| PSALOM Traditional Eastern Orthodox Chant Documentation Project |
| HYMNOGRAPHY: Hymns of the Octoechos – Eastern Slavic Repertoires | Introduction |
HOME – CLASSIFIED BY GENRES – SOURCES (printed & manuscript)
The chant systems of the Eastern Slavic communities of the Orthodox (and Uniate) Churches (completely excluding choral compositions) can be classified according to five major melodic Groups:
| GROUP | DESCRIPTION |
GROUP 1: Old Znamenny Chant – Neumatic Sources
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GROUP 1: Old Znamenny Chant, which was used in the Muscovite Russian Church prior to Patriarch Nikon's textual reforms in the mid-1600's, is still preserved by the Old Ritualists (Old Believers and Edinovertsy). This style of chanting is sung strictly unison from neumatic notation (commonly called "kriuki" or "hooks"). The earliest manuscripts were brought from the Balkans or from Mt. Athos and are melodically undecipherable; the early to late medieval manuscripts can only be theoretically transcribed, since there are no pitch marks; the manuscripts from c. 1600 onward can be fully transcribed with no ambiguity, since they contain marks indicating pitch and some qualities of time and melodic movement. Until the 1630's all of the formal chants were sung with vocalized hard and soft signs (Ú / Ü), but gradually this practice was phased out in the majority of singing traditions in central Russia; the priestless Old Believers of the Russian North and of the Baltic states continue to preserve the older vocalization of these archaic vowels. A final modification in the 1650's eliminated much of the complexity of the notational system and the use of Fity (long melismatic passages) and Anenaiki (nonsense syllables); this system is currently preserved by the majority of Old Believer communities.
[Two other extinct chant repertoires may be included as a footnote to this group: The ancient Kondakarion Chant, which was inherited from the Byzantine Church, did not survive very long in Russia and has left no lasting musical legacy. Likewise, the "Great Znamenny Chant", a lengthy and complex expansion of the standard "Stolp" Znamenny chants — somewhat analogous to the Byzantine papadic genre, developed during the 1500s, but was not preserved much beyond the early 1600s.] |
GROUP 2: New Znamenny Chant – Notated Sources
Note: Abbreviated Znamenny melodies are included as a sub-set of the full versions of these melodies. |
GROUP 2: New (or Reformed) Znamenny Chant (including the "Abbreviated Znamenny" Chant) uses the reformed texts and the subsequent modifications of the traditional Znamenny melodies, and is notated with either the older Kievan square-note (alto clef) or modern round-note notation. A few rare manuscripts exist which use the older neumatic notation together with the revised (New Rite) texts, but these have not had any significant impact on post-Nikonian Church singing.
While tradition calls for unison chanting, the reformed Russian Church has no ban on the harmonization of the traditional chant. However, Znamenny Chant does not generally have a melodic structure that easily lends itself to harmonization, and most attempts at forming a harmonized adaptation of the Znamenny Chant have proven unsatisfactory and difficult to apply. (There has been a popular trend in some modern communities to introduce the ison of Byzantine Chant, but there is absolutely no historical authenticity for such an innovation, and the resulting sound is quite artificial.) |
GROUP 3: Non-Znamenny Chant Systems
Note: Abbreviated Kievan, Bulgarian and Greek melodies are included as a sub-set of the full versions of these melodies. |
GROUP 3: Non-Znamenny Chant Systems is a category of several different melodic repertoires, all of which are almost complete repertoires by themselves. Each of these repertoires are completely separate and independent of each other, but share many similarities in their overall structure and performance style. This group includes the Kievan Chant, which is a somewhat distant (but still traceable) regional derivative of Znamenny Chant, the "Russian" Bulgarian Chant (of much-debated origin), and the "Russian" Greek Chant (which is a late 17th century adaptation and simplification of Byzantine Chant melodies). [Note: Abbreviated Znamenny, Kievan, Greek and Bulgarian melodies (etc.) are included as a sub-set of the full versions of these melodies.]
The majority of these repertoires are sung with a fairly simple and stable system of choral "homophony" (the "block chord" style of polyphony), sometimes called "folk polyphony", which first entered the Southwestern Church through cultural contacts with Poland during the Renaissance (particularly through the Unia) and eventually spread to Muscovite Russia through the patronage of Patriarch Nikon and Tsar Alexei in the 1650's. However, each of these repertoires were originally sung as unison chant, and have diverse melodic structures that hold up well when sung as unison chants, making them well suited for use in parishes with very small choirs (especially mission parishes). [Two other surviving chant repertoires may be included as a footnote to this group: the medieval Demestvenny and Put' Chant repertoires. Neither of them, however, are based on the system of 8 Tones, and thus they possess a limited or incomplete repertoire of melodies. The use of Put' Chant was generally restricted for certain unchanging portions of the Vigil on Great Feasts, while the Demestvenny Chant was generally restricted to Hierarchical and Festal Liturgies. Both varieties of chant are found in neumatic and later square-note sources, and both varieties can be found in unison and early "non-western" polyphonic settings.] |
GROUP 4: Southwestern Russian Chant Sources
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GROUP 4: Southwestern Russian Chant Sources includes regional traditions of earlier Znamenny Chant (Carpatho-Rusyn "Prostopinije", Galician "Samoilka" and Bukovina Chants), as well as the Kievan and Central Ukrainian chant repertoires documented in the works of Ablamskii and a few others. The majority of these repertoires have been sung for the past 200 or 300 years with a fairly simple and stable system of choral "folk" polyphony, but undoubtedly there was an earlier unison singing tradition. Each of these repertoires have had varying amounts of folk-song influence and intrusion into the contemporary repertoires (particularly in the Carpatho-rusyn tradition), a process which has brought some criticism from outside sources. Furthermore, some of these repertoires suffer from melodic formulas playing a higher role than the texts, resulting in many texts being sung with misplaced accents and word stress — especially in diaspora communities. |
| GROUP 5: Regional Monastery & Cathedral Chants
5A. Northern Sub-Group 5B. Southwestern Sub-Group 5C. Central Russian Sub-Group 5D. Urban Sub-Group |
GROUP 5: Regional Monastery and Cathedral Chants is a broad group which is particularly difficult to organize accurately because of all the cross-influences. These are the product of numerous prominent communities which contributed to the spiritual and artistic life of the Russian Church. (Only the most prominent repertoires are included in this catalog, while other regional repertoires are merely local variants of the ones included here.) The repertoire of each of these communities was usually a melting-pot of various local, regional and borrowed repertoires, since frequently the monks and chanters represented a wide demographics. (As an example, the Valaam Monastery drew monks from every part of the Russian Empire, and the resulting repertoire of the monastery's choir was quite diverse and eclectic. Likewise, the Uspenski Sobor in Moscow drew chanters from all parts of the Russian Empire; "moving to the big city" is certainly not a new practice.) The majority of these repertoires were sung as choral homophony/polyphony, but monophonic chant was preserved in a few isolated monasteries. (It should be noted that a number of separate groups of melodies for Podobny/Prosomoia are included in some of these repertoires.)
After considerable study, it seems best to divide this group into four sub-groups or families: a) Northern Melodies – Valaam Monastery, Solovetskii Monastery, Moscow (Uspenskii Sobor, etc.), Krasnogorsk, etc. (The Prophet Elias Skete on Mt. Athos may also be tentatively included in this family.); b) Southwestern Melodies – Kiev Caves Lavra (a distinctly separate repertoire from "Kievan Chant"), Pochaevsk Lavra and Glinsk Hermitage; c) Central Russian Melodies – Optina Hermitage and Seven-Lakes Hermitage melodies; and d) Urban Melodies – the St. Petersburg Court Chant (including Bakhmetev & Lvov settings), and the "Common" ("Obikhod") Chant. In general, the monasteries sang the chants with a tight or close harmonic structure suitable to all males or females, while the cathedrals tended to favor a wide or open harmonic structure suitable to mixed choirs. |
Some of the repertoires can be accurately categorized in more than one of the following groups, due to the process of cultural cross-pollenation. Likewise, a sizeable portion of the Southwestern repertoire has been imported to Muscovite Russia, where it has been preserved in both full and abbreviated forms (which explains the origins of all the Abbreviated melodies). Not all the various repertoires are complete systems; some repertoires lack melodies for various genres or types of hymns, and have borrowed melodies from other systems to fill the gap. However, in current practice (no matter which tradition we speak of, but particularly that of the modern Russian Church), a wide variety of melodies have been selected from several different repertoires, resulting in a hybrid system (as a glance at the Synodal Obikhod or the Sputnik Psalomshchika will readily demonstrate). It should be noted that the St. Petersburg Court Chant and the Common (or "Obikhod") Chant emerged as the dominating style of singing in Russia (and its communities abroad) in the 20th century, sweeping away most of its competition during the Soviet era, and resulting in the extreme impoverishment of the diverse musical culture of the Russian Church.