The tradition of the Orthodox Church is expressed not only through words, not only through the actions

and gestures used in worship, but also through art. Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church In his comprehensive book on Orthodox Christianity, Timothy Ware notes that to outsiders, Orthodoxy may seem akin to all other Christian religions, appearing like Roman Catholicism without the pope. He then argues that it is quite distinct from any religious system in the West. While western Christians and the cultures they have inhabited have been influenced by scholasticism in the Middle Ages, by the humanism of the Renaissance, by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the Orthodox religion has known no Middle Ages in the western sense and has only been obliquely affected by those upheavals that transformed western Europe in the modern era. Although the Orthodox attach importance to the Holy Scriptures, they regard the Bible as a verbal icon of Christ but not as a substitute for the spirit of Christianity. To the Orthodox, theology, scripture, mysticism, spirituality, and art are interdependent. All true Orthodox theology is mystical: Just as mysticism divorced from theology becomes subjective and heretical, so theology, when it is not mystical, degenerates into an arid scholasticism. Similarly, the lineage of Orthodox sacred music is quite distinct from that of the West. Adopting Christianity from Byzantium in the tenth century, the northern Slavs took on its traditions of religious devotion as wellthe lines and colors of its icons and the melodic lines and harmonic colors of its chant. It was only in the seventeenth century that the western style of music notation crept into manuscripts in the Slavic countries, and only in the eighteenth century that triadic harmonies firmly took root. The three Byzantine chants performed this evening represent three differing styles: the Typical Psalm being eirmologic (syllabicone pitch per syllable), the Allilouia being sticheraric (neumaticseveral pitches per syllable), and the Communion Hymn papadic (melismaticmany pitches per syllable). As evident from the particular papadic chant sung this evening, this style of chant became prolifically melismatic. It began with the dawn of Hesychism in the monasteries, wherein monks would spend hours on end in silent prayer. It was believed that this form of chanting was conducive to meditation, and there are even theories that Buddhist monks adopted the practice of contemplative chanting from Orthodoxy. Papidic chant would have been sung by the priests (or fathers) during the allnight vigil or during the preparation of the Eucharist in the Divine Liturgy, hence the name papidka or father chant. St. John Koukouzelis, reputedly the greatest melodist of his time and the author of this chant, possibly came to Constantinople from Bulgaria. The origin of the other two chants, referred to simply as traditional, is unknown. Since the tradition of their performance has remained continuous from antiquity to this day, it is difficult to affix a specific date or to determine their precise manner of performance in earlier centuries. In the tenth century, Volodymyr the Great adopted Byzantine Christianity as the official religion of Kievan Rus, leading a mass baptism in a tributary of the Dnieper River in the year 988. Although current historians maintain that his choice of Orthodox Christianity over Islam and western Christianity was due to economic factors, legend holds that he favored Orthodoxy because of the ornate nature of its places of worship and its elaborate liturgy. For several centuries, Kiev remained the center of Slavic Christianity, and its Monastery of the Caves religious (and hence musical) culture. In the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the music of Ukraines Roman Catholic western neighbor, Poland, began to make inroads into its sacred style. Dmitry Tuptalos triadic kant Nas dilia raspiataho exemplifies this influence. Mykola Diletskys (c.1630-c.1680) treatise Musikiiskaia grammatika begins by defending polyphonic music as compatible with the Orthodox rite and proceeds to describe composition techniques that would further assimilate features of Catholic music into Orthodox music. Together with western rules of harmony, he subscribed to the notion that music should reflect the mood or affect of its text. Diletskys counterpart in Moscow, Vasily Titov, further adapted western polyphonic techniques. To the educated ear, the partesny (part-book) motets of the early eighteenth century sound anachronistic. The fivevoice O woe is me a sinner is reminiscent of Monteverdi. Anhel vopiashe, with its pithy declamatory motives, might easily have been composed by Schtz or even the Gabrielis (had they mastered Church Slavonic). Yet, deprived of instrumental support, partesny motets do sound strikingly different. To the western ear, the opening of O woe is me a sinner, for example, with its high soprano supported by low bass-line only, screams for continuo accompaniment to fill out the harmony and texture; the very lack of chordal support creates a stunningly expressive effect. When the Russian czar Peter the Great opened his window to the west in the early eighteenth century, he began the conscious importation of western music and musicians. German and Italian composers came to occupy virtually all musical posts in St. Petersburg by the late eighteenth century. The first Slavic-born maestro di cappella to the Russian court, Dmitry Bortniansky, was nevertheless groomed in Italian composition technique, studying in Venice under Baldessare Galuppi. His sacred music marks perhaps the most westernized era in the history of eastern Slavic church

music. In the course of the nineteenth century with its nationalist impetus, however, Slavic composers for the Orthodox church came to reject westernization. At the turn of the twentieth century, the scholar Stepan Vasilyevich Smolensky actively took up the cause of restoring the native Russian chant tradition. His work influenced a generation of composers including Rakhmaninov and Gretchaninov, whose motets consciously quote traditional chants (and imitate the tolling Orthodox church bells). Today, with the end of the Soviet era and the resurgence of Orthodoxy, performers and composers in Russia and Ukraine are again turning to the musical vocabulary and inflection of znamenny, Kievan, and Byzantine chant. A common thread throughout all eras of Orthodox sacred music is its essential vocality. Since the Orthodox Church forbids the use of any musical instruments in church services, this policy strongly affected the development of musical genres and styles distinct from their western European counterparts. Bortniansky, trained in Italy to compose sacred works for instruments and voices combined, was nevertheless limited to using voices exclusively when composing sacred music for the Russian court. He thus composed pieces in a concerted genre unique to the Orthodox church, the choral concerto. His flexible approach to the grouping of voices in these a cappella concertos enriched the musical vocabulary of all subsequent composers. The varied vocal colors and textures found in Rakhmaninov and Gretchaninovs motets exemplify a trademark freedom in the handling of voice parts seen only rarely among western composers. Alfred Schnittke composed his Tri Gimny (Three Hymns) for Valery Polyansky and the Moscow Academic Choir in 1984, still during the Soviet era. The phrase prominent in the second piece Gospodi pomiluy (Lord have mercy) is perhaps the most characteristic of all Orthodoxy. In the course of the Divine Liturgys many litanies, great and small, this phrase is spoken almost continuously. Indeed The Way of the Pilgrim recommends that the faithful Christian recite what it calls the Jesus prayer Lord, Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me a sinnerunceasingly, for ages unto ages, world without end. Marika Kuzma with John Boyer