense was never practiced. Traditionally, Pythagoras' philosophy on musical chords is thought of as the predecessor of Byzantine music, but academically, the roots of the music are ascribed Hebraic origin. We will deal with the academic theory first. Because Christianity sprung up from the roots of the Judaic tradition, it is obvious that there will be traces of Jewish tradition in Christian worship. It is less known (to the non-academically inclined at least), however, that early Christians did not think of themselves as Christians at all, but rather as Jews (Hexter, 1995, pp. 60-100). It is therefore natural that the earliest followers of Jesus, who were primarily Jewish, maintained the rituals and practices of the Synagogue, including the ways of its chanters and readers. It is also inferred that the converts who were chanters and readers in the Synagogue instructed their fellow Jesus-followers in the musical tradition of the Synagogue as it was taught to them: through oral tradition.

This tradition included practices that have been followed ever since in Byzantine music such as certain Jewish rules of cantillation, which allowed for small improvisations in the way a piece was sung but never to the extent where the traditional formula and cadence were altered (Wellesz, 1954, p. 1). There is evidence that exists to this very day that proves the relationship of Byzantine music to Jewish music through the common recitation formulas that exist in both.

"[C]ertain chants in use even today exhibit characteristics which may throw light on the subject [of the evolution of Byzantine music]. These include recitation formulas, melody-types, and standard phrases that are clearly evident in the folk music and other traditional music of various cultures of the East, including the music of the Jews."

So we see that a basic link exists between the music of the Synagogue and early Christian music. A further relationship exists between the two traditions in the form of similarities of Psalmody and Hymns. Briefly, Psalmody is the chanting of the Psalms of David by the Jewish congregation, which carried over to the Christian musical tradition and modelled the way other forms of Byzantine musical pieces were sung (Christian doxologies being the best example of preservation of Jewish Psalmody). Hymns on the other hand, are paraphrases of biblical text, which are written in such a way as to fit to conform to a traditional cantillational formula. This practice was firmly based in Jewish tradition and found in Jewish liturgies. Early Christian attempts at Hymnography (creation of hymns) were immediately condemned because they were not exclusively based on the words of the Scripture. But after only altering passages that were allowable by the Orthodox majority did Hymnography take hold within the Christian tradition (Wellesz, 1954, pp. 3-4).

So we can see that the transferal of the Jewish tradition was primarily practical in nature. This means that the origin of what is today Byzantine music was based on the established practices of converted Jews whose liturgy emulated that of the Synagogues from which they came: they simply kept the practices that they learnt from the many years they spent singing and worshipping in their Synagogues and applied these practices to the worship of, what was to them, a continuation of their religion.

Traditionally, Pythagoras is taught as the founder of what has evolved to become Byzantine music. This is true to a certain extent. Where the Jews contributed tradition and practice, Pythagoras contributed theory. He was the first to connect music to mathematics and pioneered the study of acoustics. Pythagoras was also the first to create modes of music and to ascribe ratios to several series of notes. This created scales which are the basis of the Oktoechos (English: "eight modes") which is the center of Byzantine music theory (Pythagoras' notes are still used in Western music as well). (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1981, pp. 662-663, 704-705, v.12)

Ancient Greek musical modes are simply different arrangements of notes of varying pitch. These arrangements create scales that are related to one another but are characterized by different "feelings," much like a major scale compares to a minor scale in Western music. Thus, modes were classified by assigning different names to them according to the feeling which they imitated (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1981, p. 740, v.12). The eight modes that are comprised from Byzantine music are separated into three genres of feelings. This is directly descendent of the ancient Greek practice, for in both systems, the number and names of the genres are the same.

The three classificational names used both in Byzantine and ancient Greek music are:

i.Enharmonic: modes that are of this genre are heavy and/or powerful in nature. One may think of an ancient Byzantine army singing a war song when one hears music in this scale.

ii.Chromatic: these modes are sad but harmonious. Funeral and mourning hymns are usually sung in this scale.

iii.Diatonic: this scale is the one closest to the Western or European musical scale. Miracle hymns and Christ's spoken words are sung in this usually happy scale. However, this scale is almost universally used in Byzantine music as well, being the scale which possesses most modes (four Diatonic modes compared to two Enharmonic and two Chromatic).

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