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Q What is Byzantine Chant?
A Byzantine chant is the liturgical music of the Orthodox Churches located primarily around the Mediterranean Sea. It is a direct descendant of ancient musical forms from Greece, Syria, and the Holy Land. Orthodox church singing is a continuation of the tradition of the pre-Christian Jewish synagogue worship, which was centered primarily around the singing of the psalms of David.
Q Who developed Byzantine Chant
A St. John of Damascus refined the existing musical forms which were used in his day, paring down the number of musical modes or scales to the eight which he determined to be the most conducive to reverent worship and excluding those which he felt to be more suited to the songs of harlots. He also wrote many hymns, including the Resurrectional hymns in the eight tones which are sung on Sundays, and the eight funeral stichera (verses).
Q What are the distinguishing characteristics of Byzantine Chant?
A Byzantine chant is (or rather, should be) always chanted a capella.
Because it is of Middle Eastern and Hellenic origin, Byzantine Chant often sounds very foreign to the ears of those who have been raised on Western musical forms. Often it is based upon microtonal scales which incorporate some "in-between" notes (imagine a note which falls between a black key on the piano and its adjacent white key). Byzantine chant was originally monophonic, that is, non-harmonized. Within the last several centuries a drone note, called an ison, was added below the melody to accentuate the "root" of the tone. In modern practice a "variable ison" is sometimes used, in which the drone note may change to harmonize with its corresponding melody note. More recently, various efforts have been made to create a fully harmonized Byzantine chant, but these efforts generally tend to obscure and corrupt the essence of the tones.
Q Who uses Byzantine Chant today?
A Byzantine Chant is used today in the Orthodox Churches of Greece, and in the Patriarchates of Constantinople, Antioch (Syria & Lebanon), Jerusalem, Alexandria (Egypt), and Romania.
Q How is Byzantine Chant related to Western chant forms?
A Byzantine Chant shares certain characteristics with the Gregorian psalm tones, in that it is made up of eight tones, four of which are derived from the other four. In this way Gregorian chant can be said to be a derivation of the theories of St. John of Damascus. In pre-Carolingian times, Old Roman chant shared some of the same scales and musical cadences as Byzantine chant. For an excellent example of the fertile cross-pollination of Greek and Roman musical idioms, see Chants de la Catedrale de Benevento, available on CD from Holy Transfiguration Monastery.
Q How is Byzantine Chant related to other Orthodox chant forms?
A Byzantine Chant is the mother form of all other Orthodox chant forms. The chants used by the churches of Serbia and Bulgaria are modified descendants of the original Byzantine chant. Connecting Russian chant with its Byzantine roots presents a greater challenge. Upon the conversion of Russia to Christianity, the Great Prince St. Vladimir requested that the Patriarch of Constantinople send monks to instruct the people in the Orthodox faith and practices. The monks began teaching the people the melodies which were in use in the Byzantine Empire. The Russians, however, already had a strong cultural identity and folk music tradition; they began making the music of the Church more suitable for the Russian ear. Within a couple of centuries a separate Russian musical system had arisen, called Znamenny chant (znam = sign, referring to the musical notation which was written above the words). In the 14th and 15th centuries, the areas surrounding Kiev and the Carpathian mountains (near present-day Moldova, Hungary and Slovakia) fell under Polish cultural influence and developed variant musical forms which incorporated harmonies (which were improvised). Later, after Peter the Great embarked upon the culturally and spiritually disastrous effort to Westernize Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church, various private composers, many of whom had been trained in Italy, Austria or Germany, began composing church music which was only remotely related to the tonal system. Finally, in the 18th century, a panel of religious composers created the Obikhod, or common, tonal system, which streamlined the Kievan tones (combining them with fragments of a few other variant traditions, such as the so-called "Greek Chant" and "Bulgarian Chant" traditions) and once and for all removed the concept of a tone as a melodic/modal framework, replacing it with the concept of a tone as a formulaic construct. There has been a recent movement, primarily in the Russian monasteries, to return to the purer forms of Znamenny chant. For an excellent example, see "Chants from Valaam," available on CD from Conciliar Press.