Byzantine Music

Byzantine music, as it survives, is church music: monophonic, unaccompanied, sung in Greek, organised in eight modes, and notated in a system of signs that indicate movement rather than pitch. It is one of the oldest continuously practised musical traditions in the world, and it is also, for the earliest centuries, largely irrecoverable.

The reason is simple. Notation appears only around the ninth or tenth century, and the earliest notation that can be read with confidence is later still. Everything sung before that — the hymns of Romanos, the liturgy of Justinian’s Hagia Sophia — is lost as sound, however well preserved as text.

The Eight Modes

Byzantine chant is organised by the Octoechos, a system of eight modes cycling in an eight-week rotation through the liturgical year: four authentic modes and four plagal ones derived from them.

A Byzantine mode is not simply a scale. It is a set of characteristic melodic formulas, a final note, a range, and a repertory of standard turns of phrase. Composing in a mode means assembling and varying its formulas rather than inventing a free melody over its scale — closer to the Arabic maqam or the Indian raga than to a western key.

Byzantine scales also use intervals smaller than the western semitone. The modern theoretical system divides the octave into 72 parts, and several modes use intervals that a piano cannot produce. How far this reflects medieval practice is debated; the earliest theoretical descriptions are much less precise than the modern ones.

The system is traditionally attributed to John of Damascus, which is almost certainly a simplification of a longer development in Jerusalem and Constantinople.

Notation

Byzantine notation is neumatic and, crucially, interval-based: a sign tells the singer to move up or down by a given interval from wherever they are, not what pitch to sing. There is no staff, and no absolute pitch until the starting note is given.

The development runs roughly:

Ekphonetic notation (from the 9th century) — signs placed in gospel and prophecy lectionaries to guide the cantillation of readings. Not a melody, but a set of recitation formulas.

Early or Palaeobyzantine notation (10th–12th centuries) — indicates the shape of a melody for a singer who already knows it. Cannot be transcribed with certainty.

Middle Byzantine or Round notation (from c. 1177) — fully diastematic: every interval is specified, and the melodies can be transcribed reliably. This is the point at which the surviving repertory becomes readable, and it is the basis of all modern scholarly transcription.

Chrysanthine or New Method notation (from 1814) — a simplified reform by Chrysanthos of Madytos, Gregory the Protopsaltes and Chourmouzios, which is what Greek churches use today.

The 1814 reform is a genuine complication for anyone asking how medieval Byzantine chant sounded. The reformers transcribed the old repertory into the new system, but the relationship between the two is not one-to-one, and Ottoman-era performance practice had altered the tradition considerably in the intervening centuries. The question is treated in Byzantine chant today.

Who Sang

The Great Church of Hagia Sophia had a professional establishment. Justinian’s legislation of 535 fixed the staff at 160 clergy, including 25 cantors (psaltai) and 100 readers, alongside the priests and deacons.

Chant was led by soloists from the ambo, with two choirs on either side of the nave answering each other antiphonally, and with the congregation joining in refrains. The two principal singers, the protopsaltes and the lampadarios, were significant figures; from the fourteenth century individual composers are named in the manuscripts — John Koukouzeles, Xenos Korones, John Glykys — and the period produced a florid, melismatic style called kalophonic, “beautiful-sounding,” in which a single syllable might be spun out over dozens of notes.

Women sang in convents and in the home but not in the public liturgy of the great churches.

Instruments

The liturgy was unaccompanied, and it still is in the Orthodox churches — a position defended on the grounds that the human voice alone is a fitting offering and that instruments belong to the temple worship superseded by the church.

Outside the liturgy, Byzantium used instruments freely. Imperial ceremonial employed trumpets, horns and drums; the Hippodrome had organs; banquets had lyres, lutes, flutes and dancers.

The organ deserves a note, because its history is counter-intuitive. The instrument was a late Roman and Byzantine imperial device, associated with the court rather than the church. In 757 the Byzantine emperor Constantine V sent an organ as a diplomatic gift to Pepin the Short, king of the Franks. It caused a sensation, and the instrument was subsequently adopted into western church music — where it became central — while remaining excluded from Orthodox worship. A Byzantine court instrument thus became the defining sound of Latin Christianity and never entered Greek.

The Acclamations

One substantial body of Byzantine music was neither liturgical nor private: the ceremonial acclamations of the court, described at length in the tenth-century Book of Ceremonies.

The circus factions, the Blues and Greens, had an official role in these; their organised choirs greeted the emperor at the Hippodrome and at palace functions with formal chanted acclamations, sometimes in Latin long after Latin had ceased to be understood. The texts survive; the melodies do not.

Transmission

Byzantine chant travelled with Orthodoxy. Slavonic translations of the hymns required adapting the melodies to a different language, and the Russian znamenny chant tradition descends from Byzantine models by this route, as Byzantine legacy in Russia describes. Georgian, Romanian, Serbian and Bulgarian traditions all derive from the same source and diverged.

There is also a strand of influence on the west. The eight-mode system of Gregorian chant is related to the Byzantine Octoechos, and a number of Greek chants entered the Latin liturgy — the Trisagion is sung in Greek in the Roman Good Friday liturgy to this day.

What It Sounds Like

Recordings of modern Greek cathedral chant give one answer, and scholarly reconstructions from Middle Byzantine notation give a rather different one — generally slower, less ornamented, without the drone (ison) that is now standard and whose medieval existence is disputed.

Anyone wanting to hear the difference should compare a recording of the Greek Byzantine Choir with the reconstructions made by ensembles working from the medieval manuscripts directly. Neither is certainly right. What both share is the essential character of the tradition: a single melodic line, shaped by the words, in a modal language older than western tonality and unrelated to it.

Reading the Notation

A brief account of how the signs work makes the tradition’s mechanics concrete, and explains why transcription is contested.

Byzantine neumes are of two kinds.

Interval signs (somata and pneumata) indicate movement from the previous note: the ison sign means stay on the same pitch, the oligon means up one step, the apostrophos down one, and there are signs for larger intervals. They are cumulative — combinations produce larger leaps.

Expression signs (hypostaseis) sit above or below and indicate how a phrase is to be performed: emphasis, acceleration, a particular ornament, a slight hesitation. Several of these were ornamental formulas that a trained singer knew how to realise, and their meaning is precisely what the 1814 reform made explicit — and, in making explicit, fixed.

Because the system is relative, a piece has no absolute pitch until the martyria, the signature indicating the mode and starting note, is given.

The consequence for modern scholarship is that Middle Byzantine notation from about 1177 can be transcribed into staff notation with reasonable confidence for the melodic outline, and with much less confidence for the ornamentation, rhythm and performance manner. Everything before that — the Palaeobyzantine notations of the tenth to twelfth centuries — records the shape of melodies for singers who already knew them, and cannot be read cold.

The Kalophonic Style

The fourteenth century produced a musical development as distinctive as the painting of the same decades, and it is the point at which Byzantine composers become named individuals.

Kalophonia — “beautiful sound” — is a highly melismatic style in which a single syllable may be extended over dozens of notes, the text is sometimes reordered or interpolated with meaningless syllables (teretismata, sung on “te-ri-rem”), and the setting becomes a virtuoso vehicle.

The leading figure is John Koukouzeles (c. 1280 – c. 1360), a singer at the imperial court who left for Mount Athos, and who is credited with reforming the notation, composing extensively and systematising the teaching of chant. The “wheel of Koukouzeles,” a diagram for working out modal relationships, is attributed to him.

Others — Xenos Korones, John Glykys, Manuel Chrysaphes — are named in the manuscripts with their compositions attributed.

The style has been read as the musical equivalent of the Palaiologan revival: technically ambitious, elaborate, self-conscious and produced in a collapsing state. It was also controversial at the time, on the grounds that extending one syllable over two minutes of ornament does not help a congregation understand the text.

Music Outside the Church

The secular music of Byzantium is almost entirely lost, and listing what is known indicates the size of the gap.

Instruments are attested in texts and images: the kithara and lyre, the pandoura (a long-necked lute), flutes and reed pipes, the psalterion, trumpets and horns for ceremonial and military use, drums, cymbals and the organ.

Occasions are described: imperial processions and receptions, weddings, funerals with professional mourners, banquets with dancers and singers, the theatre and mime, the taverns, and the Hippodrome, where the factions’ choirs performed and organs played between races.

Texts survive for some of it — the acclamations in the Book of Ceremonies, wedding songs, work songs mentioned in passing.

Melodies survive for essentially none of it. Byzantine notation was developed for and applied to liturgical chant, and nobody wrote down a drinking song.

The result is that a thousand years of secular music in the largest city in Europe is known only as a list of instruments and occasions. What Byzantines sang at a wedding or hummed at work is irrecoverable.

• Byzantine Hymnography — the texts that were sung
• Byzantine Chant Today — the living tradition and the 1814 reform
• Byzantine Liturgy — the services the music serves
• Romanos the Melodist — the greatest hymn writer
• The Hippodrome of Constantinople — the secular music of the city
• Byzantine Literature — the wider written culture
• Byzantine Legacy in Russia — where the chant travelled