Tuesday, October 12, 2004

Interested? Talk to any member of the Bella Musica Board about getting involved (Cristin, Jeff, Jordan, Priscilla, and Ronni are board members currently singing with the chorus).

The earliest Christian music had its origins in pre-Christian Greek music, based on the modes and chords described by Pythagoras. The early Church spoke Greek, and the common music forms of the Roman Empire were also Greek. In the first few centuries of Christianity a new form of liturgical music wove together Jewish Synagogue chant and psalmody with new material using Greek music theory to create music that was beautiful and considered appropriate to praise and worship God the Holy Trinity. The earliest known hymn is "O Gladsome Light," sung every evening at Vespers, which was referred to by St. Justin the Martyr in 150 A.D. (A version of this ancient hymn forms the fourth movement of the Rachmaninoff Vespers.)

The new musical form became known as Byzantine. Like its ancient Greek predecessor, it is characterized by eight modes sub-divided into three genres of feeling: Enharmonic, Chromatic and Diatonic. Each mode conveys the feeling associated with the prayer being offered or the text being sung: grave (as in Holy Week); sad or lamentful (as in Christ's passion); or joyous (such as the Resurrection or major feasts). The eight scales do not correspond directly to the major and minor scales of western music, and are characterized by many more semitones, or sub-divisions within a scale. This gives Byzantine music a haunting and somewhat foreign sound, but also allows it the power to accurately convey different emotions or feelings.

Byzantine music was directly imported into Russia in 988 along with all the other cultural appendages of Eastern Orthodoxy, including church architecture and the painting style for icons. Orthodox music was and still is strictly vocal chant, and the earliest forms of "Russian" liturgical music, Znamenny and Kievan Chant, were both quite Byzantine sounding. But Russian culture soon made its mark on the music as well as the architecture and painting of the church. In particular, the huge body of Russian peasant folk-songs came to influence chant, mostly in intervalic relationships and fragments of melody.

The type of liturgical music thought of today as "Russian" began its development as simple polyphony in the seventeenth century under the influence of Polish religious vocal music. It was further enhanced under Peter the Great, who brought to Russia many Western European cultural influences — among them musical styles. For this reason Russian liturgical music often sounds much more accessible to the Western ear: it uses the same musical theory as Western music. (Next week: More about Znamenny chant.)