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Just played that lovely chanting, with no trouble. My Mac lap-top was not fazed by it.
Fr. Serge
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I think indeed Gregorian chant is more celestial. But the Byzantine, in another hand, is more incarnated, divinizing. That reflets the ethos of each rite, in my opinion. I'd like to add that the Byzantine Rite has always had a stronger concept of the Liturgy as heaven on earth than the Roman Rite, which has tended to think of the Liturgy more as Calvary made present upon our altars (of course, both ideas are complementary).
Last edited by asianpilgrim; 03/09/09 08:05 AM.
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Crule,
Thanks for posting that link. I could hear it there.
Alexis
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Wrong thread! Deleted.
Alexis
Last edited by Logos - Alexis; 04/18/09 05:15 PM.
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Since we are celebrating the Resurrection, perhaps I can resurrect this thread as well.
It is often repeated that during the Ottoman occupation of Greece, Greek chant took on a more distinctly "Eastern" or even "Islamic" tone (with the fluctuating melismata, etc.).
So, how true is this? If it is, what did Greek chant sound like before the Ottomans? Was there any effort to cling to the old chant methods? Are there attempts to bring it back nowadays?
Alexis
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Y'all don't make me start a new thread, 'cause I will...
Alexis
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It is often repeated that during the Ottoman occupation of Greece, Greek chant took on a more distinctly "Eastern" or even "Islamic" tone (with the fluctuating melismata, etc.). Often repeated by whom? I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure that this is not true... Byzantine chant may sound "Eastern" to untrained modern ears, but so does Old Roman chant and a lot of medieval Western stuff (see the Ensemble Organum links posted here). Byzantine chant today, as I understand it, is performed in substantial continuity with the way things were done before the Ottoman occupation. Listen, for instance, to the Romeiko Ensemble recordings if you're interested.
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One could probably fill a small library with books about the history of Byzantine Chant. Some of them are no doubt polemical attempts to assert what "true" Greek music is. Some of them are certainly first rate and useful pieces of scholarship. The vast majority I'm sure are in Greek and non-English languages (I'd imagine some recent ones are in Russian), and will probably never be translated. And which I'll never read because I can't read those languages. That being said, this [ stanthonysmonastery.org] article is instructive, and the author knows what he's talking about. A few quotes: ....most would uphold the view that the hymnodic productions of the Ottoman era represent a disintegration of the authentic, Byzantine forms of artistic expression and were the results of a growth of new and innovative impulses that were alien to the spirit and evolutionary pattern of the medieval past. As we look closer into the history of Christian art in Ottoman times, we may detect in the literature a curious duality: a mixture of conservatism and elasticity, of traditional compositional methods and personal self-aggrandizement, of laconic control and specious exoticisms. This duality is particularly apparent in the musical repertory where both old and new are seen to exist side by side. A policy of artistic liberalism and reverence for the past was the hallmark of the epoch....
It was not until several decades [after the Council of Florence] that the choral ison or drone-singing was introduced into Greek church music, marking a fundamental change from the centuries-old monophonic tradition. The earliest notification of the custom appears to have been made in 1584 by the German traveller, Martin Crusius....
The emergence of the printed music book after 1820 led to a standardization of the chant repertory both on mainland Greece and on Athos. Selected popular works of the great Constantinopolitan masters of the 18th and early 19th centuries were type set and included in anthologies of chant. But alongside these, simplified Western-style melodies were also making inroads in popular editions of sacred music published, for example, by the influential Zoe movement.....
To begin with, the Church music of these Anatolians, though very much a continuation of the earlier tradition of Ottoman times, was rejected by the Greek urban middle classes as vulgar and "Turkish." They had become enamoured of the sweet polyphonic choirs, some of them with organ accompaniment. But, in time, radio, the gramophone and television also proliferated sophisticated European styles-and these styles, though in a neo-Byzantine dress, have affected certain repertories of Athonite music even to this day. Some of the older Byzantine Chant melodies, for instance those on some of the CDs by Capella Romana, sound quite different than what we hear today. For instance, their Τῇ ὑπερμάχῳ - from a 11th century manuscript - sounds so different from what we sing today, even though it's clearly in the Plagal of the Fourth mode, that there's no way I can't think of a huge, gaudy, processional filled liturgy in Hagia Sophia (even though the celebration took place in the Blachernae). Capella Romana's performance of the kontakion for Saint Benedict, set to a 13th-century Italo-Greek melody for Ἡ Παρθένος σήμερον sounds radically different from the version commonly performed today. I don't mean to jump on a soapbox about this. But information from different spheres - such as this info about Byzantine music, the works of Father Taft - leave me with the inescapable conclusion that - for better for worse - the services celebrated in the Byzantine Churches today are similar in some ways, but also in other ways radically different from what was celebrated for most of the Imperial period. This is something I'm just going to have to accept, regardless of my opinion of it, as someone who will probably worship in a "Byzantine" church the rest of his life. Especially since I'm not keen on eparches - to say nothing of individual parishes! - making up their own redactions. The only people I'd be comfortable with trying to restore older versions of Byzantine worship are monasteries who sit on a substantial amount of their own liturgical material (e.g. Sinai, Vatopedi, Grottaferrata), and long-established Eparchies like Thessaloniki. And this all assumes that they've done their historical homework.
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I imagine the problem of not hearing comes from using a browser that is not Internet Explorer. That's what I found. It's not that uncommon that people put up web pages without testing them with other browers. I don't use IE except when something like this happens, then I figure it's been written for IE only so I try opening it there and sure enough it "works".
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Thank you! Did you or someone else say you bought somewhere the CD it's on? (The joys of dyslexia... I read but don't see...) I recently got a CD of Ambrosian Chant. It's lovely but I do prefer more Byzantine or Oriental melodies. The medieval music Anonymous 4 [ tinyurl.com] specializes in is interesting, tho also western.
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