Byzantine Culture

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Byzantine Chant Today

Byzantine chant is still sung weekly in Orthodox churches worldwide. The 1814 notation reform, the argument over the ison drone, Ottoman influence, UNESCO listing, and how to listen.

Walk into an Orthodox church in Athens, Thessalonica, Cyprus, Alexandria or a Greek parish in Melbourne or Chicago on a Sunday morning, and you will hear a single melodic line sung in Greek over a held drone, in a modal system unrelated to western tonality, from texts written between the sixth and the fourteenth centuries.

It is among the oldest continuously practised musical traditions in the world, and it was inscribed on UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2019. It is also a tradition that has changed more than its practitioners generally acknowledge, and the question of what medieval Byzantine chant actually sounded like is genuinely open.

The Practice

The essentials, as described in Byzantine music:

  • Monophonic: a single melodic line, no harmony
  • Unaccompanied: no instruments, ever, in the liturgy
  • Modal: eight modes (echoi) in an eight-week cycle, each with characteristic melodic formulas rather than being a scale
  • Microtonal: intervals smaller than the western semitone, which a piano cannot produce
  • Text-driven: the melody serves the words, and the rhythm follows the accentuation of the Greek

A choir (choros) or one or two soloists — the protopsaltes and the lampadarios — sing the melody, while other singers hold a drone, the ison.

The 1814 Reform

The single most important event in the modern history of the tradition was a notation reform.

In 1814 three Constantinopolitan musicians — Chrysanthos of Madytos, Gregory the Protopsaltes and Chourmouzios the Archivist — introduced what became known as the New Method: a simplified, more explicit notation, with a systematic theory of scales and intervals, designed to make the chant learnable without years of oral apprenticeship.

The Three Teachers also transcribed the entire existing repertory into the new system, which took years and produced the printed chant books still in use.

The reform saved the tradition and altered it. The older notation, particularly the elaborate kalophonic repertory of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, encoded melodic formulas that a trained singer knew how to expand; the transcriptions fixed one realisation of these in writing and discarded the others. What is sung today is a nineteenth-century reading of a fifteenth-century tradition, itself several centuries removed from the medieval one.

The Ottoman Layer

Four centuries of Ottoman rule left marks that are audible and awkward to discuss.

Greek and Turkish musicians in Constantinople shared a musical environment. The Ottoman makam system and the Byzantine echoi influenced each other; several eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cantors were also composers or performers of Ottoman secular music; and the theoretical vocabulary of the 1814 reform draws on Ottoman music theory.

Greek writing on the subject has often preferred to present the chant as a pure survival from Byzantium, and the Ottoman element has been played down for reasons that are not musical. Musicologists working on the manuscripts are generally clear that the influence was real and mutual.

The Ison Argument

Whether medieval Byzantine chant had a drone is the most-argued technical question in the field.

The ison is not notated in any Byzantine manuscript. It appears in written sources only in the sixteenth century, and its presence in medieval practice has to be inferred or denied.

The case for medieval use: absence from notation proves little, since notation recorded the melody and a drone needs no notation; western travellers describe something like it; and the practice is too widespread across Orthodox traditions to be a late import.

The case against: there is no evidence; Latin sources that describe Greek singing do not mention it; and the drone may derive from Ottoman practice or from post-Byzantine polyphonic experiments.

Ensembles specialising in reconstruction generally sing medieval repertory without the ison, and the result sounds markedly different — thinner, more linear, and closer in character to plainchant.

The Traditions

Greek and Constantinopolitan: the mainstream, with the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s cantors as the reference point.

Athonite: the monasteries of Mount Athos preserve a slower, more austere style with long-held notes, and the monastic performance of an all-night vigil is a different experience from a parish liturgy — considerably longer, and less ornamented.

Romanian and Bulgarian: the Byzantine system adapted to Slavonic and Romanian texts, with regional melodic variation.

Russian: a special case. Russian church music descends from Byzantine chant through the medieval znamenny tradition, but adopted western harmony in the eighteenth century under Italian influence. Modern Russian church singing is choral and harmonised, and sounds nothing like Byzantine chant; the znamenny repertory has been revived in some monasteries and by Old Believer communities.

Arabic: the Antiochian churches sing the Byzantine melodies to Arabic texts, and the relationship to Arab musical practice is close.

The Recordings

For anyone wanting to hear the tradition, three broad categories exist and they sound quite different:

  • Modern Greek cathedral practice: the Greek Byzantine Choir under Lykourgos Angelopoulos is the standard reference
  • Athonite monastic singing: available in recordings from several monasteries, slower and plainer
  • Scholarly reconstructions from medieval manuscripts, by groups such as Cappella Romana and the ensembles associated with academic transcription projects; these are the most historically argued and the furthest from current church practice

Listening to a fourteenth-century kalophonic setting in reconstruction next to the same text in modern practice is the fastest way to grasp what the argument is about.

Why It Survived

The chant outlived the empire because it was never institutionally separable from the liturgy it serves. As long as the Divine Liturgy was celebrated — under Ottoman rule, in Soviet Russia, in diaspora parishes in cities that had no Greeks in them a century ago — someone had to sing it.

That also explains the change. A living tradition adapts, absorbs, simplifies and forgets; a fossil does not. The chant sung this Sunday is not what Byzantine congregations heard, and it is the direct descendant of it, which is the most that any music eight centuries old can be.

The Three Teachers

The reform of 1814 was the work of three named men, and their individual contributions are documented.

Chrysanthos of Madytos (c. 1770–1846) supplied the theory. He wrote the Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Ecclesiastical Music and the larger Great Theoretikon, which set out the modal system, the intervals and the notation in systematic form. His interval theory used a division of the octave that drew on Ottoman music theory as well as Greek tradition — a fact that has been noted with varying degrees of comfort ever since.

Gregory the Protopsaltes (c. 1778–1821) was the practical musician, chief cantor of the Great Church, who worked out how the new signs applied to actual singing and transcribed a large part of the repertory.

Chourmouzios the Archivist (d. 1840) did the bulk of the transcription — an enormous labour, converting the older notation into the new across the whole corpus, filling dozens of manuscript volumes now in the National Library of Greece.

The Patriarchate approved the method in 1814, a school was established to teach it, and printed chant books using the new notation began to appear from 1820.

Their achievement was real: they made the tradition learnable and printable, and they probably saved it. Their transcriptions also froze one interpretation of an oral tradition, and everything now sung descends from their reading of it.

The Reconstruction Movement

A body of scholarship and performance has grown up since the 1970s attempting to recover medieval practice, and it is worth knowing what it does and claims.

The method: work directly from Middle Byzantine notation in manuscripts of the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, transcribe using the interval values those manuscripts imply, and perform without the accretions of later practice.

The results differ audibly from modern church singing. Reconstructions are generally slower, plainer, less ornamented, and — most controversially — often performed without the ison drone, on the grounds that no medieval manuscript notates one.

The principal figures and ensembles include the work descending from the Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae project in Copenhagen, which has been editing and publishing Byzantine chant manuscripts since 1931, and performing groups such as Cappella Romana, which has recorded reconstructions of the medieval liturgy of Hagia Sophia — including, in one project, a recording made using an acoustic model of the building itself.

The objections from within the church tradition are that the manuscripts record the melody and not the manner, that a living tradition is better evidence of how music sounds than a scholar’s reading of its notation, and that the reconstructions sound like what they are — a modern hypothesis.

Both positions have force. The honest statement is that nobody knows what tenth-century Constantinople sounded like, and that the two approaches are answering different questions.

Where to Listen

A short, practical list, since the tradition is better encountered than described.

Modern Greek cathedral practice: recordings of the Greek Byzantine Choir under Lykourgos Angelopoulos are the standard reference. Angelopoulos, who died in 2014, was both a practising cantor and an advocate of scholarly engagement with the manuscripts, which makes his recordings unusually interesting.

Athonite monastic singing: recordings from Vatopedi, Simonopetra and other houses. Slower, plainer, and sung by communities rather than choirs.

Reconstructions: Cappella Romana’s recordings of medieval repertory, and the various projects associated with the Danish and Greek editorial traditions.

Romanian, Bulgarian and Arabic practice: worth hearing for the same melodies in different languages, which demonstrates how the system adapts.

Russian znamenny: recordings by Old Believer and revival ensembles, showing where the Byzantine tradition went in Slavonic before western harmony displaced it.

An hour spent comparing a modern Greek recording of a kalophonic setting with a scholarly reconstruction of the same piece is the fastest possible introduction to what is at stake in this field.

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