Ioannis Arvanitis
A personal profile
Please tell us your name and something
about how your interest in Byzantine chant began.
My name is Ioannis Arvanitis, born in 1961
in Stropones, a small village in the island of Euboea in central Greece.
It was in the fifth class of elementary
school that I stood for the first time by the singers in the church. Our
teacher in the elementary school, Lucas Anagnostopoulos, had an excellent voice
and was a church singer with a practical knowledge of singing (he didn’t know
to read musical notation). He didn’t teach us anything specifically but we had
the chance to sing with him - or believe that we sang!- and feel that we are
members of the choir. This was my first contact with Byzantine music and church
singing ( I had no idea at that time that this is called "Byzantine
music" or that it has a special musical notation).
I went to the high school and started to
learn western music and notation. When I was in the second class, our music
teacher, Spyridon Simitzis, who was, and still is, a Byzantine music teacher
and singer as well, told us that we could learn Byzantine music with him. So, I
started to learn Byzantine musical notation, theory and praxis, at the same
time singing with him in the church. I stayed with him almost seven years
singing in every service and helping him. In 1981, I acquired a "Church
Singer’s Diploma" under his guidance. In the course of the time, I had
already realized that what I had learned was not enough to explain the various
ways of singing the Byzantine melodies, that is, it couldn’t explain the
ornamental style of some singers or their so called "arrangements". I
had been taught to sing the notation almost at face value, not adding many ornaments.
On the other hand, although I liked ornamental singing and little by little
became used to it and could even compose new melodies in this style, I was not
satisfied with the idea of "arrangement" the followers of this style
attributed to the writing down of their performances. This way of writing was
simply to write down every note they used to sing; in other words, to write the
ornaments in full. But I liked the older way of writing and the older melodies.
So, what was the correct way of singing? At
some moment, I realized that the answer to my question was the doctrine of
Simon Karas, an investigator with an enormous corpus of work on Byzantine
chant, its theory and musical palaeography and on Greek folk song. In May 1982,
I joined Karas’ pupil, Lykourgos Angelopoulos, and began to sing under his
direction in his "Greek Byzantine Choir". In October 1982, I went to
Simon Karas’ music school to study with him. He was a somewhat difficult person
and didn’t want to accept all my previous knowledge and experience, not even
that which I had with his pupil (this is another story to be told in another
personal profile!). So, he obliged me to begin from scratch! I had no other
choice, and it proved to be the best choice, so I finally accepted and began
again from the beginning. I stayed there for six years. Karas appreciated my
abilities and my devotion to Byzantine and Greek folk music, so he trusted me
to teach in his school from the third year of my apprenticeship by him. Thus, I
taught there for four years.
Please tell us about your professional
development as a singer of this repertoire
As I have already said, I sang with my first
teacher for almost seven years. Through him, I acquired the practical knowledge
of the liturgy and the services as well as of a lot of practical details of
singing. I used to attend every service in the church, from beginning to the
end, and I became my teacher’s principal assistant, singing sometimes in his
place. In February 1982, I became for the first time a professional church
singer, occupying the position of the second (left) singer at Saint Paraskevi’s
Church in Halkis, the capital of Euboea. I stayed there for four years. After
some time, I became first singer for one year at Saint John’s Church in the
same city. I didn’t occupy any other singer’s position for some years but I
used to sing as a guest in a lot of churches in normal and all-night services
(in church singers’ jargon, I was then a ‘sniper’).
In October 1993, I undertook the
directorship of the left (second) choir of the Church of Saint Irene at Aiolou
Street in the centre of Athens, with Lykourgos Angelopoulos in the right
(first) choir. I stayed there for six years. Because of some disagreements
concerning singing style, I was obliged to leave this church, so I became first
singer in another church. I stayed there for five months. As I am now obliged
to acquire a Physics degree from Athens University to be able to continue with
a PhD in musicology and have maybe a permanent job in the Ionian University I
am at present teaching, I am now a ‘sniper’.
Another branch in which I have been and am
still active is the direction of Byzantine choirs for public concerts. I have
been a member for many years, and then the director for two years, of the Choir
of the Society of Church Singers of the Euboea Archdiocese. After I began to
teach (1988) in the Experimental Public Music School of Pallini, in the
district of Athens, I directed concerts with the pupils’ choir in Greece and in
the Abbey of Royaumont in France. I have also directed the Greek Byzantine
Choir in transcriptions made by me from old musical manuscripts. In the course
of my teaching in the Model Musical Centre of Piraeus (1994-1999) and the
Philippos Nakas Music School (1999 to the present) I managed to form a choir
with my pupils and give many concerts in the frame of these music schools or in
public. This choir is now becoming a professional one , under the name
"Hagiopolites", and is going to publish a CD, already recorded, of
monastic chant from the oral tradition of Mount Athos and give several concerts
at the beginning of 2002 in Holland and Belgium.
In 1997 I also sang with Marcel Peres in
concerts of the Notre Dame repertoire.
In January 2001 I participated in the
singing of Old Roman Chant and directed my own transcriptions from old
manuscripts in concerts with Alexander Lingas’ choir Capella Romana in Portland
(Oregon) and Seattle.
Please tell us about your research
interests and teaching in Byzantine chant
I have already mentioned some of my research
and teaching activities. I’m presently teaching at the Philippos Nakas Music
School and in the Music Department of the Ionian University. In 1982 I came in
contact for the first time with Byzantine musical manuscripts. I began to study
the old notation, that is that prior to 1814 when the Reform of the so-called
"Three Teachers" provided us with the system used nowadays. This old
notation was, and continues to be, rather unknown to the majority of the church
singers or, even if some have a little knowledge of its profile, they don’t
possess a deep understanding of it.
I can claim that I am almost self-taught in
this field ; I mean that I had no personal guidance (moreover who could give
this to me?) except from the transcriptions of the Three Teachers, my knowledge
and experience of the new notation and chant and the doctrine of my teacher,
Simon Karas, described by him in outline and through some examples in three
papers (he didn’t teach me or anyone else directly about this). He was the
first to investigate the old notation in a precise manner and suggest some
fresh ideas about the meaning of the musical signs. At the same time, he
proposed an interpretation (transcription) of some chants which differs from
that of the Three Teachers. Byzantine musical notation has a long history and
its interpretation (especially the notation of the older chants) has been a
matter of controversy among Greek and Western scholars.
What constitutes the problem is the
following: chants like the so-called stichera (chants with psalmic
verses before them) have a syllabic appearance in the manuscripts, i.e., to
each syllable of the poetical text there corresponds in most cases only one
musical sign or a very small group of musical signs and consequently, as it is
reasonable to imagine, one note or a very small group of notes. This was
exactly the way Western scholars like E. Wellesz or H.W. Tillyard transcribed
these chants. But the Three Teachers have given a highly melismatic
interpretation of them, in which to each old sign there corresponds a very
large number of signs, and consequently of notes, in their new notation. This
results in a stenographic conception of the old notation, ie. the written chain
of signs gives only a skeleton of the melody which must be ‘filled in’ through
an oral, but more or less concrete, tradition to give the full melody. In other
words, the old chants were, according to the tradition of the Three Teachers,
extremely long.
However, something like that enters into
conflict with a reasonable duration of the services (even by mediaeval
standards!). So, the long way of interpretation could possibly be the tradition
the Three Teachers had received from their forerunners, but it couldn’t be the
case for some centuries before them. The long interpretation is certainly not
something imaginary, something coming from the imagination of the Three
Teachers; it’s a fact, it’s a tradition, but it must probably be, for one
reason or other, a somewhat later one. My teacher, Simon Karas, investigated
the notation of the old stichera and proved that many formulas of them
are also contained in another kind of chants, the heirmoi. But the heirmoi
were transcribed by the Three Teachers and are sung today in a syllabic or,
sometimes, in a ‘short melismatic’ style, ie. mostly with two time units and
short melismas (a few faster notes) per syllable.
In the same short melismatic style are also
sung (and transcribed by the Three teachers) the new stichera from the
18th cent. So, Karas suggested that the old stichera would
originally have had a shorter interpretation and are in fact the ancestors of
the stichera sung today, revealing at the same time a continuity in the
tradition in a process of a transition from more complex to simpler musical
forms. And this was not only a suggestion. He gathered all the available
evidence and managed to reconstruct the short melismatic interpretation of the
old stichera, making this relation and continuity evident in a concrete
manner. This has been also my own field of investigation. I found much more
evidence in favour of this theory, organized this in a demonstrative manner and
presented a paper in a symposium in 1993. But, as I will further explain, it is
not a closed subject for me. I am still collecting evidence and carrying research
on this.
In November 1993, one day before presenting
my aforementioned paper, I received a manuscript from the 13th
century containing the music of the heirmoi. The text of these chants is
still used today but their music in not the same. As I have already mentioned, heirmoi
are sung up today in two ways: syllabic and short melismatic. No other Greek
scholar had, or has up today, given transcriptions of the heirmoi of the
medieval periods. The style of the heirmoi of the 13th
century or before is exactly the same as that of the old stichera. So,
if the Three Teachers had transcribed them, they would have done so in a long
melismatic way. But this would be completely unreasonable because heirmoi
are only the musical patterns of long hymns with many musically similar
stanzas. So, their music should have a shorter duration and their notation
should be read in a syllabic or short melismatic way. Because of their
similarity to the old stichera, it was reasonable for me to suppose that
they should be interpreted in the short melismatic style already suggested by
Simon Karas. I had worked on this some time ago but I wasn’t completely
satisfied. When I received the 13th century manuscript, in a moment’s
inspiration, I realized that not only heirmoi but stichera as well
should have a syllabic original form.
This was of course not a completely new
idea. Western scholars had already transcribed these chants in this way,
reading the notation ‘at face value’. Yes, but with one difference : they
transcribed them either without a rhythm, even without a beat, or with an
ill-defined or mixed rhythm according to their individual ideas about the
durations of the musical signs and their combinations. The earlier scholars,
like Wellesz or Tillyard imagined that Byzantine chant should sound like
Gregorian chant as sung by the Solesmes monks: free and oratorical. They
couldn’t accept that a medieval chant could have a specific rhythm or at least
a well defined beat. This could, of course, be true for Gregorian chant, but
why should it be the case for Byzantine chant, too? (This prejudice is very
common even today.) Other, later, western scholars, such as Joergen Raasted,
tried to approach the subject by means of the present day conception of the
rhythm of Byzantine chant, ie. the accent-based mixed rhythm which the church
singers believe holds true for the chants they sing. But his, or other
scholars’, interpretations suffered from incorrect interpretations of the
duration of some signs or of their combinations.
So, my difference from the western scholars
was that I realized that the old heirmoi and stichera should have
basically a binary rhythm (or pulse) with very few exceptions of triple
rhythmical feet which moreover were usually present at very specific points of
the chants. Central to this conception of rhythm is the fact that an accented
syllable can fall on the upbeat, if it is on a higher note than at least one of
its neighbouring syllables, i.e., if it has a pitch accent. This is in
opposition to the current view of the singers who believe that an accented
syllable must always fall on the downbeat (accent-based rhythm). But this is
sometimes applied in present-day chants; it is simply that no one has paid
attention to this. It was known to me but I didn’t realize that it could be of
crucial importance. It seemed to impose itself on the music of the old heirmoi.
After this discovery, I subsequently worked on this and managed to formulate a
full theory of the rhythm of the old stichera and heirmoi, a
theory that explains not only the composition of the music of these chants but
also the construction of their contrafacta, i.e., of similarly sung
poetical texts. So, not only the music is revealed in its more or less original
syllabic and rhythmical form but an unsolved problem of hymnography, namely the
problem of the metre of the poetical texts is solved. Byzantine hymns appear
mostly as prose texts in the liturgical books, so their poetical nature was
doubted. My investigation showed in a concrete way that although they are in
fact like prose, they acquire a meter through the musical setting and this
‘musical meter’ is the basis for the construction of the poetical texts of the contrafacta.
The results of this investigation can be applied to the chants sung nowadays
which are the descendants of the older ones, leading to a full and deep
understanding of the rhythm and of the continuity and transformation of chant
in the course of time.
What I have said is related to the first
stages of the notation and the chants written down by means of it. But the
notation and the chants themselves underwent a continuous evolution. All this
is in my research interest because I believe in a diachronic study of Byzantine
chant. One cannot solve problems of the present day praxis and theory without
referring to the past and, conversely, present day praxis can give at least an
idea of some aspects of the past. I have seen that a mere synchronic study has
very often led to errors and misconceptions. So, another field of my
investigations is the study of the history of the modes. The same poetical
texts have remained in use in the Church for many centuries (some hymns date
even from the earliest Christian times) but their music has, little by little,
changed. Although heirmoi, for example, were at some time written down
(musical manuscripts exist from the 10th century), their liturgical
use as model melodies for other chants forced singers to rely chiefly on their
memory rather than on the written melody. So, heirmoi became essentially
a part of the oral tradition occasionally written down but already in a form
changed through orality. This process of transformation even included a change
of the scales or the tonic of some modes. Studying all these stages of the
music of the chants, one certainly realizes that there is an impressive
continuity of the tradition, but without such a study one cannot understand or
explain the complexity and diversity of the modern system of modes of Byzantine
chant.
All these and other related investigations
have given to me a firm basis for my teaching of the present day musical
praxis. Unfortunately, I have not been able up today to give all this in a
complete published form (except in a couple of papers) or teach it in a
systematic way.
How has Byzantine chant changed over the
centuries? How is it presently sung in the liturgy?
Byzantine chant has changed over the
centuries chiefly through the following processes :
a) through the interplay and mutual
influence between the oral and written tradition. Some very well known chants were
seldom or even never written down to notation. On the other hand, the written
down music of model chants, such as the heirmoi or some stichera
automela, served only for reference and learning purposes because a singer
had to know his melodies by heart, as he had to adapt many other words to them.
As a result, all these chants were sensitive to change due to inadequate
memory, a sense of freedom during performance, difficulties of adaptation,
small changes in aesthetic standards, corrupt transmission and so on. The oral
forms of these chants were sometimes written down, and they became a written
tradition subject to the same use as the earlier one and so forth. This oral
tradition could exert in each period an influence on other written and more
stable chants. Through such processes, the music of the heirmoi appears
changed from the end of the 13th century onwards. Several local
traditions appear in the manuscripts in the 14th century, while from
the end of the 16th or beginning of the 17th century. we
see the first record of the Heirmologion (book of the heirmoi)
under the name of one composer, Theophanis Karykis. After almost two centuries
(end of 17th century), we find the heirmologion of Balasios
the Priest and in the second half of the 18th century the heirmologion
of Petros Lampadarios which is used today.
All these three heirmologia are
records of the Constantinopolitan tradition (with possible arrangements by
their notators) but we can assume that they were widely disseminated due to the
ever growing role of Constantinople as a national and musical centre during the
Turkish domination. Examining these heirmologia, one can follow the
continuity of the tradition and the course of changes. Another genre of chants,
the stichera idiomela remained essentially unchanged up to the 17th
century. An embellished, but essentially old style, form of the Sticherarion
(book of stichera) appeared by the middle of the 17th
century. In the first half of the 18th century we can imagine, or
sometimes follow in manuscripts, a process of simplification of the music of
the stichera idiomela with a parallel influence of the music of the
contemporary heirmoi on them. The final stage of this process was its
written record by Petros Lampadarios (d. 1778). This is the so-called ‘New sticherarion’
which is itself or with minor changes or small embellishments still sung today.
b) the change in the way of reading the
notation. As I have already mentioned, I believe I have proved that the
notation was originally read ‘at face value’: one simple sign indicated one
plain or sometimes slightly ornamented note. But we have also received two more
ways of reading the old notation: short melismatic and long melismatic (see
above). These are, of course, part of our tradition and cannot be discarded.
Given that, I believe that one can suppose that these changes in the conception
of notation, from the syllabic to the long melismatic, occurred at particular
times, and this is exactly one of my fields of investigation. Through such
changes, chants became ever longer and this led to tendencies of ever more
embellishment or, in the opposite direction, to simplification and
abbreviations (cutting of some embellishments of melismatic chants). This is a
very complicated story to describe here. What is important is that changes in
the music itself necessitated the development of the notation and changes in
the notation affected the music. The final stage of the notation, the reformed
notation of the Three Teachers used nowadays, being capable of being fully
analytical and describing every detail of the performance, has on the one hand
facilitated the singing but on the other hand has contributed to the
deterioration of church music in the compositions of some modern composers
through strong influences from secular music.
c) the tendency to more melismatic forms
and, on the contrary, to simpler ones. I have already mentioned this with
regard to the reading of the notation. But these tendencies can be traced in
the compositions themselves irrespective of the way the notation is read.
Melismatic chant seems to have existed from time immemorial. However, a turning
point in its history is the emergence of the so-called kalophonic
(literally beautiful voiced, embellished chant in the 13th century
and its subsequent development in the 14th and 15th
centuries. A leading figure who also codified this chant is Ioannis
Koukouzelis. This style was extremely melismatic, sometimes with inserted
tropes, with rearrangements of the text and very often with the insertion of
meaningless syllables such as ‘terirem, to to, ti ti , ne ne na’ etc. This
style continued to flourish after the fall of Constantinople and has in fact
left its imprint in the whole subsequent production of Byzantine chant.
d) the transformation of intervals. In
opposition to the views of many Greek, and in the last decades of some Western,
scholars, or the belief of the church singers concerning present day praxis in
which there is a plethora of musical intervals, I have good reasons to believe
that Byzantine chant was originally diatonic with ‘in principle’ Pythagorean
scales, the scales of the modes being exactly like those described by the
western musician Odo de Cluny of the 9th century. (We know that the
theory of the modes of the East was transmitted to the West).
‘In principle’ means that the relative
position of the tonics of the modes is regulated by the intervals of the
Pythagorean scale. As far as the intervals in the actual practice of singing the
chants of a mode are concerned, I notice that Pythagorean intervals cannot
always be sung in a precise manner ; the voice ‘slips’ frequently to slightly
different intervals like those of just intonation (instead of the Pythagorean
major tone and leimma, ie. small semitone, one sings a major tone, a
minor tone and a big semitone). Although some acousticians speak also in favour
of the contrary, I am sure that I observe such deviations in the present day
praxis for the case of modern modes with theoretically Pythagorean scales. In
addition, this transition from a theoretically ‘hard diatonic’ (Pythagorean) to
a ‘soft diatonic’ (using major and minor whole tones) can also be observed in
the transcription of the Three Teachers, revealing a dual nature of the intervals,
for some formulas at least (that is, one can sing these formulas either in hard
or in soft diatonic). All this makes me suspect that the original form of the
scales is the hard diatonic transformed through musical praxis to the soft
diatonic which dominates the present day praxis. Two modes, second and plagal
second, went even further : they developed augmented seconds (intervals more or
less larger then the whole tone) and became ‘chromatic’ (‘chromatic’ meaning
exactly this in Byzantine chant). Again, such transitions from the hard or soft
diatonic to the hard or soft chromatic (with larger or smaller augmented second
respectively) can be traced in the present day praxis, in the transcriptions of
the Three Teachers and in the manuscripts and the chants in their evolution
over the centuries.
Chromaticism in Byzantine chant has been a
subject of great controversy. It was supposed by many western scholars that it
constituted an oriental influence upon that. But, as I stated, it can with good
evidence be seen as the result of a slow and continuous transformation in the
system of Byzantine chant itself. On the other hand, one does not know the
exact form of Arabic or Ottoman music of the medieval times sufficiently to be
able to speak about influence on Byzantine chant, although such influences can
be suspected through the titles of some Byzantine compositions, such as
‘Persian’, ‘Tatarian’ etc. In brief, I believe that the absence of instruments
in worship, the absence of an exact theoretical description of the intervals
and the continuous musical praxis contributed to the transformation of the
intervals and the formation of the sound of the now sung Byzantine chant, a
sound not so much new but with a life of several centuries.
The bulk of Byzantine chant now sung
consists of chants from the tradition of the 18th century,
especially the notations and compositions of Petros Lampadarios, which
constitutes the tradition of the ‘Great Church’, i.e., the Church of the
Patriarchate of Constantinople. Other older chants are, of course, sung, as
well as later compositions, some of them following the tradition and retaining
the ‘ethos’ (character) of church music, some of them slipping to secular
styles. The same can be also said about the vocal style : on the one hand
traditional and on the other secularized (usually heavily and in a bad sense
orientalized). Let us hope that research, teaching and, above all, a true sense
of the Truth of the Church will result in an improvement of the situation of
this, in spite of deficiencies, living tradition of a music which has its roots
- I’m happy to see this in my investigations- in the Church Fathers themselves.
How important is chant to Byzantine
liturgy?
Chant has a central role in Byzantine
liturgy. From the 4th century the chanted parts of the liturgy
increased in number and, according to the description of Saint Symeon, Bishop
of Thessaloniki in the 14th century, in the old cathedral, the
so-called asmatic (chanted) rite, everything in the liturgy was chanted
in one or another way except of the prayers of the priests. The cathedral rite
declined after the Latin occupation of Byzantium in the 13th century
in favour of the monastic rite which was originally simpler and could be only
read but acquired many new hymns from the 7-8th centuries onwards,
hymns which were poetical and musical compositions by monks and Church Fathers
such as Saint John of Damascus, Saint Kosmas the Melodist, Saint Andrew of
Crete and others, and in fact became from the 13th cent. much more
elaborate and chanted, incorporating the older melismatic chants of the
cathedral rite and at the same time giving rise to the so-called kalophonic
chant (see above). So, one cannot think of a service without chant today,
although monks, hermits, priests on ferial days or individuals at home can
simply read the same services. This does not hold true for the Divine Liturgy,
where the presence of at least one person besides the priest is indispensable.
At any rate, chant reinforces the meaning of the words and gives a further
dimension beyond the mere understanding not only of them but of the whole
worship as well, approaching and reaching the ‘kingdom of the heart’ and the
sense of the presence of the Lord.
Do you see any connection between Western
chant and Byzantine chant?
This is a subject I have not investigated
but, as far as I know, one can see similarities and differences between them.
To try to make a comparison, one must have in mind the following:
a) one must read the old Byzantine notation
in the simple syllabic way and with the diatonic intervals I have described
above. The long melismatic way of reading it is probably a somewhat later
elaboration and obscures the immediate comparison. So, when one has in mind an
‘at face value’ reading of the old Byzantine notation, one can, for example,
discover many similarities - and some differences, of course - between the
Western and the Byzantine way of reciting the verses of the Psalms. One must of
course compare the corresponding versions, ie. compare a simple recitation with
a simple recitation and a melismatic with a melismatic. At least the simpler
recitations bear similarities. I cannot at present say anything about the
melismatic ones.
b) a very large portion of Byzantine chants
consists of hymns. On the other hand, Western chant is based chiefly on the
Psalms. So, one must again be careful on what one compares with what, although
influences between different genres are not forbidden and should perhaps be
investigated. There are some hymns (heirmoi or stichera) of
Byzantine origin that were translated and entered the Western liturgy and are
used as antiphons, such as Adorna thalamum tuum, O quando in crucem, the
antiphons for the Octave of Epiphany and so on. The similarities of Western and
Byzantine chant were perhaps more striking at the beginning. It is a field for
investigation to reveal the details of these similarities and differences.
Originally published in: Anail De, The
Breath of God, Music, Ritual and Spirituality, edited by Helen Phelan,
Irish World Music Centre, University of Limerick, Veritas Publications, 2001.
Reproduced here by permission.
©
Ioannis Arvanitis 2001, 2002
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