Download PDF | Simon Harris (editor) - Communion Chants of the Thirteenth-Century Byzantine Asmatikon (Music Archive Publications)-Routledge (1998).
181 Pages
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Over more than thirty years many people have helped me to produce these transcriptions. In particular two things stand out in my memory. One is the help I received from Nigel Wilson-currently Sub-Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford-with several Greek- language problems. The other is the trouble to which the Director of the Library at the Greek Monastery at Grottaferrata went many years ago to supply me with photographs of manuscripts in the library, without which transcriptions such as these would have been inconceivable.
In addition I should like to thank the following: the late Dr Egon Wellesz, for supervising this work in its early stages; Merton College, Oxford, for financing two visits to Rome to start the project; Christian Thodberg (later Prof. Chr. Thodberg of the University of Aarhus) for his informative help on the first of these visits; the late Prof. Oliver Strunk of the University of Princeton for drawing my attention in particular to the two manuscripts from mainland Greece; Prof. Kenneth Levy, later of the University of Princeton, for sending me a copy of his work on the Maundy Thursday Communion; Professors Levy and Thodberg and the late Prof. Jørgen Raasted of the University of Copenhagen for photographs of manuscripts used here; Prof. David Hiley of the University of Regensburg for introducing me to the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society and Prof. Hiley, Prof. Brian Trowell and Dr John Caldwell (both of the University of Oxford) for supporting my work in that Society; Mr Bruno Turner, at that time Chairman of the PMMS Council, for his support and particularly for his help in exploring the possibility of a triple collaboration between the PMMS, the British Academy and an American publisher, Miss Yanna Zissiadou and Prof. Charles Atkinson of the University of Ohio for their help in this venture; and Mr Ivan Moody, formerly of the PMMS Council for stepping in and suggesting the present arrangement when this venture came to nothing.
I should also like to thank particularly the following libraries for enabling me to use their facilities: the University Libraries of Sydney and London, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the British Library, the Library of the Greek Monastery at Grottaferrata and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. And I should like to thank my family, to whom this work is dedicated. for their encouragement in my pursuit to its conclusion of something that I had begun some years before I had a family to think about. Simon Harris London 1997.
INTRODUCTION
The Asmatikon For the study of musical history in Western Europe the music of the medieval Greek Orthodox Church-Byzantine Chant-is of interest mainly for the light it may throw on the way Christian Chant evolved, especially during the long period before the earliest surviving musical manuscripts. And although Byzantine sources cannot quite match the antiquity of those in the West, we know that the Latin Church owes not only many hymn-texts to the Eastern Church but also the origins of its modal theory; and there is an unquestionable musical affinity between many Byzantine and many Latin chants. Knowledge of the early traditions of Byzantine Chant is very incomplete, and likely to remain so. But enough is known for it to be clear that.
beside the similarities, there are important differences: Byzantine traditions never seem to have evolved a body of music. equivalent to the Westem Ordinary; nor are there equivalents in the East to the repertoires of Ambrosian and Mozarabic Chant, even though the Orthodox world from medieval Russia to Mount Sinai and the Greek communities of southern Italy Sicily was politically and culturally much more fragmented during the Middle Ages than Western Europe; but above all there is no equivalent in Latin Chant and Psaltikon and Asmatikon." to the elaborate melismatic traditions of the Byzantine world, contained mainly in the These melismatic traditions underwent important changes during the Middle Ages, and particularly during the fourteenth century when change was so convulsive that many melodies in the older repertoire did not survive the century.
New melodies at this time were often associated with the name of the monk John Kukuzeles and with the term "kalophonic", their appear- ance seems to have gathered momentum during the thirteenth century, but their existence is usually only recognised from the earliest surviving dated manuscript of kalophonic chants (Athens 2458, dated 1336); and new melodies continued to appear at least until the middle of the fifteenth century? Before then (that is, until about 1300) there were four repertoires of chant in the Byzantine world-the Sticherarion, the Heirmologion, the Psaltikon and the Asmatikon. The first two of these consisted of simple chants with hymnodic (that is, non-Biblical) texts, which were intercalated between, or otherwise associated with, the verses of psalms or canticles. Many of these chants can be found in liturgically arranged collections in the earliest musical manuscripts, but gradually during the period 1000-1200 they came to occupy separate books devoted to their respective musical repertoires.
The music of the Psaltikon and Asmatikon is also frequently to be found in separate books. That of the Psaltikon appears in two traditions a more widespread and simpler one that seems to have occurred throughout the Byzantine world in the thir- teenth century, and a more elaborate one, related to the other rather as some Old Roman Chant is related to the Gregorian repertoire, and which today is usually associated with the one-time monastery of S. Salvatore at Messina in Sicily. seems to be no division parallel to this in the musical tradition of the Asmatikon, though there are a few chants in it which do seem to be associated exclusively with the Messina tradition of the Psaltikon. But there does seem to be an impor- tant difference in organisation. Asmatic chants in the Messina tradition are frequently put together with psaltic chants in the same collection, whereas elsewhere they occupy a separate book." There There are very few surviving sources for both repertoires. For the Psaltikon. Thodberg lists 23 sources excluding tiny frag- ments 12 for the more widespread tradition, 8 for the Messina tradition and 3 for a mixed tradition which may have been associated originally with the monastery at Grottaferrata near Rome.'
Of the 8 Messina Psaltika listed by Thodberg, 3 are important sources also for the Asmatikon and another would be if it did not show a complete failure to understand the musi cal notation it uses. To these four should be added two Psaltika listed by Thodberg which also contain a very few Asmatikon chants, and one rather heterogeneous manuscript not listed by him which basically seems to be an Asmatikon with psaltic and tant di sam T men import kalophonic additions. Besides these sources for the Asmatikon among the Psaltika of the Messina tradition, there are five separate Asmatika, three of which are preserved at the library of the monastery at Grottaferrata, one on Mount Athos and one was discovered in Macedonia thirty years ago. This seems to be the total of medieval Asmatikon sources; nearly all of them are, for one reason or another, far from complete; and all have the mediobyzantine musical notation which dates them after 1200.
The Psaltikon seems to have been a book destined for a solo singer, and most of its chants need to be supplemented with choral responds that are not preserved in any medieval sources and may never have been written down, the Asmatikon, by far the smallest of the surviving repertoires of music for the medieval Orthodox Church, seems to have been intended for a choir of trained singers, and its music is probably complete.
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