www.byzcath.org Forums Mysteries: The Life of Worship The Kliros Communion Chant

No place for the original languages in an American patriarchate?

English would undoubtedly be the principal liturgical language, but that is no reason to discard Slavonic--or Greek, or Arabic, for that matter. The ability of a congregation to move seamlessly from one to another within the Liturgy is a sign that it is comfortable within the Tradition.

One must recognize that when Byzantine chant is sung in English, the melody, or the text, or both, must be altered to accommodate the differences between English and Greek. Remember that the Slavs received the full corpus of Byzantine chant along with the Divine Liturgy, and used it for a couple of centuries before developing their own unique tones better adapted to the peculiarities of Slavonic.

I've heard Znamenny and other forms of Russian chant transcribed for English, by Mark Bailey and others (not to mention Byzantine, Romanian, Melkite and Bulgarian chant transcribed for English), and while they keep the core of the original melody, it's hard to say that it hasn't been adapted for English.

The same might be said of the simplified Prostopinje that was used in Ruthenian parishes up to the promulgation of the RDL. Here, the melodies were tailored to the English texts and adapted more for the ears of English-speakers (as Levkulich famously noted, "The curlicues don't work"). Ironically, these simplified melodies are significantly closer to what is being used in Old Ruthenia than the music of the RDL, because, being an oral tradition, Prostopinje continued to evolve even in its homland.

If left alone, gradually and organically, the chants of the Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church would have continued to evolve, retaining its ties to Slavonic Prostopinje, but distinct from it, and reflecting the genius of the Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic faithful.

Pity that some people felt they could do better by short-circuiting the process and locking the Church into a fixed set of chants that will shortly be regarded as a museum piece.

I don't think there is anything wrong with a slight change in the melody of Byzantine chant to accommodate English, for example.
Papa Ephraim at the monastery of St Anthony is doing a lot of good work putting English to correctly written Byzantine chant.

Issues normally arise, in my experience, when choirs or chanters are insufficiently trained and cannot chant according to the Byzantine tuning. There seem to be quite a few choirs who will sing the closest Western tone -- and this takes away from the true Byzantine melody.

My two cents regarding Prostopinije. My dad was regarded as something as an 'expert' by both the Orthodox and Byzantine practitioners of the chant during his lifetime. I learned long ago that the type of disagreement being described here was nothing new.(This probably applies to other chant traditions as well, but not being familiar with them, I can only speculate on that.) In Europe, within the borders of the former Austro-Hungarian empire, there was, and remains, a divergence within Protopenije between the Uzhorod school and the Presov school of chant. This was carried over to the US with the immigrants and became exacerbated as fewer academy trained 'Kantors' arrived from Europe following the first war. Oral means of teaching began to prevail and differences from region to region in the US and parish to parish were common. The divisions which led to ACROD continued the process. Both ACROD and the Byzantines have gone through a fair number of translations and chant renderings over the years.

Today, it is only with Slavonic that the Orthodox and Greek Catholic practitioners of Prostopenije can sing together in the traditional manner. (This was witnessed by me last month when the Iveron Icon was at my Church. Many of our Byzantine neighbors attended the Moleben. The limited number of Slavonic responses to both the service and Marian hymns was robust but the confusion caused by competing English versions was quite evident to the ear.) The same is true in Slovakia and Ukraine, as attempts by both have led to various translations in those languages as well.

Finally, we were taught as children by my father and other priests to use the 'written' music as a guide and learn to follow the lead chanter and congregation - not to force them to follow a written 'ideal'. Easier said than done.

We sing it this way [youtube.com] in my Russian Byzantine Catholic parish. I'll have to ask the old parishioners how it was sung when everything was in Slavonic. We do use some Slavonic but I've never heard Slavonic for the Communion singing in the few years I've been in my parish.

I can't help but note that ACROD and the Byzantine Church share prostopenije of course. Until the mandate of the RDL the Levkulic work served as the base for both of us, since RDL our chant in ACROD has remained the same relatively while the BC chanting is noticeably different to the ear. At a St. Nicholas dinner at the BC church in town recently, I sadly remarked to the Byzantine pastor that we could only sing the Hymn to St. Nicolas together in Slavonic these days as the pacing and words now differed. Stuart's observations about the oral nature of the chant are correct and regional and parish based distinctions were always present in the old days. However, they never sounded forced to the ear.

Our choir sings this melody.