Words And Music In Byzantine Liturgy

Words and Music in Byzantine Liturgy Author(s): Egon Wellesz Source: The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Jul., 1947), pp. 297-310 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/739285 Accessed: 09/01/2009 07:35 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=oup. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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JULY, 1947

VOL. XXXIII, No. 3

THE MUSICAL QUARTER WORDS AND MUSIC IN BYZANTINE LITURGY1 By

EGON

WELLESZ

ALL who have ventured to explore the vast domains of Byzantine hymnography from one aspect or another know that we are only at the beginning of the work that must be done. We can divide the preparatory period into two sections: the first, dating from 1850 to the beginning of this century, comprises in the main the work on the texts by Mone, Neale, Pitra, Christ, Wilhelm Meyer, Bouvy, Stevenson, and Krumbacher. The second, dating from the last decade of the 19th century to 1930, comprises the successive attempts of Thibaut, Gaisser, Gastoue, Fleischer, Riemann, Tillyard, and myself to decipher the musical notation. The foundation of the Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae marks the beginning of a systematic approach to the problem of Byzantine music and hymnography as a whole; the first step taken by a group of scholars who could not have been more different in outlook and training, to coordinate their plans and aims into a common effort. 1 This paper was read before the Bicentennial Conference on Scholarship and Research in the Arts, Princeton University, on April 23, 1947.

297 Copyright, 1947, by G. Schirmer, Inc.

The Musical Quarterly They also sought cooperation with other scholars, such as Dom Tardo and the regretted Kirsopp Lake, and they are now anxious to cooperate with their American friends and European colleagues, of whose work we have known too little during the isolation of the war years, and with whom we want to renew and open personal contacts. Hitherto most of our time was taken up by the difficulty of deciphering Byzantine notation in its various phases, but I hope that the main obstacles that stood in the way of the transcription of the innumerable surviving melodies have been removed. We can read the music of the 13th-century hymns at least as well as we can read that of Western hymns of the same century. And just as in Gregorian research we work back from later manuscripts to earlier ones, using the linear notation to help decipher codices that have the neumes in campo aperto, so we can use the Middle Byzantine notation of the 13th century to help us to read manuscripts of the 298

12th and 11th centuries written in the Early Byzantine

notation.

Continuous occupation with manuscript versions, wearisome as it was, proved to be an excellent means of studying the alterations in the melodies that are found in later manuscripts, though they are usually only slight, and of investigating the influence the individual words and the structure of the line have on the expression marks and rhythmical signs of the notation. It is the close connection of words and music to which I should ultimately like to draw attention, because I see in it one of the most remarkable features of Byzantine hymnography. But before we come to this point I should like to deal with the texts and the music in general.

By an unfortunate aberration our immediate predecessorstreated the texts and melodies of the hymns in isolation without reference to their place in the liturgy. Neale, Mone, and Pitra, all of them excellent liturgiologists, had begun the study of the texts in the right way. Cardinal Pitra above all, who was able to approach the study of hymnology, Eastern and Western, as a whole, had rediscovered the metrical character of the various forms of Byzantine liturgical poetry from the simple monostrophic Troparion to the metrically complex Kanon. Here he stopped, and did not attempt to apply the rules of Greek classical poetry to a genre which, as he rightly saw, was derived from Semitic prototypes. The same sound view was held by Bouvy and by Thomas Wehofer, whose

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premature death in 1902 deprived Byzantine research of one of its most promising scholars. At this point, however, the metrical theories that Wilhelm von Christ had put forward in his Anthologia Graeca Carminum Christianorum began to spread. Christ's treatment of Byzantine verse in accordance with Greek metrics must be regarded as a serious setback, because it influenced not only the investigations of Karl Krumbacher into the structure of the Kontakia of Romanus, but also those of Gaisser and of Hugo Riemann into the music of the hymns, and made them introduce into their transcriptions of Byzantine melodies a rhythmical scheme alien to the music of that period. All these attempts to treat Byzantine poetry and prose-poetry as an efflorescence of Greek classical poetry belong to the past, but for us, who had to get rid of this sham tree of knowledge, it cost much time to destroy its roots, and to replace it by a modest but straight plant. Here, I wish to express my gratitude for the inspiration I received from the work of Dom Mocquereau and the School of Solesmes, and particularly from my reverend friend the late Dom Sufiol, with whom I discussed these questions. Dom Suniol provided me with many examples of Ambrosian melodies for my study entitled Eastern Elements in Western Chant, in which I was able to prove the close relationship between Byzantine and Ambrosian melodic formulas. The discovery of this affinity supported my view of the origin of Byzantine and pre-Gregorian Chant from a common source, namely the music of the Syro-Palestinian Church and, further back, of the Synagogue. This theory is, I should like to add, in accordance with the conclusions reached by Dom Cagin in the fifth volume of the Paleographie Musicale, in which he dealt with the texts of the Ambrosian Antiphonary. I want to quote one example only. The text of the Ambrosian Responsory Vadis Propitiator is, as Dom Cagin has shown, a free version of parts of the second and fourth Troparia of the Kontakion Tov bL' lt;sg oTavQcivtcf of Romanus. It is difficult to assume that the Latin antiphon is derived from the Greek Kontakion; they must both go back to an earlier prototype. Since we know that the hymns of Romanus have their roots in Syriac poetical homilies, the obvious explanation is that both the Kontakion and the antiphon are derived from a Syrian prototype. We must now turn to the main subject of this paper. Byzantine hymns, both the words and the music, are an integral

The Musical Quarterly part of Byzantine liturgy. Their artistic qualities can only be properly appreciated if we consider them in relation to their function in the service of the Eastern Church. This may seem a platitude to those who are acquainted with the history and development of Byzantine liturgy, but it can easily be shown that this factor has not been taken into account by prominent scholars who have dealt with Byzantine religious poetry. When, for example, we examine the books and articles that have dealt with the two main forms of Byzantine devotional poetry-Kontakion and Kanonwe find the view expressed, without a single exception, that the Kontakion, which flourished in the 6th and 7th centuries, was poetically superior to the Kanon, which replaced it in the 7th century, and unfavorable comments are made about the dry, didactic, and verbose character of the Kanon. Such a conclusion may, indeed, be reached if the Kanon is studied merely as poetry, without the music, and without any consideration of the function of both these elements in the liturgy. But the result will be a different one if we approach the problem from another angle and ask why it was that the Orthodox Church replaced a traditional and flourishing poetical genre, the Kontakion, by another, the Kanon, so completely that only a few stanzas of the earlier genre remained as part of the Office. The Church had, I think, two reasons for making this important change. The first one, relating to the content, is connected with the igth decree of the Second Trullan Council of 692, ordering the heads of the churches to preach every day. The second, relating to the form, is connected with the extension of the service. Let us explain this statement, briefly. The Kontakion is, in content, a poetical homily. Like its predecessor the sermon of the early Church and the Synagogue, it had its place in the Office after the Lesson from the Gospel. When Romanus (fl. c. 500) begins his Kontakion on the Ten Virgins with the words: "I was stupefied when I heard in the Gospel the holy parable of the Ten Virgins," we are instantly reminded of the scene in the synagogue of Nazareth described by St. Luke in 4:16-22, when Jesus, after having read the pericope from Isaiah, 61, begins his sermon with the words: "This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears." The gap between the sermon of Our Lord and the Kontakion of Romanus is filled by many examples to be found in the homilies of Romanus' predecessors.The most important comes from Melito's 300

Words and Music in Byzantine Liturgy 301 homily on the Passion, recently discovered by Campbell Bonner, in which he chants from the pulpit: "The scripture of the Hebrew Exodus has been read, and the words of the mystery have been explained; how the sheep is sacrificed and the people is saved. Therefore, hear ye, beloved: thus the mystery of the Passover is new and old, eternal and transient, corruptible and incorruptible, mortal and immortal." We can see a clear development from the sermon in the Synagogue to the early Christian homily of Melito, from this to the homily in poetical prose of Basil of Seleucia and his contemporaries, and finally to the poetical homily of Romanus. But it is clear that the decree of the Trullan Council made it liturgically impossible to retain in the Office the singing of the Kontakia as well as the now obligatory preaching of a sermon. This would have meant the duplication of a liturgical act. The Kontakia, therefore, had to be dropped. The second point, the substitution of the Kanon for the Kontakia, was also a consequence of this measure. The extension and the increasing splendor of the liturgy led, as a matter of course, to an increasing embellishment of the service by songs. Instrumental music was strictly excluded from the inside of the church, and portable organs which accompanied the processions had to be left outside the door. The institution, therefore, of a new genre of hymns, in which music played an essential part, was an obvious development. In the days of Romanus the same melody, certainly of a syllabic character, was repeated to each of the isosyllabic stanzas of the poem, that is eighteen to thirty-two times. The new genre, the Kanon, consisted of nine odes, each one made up of a number of stanzas. This meant that nine different melodies, composed in different meters and differing in expression, were sung. But this was not all. The refrain of each stanza was repeated by the congregation, and Troparia, that is monostrophic hymns, were inserted after each ode. Thus a rich pattern of Troparia of different kinds arose, among which the groups of isosyllabic stanzas of the odes were predominant. It still remains to be shown in detail how the nine odes of the Kanon gradually developed from refrains inserted between the verses of the Canticles up to the moment when the poetical power of the Kanons became so strong that the Canticles were replaced by the odes of the Kanon. It must also be shown how far the odes

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were treated as "images" of the Canticles, as earthly, audible echoes of the hymns which, according to the Dionysian theology, are incessantly sung in heaven by the ranks of angels, inaudible to human ears but perceptible to the inspired hymnographer. It must also be explained why, at a certain time, the singing of all the stanzas of an ode was abandoned and only three or four odes were sung in the truncated version, so that at the final stage the hymnographers only wrote down three stanzas of each of the remaining odes. The liturgiological explanation of the replacement of the Kontakion by the Kanon makes it clear that the new stage of hymnography, in which the center of gravity had shifted from the poetry to the music, needs a different treatment of the words from that of earlier Byzantine hymnwriting. In the Kontakion the melodies were certainly of a simple type, making it possible for the congregation to understand every word of the text, which often had a didactic, even polemic, character, as was fitting for a hymn of the homilectic type. In the Kanon the music was more elaborate and the melodic line more extended. The narrative character of the homily disappears and makes way for a more emotional treatment. The poetical vision of the hymnwriter is extended over the whole ode, which is treated as a unit. This leads to repetitions which may sometimes seem dull if one merely reads the poetry, but this feeling disappears if one hears it sung. We may go a step further. As in the case of Latin hymnography, highly inspired poems are mingled with uninspired. The printed anthologies contain many exquisite examples of Byzantine devotion. There are also hymns in which the Eastern mind expresses itself with more passion than can be found in any Latin hymn, and it is these hymns that provide the best approach to Byzantine hymnography. This applies not only to the two main genres of Byzantine minor hymnography which we have mentioned, but also to the all over so thickly forms, the Stichera, which are found clustering the parts of the Office that we can well understand how one of best scholars in Eastern Liturgy came to refer to them as "the ivy of hymnography". We are at present better prepared to understand the nature of the Byzantine devotion than were the scholars who approached and problem looking back to the great masters of Greek poetry the whom hymnographers. with Byzantine they compared thought

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This was an unjust estimate of poets who were gloriously defending the realm of their ideas against iconoclasm, which threatened to destroy monastic life in the entire Eastern Empire, and who, faced with torture and death, professed their faith. We can go even further back, to the days of Romanus, in order to show the formation of the new spirit, which is the spirit of the Orthodox Church. so different from that of Clement of Alexandria, who represents the Catechetical school of the 3rd century, and who draws inexhaustibly on classical writers - Homer, Pindar, Aeschylus, Euripides, Pythagoras, Plato. Romanus is the poet of Orthodoxy; he expresses in his poems the dogmas of the Church. He makes an uncompromising stand against the spirit of ancient Greek poetry and philosophy. In the 18th stanza of his hymn on Pentecost we find the following outburst: Ti (pvoGot xal Povt6ewoiotv ot "EMqVg;; L qpavTilovtral tJog

"AeaTov TOvtrQtaxataQatrov; Tt XAavctval rrO

HXoaTova;

Tl ArO EVnOvqv OTeQyovat ay trov vEv; Tl Lil VOOVOiV "OpQov

iVEtov aQyov; TI HlUcayo6av 'iQVoUoVt5 TOv bltalcog )Lto(poivTa; Why are the Greeks puffed up, and why do they chatter? Why do they let their imaginations wander after Aratos, the thrice accursed? Why do they err in pursuit of Plato? Why do they adore Demosthenes the degenerate? Why do they not see that Homer is a hollow sham? Why do they prattle about Pythagoras, who should by rights be put to silence?

Here we have laid bare the style of the poetical homily. Some may feel that such hostility to the great minds of the past should have no place in a poem. But we may come to understand Romanus better if we look for parallels in poetry that lies nearer to us. We shall find them in 17th-century England, in Milton, and in contemporary France, in Paul Claudel. There is a passage in a poem of Claudel in which the poet raises his voice as defensor fidei

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in an age filled with the spirit of religious indifference. I quote a passage from his Magnificat, written in 1907: Restez avec moi Seigneur, parceque le soir approche et ne m'abondonnez pas! Ne me perdez point avec les Voltaire et les Renan, et les Michelet, et les Hugo, et tous les autres infamesl Vous montrez at l'obscure generation qui arrive, La lumiere pour la revelation des nations et le salut de votre peuple Israel.

In Paradise Regained Milton sums up the Christian's attitude to the pagan philosophers and ends: Who therefore seeks in these True wisdom finds her not, or by delusion Far worse, her false resemblance only meets, An empty cloud.

Neither Romanus nor Milton nor Claudel can be charged with ignorance of the greatness of the men whom they attack, indeed it is because of this greatness in the eyes of the world that the attack has to be made and the attention of the audience turned to values beyond those of the world, to active Christianity. Should poetry of this kind be called sophisticated and sterile because the hymnwriters dwelt so constantly on dogmatic problems, and were influenced by theological questions which the present-day reader must be familiar with if he is to understand their work? I think that the answer to this question depends on the creative power of the hymnwriter to assimilate these elements and to compose a hymn that fulfills the purpose for which it was written, namely to produce in the congregation the state of devotion that the feast of the day requires. There have been many great poems in the West, from the Middle Ages up to modern times, which need an exegesis to be fully appreciated. It is enough to mention Dante's Divine Comedy, Langland's Piers the Plowman, Johann von Saaz's Ackersmann aus Bihmen and Milton's Paradise Lost. The great hymns of the Orthodox Church have not yet found an adequate literary exegesis, or a translator of high literary qualities. Yet even the early Victorian adaptations of some of the hymns made by Neale revealed so much of their beauty that they now form an integral part of the English Hymnal. There is also a German prose translation of the Lenten and Easter hymns by P. Kilian Kirchhoff, who, like a Christian martyr of the days of Nero, died for his faith before he was able to finish his work.

305 Words and Music in Byzantine Liturgy But we need a poet who is at the same time an accomplished Greek scholar, a man like Milton or Dryden, to give us a translation of Romanus, Andrew of Crete, John Damascene, Theodore and Joseph of the Studion, in order to make Byzantine hymnography accessible to the modern mind, or else a great scholar capable of evoking the spirit of the hymns. We must hope for such good fortune; without it the work we Western scholars are now undertaking will be restricted to the understanding of a small group of the highly educated. We shall now turn to the music of the hymns. On various occasions I have drawn attention to the fact that Byzantine melody construction reflects the same attitude towards art that we find in Byzantine poetry and also in the icons. The Byzantine conception of art is based upon Platonic and Neoplatonic thought, adapted to orthodox theology by Denys the Areopagite. According to this conception the work of art belongs to the world of appearances. It is comparable, to quote a passage from Plotinus, to the reflection in a mirror of that which has its substantial existence outside the mirror. It is a projection of the Reality which is audible and visible only to the higher ranks of the celestial hierarchy. But through them the reflection of Divine Beauty is transmitted to the lower ranks, and from them to the prophets, the saints, and the inspired artists, who, in a state of vision, paint an icon or compose a hymn. Thus the artist could never attempt to follow his own imagination-such a thought could never have occurred to him. He had to follow a given pattern. If he was a painter he had to imitate an already existing icon, which represented to him the visible manifestation of the immutable features of the saint who dwells among the angels. If he was a hymnographer he had to imitate an already existing hymn which was the echo, made perceptible to human ears, of the hymns of praise sung in heaven by the ranks of the celestial hierarchy. The rigidity of Byzantine sacred and ceremonial art is not, therefore, a sign of lack of imagination or of creative sterility, as was thought by many writers who approached the problems of Byzantine art from the Western point of view and were dominated by igth-century esthetics. What seemed to these writers lack of imagination appears to us as the uncompromising realization of Orthodox thought, the complete integration of art into the concep-

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The Musical Quarterly tion of Orthodox theology, which found its supreme expression in Eastern liturgy. The wealth of melodies possessed by the Byzantine Church is overwhelming. As the student turns the pages of the two facsimile volumes

of the Monumenta

Musicae Byzantinae,

which contain

the hymns of the Hirmologium and the Sticherarium, he will have difficulty in finding his way. The Hirmologium contains more than 1700 melodies and the Sticherarium more than 700. But, after having

transcribed the greater part of these main sources for the study of Byzantine hymnography from various codices, we can see that the problem of ordering and classifying the melodies is not as difficult as it seemed at first. Nearly all the codices we examined show, in principle, the same versions of the melodies. An exception is the Hirmologium Codex Saba 599. It remains to be seen whether there was a divergence between the usage of the Palestinian monastery of St. Saba and that of the monasteries on Mount Athos and the Studium in Constantinople. But our investigations have simplified the problem. They have shown, first, that there is a uniform tradition in most of the relevant hymnbooks which we can trace back through all the stages of notation from the i5th century to the manuscripts of the 9th century, the earliest with musical notation that are known to us. Secondly the examination of the structure of the melodies has made it clear that they are all built up of a limited number of formulas, short groups of notes that are significant of the mode, the echos of the melody. Let me be more precise. I have found that Byzantine melodies are not composed in a mode as the Greek melodies are supposed to have been, but that the use of a certain group of formulas gives each melody its character, which is called its echos or mode. The principle of the formulas was first discovered fifty years ago by Idelsohn in his study of the maqams in Arabic music, and for some time such groups were simply called maqams. My own investigations have shown that as a principle of melody construction the formulas are characteristic of the music of the Eastern Church. They are also characteristic of the pre-Gregorian melodies in the West and of those groups of Gregorian melodies whose Oriental origin is obvious. It therefore seemed better to replace the term maqam by the less striking but clearer one of "formula". I venture to say that the principle of the formulas is the basic

Words and Music in Byzantine Liturgy

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principle of musical composition in, the Syro-Palestinian countries, and it spread from there with the expansion of early Christian music to the countries of the Byzantine Empire and to those of the Mediterranean basin. The kernel of the melodies of both the Eastern and Western Churches derived from the melodies of the Jewish Synagogue. But their character was considerably modified by the genius of the language to which they were sung; the original form remained unaltered only in a few bilingual chants in which the original language survived as a venerable relic. An example of such incrustation is the monostrophic bilingual hymn "'OTrT( oGavQ6 -

0 quando in cruce, which I have analyzed in my Eastern

Elements in Western Chant. The fact that the vast number of Byzantine melodies can be reduced to a limited number of archetypes may lead to a wrong judgment of the creative qualities of Byzantine composers, as has often been the case with the icons. But we have already made it clear that the Byzantine composer had to submit to the exigencies of the Orthodox liturgy; his task was prescribed for him by the work of his predecessors. The melodic archetypes he had to use and combine were to his mind the apechema, the echo of the divine hymns. The work of the composer consisted in giving the melodies a new frame by linking them together. These short passages, consisting of a few notes leading up or down by steps, or remaining on the same pitch, were the work of the hymnode. The formulas were, as a matter of fact, so well known to the hymnwriter that he had them all by heart. This becomes evident from the study of the manuscripts using the earliest stage of Byzantine notation. Like the Latin neumes the Byzantine musical signs indicate the rise and fall of the voice. Both are interval notations and both, in their early stages, are intended to guide the singer who is supposed to have learned the melody before he sings it in the service. There is, however, a difference between the systems. Plainchant notation gives the interval signs from beginning to end. Early Byzantine notation consists of interval signs and rhythmic signs. In gth-century manuscripts the formulas have, as a rule, no interval signs, but mainly signs relating to expression and rhythmic nuances; the transitional passages, however, have interval signs set to every syllable of the text. This indicates that Byzantine notation aimed at helping the singer to combine the words and the music, so

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that the words should be given the right musical expression, and at giving him a clear indication of how to sing the transitional passages. Let us take an initial formula of the first mode and see how the accents of the words correspond to the rhythmic signs of the music:

Ex.lr t n- ste-e E-Rct-vae-

:"E-Laoyv

v - r-dCV Et- K >-vXO,-:E.-ev X9.- ,s Y-..w- Tat C.X-6v A^

,T_- .te-

te

mt

i f

C) }

QS

Trov I?O-(p-lV

eV iE-4o-Y-c

nEKvo-KTbs a0o- Tev*vgpXo-1.

T?

Plou)

'EK VU-KTb

(a) shows the lin of ethe Hirmos beginning with an accented syllable, (b), (c), (d) the accented syllable preceded by one, two, or three unaccented syllables (the article is always treated as an unaccented syllable). In all cases the accent of the words coincides with the mark of expression in the musical notation. It may be noted that no distinction is made between acute and grave, or between short vowels and long. These differences did not exist in Byzantine pronunciation and the same dynamic sign is used for all of them. The second table gives further evidence for the treatment of the accents: The hymns of this group begin with a recitation on a. The recitation is interrupted by the lower fifth on d which either coincides with the first accented syllable or is used as a preparation for it. Whether the first or the second method is used depends on the rhythm of the lines to which the formulas are set, or on the words that are to be emphasized by the interval of the fifth.

Ex2 VJ

n^

I>n J-.

rTT- -cb - v -6

TTe-no6-KxA- /A -vr

>,

eu-6n

of

a t u-[665] Ne- VL-
'09 - FL-4ov-t?5

6'.

Irv- v-Yov-o?iv

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If we take a whole line and compare the accents of the music with the accents of the words we shall find other words treated as unaccented besides the article. In a verse of twelve syllables there are as a rule four syllables that bear the musical accent, either by an accentuated or prolonged note or a group of notes equivalent to a prolonged note. In shorter verses there are two or three main accents, as can be seen from the following examples:

Ex3 r >-' lo6-i-Xw-dcAvr.x-ea-voooc t-Aov

o/

T'O

w-_-TOV

'&A-Aov rb 'xK-tco6oi ee-ov 55i-60v

IC%v TaU

ir6x-To$

yu-64-

I'KE-Ka-yu-vou

jc%-vo5

Au- va.- ?v 'o ngo-p-TrS K-- L- , ix- P9-&x"5 cv (- [v-6cS] sX_a c-t(Tta-6eL. el-

"0-

e Txy 6tcwu-

'O0-.-t,o-yv

x,

61

tV Utv 'e-jpa-Auv-v41 6TL TTTa-ALv'I605 /A o,-t-T yo -"'os Ka_-ac-vo-_iv

TO

-L-

- Kv

This discovery confirms the metrical theories of Paul Maas, who, in his editions of Byzantine hymns, disregards the classical system of accentuation and puts accents only on words that have a special significance in the meter of the line. The correspondence of the metrical scheme with the rhythmical is another proof of the integral connection between words and music, and shows that neither can be studied independently. Moreover, close examination of the words in connection with the music, and vice versa, will show how subtle the work of the hymnographers was in creating new hymns on the patterns of older ones. Indeed, the more we occupy ourselves with the problem the more we are bound to admire the achievements of Byzantine hymnographers, whom we may call without exaggeration supreme masters of musical and poetical variation. In a period of musicological research in which the scholar's attitude towards any kind of homophonic music was biased by the prevailing interest in polyphony and highly developed harmonic

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The Musical Quarterly writing, neither plainchant nor the music of the Eastern Church was fully appreciated. In that period, as we know, there could be no spontaneous approach to medieval melodies. Plainchant was revived by setting the melodies to a harmonic accompaniment on the organ, and these harmonies were treated in accordance with i9th-century theory. Byzantine melodies, fortunately, escaped this distortion because they could not be deciphered from the manuscripts in which they were preserved. The music of the Greek Orthodox Church was known from everyday usage, and we can now see that the musicians of the 16th and 17th centuries had added so much of their own that the original shape can hardly be discovered under the extensive ornamentation and coloratura. A minute investigation into the dynamic and rhythmic signs of the notation and their groupings was therefore needed in order to find out how they corresponded to the meter of the words. These investigations, exacting as they were, proved most valuable. It can now be seen that the Byzantine hymnographers were extremely careful in setting words to music, and that by slight changes of the melodic line, or even by introducing a rhythmical nuance, they blended words and music perfectly. Nothing was left to chance, nothing to improvisation. Byzantine musical notation is an instrument far superior to Western neumatic notation, and instantly reveals a mistake of a scribe, or the defects of a minor composer who sets the words of a new hymn to an existing melody without making the necessary changes. We have just succeeded in finding out the main principles of hymn-composition. It will be the task of our successors to work them out in detail and to make the treasury of Byzantine melodies a living part of our musical experience.