Hi Everyone - I have a few questions around chanting and history of the liturgy for the Carpatho-Rusyn people. A little background on me and why I'm asking:
My father is Russian Orthodox (from Saint John The Baptist Church in Mayfield, PA) and my mother Latin Catholic. I was baptized in the Ukrainian Catholic church as a compromise. I never knew anything about the Carpathian Rus (my father's family always identified as Russian) but later in my life I took a trip to Galicia and it all came out (my grandparents were both from Galicia - Grandma from Lviv and Grandfather from Southern Poland). My father's church was Greek Catholic but converted at the turn of the 20th century (apparently with direct influence from Alexis Toth).
After a stint of inactivity in the church I got very interested again (I now live outside PA). I began attending a Ukrainian Catholic parish but I found it emphasized the Ukrainian nationality so much that I couldn't get into it. I checked out a Byzantine Ruthenian Catholic parish near me and really liked it. At first the congregation chant was very different from the choir tradition I was used to from the Ukrainian Catholic/Russian Orthodox churches I attended as a child. However I really began to enjoy it and I liked that the Byzantine Catholic church was oriented more toward a Rusyn American identity. My thinking was that all Greek Catholic churches looked like this originally and then some, after converting to Russian Orthodoxy, became more Russian and ditched the congregation chant in favor of choirs. I also assumed this happened to the Ukrainian Catholic church since it was incorporated into the Russian Orthodox church during communist times in Europe (though so was the Ruthenian Church in Europe so that never really made sense).
I am reading a dissertation paper from Joel Brady called:
"TRANSNATIONAL CONVERSIONS: GREEK CATHOLIC MIGRANTS AND RUSSKY ORTHODOX CONVERSION MOVEMENTS IN AUSTRIA-HUNGARY, RUSSIA, AND THE AMERICAS (1890-1914)"
I came to find out that there was tension between Subcarpathian Rusyns and Galician Rusyns here in America among immigrant communities. In fact according to the paper some Greek Catholic immigrants from Galicia chose to attend an Orthodox church that was Galician in character rather than a Subcarpathian Greek Catholic one because the chant was different enough to seem foreign (this also was the cause of some conversions). As you all probably know there was a split creating the Byzantine Catholic Church for the Subcarpathians and the Ukrainian Catholic Church for the Galicians. So it seems that the Byzantine Catholic church I'm attending now, while Rusyn of course, is actually a little different in terms of liturgical history vs what a Galician Greek Catholic church would have looked like at the turn of the century.
I looked up Galician chant and one of the first videos I came across was from Saint John's Russian Orthodox Church in Mayfield, with the choir singing in the Galician style or chant:
That brings to me to a number of questions:
- How different is Galician chant from the Subcarpathian Prostopinije? Are there any resources that explain the difference between regional chants? - Did Galician churches always have a tradition of choirs or did they also have congregational chant like the modern Byzantine Catholic church? Is it still considered "chant" if the liturgy is sung by a choir (I always figured chant is cantor/congregational only, put the youtube video above seems to call that into question) - Why do the Ukrainian Catholic emphasize choirs while the Byzantine Catholic church does not? - Were the Galicians always more oriented toward a Ukrainian/Russian identity vs the Subcarpathians? I assume that was imposed during conversions, but the paper from Joel Brady seems to put that into question.
So this lecture was really interesting but didn't quite answer the questions I was looking for. However I did discover that the Metropolitan Cantor Institute has a series of lectures on Youtube about the history of Plainchant. I'm going to listen to them and I'll let you know if they clear anything up:
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