Download PDF | Oliver Strunk, Kenneth Levy - Essays on Music in the Byzantine World-W. W. Norton & Company (1977).
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Essays on Music in the
Byzantine World Oliver Strunk
In this companion volume to Essays on Music in the Western World, Oliver Strunk focuses on the area of study that has dominated his interests for the last thirty years—the chant and liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox church. In the twenty-two essays that comprise this collection, Dr. Strunk discusses aspects of musical development and style from late antiquity to that period of Byzantine history corresponding to the early Renaissance. His contributions in the study of medieval Slavic chants and Carolingian music, for example, have served as pace setters for all who have done research in this field. Through the writings presented here, the craft and intellectual artistry of this extraordinary scholar are revealed. Kenneth Levy, a gifted Byzantine scholar and former student of Dr. Strunk’s, has provided a foreword that places this body of works in perspective. Taken in conjunction with the companion volume, these essays stand as a mighty testimonal to the stature of a pre-eminent figure in American musicology.
FOREWORD
TWO recent essays have put into words some special qualities of mind and spirit that distinguish the career of Oliver Strunk. In Harold Powers’s “Scholar and Teacher,”’ prefacing the collection of essays by colleagues offered to him in 1968, and in Lewis Lockwood’s Foreword to the first volume of the present edition of his collected papers, the figure of the man and the profile of the mind emerge with genial clarity. The contents of the first volume in themselves form a substantial portrait, for they display some of the astonishing versatility and the high scholarly and musical competence that have put Strunk in a class by himself among musicianscholars of his generation. The wide range of subjects—from the late Middle Ages through the northern Renaissance, Palestrina, and the works of Haydn and Verdi—cannot fail to impress. Yet what surprises and delights the reader most is the sharpness of focus and freshness of imagination. With a few neat intuitions and a few deft touches Strunk always gets to the heart of a matter.
In this second volume of the collected papers the scope is quite different though the total effect is no less compelling. The field of inquiry shifts to what may strike the casual reader as narrow and specialized—medieval liturgical chant, in particular the chant and liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox church. In place of the broad canvas and virtuoso display of varied interests found in the first volume, there is the concentration on an austere and unspectacular body of music that has little in common with the conventional musical styles of the Western world. These studies in Eastern chant, however, are the one large and unified body of work that Strunk has produced. Representing a sustained creative endeavor that covers nearly forty years, they illumine, as nothing else can, the developing qualities of Strunk’s mind, the remarkable perseverance and powers of penetration combined in him. If Volume I shows a wide-ranging brilliance, it also shows a characteristic impatience with a field once it has been fairly mastered. Volume II offers instead the core of a life’s work—the one subject that captured Strunk’s imagination and held it over a long period of time. To fathom the craft and intellectual artistry of this extraordinary scholar one must turn to the field that he himself has preferred.
The question will arise: Why does a scholar whose mind and ear rank with the best ever drawn into historical musicology put the major portion of his efforts into an area that on its surface seems so narrow, that offers no scope for his manifest powers with conventional musical styles, and that provides so little outlet for communication with large numbers of students and colleagues? Why does the bulk of a life’s work go into this one recondite specialty? Those who know Strunk at all know that such questions are not readily put to him. And such answers as are ventured here are perhaps at odds with those he himself would give. Factors of personal taste must be involved. The eastern Mediterranean and its past still exercise fascination enough to fuel many a lifetime’s endeavor. The spirit of the church and a penchant for ancient ceremonial still fuel many others. There is another personal factor—a distaste for subjects where unrefined speculation is in oversupply. Strunk’s leanings are to uncluttered fields where vision can range and exciting. new shapes can be discerned. He knows the crowded fields. They are handled as masterfully in the earlier volume of essays as are the less crowded ones in this volume.
Yet this explanation is not enough. Something more must urge the rejection of Western common practice as the principal field of inquiry. There are, at bottom, just two tests for the worthiness of a musicological undertaking: (1) that it be concerned with first-class music; and (2) that it be concerned with a first-class problem. Byzantine chant amply meets both tests. What Eastern church music offers a scholar of expansive capacities, beyond its exotic appeals, is a sophisticated challenge of monumental proportions. It represents a thousand years’ growth of styles—a luxuriant accretion of musical practices that flourished over vast areas of the Middle East and that survive now in an imposing bulk of some five thousand noted manuscripts.
The chants are transmitted in notations that must be prudently converted into modern notations in order for the underlying structures to emerge. Linked with the music are the large sister worlds of liturgy, theology, history, literature, and the fine arts of late antiquity and the Eastern empire, each with its highly professional scholarly tradition. All of this touches on many Eastern languages and peoples beyond the Greeks. Byzantine waves also wash on Western shores, leaving traces in the musical rites of pre-Carolingian Spain, Rome, and Ravenna; marking fundamentally the chant recensibns of the Franks; and lingering finally in pockets of the later south Italian rites.
As for the music itself, what warrant is there for describing it as first-class? If this volume has a prime lesson, it is the uniqueness of Byzantine chant among bodies of liturgical chant in the rigor of its organization—in the systematic treatment of the eight modes, the characterization of individual modes, the delicately worked accommodations between psalm cadences and hymn openings, the fine distinctions maintained between styles. Byzantine composition is an exercise of craft that regularly touches the level of high art in the subtlety of its centonate procedures, the responsiveness of musical fabric to text prosody, the sense of style intimately tied to elegant details. None of this is surprising. All that is best of late ancient and early medieval culture is epitomized at Byzantium. The chants represent the same high ideals as do the mosaics of Karieh Djami, the miniatures of the Menologion of Basil II, or the dome of Hagia Sophia. Between the fourth and ninth centuries, the music of Byzantium is the pace setter for musical styles in Western Christendom. It is the model when the West goes about ordering its “Gregorian” chants in the later eighth century. Even when the Byzantine political decline sets in with the thirteenth century the musical styles are embarking on fresh explorations that carry them forward as living art into the eighteenth century. This is a late flowering denied the monodic styles in the West.
Thus our questions return. Does one have in Byzantine chant a first-class problem and first-class music? Or, better yet, can a concern for first-class musical scholarship be incompatible with a con- cern for these artfully structured and culturally powerful styles? In short, can a challenge like this one be ignored?
Students occasionally observe that Professor Strunk’s literary presentations are uncommonly compressed, sometimes making for slow comprehension even after repeated readings. One has only to sample a few sentences in this book to see that Strunk’s prose style is of a wholly different order than the general run in professional journals. Its difficulties, however, lie rather in the habits of readers than in any obscurities of the style itself. There are really two issues here—one, the style; the other, the preparation asked of the reader by an out-of-the-way subject matter. Concerning the style, Strunk’s presentations are invariably models of clarity and economy.
He has a lively distaste for discussions that straddle issues and stir theories about without a solid result in sight. And he has no use for prose that is wordy, or laden with conditionals, or that makes its points with rhetoric instead of reasoned sequence. Strunk writes a lean prose muscled with cogent fact and salted with applications of the mot juste. Partly masking the taughtness of logic, data, and word, however, is an extraordinary flair for the graceful turn of phrase. The casual elegance of this language sometimes catches a reader unawares. Carried along on its flow, one may not notice that the clockwork-tight content is slipping by. The arguments here are precise and subtle. Their illuminations must be savored at tempo andante, never allegro or presto.
Now must these papers be read only after a large store of outside fact and concept has been laid up? For articles on medieval music this is too often the case. For these, the answer is no. The field of Christian chant and liturgy has a large and precise technical vocabulary. Yet it is a matter of obvious pride with Strunk to include within each article all of the special information needed by the novice. There is some natural continuity between articles—one that reflects the widening of Strunk’s grasp and the growth of the field itself. This is particularly noticeable here“With the articles collected in the order of composition. In each there is the overriding concern for getting matters straight—not just straight in themselves, but for the reader as well. No factual or logical steps are missing. The deft explanation is always at hand to render the exercise complete. Yet, again, these are not materials for speed reading.
They have to be taken with the sustained awareness that every word counts.
What this book offers, then, is witness of an extraordinary scholar’s ability to penetrate time and again, and in a manner that radiates effortlessness, to the heart of complex and provocative musical matters. Strunk has the legendary ‘“‘nose’’ for the essential. Coupled with the clarity of mind and resourcefulness of imagination that this betokens are his gifts for elegant and compelling presentation. With him, intellectual control and verbal style are essentially one. Those who on occasion receive his incisive, stylish letters on professional or scientific matters know that his masterful co-ordination of language and subject matter has for decades been attained simply by dictating to a secretary. The grand lines of an article’s structure as well as the details of literary composition are settled in his mind before they go down on paper. The first draft is by and large the final draft. Such facility is granted only to a happy few.
The polished essays in this book, while they may on their face address the musicologist, Byzantinist, or humanist, are in the larger sense an invitation to anyone who relishes superior intellectual fare. The subjects are not everyday but the treatments are selfexplaining, and a newcomer can pick up any article with confidence that full understanding is possible if it is read at a pace appropriate to the care lavished on it by its author. The rewards for such industry are considerable. There are too few worthy occasions to exercise the mind. There are too few examples of first-class subjects treated in a first-class way for anyone to ignore the rich satisfactions gained from an exposure to examples like these.
KENNETH LEVY
Princeton, New Jersey May, 1974
PREFACE
SHORTLY after I began teaching at Princeton in the fall of 1937, I received a call from my colleague Albert M. Friend, Jr., Marquand Professor of Art and Archaeology, later director of the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies in Washington. Through his younger associate, Professor Kurt Weitzmann, Friend had secured from Mount Athos complete photographs of an illustrated Byzantine choir book, and of this he was planning an edition in facsimile. The primary interest of the manuscript was art historical; the quality and quantity of its illustrations made it a unique document. Yet it was only incidentally a picture book; its actual purpose was practical—to provide the members of a medieval Byzantine choir with the texts and melodies they would need from day to day in their celebration of the Office. With this in mind Professor Friend invited me to collaborate with him, and although it meant taking on a task for which I was almost totally unprepared, I rashly accepted.
It has seemed to me that I could not introduce this volume more fittingly than by invoking the names of Professors Friend and Weitzmann, the men who first aroused my interest in Byzantium and helped me to realize the enormous possibilities of Byzantine music as a field of study. Without their encouragement I might never have begun; without the force of their example I would surely not have persevered. Music historians have much to learn from art historians, I have found. With Friend and Weitzmann at my side I soon came to realize that, in early Christian music as in early Christian art, one must begin in the East, above all in the Greek-speaking East, if one’s aim is full understanding of the music or the art of the medieval West. And if this preface and the essays that follow it serve their purpose, the reader will come to share that realization with me together with the further realization that Byzantine music is in itself a subject worth studying, with an importance and a fascination of its own.
The prevailing political climate did not favor our enterprise. Sealed off from Europe by the war, I lacked the resources I needed to make comparisons. Of the hundreds of extant manuscripts with which our photographs might have been compared, not one was held in the United States, although one had been published in facsimile in 1935 and although single folios from a few others were available, chiefly in paleographic albums. That was all, and, as I reluctantly concluded, it was not enough. In wartime one must make do with what one has. The larger project was accordingly laid to one side in favor of lesser ones to which the resources at hand lent themselves more readily. And when the war ended and I could again visit libraries abroad, one absorbing new problem after another challenged my attention and the original plan was, for the moment, lost from sight.
In my paper for the Oxford congress I have spoken of the year 1950 as constituting a sort of turning point for research in Byzantine music. What was true of the research as a whole was also true of my own involvement in it. Until 1950 I had been obliged to work almost entirely from facsimiles and a limited stock of photographs; now I could at last begin to build up a familiarity with the principal sources at firsthand. Thanks to the extraordinary kindness of Father Lorenzo Tardo of Grottaferrata and to the warm welcome extended to me by his younger disciple, Father Bartolomeo Di Salvo, I could spend part of the summer of 1950 in the library of the Badia greca in the Alban hills, and between 1951 and 1958, with help from my university and from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, I could also visit Messina, Mount Athos, Athens, Patmos, and Mount Sinai. In the meantime the American expeditions to Jerusalmen and Sinai had placed microfilms of more than 1,750 Greek manuscripts at the disposal of interested scholars; more recently a similar project, initiated by the Institute for Patristic Studies in Salonica, has begun microfilming the manuscripts of the Athos monasteries. Never again will students of Byzantine chant be forced to contend with difficulties of the sort that confronted me in those early years or that had confronted my older fellow workers from the very beginning.
In principle, the essays in this volume are printed in the order in which they were written. Yet no reader need begin at the beginning, and those to whom the whole subject is entirely new will probably do best to begin with the longer essay placed arbitrarily at the end although it was actually written before the essays for Bari and Bucharest—the broad summary written for K. G. Fellerer’s Geschichte der katholischen Kirchenmusik, the original English text of which is here substituted for the German translation published by the Barenreiter-Verlag. Addressed primarily to readers interested in the music of the Western rites, this essay assumes only that such a reader may be tempted to dip into an account of parallel developments in the Eastern empire provided it is written in language that he can understand. Chiefly because it is a summary, but also because it is accompanied by an extensive bibliography, I have printed it out of order, making it an exception to my general rule.
A further exception, this time to another general rule of mine, is the essay with which the volume opens. Its argument is not easily followed, and as originally printed it was made still less so by my vain attempt to solve the typographical problem in which I had involved myself. Reluctant as I am to tamper with a text already in print, I have, in this instance, allowed myself to insert an additional paragraph which, without affecting the substance of the argument in any way, permits a drastic simplification of the typography, making the essay distinctly easier to read. At bottom, ‘““The Tonal System of Byzantine Music”’ is an outgrowth of my unwillingness to accept as axiomatic a set of widely accepted assumptions without knowing why I was justified in doing so. The essay seeks to answer that question, and in its day it may have served a useful purpose. But since the demonstrations by Wellesz and Handschin that certain Byzantine melodies, their texts translated into Latin, are transmitted in diastematic Western neumes, the question no longer calls for an answer. Like Rosetta stones, the antiphons ‘‘O quando in cruce’’ and ‘‘Veterem hominem”’ answer it for us, and the reader will discover that in my essay for Fellerer I have been able to dispose of it quite simply.
The three essays that follow “The Tonal System” were also written before I could begin working with manuscripts in Europe. This is already sufficiently evident in “‘Intonations and Signatures of the Byzantine Modes’’; it becomes still more so in my little contributions to the symposium at the Temple Emanu-El and to the International Congress for Sacred Music in Rome. Byzantine psalmody and the classification and development of the early Byzantine notations are problems that cannot be presented profitably until the essential sources have been identified and studied; since 1950 these problems have never ceased to concern me, but it was years before I could confidently return to either one. Even so, the two little papers touch on ideas that I was later to develop, and without specifically locating them they at least refer to two of the key sources—Iviron 985, which I knew at the time only from the description in the Lambros catalogue, and the Carbone Menaia, a few thought-provoking photographs from which had been published without comment by Fathers Petrescu and Tardo.
At this point I can perhaps afford to abandon my running commentary, for insofar as the remainder of the volume is concerned the commentary is, as a rule, built in. Inevitably I have found myself obliged to return again and again to certain basic topics, and when a correction or an amplification of an earlier essay seemed called for, I have usually made it in a later one. Further correction or amplification here would be inappropriate.
Until now, only a very few of these essays have been published in the United States. Not previously published anywhere in any form is the essay on the music of the kontakion; previously published only in a fourteen-line abstract is the one dealing with the Italo-Greek tradition. Previously published only in Italian translation are the essays commenting on a passage from the papal encyclical ‘‘Musicae sacrae disciplina’’ and on the edition of the Oktoechos brought out by Father Lorenzo Tardo.
Like the essay for Fellerer, the appraisal of the two choir books at the Chilandari monastery has previously been published only in German translation; for this I have preferred to print the original English text of the abbreviated version from which the translation was made, and I am printing it exactly as I read it in Bratislava in early August, 1964, at a symposium on the beginnings of Slavic music. Not included here is the essay ‘‘A Cypriot in Venice,’ already reprinted in my Essays on Music in the Western World. Also not included are two longer contributions of mine to the series Monumenta musicae byzantinae, useful only when accompanied by the hundreds of plates to which they refer—the introductions to the Specimina Notationum Antiquiorum and to the edition in facsimile of the Triodion Vatopedi 1488, prepared in collaboration with Enrica Follieri. If the reader follows my earlier suggestion and begins with the essay for Fellerer, he will find that from time to time I have drawn attention to the dependence of Western liturgical music and practice on the liturgical music and practice of the East and to the many ways in which the two phenomena resemble one another.
Thus what is relatively familiar becomes a point of departure for what is less so, an entering wedge opening up territory the reader has still to explore. Here and there, as in the close parallelism of the Greek and Latin orders of Mass or in the virtual identity of the two responsorial practices, the dependence is perhaps deceptive and more probably to be understood as an indication of common origin. In other instances—for example, in those involving bilingual singing or in the rites formerly celebrated at the Lateran during Easter Week—the Greek language is joined with the Latin in order to typify symbolically the ecumenical universality of the Christian faith. With the same purpose in mind the Eastern church still reads the Easter gospel in as many languages as can be managed, just as in the Western world, at the dedication of a church, rubrics once prescribed that the officiating bishop should trace with his staff, in sand strewn upon the pavement, the Greek and Latin alphabets intersecting in the form of a cross, or again as the Ordines Romani, in setting forth the rite of baptism, once called for the singing of the creed in Greek and Latin by an acolyte. But where the Latin rites have translated, paraphrased, or imitated Greek texts that are neither scriptural, as with the Alleluia verses, nor doctrinal, as with the creed, the case is entirely different. How frequently this has happened we have barely begun to learn, yet even the few instances touched on in the essays that follow can teach us that the Western world was sufficiently familiar with Byzantine ecclesiastical poetry to admire and seek to recapture its formal symmetry, its eloquence, and its vivid imagery. So far as we can at present determine, this sort of indebtedness seldom extended to Byzantine melody, but even here there were exceptions and they were doubtless more numerous than we think.
At the same time there are differences as well as resemblances, and in defining a less familiar phenomenon in terms of a more familiar related one, they too will need to be considered. To begin with the canonical hours, the correspondence of this cycle in the several Latin rites to the Greek cycles is minimal and largely confined to the most venerable elements. Utterly different from any Western distribution of the psalter are the Byzantine distributions, whether monastic and Palestinian, or ‘‘ecclesiastical’’ and Constantinopolitan.
In the West the antiphons attach themselves mainly to the psalms of the cursus; in Byzantium, just the other way, the troparia are sung with the Ordinary psalms of the Orthros and Vespers or with Ordinary or Proper verses while the psalms of the monastic cursus have only Alleluia refrains. In the West it is the music of the Mass that is the richest and most highly developed; in Byzantium it is the music of the Office. Peculiarly Byzantine is the tendency to rely on oral tradition where the melodies affected were held to be generally known.
Thus West illumines East, and East illumines West. Indeed, the reader will find that certain basic phenomena in the music of the medieval West cannot really be understood at all without some familiarity with the comparable phenomena in the East. The meaning of the eight-mode system, the normalizing of syllabic and melismatic psalmody, the technique of centonization—these things reveal themselves more readily or are more readily studied in the music of Byzantium than in that of the Western world. To say that the study of Byzantine chant is the best and simplest preparation for the study of the chants of the Latin rites is a paradox, a seeming absurdity that is literally true.
In the course of my more than thirty-five-year involvement with the study of Byzantine music I have been assisted in any number of ways by any number of generous people. I am grateful to them all, and in the essays that follow I have thanked a good many of them individually, some of them repeatedly. Here I can mention only a very few—Professor Ernest W. Saunders of the Garrett Biblical Institute; the Abbé Marcel Richard of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, now retired; Professor Linos Politis of Salonica; Mr. Georgios Kournoutos, the former curator of manu- scripts at the National Library in Athens; Professor Nikolai Uspensky of the Leningrad Theological Academy and Seminary; and the librarians of the many monasteries whose hospitality I have been fortunate enough to enjoy, in particular Father Panteleimon, the librarian of the Great Laura at the time of my visits there in 1953 and 1955, and Father Marco Petta, the librarian of the Badia greca di Grottaferrata.
More than to anyone else, however, I am indebted—and deeply indebted—to those distinguished scholars, my immediate predecessors, to whose earlier writings I owe my first introduction to the study of Byzantine music and with whom it was later my privilege to collaborate. Thanks to these men and to the solid foundations they laid down, I need not apologize for this volume’s many omissions or for its lack of continuity. They are deliberate. To the heroic achievements of H. J. W. Tillyard and Father Lorenzo Tardo I have paid tribute in two of the essays that follow. From Carsten H¢geg, founder of the Monumenta musicae byzantinae, I have perhaps learned most of all, although in 1958 the state of his health prevented our meeting as often as J should have liked during the months I spent in Copenhagen at his invitation. He was kindness itself, a born teacher from whom one could learn even when one disagreed, original, independent, quick to question received opinion, one who thought things through, self-confident but with confidence also in those whom he admired. And to Egon Wellesz we Owe an immense debt. The first to recognize and state the case for the study of Byzantine chant as a field of music-historical research, the one musicologist on Monumenta’s original board of editors, Wellesz was in the strictest sense of the word a founder. His death in Oxford on November 9, 1974, marked the end of an era.
Nothing can be more heart-warming to a man who has spent a good many years in teaching than to follow or look back upon the brilliant careers of the talented younger men whom it has been his good fortune to have as students. He doubts, of course, that he really taught them anything, but he is naturally gratified when he discovers that they believe he did and that they insist upon saying so. While disclaiming any responsibility for the far too generous things they have said, I have concluded that I ought to allow Lewis Lockwood and Kenneth Levy to say what they pleased in their forewords, for I am deeply grateful to them both for all that they have done for my two volumes. And with editorial work on this second volume in the final stages, when failing eyesight made it impossible for me to do anything further for it, two capable colleagues from the University of Rome came providentially to my rescue—Ariella Lanfranchi, of the Istituto di Storia della Musica, and Enrica Follieri, of the Istituto di Filologia Classica. To them, for their readiness to help and for their devoted application to the task they had taken in hand, my warmest thanks. Acknowledgment is due also to Norton’s music editor, Claire Brook, for the careful attention she has given to an assignment that has involved a great deal of transatlantic correspondence, for her interest, her patience, and her resourcefulness.
OLIVER STRUNK
Rome, Italy April, 1976
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