The Past Is Always Present: The Revival of the Byzantine Musical Tradition at Mount Athos 0810881470, 9780810881471

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Europea: Ethnomusicologies and Modernities Series Editors: Philip V. Bohlman and Martin Stokes 1. Celtic Modern: Music at the Global Fringe, edited by Martin Stokes and Philip V. Bohlman, 2003. 2. Albanian Urban Lyric Song in the 1930s, by Eno Koço, 2004. 3. The Mediterranean in Music: Critical Perspectives, Common Concerns, Cultural Differences, edited by David Cooper and Kevin Dawe, 2005. 4. On a Rock in the Middle of the Ocean: Songs and Singers in Tory Island, Ireland, by Lillis Ó Laoire, 2005. 5. Transported by Song: Corsican Voices from Oral Tradition to World Stage, by Caroline Bithell, 2007. 6. Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman Ecumene: Music, Image, and Regional Political Discourse, edited by Donna A. Buchanan, 2007. 7. Music and Musicians in Crete: Performance and Ethnography in a Mediterranean Island Society, by Kevin Dawe, 2007. 8. The New (Ethno)musicologies, edited by Henry Stobart, 2008. 9. Balkan Refrain: Form and Tradition in European Folk Song, by Dimitrije O. Golemovic´, 2010. 10. Music and Displacement: Diasporas, Mobilities, and Dislocations in Europe and Beyond, edited by Erik Levi and Florian Scheding, 2010. 11. Balkan Epic: Song, History, Modernity, edited by Philip V. Bohlman and Nada Petkovic´, 2011. 12. What Makes Music European, by Marcello Sorce Keller, 2012. 13. The Past Is Always Present: The Revival of the Byzantine Musical Tradition at Mount Athos, by Tore Tvarnø Lind, 2012.

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Europea: Ethnomusicologies and Modernities Series Editors: Philip V. Bohlman and Martin Stokes The new millennium challenges ethnomusicologists, dedicated to studying the music of the world, to examine anew the Western musics they have treated as “traditional,” and to forge new approaches to world musics that are often overlooked because of their deceptive familiarity. As the modern discipline of ethnomusicology expanded during the second half of the 20th century, influenced significantly by ethnographic methods in the social sciences, ethnomusicology’s “field” increasingly shifted to the exoticized Other. The comparative methodologies previously generated by Europeanist scholars to study and privilege Western musics were deliberately discarded. Europe as a cultural area was banished to historical musicology, and European vernacular musics became the spoils left to folk-music and, later, popular-music studies. Europea challenges ethnomusicology to return to Europe and to encounter its disciplinary past afresh, and the present is a timely moment to do so. European unity nervously but insistently asserts itself through the political and cultural agendas of the European Union, causing Europeans to reflect on a bitterly and violently fragmented past and its ongoing repercussions in the present, and to confront new challenges and opportunities for integration. There is also an intellectual moment to be seized as Europeans reformulate the history of the present, an opportunity to move beyond the fragmentation and atomism the later 20th century has bequeathed and to enter into broader social, cultural, and political relationships. Europea is not simply a reflection of and on the current state of research. Rather, the volumes in this series move in new directions and experiment with diverse approaches. The series establishes a forum that can engage scholars, musicians, and other interlocutors in debates and discussions crucial to understanding the present historical juncture. This dialogue, grounded in ethnomusicology’s interdisciplinarity, will be animated by reflexive attention to the specific social configurations of knowledge of and scholarship on the musics of Europe. Such knowledge and its circulation as ethnomusicological scholarship are by no means dependent on professional academics, but rather are conditioned, as elsewhere, by complex interactions between universities, museums, amateur organizations, state agencies, and markets. Both the broader view to which ethnomusicology aspires and the critical edge necessary to understanding the present moment are served by broadening the base on which “academic” discussion proceeds. “Europe” will emerge from the volumes as a space for critical dialogue, embracing competing and often antagonistic voices from across the continent, across the Atlantic, across the Mediterranean and the Black Seas, and across

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a world altered ineluctably by European colonialism and globalization. The diverse subjects and interdisciplinary approaches in individual volumes capture something of—and, in a small way, become part of—the jangling polyphony through which the “New Europe” has explosively taken musical shape in public discourse, in expressive culture, and, increasingly, in political form. In order to capture something of the turbulent dynamics of music performance, a critical framework is necessary, and this is what Europea: Ethnomusicologies and Modernities aims to provide, engaging the forces that inform and deform, contest and mediate the senses of identity, selfhood, belonging, and progress that shape “European” musical experience in Europe and across the world.

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The Past Is Always Present The Revival of the Byzantine Musical Tradition at Mount Athos Tore Tvarnø Lind

Europea: Ethnomusicologies and Modernities Series, No. 13

THE SCARECROW PRESS, INC. Lanham • Toronto • Plymouth, UK 2012

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Published by Scarecrow Press, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.scarecrowpress.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2012 by Tore Tvarnø Lind All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lind, Tore Tvarnø, 1969– The past is always present : the revival of the Byzantine musical tradition at Mount Athos / Tore Tvarnø Lind. p. cm. — (Europea : ethnomusicologies and modernities ; no. 13) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8108-8147-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8108-8148-8 (ebook) 1. Music, Byzantine—History and criticism. 2. Byzantine chants—History and criticism. 3. Church music—Orthodox Eastern Church. 4. Athos (Greece)—History. I. Title. ML188.L56 2012 781.71’900949565—dc23 2011026340

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

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We are concerned with observing contemporary society through contemporary society. There is no metaécrit because there are no external observers. Whenever we use communication—and how could it be otherwise—we are already operating within society. —Niklas Luhmann

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Contents

Series Editors’ Foreword Acknowledgments Note on Transliteration List of Figures CD Track Listing

xi xiii xv xvii xix

1 Introduction: Toward an Ethnomusicological Study of 2 3 4 5 6 7

Byzantine Chant Musical Blossom Sacred Musical Transorthography Producing Mount Athos: Byzantine Chant, Pilgrimage, and Tourism “The Monks Have Prayer”: On the Athonite Style of Chanting Spiritual Silence, Sacred Sound Conclusion

Glossary of Greek Terms Bibliography Index About the Author

1 37 75 121 151 173 199 211 215 231 241

ix

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Series Editors’ Foreword

The Past Is Always Present describes music in a European place of pilgrimage.

It does so in the idiom of pilgrimage, in a mode of inquiry and exchange fashioned in the very act of walking. In one of many striking encounters depicted in this book, our Danish ethnographer brings a gift to the Vatopaidian monks. It is a facsimile of one of the monastery’s own 11th century manuscripts, edited by Enrica Follieri and Oliver Strunk, and published as part of the Monumenta Musicae Byzaninae series in Copenhagen in 1975. Our presenter is dripping with sweat. He has just trekked over a mountain ridge with the weighty volume, evidently brought with him all the way from home, along with greetings from the current head of the MMB, Christian Troelsgård. He hands it to Father Maksimos, who gazes at it, momentarily, one imagines, lost for words. Eventually he murmurs, “Oh my . . . Kýrie eléison . . . this is our manuscript!” The gift is clearly much appreciated. Getting it there has involved effort and thought. For the monk, quite possibly, it constitutes a return of knowledge and tradition, an acknowledgement of a debt to a Greek heritage at once claimed and (puzzlingly) distanced in Western Europe. But to Lind it also seems to represent the heavy baggage of a century or so of quasi-orientalist Byzantine music study in the West. Lind—heir to an enlightened tradition of Danish Byzantinology represented by such scholars as the late Carsten Høeg, founding director of the Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae—nonetheless comes to the field obsessed, as he puts it, with paleography, calligraphy, and “riddles.” He leaves absorbed by questions of authority, of heritage, of the performative and discursive struggle for historical, musicological, and spiritual meaning. In this act of gift giving, something has been shed as well as given. Lind’s gift of this facsimile is also embedded in a complex tussle over spiritual matters, perceptively and often movingly narrated in these pages. The xi

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xii

Series Editors’ Foreword

first signs of this struggle are often, as the anecdote of the gift suggests, amiable speechlessness. Ethnographer and interlocutor seem sometimes to be simply lost for words. And even as they grope for something to say, new questions emerge and unforeseen positions inevitably take shape. The monks start to wonder why Lind should go to such trouble to understand the chant traditions of the monastery and yet refuse baptism, refuse to contemplate, as Father Maksimos puts it in a blunt imprecation at the end of the book, “what will happen to your soul when you die.” Our ethnographer, a self-defined secularist from the city of Kierkegaard, feels he must resist these overtures. But, at the end, and despite his reading of Weber, he finds himself with something he did not expect—a growing sense of religious revival entangled with, rather than opposed to, European modernity. He concludes his period of learning with the Athonite monks on an unsettled but optimistic note: with a mutual commitment to conversation. “There was much more our dialogue might yet produce,” he observes, reflecting on his last encounter with Father Maksimos. “I have a growing feeling that this was his way of not saying goodbye.” This is a book, then, about orthodox chant, about religious revival, and about pilgrims and pilgrimages of one kind or another. It is also a book about ethnography. Lind reminds us that the challenges posed by an ethnography of Europe remain sharp ones. They are exacerbated by the climate of extreme anxiety and—at the time of writing this foreword—about the Eurozone debt crisis and, more broadly, Europe’s future. In the eyes of some, this has put Greece’s place in Europe in question, though what “Europe” might then be is very hard to imagine. The research for this book took place earlier, but it will surely help us think through questions about exactly who owes what to whom on more subtle and sensitive cultural terrain. Philip V. Bohlman and Martin Stokes

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Acknowledgments

It is a great pleasure to thank everybody who has made this book possible.

The monks’ kind hospitality and interest in my research on Byzantine chant was a premise for the coming into existence of this book. Therefore, first and foremost, I want to express my gratitude to the monks at the Holy Mountain—notably at the Great and Holy Monasteries of Vatopaidi and Iviron, where I conducted most of my fieldwork, for welcoming me and for sharing with me substantial amounts of their time; but also at the other monasteries, even if I was allowed to stay but for the night. Likewise, many warm thanks go to Georgios Konstantinou and Kostas Angelidis for participating in, and showing interest in, my research. Many colleagues and friends have been overwhelmingly supportive since the first time I went to Mount Athos in 1997 to do preliminary fieldwork that resulted in my master’s thesis. This book includes material from all my ethnomusicological pilgrimages and fieldwork sessions at Mount Athos, as well as from my academic journeys, and it is in the main a reshaping of my PhD dissertation from 2003. I want to warmly thank all my fellow pilgrims, as well as students, supervisors, mentors, and colleagues in Copenhagen and Aarhus and elsewhere in the world, for the advice, comradeship, criticism, and comments that I have received over the years. Series editors Philip V. Bohlman and Martin Stokes commented on earlier versions of chapters, which has greatly improved the pages that follow, and their advice (and William Germano’s excellent guide From Dissertation to Book) has indeed helped me in turning my writing into the shape of a book. Martin Stokes has made an admirable effort in turning my hopeful Danglish (i.e., English words in Danish sentences) into academic and idiomatic English. I take full credit myself, of course, for the errors and shortcomings that remain in this work. xiii

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xiv

Acknowledgments

I owe many thanks to Bennett Graff and the rest of the staff at Scarecrow Press for professional support and for reminding me about deadlines and always having an updated page count of the manuscript ready. For any misplaced comma or the like that remains, though, I alone am to blame. Idella Foundation, the Sasakawa Foundation, the Eleni Nakou Foundation, the Danish Institute at Athens, and the University of Copenhagen have endorsed my fieldwork and traveling to and within Greece, and I wish to express my gratitude for the trust and financial support that I have thus enjoyed. I dedicate this book to my family, Rikke, Hugo, and Pil, and thank them for their great impatience, which made me feel wanted elsewhere in hours of much writing and when I was on the road. A dedication won’t make up for being absent, I know all too well; the only way of paying back is to be present and share their company. Tore Tvarnø Lind, Copenhagen

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Note on Transliteration

Throughout the book I use transliterated Greek. As there is no single sys-

tem of transliteration for Modern Greek, I have chosen in the main to follow the current version of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Some terms have found their way into Byzantine musical scholarship, where they have achieved transliterated forms of their own (as in echos, or “e¯chos”). I will stick to those conventions as far as possible. Transliterations in quotations have been left in the form originally chosen by the author. I present Greek terms and words in italics and use the acute accent to indicate the stress in the word. Standardized proper names and toponyms are written in normal type letters in their English form and without accents. Greek titles in the bibliography are also transliterated—without accents, however. I use the following transliterations [phonetics in brackets]: Αα Ββ Γγ Δδ Εε Ζζ Ηη Θθ Ιι Κκ Λλ Μµ

Νν Ξξ Οο Ππ Ρρ Σσ/ς Ττ Υυ Φφ Χχ Ωω

a v g/gh d/dh e z i/ı¯ th i k/c l m

n ks/x o p r/rh s t y/i [i] f/ph ch/h o

xv

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xvi

Note on Transliteration

αι αυ ει ευ οι

ai [e] au/af [av/af] ei [i] ev/ef/eph [ev/ef] oi [i]

ου αï εï οï

ou [u] aï [ai] eï [ei] oï [oi]

μπ/−μπ γκ γγ

b/mp [b/mb] gk [ng] gg [ng]

γχ ντ/−ντ −σχ

gh [nh] nt [d/nd] sh [sh/sch]

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Figures

1.1. 1.2. 1.3. 1.4. 1.5. 2.1. 2.2. 2.3. 2.4. 2.5. 3.1. 3.2. 3.3. 3.4. 3.5.

On the path: view toward Karyes and Mount Athos. Map of Greece. Map of Mount Athos. Sign in front of the Monastery of Iviron, flashing the amount donated by the EU for the restoration, November 2001. Renovation at the monastery of Great Lavras: crane with white cross, March 1997. Restoration site: Vatopaidi with a yellow crane, November 2001. Music lessons at Mount Athos. From left to right: Father Agapios, the author, and Georgios Konstantinou, November 2001. Father Agapios attends the construction of the new landing stage, November 2001. Cover of the Vatopaidian CD-ROM, 2001 (courtesy of the Great and Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi). Chain of Psáltes: Musical genealogy at the Monastery of Vatopaidi, select list (three pages). The “untranslability” of the okseía (one element) to the staff notation (at least five elements). The olígon sign for an ascending second. The petastí sign: transcription of notation and of Father Bartholomeos’s performance. The okseía sign: transcription of notation and of Father Bartholomeos’s performance. Two versions of “Kýrie ekékraksa”: Ioannis Lampadarios’s version (ANA 1858) above, and Efesios’s version with okseía (EFE 1820) below.

8 8 10 12 18 39 45 47 52 54 81 86 87 89

90

xvii

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xviii

3.6. 3.7. 3.8.

Figures

Chromatic word-painting on the word armatolós (“sinner”). The náos mode, created on the basis of the 1st mode. Apichímata (intonation formulas); photocopy of a plastic-coated sheet from the main church of the monastery (courtesy of the Great and Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi). 3.9. Transcriptions of intonation formulas for the 1st mode, 2nd mode, plagal 1st mode, and plagal 2nd mode. 3.10. The anatomy of prayer. 3.11. Drawing musical signs in the air: examples of cheironomía signs. 3.12. Transcription of “O Thy Divine” (two pages). 4.1. Ouranoupolis tourism: “Mount Athos Corner,” June 2000. 4.2. “Athos City,” the main street of Ouranoupolis, June 2000. 4.3. Flourishing tourism: daily cruises, not exactly to the shore of Mount Athos, but close, June 2000. 4.4. Two CD covers with chanting from the Holy Week: The Vatopaidian Musical Bible, vol. 3, with local compositions (1997); and Easter Sunday (2000) with the classical Easter repertoire (courtesy of the Great and Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi). 4.5. A Bulgarian Orthodox monk decorates the summer 2001 travel catalog for the Danish seniors’ travel agency 65-Ferie (courtesy of 65-Ferie). 5.1. Allegory of chanting (from bottom up): palate, cupola, firmament. 6.1. Ground plan of the main church at Vatopaidi. 6.2. A performance-based transcription of Bereketis’s Cherubic hymn: empty spots mark the phrases that were cut out. 6.3. Vatopaidian Fathers performing a Cherubic hymn at the Divine Liturgy in the main church, November 2000 (courtesy of Toptsidis Photo). 6.4. Conversation with Father Vasileios at the monastery of Great Lavra, March 1997 (courtesy of Bjarke Lund Sørensen).

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91 95

101 102 109 112 114 125 127 128

135

146 159 176 186

188 197

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CD Track Listing

1. “Christ Is Risen” (1st plagal mode), from VAT-CD6/00 (by courtesy of the monastery of Vatopaidi); see p. 51, for poetic text see p. 73n18. 2. “Joseph with Nikodemus Took Thee Down” (1st plagal mode), melody by Matthaios Vatopaidinos, from VAT-CD3/97 (by courtesy of the monastery of Vatopaidi); see p. 60, for poetic text see p. 73n28. 3. Notational sign: petastí, performed by Father Bartholomeos at a music lesson (recorded by the author); for transcription, see p. 87. 4. Notational sign: okseía, performed by Father Bartholomeos at a music lesson (recorded by the author); for transcription, see p. 89. 5. “Ton tafon sou, Sotir” (“Thy Tomb, O Savior”) in the náos mode (copyright: the author; recorded by the monks); see pp. 94–96, for poetic text see p. 118n15. 6. “Ton tafon sou, Sotir” (“Thy Tomb, O Savior”) in the 2nd softchromatic mode (copyright: the author; recorded by the monks); see pp. 94–96, for poetic text see p. 118n15. 7. Intonation formulas: the 1st mode, ananes (copyright: the author; recorded by the monks); for transcriptions (examples), see pp. 102–103. 8. Intonation formulas: the 2nd mode, neanes. 9. Intonation formulas: the 1st plagal mode, aneanes. 10. Intonation formulas: the 2nd plagal mode, necheanes. 11. “O Thy Divine” (1st mode), melody by Bereketis, from VATCD6/00 (by courtesy of the monastery of Vatopaidi); see pp. 107 and 113–116, for transcription see pp. 114–115, for poetic text see p. 120n47. xix

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xx

CD Track Listing

12. Papa-Vasilis performing at an all-night vigil, Vatopaidi, November 2000 (recorded by the author); see pp. 163–164. 13. Papa-Vasilis performing at an all-night vigil, Vatopaidi, November 2001 (recorded by the author); see pp. 163–164. 14. Cherubic Hymn (1st mode pentáfonos), melody by Bereketis, performance from the Divine Liturgy in the main church at Vatopaidi (recorded by the author); for transcription and for poetic text, see pp. 185–187. 15. “Se ymnoumen,” performance from the Divine Liturgy at a Vatopaidian chapel (recorded by the author); for poetic text, see pp. 192-193.

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•

1

•

Introduction Toward an Ethnomusicological Study of Byzantine Chant

“The past is the present. Time? Time does not exist.” —Father Christophoros, Iviron Monastery1

T

his book represents an ethnographic encounter with Greek Orthodox monks and their music. It engages the monks’ views on sacred music and history, the interconnectedness of notational signs and oral transmission, and the relationships between Orthodox spirituality, prayer, silence, and voice. Voices, utterances, and perceptions of Vatopaidian and other Athonite monks2 are interpreted from within an ethnomusicological project with its theoretical and methodological framework, ambitions, and limits. This approach to Byzantine music supplements conventional musicological and philological approaches focusing primarily on Byzantine music as text (notational and theoretical studies) or as phenomena relegated to the past (ritual and performance practices in the Byzantine and post-Byzantine eras).3 Through conversations with monks and living with monks during fieldwork, I have attempted to understand their ideas of music theory, notation, history, and oral transmission and how the musical tradition in its Greek Orthodox spiritual context is perceived, administered, and lived as part of modern Orthodox monastic life and worldview. This approach might at first seem like entering unstable territory as it bases the research project on an ethnographic encounter with a relatively small group of monks and urban musical specialists. Yet it follows from the poststructuralist ethnomusicological approach applied here that the truth about music and history can never be claimed from a neutral position. Music, as well as music history, is always produced from a specific position by someone communicating something to someone else. From this perspective, then, it becomes possible to reveal some of the dynamics and processes involved in this specific group of monks’ involvement with their musical tradition. 1

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2

Chapter 1

Each musical performance is always related (in various ways) to preceding performances, and it sets the directions for future performances. Performances are always local and specific: they take place at a particular place at a specific moment, and the performers and listeners are specific individuals with opinions, skills, experience, and thoughts about performing and listening to music. Each performance is both unique and related to other performances at the same time: in a word, they are “unoriginal.” What we see is the meltdown of the binary oppositional framework between past and present, authentic and inauthentic, tradition and modernity. “The dichotomous view of cultural practice as either authentic or spurious has been challenged in academic ethnography in recent decades” (Cooley 2005: 10; Bendix 1997: 13). Cooley points to the thorough research on authenticity in folklore studies by Regina Bendix (1997). Nevertheless, ideas of historical authenticity are very much present in scholarly, monastic, and lay people’s discussions about Byzantine music. The Past Is Always Present investigates how notions of historical authenticity and tradition in Greek Orthodox monasticism at Mount Athos are shaping images of the Byzantine musical tradition and, conversely, how Byzantine music shapes Orthodox spirituality and Athonite heritage both at Mount Athos and beyond the geographical territory in the Athonite imaginary (see chapters 4 and 5). In this book I seek to identify and discuss some of the discourses, assumptions, theories, and ideologies of the Vatopaidian monks for whom questions of authenticity and tradition serve as a determinant of their own (sacred) musical research that forms the basis of the present performance practice at the monastery. The study of the revival of Byzantine chant and its aesthetics of authenticity seeks to uncover relations of power, spirituality, and the ideologies of authenticity that frame conceptions of orthopraxis, or the “right” performance practice. The present study attempts to illustrate how the monastery of Vatopaidi, with the help of specialists from Athens, asserts claims to musical authenticity and legitimacy through an appeal to particular conceptions of Byzantine, Orthodox, Athonite, Vatopaidian, oral, and written tradition. Even when positioned ideologically in opposition to modernity, living religious traditions are inextricably modern, and I argue that Vatopaidi is a case in point. A multiplicity of Byzantine and post-Byzantine pasts is used to authenticate and thereby legitimate contemporary musical practice at the monastery, though certain historical moments are cardinal points in this ethnography: the revival of the Byzantine musical system in the first third of the 19th century, the period of revival at Vatopaidi beginning in the 1990s, and the moment of ethnographic encounter on which this book is based, at the beginning of the 21st century.

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Introduction

3

THE FALL IS ALWAYS PRESENT The story of Byzantine music starts with the Fall. The meaning of sacred chanting is to pray for forgiveness for the sins of humankind and reunion with God. In this, the music works alongside other appeals to the sensory capacities of the devotees (see chapter 6). Chanting provides Orthodox spirituality with a voice, a means of vocally addressing the creator of the world that inspires and encourages those who attend. Vocalizing sacredly means praying, and this involves the protopsáltis’s (cantor’s) use of his voice, with which he expresses the spiritual sentiments in his heart in accord with the aesthetics of “right chanting” and the ecclesiastical and heavenly hierarchy. The Finnish scholar of comparative religion René Gothóni, who was the first to conduct modern academic field research among the monks at Mount Athos, notes in his book Paradise Within Reach the significance of the Fall to monastic life: “On Athos the story of the Fall is regarded as the sacred truth of man’s spiritual condition in the world. . . . The Fall is not only a transgression in the distant past—it happens every day, here and now. The past is always present” (Gothóni 1993: 35). Gothóni’s study points to the monastic community at Mount Athos as a place of hope and salvation for ever-falling man. In trying to understand what the Fall means to the Athonite monks, it becomes clear that transgression of God’s will not only took place in some remote, indefinable past—transgression happens every day as a consequence of human weakness and betrayal of man’s true nature and mission on earth (Todorov 1981: 8). The sense and significance of the religious tradition and spiritual pastness of Christian Orthodoxy is crucial to the understanding of the meaning and value of the modern, living Byzantine musical tradition. The Fall represents the absolute beginning of human existence as human, as opposed to the nonhuman existence of Adam and Eve in paradise. It is the ultimate Christian Orthodox epic world, inhabiting a timeless past. The present is tied, through the New Testament and the Old Testament, to the moment of expulsion. Consequently, conventional borders of historical periodization are suspended and linear historical time rendered irrelevant. The timeless past is distanced from the world of contemporary reality, separated by epic distance. It is a monochronic and hierarchical world; it is “a world of fathers and of founders of families” (Bakhtin 1981: 13). The epic past is the single source and beginning of everything good and true, as witnessed by the promise of return to paradise. Epic past is marked by nonchange; it is a conclusive and closed temporal category. Father Christophoros’s remark (see the epigraph) epitomizes the (subordinated) otherworldly meaning of time: what happened in the past happens also now; the past is the present. This epic discourse forms the core

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4

Chapter 1

of what is handed down by tradition unchanged. Therefore tradition is itself sacred and sacrosanct, demanding a specific pious, impersonal attitude, which has a crucial bearing on the musical practice, as chanting is central to the transmission of Orthodox tradition.

FIELDWORK AT MOUNT ATHOS This ethnography is based on fieldwork carried out at Mount Athos, principally at the Great and Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi (in June and November 2000, November 2001, and April 2007), and though fieldwork at the Great and Holy Monastery of Iviron and a few other monasteries (in the period between 1997 and 2001) is also included, it is musical practice at the monastery of Vatopaidi that mainly occupies my attention in this book. The fieldwork material in this ethnography is polymorphous in the sense that it consists of verbal statements and utterances, field notes from my experiences of lived life and events, written accounts, photocopies of sheets of musical notation and manuscripts, notational systems, field recordings, early recordings, commercial recordings, videos, and a CD-ROM produced by the monastery itself. A substantial part of my field material consists of written evidence in the form of musical notation, commentaries in CD booklets, and tourism websites. In other words, diverse kinds of material and sources of information are of value to the study of Byzantine music. I thus employ an inclusive methodology, as for example described by Kay Kaufman Shelemay and colleagues in their cooperative study of Ethiopian chant: “The combination of ethnographic, paleographic and documentary evidence provides a much fuller picture than that possible through only a single disciplinary matrix or set of sources” (1993: 58). This is principally a study of the musical tradition at the monastery of Vatopaidi, which is why substantial parts of it have been centered on musical notation as it is central to the music revival. As I introduce my fieldwork at the monastery, part of which took the shape of music lessons, in chapter 2, I address the musical revival and restoration of the monastery, and the monk’s historical engagement in and perception of music history. In chapter 3, I present the musical material in detail and offer a brief introduction to Byzantine musical notation alongside a discussion of importunate problems relating to transcribing the music, which are as good as never addressed in studies of Byzantine music.4 Parts of my fieldwork also took place at the sites of Athonite tourism and pilgrimage (other than the monasteries themselves); in the small town outside the border of Mount Athos, Ouranoupolis; on the ferryboat to Mount Athos; and at the paths between monasteries. Chapter 4 addresses Athonite tourism

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Introduction

5

and pilgrimage, as these are central to the production of the Athonite imaginary beyond Athos, as are also the musical productions issued by Athonite monasteries, having a bearing upon the reception of monastic Byzantine chant. In chapter 5 I continue this line of thought, but focus on how ideas of Athonite chanting and vocal ideals ascribed to monk psáltes (cantors) are generated inside the monastic community, as I try to encircle what is particularly “Athonite” about Athonite chanting. Sacred Vocality The point of departure of my understanding of Orthodox religion and sacred music is that it is anthropomorphic, a human construct. I understand this tradition as culturally appropriated through practicing Christian virtues of obedience and discipline, among others—in other words, as part of a wide web of human spiritual practice and belief. By this I do not mean to imply that the academic stance is “right”; instead, I insist on the historical and cultural positioning of both worldviews in order to bring them into dialogue. Thus positioned, I embark on a journey into the world and worldviews of the Orthodox monks, with the aim of learning from them through dialogue, an interpretative strategy that inevitably jeopardizes the point of departure. Put differently, I am interested in Byzantine music as it is practiced, conceptualized, and performed by a particular group of devoted monks. What religion means to Orthodox monks through the practices of music, sound, silence, and voice is the focus of the investigation, which I return to particularly in chapter 6, while addressing the monastic style of chanting in chapter 5, and the general production of Mount Athos and Athoniteness in tourist imaginary and scholarly discourse in chapter 4. Conversely, the meaning of voice, sound, and music to a group of people in a Christian Orthodox cosmology is equally in focus. The idea of the creation of the world as a consequence of God’s will and voice, and how this relates to Christian Orthodox musical practice, makes the subject ethnographically appealing, as it presents itself as a sonorous cosmology: “In the beginning was the word,” the Holy Scripture reveals. This means that the beginning of light and time was initiated by sacred sound. Before anything else the world was an utterance, a soundscape. By extension, Byzantine chant forms a musical soteriology. Through devotional musical practice, prayer, and spiritual silence, human beings will be relieved from sin and reunite with the Savior in paradise. “The concept of the human as vessel for the voice of God provides a common ontological moment—indeed, a remarkable metaphysical coupling of God and humans through voice and music,” as Bohlman (1999: 27) notes for the sacred voice. What this means from a sociocultural viewpoint is that whoever makes a

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6

Chapter 1

claim, or is empowered, to speak on God’s behalf, such as a patriarch, priest, or abbot, is in a position to exert power. This idea has a certain impact on the interpretation of how and why the sound of the chanting (which communicates the words of Biblical texts and Orthodox poetry) matters spiritually, as well as culturally and politically. In order to understand certain aspects of performance practice, such as why some musical notational signs are believed to be more “right” or “correct” than others, I find the notion of orthopraxis, as it has been applied by Jeffers Engelhardt in his ethnomusicological study of congregational chanting in a Christian Orthodox community in Estonia (2009), to be very helpful. The concept of orthopraxis (“right practice”) describes a matrix within Orthodoxy (“right belief”) where musical, theological, and spiritual aspects conflate: “Right singing creates the correct unity of doxa (belief) and praxis (practice) that is the conservative essence of Orthodox Christianity” (Engelhardt 2009: 36). Whereas a musical orthopraxis in a religious context is about knowing how to participate aurally and behave vocally in the right way (see chapter 5), I also seek to extend the notion of orthopraxis to include ideas about a musical orthography and transorthography, concepts that I use when addressing the revival and reintroduction of older notational signs (see chapter 3). The present study is written from an outsider’s perspective and is an attempt to communicate, within a certain theoretical framework and methodology, understandings and interpretations of Orthodox musical life and musicality. This is done by means of conversation; through participation in chanting, musical training, and everyday tasks; and by living with the monks at the monasteries. Details about the nature of my fieldwork in everyday life in the monastery will unfold throughout the book. Ethnographic Voice, Ethnographic Present Fieldwork is commonly understood as a spatially and temporarily defined event––“field” pointing to a specific geographical place or territory; “work” implying a specific, time-limited working process and modality of being. However, fieldwork “should be seen as an expression of a temporary establishment of a third culture,” in which the fieldworker “gives in to an alien reality and lets oneself change in the process” (Hastrup 1986: 10). This “third culture” is relational, consisting in the present case of the relation between the monks and the fieldworker, reaching beyond the limits of territory and historical time, and is partly formed by an inner dialogical process in which the ethnographer condenses impressions and understandings. Fieldwork takes place in an autobiographical past, but the chronotope of fieldwork, or the ethnographic present,5 marks the fieldwork experience in the present, to which

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Introduction

7

the fieldworker returns for “re-collection” (Hastrup 1990). As Holquist (2002: 24) has it, “brute chronological indicators,” as measured by clock and calendar, do not guarantee whether an event has meaning or not. An event may have been initiated in the past but still be fresh and unfinished in the recollection and writing of it. It is this inner dialogue that forms the construct of the ethnographic present. Throughout, I give precedence to the narrator-I representing both the fieldworker present at specific locations and in specific social relations and the author recollecting fieldwork. I do so to invoke a sense of presence and involve the reader not just in what I “discovered,” but in how I came to understand events in the moment of encounter. The ethnographic voice I employ here is a means of insisting that my fieldwork material exists from the outset in a web of interpretation (apart from trivia and certain kinds of formal information), is interpersonally and intersubjectively produced, and is brought about in and through the dialogical encounter between fieldworker and monks.

MOUNT ATHOS: THE GARDEN OF THE ALL-HOLY MOTHER OF CHRIST Mount Athos is the most eastern of the three peninsulas of Halkidiki (the Macedonia region) jutting out in the Aegean Sea in northern Greece.6 Outside Greece, the place is mostly known as Athos or Mount Athos, a name referring both to the Christian Orthodox monastic community and to the 36,167-square-feet area of rocky terrain that is dominated by the 6,670-feethigh Mount Athos that crowns the southern tip (fig. 1.1). Sharing borders with (from west to east) Albania, the Republic of Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Turkey (fig. 1.2), Greece forms the southeast corner of the European Union (EU). Bulgaria has recently joined the EU (2007), while the three other countries remain non-EU neighbors to Greece. Terms: Mount Athos and Athonite The expression “at Mount Athos,” throughout the book, refers to Athonite monasteries and monastic life in general—as opposed to the expression “on Mount Athos,” which refers to somebody’s presence on the actual mountain for trekking or praying. The term Athonite designates practices, persons, objects, offices, and so forth that derive or originate from the monasteries of Mount Athos, as in the designation “Athonite style of chanting,” which I address in more detail in chapter 5.

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Figure 1.1. On the path: view toward Karyes and Mount Athos.

Figure 1.2.

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Map of Greece.

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Introduction

9

In Greece, the names most commonly used are “the Holy Mountain” (to Aghion Oros) and “the Garden of the All Holy Mother of Christ” (to Perivoli tis Panaghias), the term generally preferred by the monks. The name emphasizes to whom, according to legend, the holy land is ascribed. I use all names interchangeably throughout the book, depending on the context—a practice reflecting the variety of references that the traveler and fieldworker actually experiences when visiting the peninsula. Administrational and Historical Setting Spiritually and ecclesiastically, Mount Athos is subject to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, a self-governed part of the Greek state.7 A civil governor represents the Greek state, but the judicial, legislative, and administrative authority belongs to the two Athonite assemblies at which each of the twenty ruling monasteries are represented: the Holy Community and the Holy Epistasia. These are seated in Karyes, the administrative capital of Athos (fig. 1.3). Karyes is the only actual town on the peninsula with administrative buildings, a bank, a post office, a bakery, a hotel, and a number of shops, groceries, and cafes. All monks that live the Athonite monastic life follow the same order, known as the Order of St. Basil, although the rules and structure of daily life are interpreted and practiced in slightly different ways from monastery to monastery. Today, all monasteries are coenobitic (koinós víos, “common life”), which means that the monks follow a common daily routine, and share the tasks and duties among themselves.8 A monk who preferred to live a more ascetic and solitary life, and had the blessings of the abbot (hegoúmenos) of the monastery to do so, would move to one of the monastery’s dependencies and live with a few other monks in a skíti, a small assembly of a few houses and a chapel (also known as a monastic village), or in a primitive hut in solitude. The southern part of the Holy Mountain is called the desert (érimos), where the hermits reside. Around the celebration of the millennium for the official foundation of the community in 1963, it was generally believed that its status as a spiritual center of Christian Orthodoxy was waning. But since 1972 the number of newcomers (mainly Greek) has increased steadily. In 1992 the official number of inhabitants reached 1,337 monks (Chatzifotis 1995: 49; Mantzaridis 1997b: 63), steadily increasing to approximately 2,500 in 2007. To get these numbers in perspective, the yearly number of visitors was close to 40,000 in the beginning of the 1990s (Gothóni 1993: 121), increasing to more than 50,000 on an annual basis (unofficial estimate 2007). In addition to monks and pilgrims there are vast numbers of workers who live there as they rebuild and restore the monastic building complexes.

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Figure 1.3. Map of Mount Athos.

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Introduction

11

The geographically isolated position of the Mount Athos peninsula, its inaccessibility and remoteness, has made it well suited for spiritual absorption. The first hermits found their way to Mount Athos at least some 100 years before Athanasios of Trebizond founded the first monastery, the Great Lavra, in 9639 with the help of the imperial patron, Nikephorus II Phokas. Shortly after, in 971–972, Emperor John I Tzimiskes granted Athos its first charter, or typikón. Since the 10th century, Athonite monasticism has been playing a central role in the formation of Orthodox Christianity and Byzantine rite and music, and the spiritual and political position of the Holy Mountain has influenced the surrounding world far beyond the historical era of the Byzantine Empire (330–1453). Mount Athos continues to be an important spiritual power center for the Pan-Orthodox world. Other places of importance include Jerusalem, Constantinople/Istanbul, and Sinai. One of the crucial ways that the monks on the Holy Mountain revitalize, maintain, and strengthen the spiritual and cultural position of the place in particular and Orthodoxy in general is by cultivating its sacred voice, Byzantine chant, and making it heard. The Greek Nation-State and the European Union Greece’s modern statehood followed the Greek War of Independence, which began in 1821 and culminated in the London Protocol of 1830. However, northern Greece, including Mount Athos, was liberated from the Turks by the Greek army much later, in 1912. The London Conference of 1913, followed by a number of international treaties (the last being the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923), conferred on Mount Athos its independence as a self-governed region under the protection of the Greek state. The present constitution of the Holy Mountain was drawn up by the abbots and elders in the Holy Epistasia in 1924, just after the Treaty of Lausanne, and was included in the Greek constitution as of 1927. The special status of Mount Athos as a “self-ruled monastic state” originates from a chrysobull10 parchment signed and sealed by the Byzantine emperor John Tzimiskes I in 972 (nine years after the foundation of the Holy Mountain). This document is still preserved by the Holy Administration in Karyes. The legal status of Mount Athos was strengthened through Greek membership in the European Economic Community beginning in 1981. The Final Act of Agreement drawn up in 1979, relating to Greece’s accession in the EU (until 1993 called the EC, the European Communities), includes Article 105 of the constitution (1975), which ensures legal protection of the special status of Mount Athos. It still enjoys autonomous status within the Hellenic Republic, not only according to the Greek constitution, but also in the legislation of the EC, which ratified Article 105 on Greece’s admission. With

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Figure 1.4. Sign in front of the Monastery of Iviron, flashing the amount donated by the EU for the restoration, November 2001.

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Introduction

13

Greek membership in the European Union and the designation of Mount Athos as a World Heritage Site in 1988 by UNESCO, the monasteries have become eligible for substantial economical support from the EU (fig. 1.4).

BYZANTINE CHANT: MULTIPLE DEFINITIONS Byzantine chant at Mount Athos is the lived life of the monks. Byzantine chant is prayer. Byzantine chant is the past embodied in the present, the present that embraces the past and gives hope for the future of humankind. Byzantine musical performance is the creation of time and space, of belonging, of locality, of the meaning of life, death, and afterlife. Byzantine music is the cohesive vocal power between human beings and the divine, between all presents, pasts, and futures. Ultimately, Byzantine music is a disciplinary path to the reunion with God through obedience, love, and forgiveness. Byzantine music is divine knowledge of Christian Orthodoxy embodied in musical practice within the framework of the monastic community and hierarchy (cf. Asad 1987: 196; van der Veer 1989: 460). Defining Byzantine chant is not a simple matter. As a sacred music, it cannot be separated from the ritual practice it inhabits. Therefore, it is problematic to speak about music in any conventional sense (if such a thing as a “conventional” sense of music exists at all). Some scholars prefer to use the expression “Greek Church music” (ekklisiastikí mousikí), some “art of the Psalter” (psaltikí téchni) or “psalmody” (psalmodía),11 others “Byzantine chant” (in English) and “Byzantine music” (vyzantiní mousikí), both of which are widely accepted. I use these two latter terms interchangeably throughout the book. “Byzantine music” is a complex system of theory, notation, and practice relating intimately to Byzantine/Orthodox Christian rite, tradition, and spirituality. From the ethnomusicological position I take here it is hardly worth studying Byzantine music as a separate element outside of its context, where its function, meaning, history, and value are created and asserted by those who live the tradition and live the music. In turning to the more conventional definition, “Byzantine chant” is the music of the liturgical rite of the Greek Orthodox Church and is related to other national and regional Orthodox churches in Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Syria, and other countries, with claimed and contested connections to the musicoreligious practices of Russia, Estonia, and Ethiopia, to mention but a few. The music is strictly vocal, hence the reference to chant. Yet chant is distinguished from “song” (tragoúdi), which solely designates nonsacred music, the music outside the doors of the church. The language chanted is Church Greek. The music is monophonic although accompanied by a drone, known

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14

Chapter 1

in Greek as the íson. The interval structure is organized in tetrachords and pentachords on the basis of eight basic modes, four authentic and four plagal, to which are added in practice a vast number of variants and submodes. The modes are divided into three genera (génoi), the diatonic, the chromatic, and the enharmonic.12 Intervals vary in size, which means that they are not entirely translatable to Western halftones and whole tones. Distinctions must be made between mode understood in terms of scale and structure, and mode as it is created in the course of performance. I will return to this in more detail in chapter 3. It is crucial for an understanding of Byzantine musical performance practice and its relation to Byzantine music theory and notation not to satisfy oneself with structural and notational analysis alone. A vast amount of research addresses the many stages and styles of Byzantine musical notation. The international center for Byzantine musical paleography, Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae (founded in Copenhagen in 1931 by Carsten Høeg, Egon Wellesz, and H. J. W. Tillyard), has extensively documented and published studies and facsimiles of Byzantine musical notational practice. Byzantine music has its own notational system(s) with a long history, of which the first evidence can be dated to the 9th century with the so-called ekphonetic notation (ekphónisis, “reading aloud”), which is nondiastematic but “served as a mnemonic aid in the solemn reading of the Prophets, other passages from the Old Testament, and Epistle and Gospel texts” (Levy and Troelsgård 2001: 734; Høeg 1935). A rudimentary notational form, the so-called Theta notation, dated as early as about 800 (Raasted 1962; 1995), is believed to be an early stage of Paleobyzantine melodic notation. Since the time of Tillyard, who, in his Handbook of the Middle Byzantine Musical Notation printed in 1935 (reprinted in 1970), divided the history of musical notational forms into a number of overall categories, these have been altered slightly, most recently in the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Here, melodic notation is divided into three main types. The first is “Paleo-Byzantine” or “Early Byzantine” notation (between the 10th and the 12th centuries). The second is “Middle Byzantine” notation or “Round Notation” (from the 12th century to about 1815; Levy and Troelsgård 2001: 735). Tillyard describes what he calls “Late Byzantine” notation as florid in character and with chromatic ornamentation due to the growing and, perhaps, “overwhelming” influence of the East, as Greek composers “naturally borrowed from Oriental sources much of the new melodic material used in the setting of Byzantine hymns” (1970 [1935]: 15). The Nea Methodos, or “New Method,” defines the third type, the outcome of the reform of the Byzantine musical system carried out by the Three Teachers, Chourmouzios Chartofylax (?1770–1840), Chrysanthos of Madytos (1770–?1846), and Grigorios Protopsaltis (?1778–1821). Tillyard named this notational form “Chrysan-

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Introduction

15

thine” or “Modern” using the year of the Greek War of Independence (1821) and the year of the publication of Chrysanthos’s treatise on the New Method (1832) interchangeably to date it. The implementation of the reform of the Byzantine musical system took place at the Fourth Patriarchal School of Music in the years 1815–1821 and was preceded by the patriarchal final acceptance of the New Method in 1814 (Lingas 2001; Levy and Troelsgård 2001: 739). It is this notational system, along with notational and theoretical elements from preceding notational forms revived at the monastery of Vatopaidi, that plays a central role in this study. As mentioned above, I offer a brief introduction to this system and the problems of transcribing it into staff notation in chapter 3. The reformists’ introduction of the New Method is crucial to the understanding of the historical horizon of the monastic revival of the musical tradition, as I shall be arguing throughout, and especially in chapter 2. A word list of Orthodox and Byzantine musical and monastic terms is to be found at the end of the book.

ON THE LIMITS OF THE BOOK Although this is a study of Byzantine music, it does not focus as such on the liturgical, ritual, and theological aspects. A thorough demonstration of the role of the enormous musical repertory and a definitive taxonomy of hymns and the rules guiding their use in the Byzantine mass and rite are far beyond the scope of this book.13 Suffice it to say at this point that Byzantine chant is based on a yearly cycle of sacred texts, which are performed each day at the monastic leitourgía, or the Divine Liturgy (the Mass), and at akolouthíai (i.e., services) during the liturgical day, starting with esperinós (vespers, often transliterated “hesperinos”) and apódeipnon (compline, a short service after the evening meal). Early in the morning the órthros (morning service, including midnight service and the hours) follows, and then, immediately afterward, the leitourgía, which usually ends around ten o’clock in the morning before the main meal of the day, which often, at the monastery of Vatopaidi, includes reading and chanting. Thus Byzantine chant also refers to the daily act of performing the complex of melodies of both the ordinary and the movable church calendars.

MODERNIZING THE TRADITIONAL The study of Byzantine chant from an ethnomusicological point of view is inevitably bound up with concepts of tradition and music revival, concepts that

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Chapter 1

immediately point to notions of history and modernity. For a fieldwork-based approach, it seems fruitful to allow the traditional in the ways we imagine modern musical practices. It is hard for a modern understanding of a culture as conservative and traditionalistic as Christian Orthodoxy to do without: tradition is at the very core of monks’ (and others’) understanding of what it means to be living—and chanting—in God. In the pages that follow I introduce the ideas of modernity and tradition that underlie my discussion of the present case of monastic chanting. But before I do so, two fieldwork encounters will illustrate how modernity, in my view, is forming Orthodox monks’ ideas of tradition and belief in a modern world. Electricity and the Light of God After hours of hiking on a warm and humid day in May from Karyes on the middle of the peninsula to the monastery of Iviron, I am welcomed warmly by Father Iakovos. He asks about my family and my research while serving coffee, loukoúmi, and a vodka shot. Normally, monks would serve the national drinks, rakí or oúzo, and Greek coffee, but Father Iakovos makes French coffee and serves international liquor brands as welcoming refreshment. He used to live in Paris, he tells me. A few monks keep us company, chatting and drinking coffee. One of them tells me that Father Iakovos’s shop is known as to mikró Parísi, “Little Paris.” I met Father Iakovos on my first visit to the mountain in 1997. Back then the shop was located in a tiny (and, in my recollection of it, cavelike) space close to the main gate, and the monastery had only limited electricity. The generator would be turned off at some point in the evening and everybody would retire from their duties. Iakovos would close the shop early, and conversations would continue quietly in the dark or in the dim light of candles or petrol lamps. Now many buildings at the monastery have been renewed, including the refectory, the guest wing, and the museum. Father Iakovos’s shop is beautifully restored and lit with warm electric light, and there are a lot of things for sale (books, knit-work, icons, rosaries, and so forth), of which the most precious are displayed in lighted glass cases. He tells me that working hours have increased, and recalls how the abbot warned the fathers against electrification: “You believe you need electric light, you believe it will make you happy. But I tell you, it won’t help anything, it won’t make your life any easier—it is the light of God you need.” Father Iakovos sighs. “His words, I must say, are true. Of course, electricity helps keeping the room lit and the vodka cold, which is nice, but I work more.” He continues, not without irony: “I became a monk partly to escape long working hours and having to deal with money (chrímata), and here I am, working late and exchang[ing] monastic souvenirs for cash money. Kýrie eléison (Lord, have mercy)!”

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Introduction

17

“All the Modern Things” I hit the path early and take the long walk from Vatopaidi, heading for the monastery of Simonos Petras, located on the other side of the peninsula. Walking is a welcome chance for exercise in between the many hours I spend observing and participating in church life. It helps clear my mind and facilitates decisions about what to do next. I have an appointment with Father Tychonas, whom I met in 1997. I want to give him a copy of my master’s thesis, in which a chant performance of his is included. Father Tychonas remembers me well, he says. He smiles and holds my hands in his for a while. As we turn over the pages of the thesis, illuminated with transcriptions, drawings, and photographs, Father Tychonas expresses his gratitude that I came back as I promised. He says he will pray for me, hoping I will continue to work along the path that I have chosen. “As you may know, studying Byzantine chant is a way of approaching Orthodoxy,” he tells me. He suddenly stops at the page with a photograph of the katholikón and a mighty red crane at the monastery of Megistis Lavra (see figure 1.5), placed there for renovation purposes. I took the picture out of sheer fascination with the white cross placed on the top of the crane. “Oh, you have included all the modern things, I see . . . ! Well, since they are here . . .” Father Tychonas pauses. His reaction suggests, in my understanding, that it is possibly all right that the “modern things” are noticed, but they are not necessarily significant to the continuation of the sacred tradition. As far as modern ways and means are helpful, they are not considered a hindrance to the maintenance and continuation of the traditional. Rather, the contrary. As I shall discuss in the following chapters, modern means of mediating Byzantine chant are merely seen as a vehicle to further the revived tradition. Multiple Modernity and Tradition The monasteries at Mount Athos are modern in many ways, as the two examples show. In addition, contemporary musical-performance practice, sound, and discourse locate the living Orthodox-Byzantine musical tradition at the Holy Mountain in modernity. The habitual distinction between the concepts of tradition (continuity) and modernity (change), no matter how convenient it might seem at first, brings more confusion than clarity to the understanding of a sacred tradition today. Monastic musical practice in lived life does not fit into neat a priori categories and binary oppositions. The concept of change (often equated with “modernity”) does not exist separately from the concept of stability (often equated with “tradition”). Musical events and practices eventually have to be repeated in order to create a continuum, forming what we in a popular sense understand as tradition. In the act of repeating, past

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Chapter 1

Figure 1.5. Renovation at the monastery of Great Lavras: crane with white cross, March 1997.

and present merge. Various parameters and elements of the tradition, as well as the meanings and values that accrue to cultural identity, are put at risk and subject to change, albeit slowly, due to the implied impact in the present of the cultural negotiation that is taking place in contexts of musical performance. Fieldwork at Mount Athos has taught me that religious traditions are both real and modern, even when they are the consequence of a process of reinvention. This is nothing new, although it is commonly believed that religious traditions are often exceptions to the principles that otherwise are quickly admitted value to the understanding of secular musical traditions, such as folk music or classical music. In line with views on modernity as explored in the work of James Faubion (1993), Shmuel Eisenstadt (2000), Elisabeth Prodromou (2004), and others, I argue that the revival of Byzantine musical

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Introduction

19

tradition at the monastery of Vatopaidi (and elsewhere at Mount Athos) constitutes a particular modernity among others. Faubion insists that modernity “is not one but many things” (1993: xvi) and is not exclusively based on the occidental idealization of progress and technical rationalism. “Countermoderns,” Faubion notes, believe despite the postulated decline of a “divinely preordained and fated cosmos,” and he points out that the Weberian sociological tradition stops short of labeling European modernity as “secular.” Eisenstadt operates with an alternative to mainstream, Eurocentric sociology and its presupposition of a one-sided structural modernization paradigm: modernity, for him, is a flexible concept that is a social phenomenon conditioned by specific historical and sociocultural contexts (2000: 592–93). This mirrors Victor Roudometof’s notion of glocal modernities (2003), which allows for both global and local factors in the production of a plurality of “modernities.” With specific reference to the religious domain, Prodromou notes how conventional approaches to modernity in Greece tend to conclude “that the Church, Orthodox Christianity and, most broadly, religion, are impediments to the realization of modernity in Greece” (2004: 476).14 Prodromou argues, by contrast, that the “Greek case is part of the ample empirical evidence that supports the claim that modernity and secularity are not synonymous” (481). Traditions exist right in the middle of modern worlds—sacred-music revivals are modern manifestations like other types of musical revival, such as folk-music revivals, early-music revivals, and so forth. Today, the very ways we think traditions are inextricably modern.

ORTHODOX TRADITION: EXILE IN THE BYZANTINE PAST Modernity, when understood in context of Athonite and Orthodox tradition, is the once-and-for-all distinction between the present age (referred to as modern) and the past (cf. Ardener 1985: 47). I consider such once-and-for-all distinctions themselves a part of modernity as they are uttered, embodied, and performed in a present. I understand the terms modernity and tradition as Martin Stokes does authenticity, primarily as discursive tropes “of great persuasive power” (1997: 7) or, to follow a similar line of thought in Michael Herzfeld’s writing, “as rhetorical markers for a series of ideological arguments created by hugely accelerated processes of globalization and transnational contact” (2002: 202). To view these terms as narrative categories is a way of discrediting ideological narratives of modernity and tradition (Jameson 2002: 40–41), of course, and this outlook forms the framework within which I aim to understand the revival of the musical tradition at Mount Athos and the monks’ conceptualization of it.

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20

Chapter 1

In Greece, the church and the state have been both allied and competing in representing the modern Greek nation in the most persuasive way. This has led the church to represent Greek ethnoreligious nationalism, or “cultural fundamentalism” (Herzfeld 2002), and the state the process of modernization, aimed at tying together national self-understanding with European ideals, subsumed in the notion of Eurohellenism (Begzos 2007). However, such distinctions between church and state sustain an opposition between Orthodoxy and modernity, a modernity in opposition to which the church positions itself in exile in the (imagined) “Byzantine” past. In this way, Orthodoxy easily becomes a metaphor for everything that is not modern. To many Athonite monks, notably among those who live in the smaller settlements (skítes) outside the main monasteries, the modernization of the monastic society seems contrary to the monastic ideal, and, according to Sir Graham Speake, “some have even gone so far as to equate the European Union with the Antichrist” (2002: 184). These monks speak of a spiritual past, alluding to the idea that spirituality and faith was stronger in the past, and this conception is deployed to distance themselves from a decadent European modernity and to critique the “Westernization” of Greek culture. This ideology is strongly articulated within the cultural domain of Byzantine music past and present, which I will return to in the next chapter. The revived musical tradition of the Orthodox Church is in a compelling sense a living example of the fact that commitment to Orthodox faith and spirituality is a part of present life, part of modernity, amid a changing modern European Greece. Therefore the aesthetics of a spiritual outlook on the world may constitute the basis for an alternative European modernity. And so the notion of a spiritual past is a way of insisting on a spiritual present in a secularized Europe (secularized at least in terms of legislation and administration). Moreover, as Greece is a member of the EU, Mount Athos is part of the European cultural heritage. I argue that the restored monastic complexes at Mount Athos, as well as the revived musical tradition, testify to the fact that Orthodoxy (a prime virtue of cultural Greekness) is slowly changing its conceptualization of its own role in the EU: the revived music makes Orthodoxy heard far beyond the borders of the Holy Mountain. The reawakening of the voice of the Byzantine past thus becomes a means to negotiate Orthodoxy’s religious space in European modernity. The revival of Byzantine chant understood in terms of revoicing the past “elucidates how both local and transnational imaginations are formed through music and discourse” (Kapchan 2007: 238). The revival can be seen as an attempt at strengthening the constitutional position of Christianity in the European Community, and, simultaneously, a way of insisting on (Greek) Christian Orthodoxy, in particular, as legitimately European in its

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Introduction

21

own right. In relation to this political, theological, and cultural agenda, the revival of Byzantine music is a way to make manifest Orthodox tradition as “traditional” but with a modern appeal: the new and cultivated Orthodox voice of Vatopaidi insists on a religion full of vigor and promise for the future of humankind, locally, nationally, and in Europe as well. The so-called neo-Orthodox movement in Greece has advocated for a return to the traditions of the Orthodox Church. In line with this, the ideology of music revival at the Monastery of Vatopaidi seems also to favor traditional elements in its concern for authentic musical-performance practice. The ideological “return to tradition” rests on a paradox. On the one hand, the aim is to reach a religiosity uncorrupted by modern culture and detached from political concerns. On the other hand, it also insists upon the relevance of Orthodox virtues, values, and expression to contemporary society (cf. Willert 2009).

THE AGE OF RESTORATION Having thus placed tradition within an understanding of modernities in the plural, let me say a few more words about how I use the concept of tradition. Tradition describes something that culture members do, feel, reflect, mean, valuate, and identify with in a specific sociohistorical context that implies ideas of cultural continuity over time marked by spatial and diachronic idiosyncrasies. The traditional is not synonymous with the habitual, or the usual, and yet it is deeply related to those things. Tradition involves repetition and therefore implies both stability and change, but also the means of passing on the meanings and values of tradition beyond tradition itself. Means of passing on knowledge and skills, such as chanting, are part of any involvement in a musical tradition, something that is often described in terms of transmission. Bruno Nettl describes tradition and transmission, while addressing the simultaneity of continuity and change: The term most used to lump together all of the various processes that may be found in the history of a musical repertory is tradition, a concept that combines the stable nature of a culture’s way of life within the implication that by its very existence over long periods of time this way of life is subject to change. The way in which tradition is passed on is called transmission, and the two terms are sometimes used, informally and perhaps colloquially, to emphasize two sides of the character of a culture or indeed of a music—its stability on the one hand, its tendency to change on the other. (1982: 3, emphasis in original)

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The Byzantine music revival might be understood as an expression of a desire to improve existing standards of music-performance practices continuously, in order to facilitate the religious service in the best way possible according to the eternal, spiritual values of Orthodox Christianity as expressed at the Athonite monastery but also according to ideas about how to answer the challenges of changing Greek and European politics. The Byzantine musical tradition is believed by many practitioners and scholars to be ancient. As an abundance of evidence testifies, this is an indisputable argument. Yet it has changed, and it is marked by modernity in many ways, as it also partakes in defining modernity itself. That the Byzantine musical tradition is restored or reinvented does not mean that it is not traditional or that it is something less than real. Rather, the point here is to emphasize the role of actors in the Greek sacred-musical arena and their positioning in relation to issues about cultural continuity. “Traditions which appear (or claim) to be old are often quite recent in origin and sometimes invented” (Hobsbawm 1983a: 1). The somewhat imprecise diachronic designation “quite recent” aside, many musical traditions we take for being old, and historically identify with in various ways, are in fact modern inventions. Gregorian chant, to take one obvious example, is believed to be one of the most ancient in origin in Europe. However, the remains of the tradition as we know it today were reinvented or restored comparatively recently. According to Katherine Bergeron (1998), Gregorian chant was indeed suppressed by the secularizing French Revolution, which virtually put the tradition to an end. Another example is the “baroque music” of Johann Sebastian Bach, which is an invention of the Romantic movement dating from the rediscovery of the composer’s scores in the first quarter of the 19th century. Though Bach’s music was perhaps not totally forgotten in the intervening years, it owes its prominence in the Western musical canon entirely to what is commonly known as the “Bach Revival” (Temperly and Wollny 2001: 438). A third example of an invented musical tradition is that of Jewish music. The very concept of “Jewish music,” Philip Bohlman argues, was at best inchoate around the middle of the 19th century (2002: 33–36). One might argue along these lines that with the reform of the Byzantine notational system in the first third of the 19th century, the entire Byzantine musical tradition—which, just like Gregorian chant, is commonly perceived as one of the most ancient musical traditions in Europe—was restored, if not virtually reinvented. This does not imply that there is nothing more to be said, ethnographically speaking, about “reinvented traditions.” I intend in the following chapters to discuss the various possible and contested meanings of the reform of the Byzantine musical system as they are articulated at the monastery of Vatopaidi.

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Restored musical traditions like the ones mentioned previously are numerous, and they all point to an “age of restoration,” I suggest, following what the historian Iggers has called an “age of revolution” (1997: 5). The idea of an age of restoration seems to me to be both useful and meaningful in relation to the historical study of music. It is not a coincidence that these inventions took place during the formation of the modern European independent nation-states. Hobsbawm’s notion of reinvented traditions supports and widens these ideas by focusing on the mass production of traditions in Europe in the period of 1870–1914 with “capitals, flags, national anthems, military uniforms and similar paraphernalia” (1983b: 266). In addition, the music of religious, political, and national symbolic value played an important role in the formation of the greatness, glory, and power of European states alongside the three major innovations particularly relevant for the invention of traditions: monuments, public ceremonies, and the institutionalization of secular education (Hobsbawm 1983b: 271). As the musical expression of the church, Byzantine music might to some degree be understood as a vehicle for Greek religious nationalism in the years that followed the Greek War of Independence. Hobsbawm’s ideas are helpful for an understanding of the value of the reform of the Byzantine musical system in the formation of the Greek nation-state, in relation to which Mount Athos was central from the outset as the monastic society and Orthodoxy became a symbol of Greekness. All the ingredients are there at Mount Athos as visible evidence of both past and present: flags, monuments, ceremonies, and educational institutions—even a uniformed Athonite police force. The cohesive power of the reform of the Byzantine musical system on the musical tradition in the Greek Orthodox Church played a central role in the formation of the Greek nationality and national identity. At least it did so in the imaginary of a united and homogenized Greece after the War of Independence, as the new musical system had the overall aim of uniting differing regional and local notational styles and performance practices. However, this “unity theory” tends to overlook the silencing of contemporary critics of the reform and other discrepant views about right chanting practice—a silencing that reverberates through the debate in today’s Byzantine musical circles. Perhaps the musical tradition was not in practice as united and homogenous as historical interpretations invite us to believe. The attempt to unravel the complex history of the Greek Orthodox Church from a contemporary point of view strongly suggests that psáltes and other influential figures within the musical tradition (composers, teachers, musical-committee members, etc.) agreed as little in the past as they do today on matters concerning music theory, musical notation, and performance practices. From that point of view an analysis of today’s musical changes might prove highly informative.

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Nevertheless, the church became a central symbol of what was particularly Greek. Having chanting tradition and ceremonies handed down from a distant past, it provided a sense of historical authenticity. The church buildings themselves, as well as the monastic complexes in their entirety, were already there in their monumental splendor—or even better, in their aesthetically appealing ruins, creating a sense that the passing of time was visible and tangible in various material forms of pleasing decay (Lowenthal 1985: 125–82), which helped shape the imaginary of a tradition that had always existed, long before the construction of the modern “national.” At Mount Athos, two flags are often seen waving in the wind, side by side: the black-colored double-headed eagle on a yellow background—a symbol of the Greek Orthodox Church, but also of Byzantium, pastness, and greatness15—and the Greek national flag adopted in 1978, known as the “Blue-White” (i galanólefki), on which the white cross in the upper hoist-side corner symbolizes Greek Orthodoxy. The Great and Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi was engaged in the establishment of the Academy (1748–1753), later known as the Athonite School, an institution for men of letters on a plateau near the monastery. The Academy, which was ideologically oriented toward the European Enlightenment ways of learning, is described, by representatives of the monastery itself, as “the Vatopedi’s greatest contribution to the interests of the enslaved nation” (Vatopaidi 1993: 17). However, the Academy did not survive the constraints of Turkish rule, and it stopped functioning in 1811, subsequently falling into ruin during the War of Independence. But the symbolic value of the ruin today should not be underestimated. It was once the constituting physical frame of the only academy that existed in Greece, and thus it is still a symbol of the nation’s—and, by extension, the Monastery of Vatopaidi’s—greatness and glory. The academy was officially reestablished in Karyes (the skete of Saint Andrew) in 1953 with the name Athonite Ecclesiastical Academy, and today it is an Orthodox school.16 The war actively involved the Vatopaidian monks, as it involved monks from all over Mount Athos, many of whom were forced to escape from the peninsula. In the five-year period from 1821 to 1826, the number of monks decreased from 2,980 to 590. This painful situation is itself of considerable interest when related to claims of unbroken musical tradition at the Holy Mountain’s monasteries, and one can hardly imagine that everyday monastic life (including ceremonial life) was not affected by the presence of troops, casualties, and refugees. Of those monks who escaped, how many were psáltes? Did they come back? Were some of the monasteries deserted for a shorter period of time? When was the liturgical and musical practice restored to “normal” daily life? Indeed, times of war and political crisis are strong markers of disruption, dislocation, and discontinuation. The Turkish occupation was

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followed by a period of rebuilding and restoring the monastic complexes at Athos, suggesting a certain wealth and national-political interest, which again might have involved the return of previously escaped monks and the arrival of newcomers who might also have benefited the musical situation. Most certainly this had an impact in terms of musical change. Authenticity Notions of authenticity tend always to generate a certain suspicion. Those who ascribe authenticity to a musical practice or custom and claim the authority of the past always have an agenda, a certain interest. Authenticity marks business interest; it is a label on vanilla fudge wrapped in shiny paper. While Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s much-acclaimed work The Invention of Tradition (1983) must be recognized for its influence on studies of traditions particularly associated with nation-state formation, the approach has its limitations in an ethnomusicological context such as this. One of the problems with the invention-of-tradition school’s stance is the notion that modern cultures’ claim to tradition and their emphasis on the antiquity of these traditions are precisely what signifies their absence (Kvaale 2004: 306). It follows that it is in fact possible to distinguish between the unreal and the real, the fake and the genuine: some “traditions” are allegedly more invented (the modern) than others (the premodern). This dubious naturalization is based on the premise that in premodern “traditional societies” things were simply a part of human nature, as it were. The rigid distinction between modern and traditional societies, however, might be seen as a fabrication of modern social theory. As Arjun Appadurai reflects, One of the most problematic legacies of grand Western social science (Auguste Comte, Ferdinand Toennies, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim) is that it has steadily reinforced the sense of some single modern moment, which by its appearance creates a dramatic and unprecedented break between past and present. Reincarnated as the break between tradition and modernity and typologized as difference between ostensibly traditional and modern societies, this view has been shown repeatedly to distort the meanings of change and the politics of pastness. Yet the world in which we now live . . . surely does involve a general break with all sorts of past. What sort of break is this, if it is not the one identified by modernization theory? (1996: 2–3)

Traditions are invented, everybody agrees, yet there is no way of speaking of “real” pasts as opposed to reinvented pasts, or, as Herzfeld puts it, “if any history is invented, all history is invented” (1991: 12). Therefore the inventionof-tradition school can hardly serve as general principle for understanding

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how cultural practices work and how tradition is conceptualized in different cultures. What happens if we allow various culture members to determine what they themselves believe to be authentic? One thing, to be sure: it diverts the scholarly objective from determining (in)authenticity in various parts of the world, making it possible to focus on more important issues, namely, why authenticity is important to so many cultures, and how the struggle for authenticity is embodied and practiced. Often in scholars’ own culture(s) and academic traditions, the desire for authenticity is pervasive. Nobody really wants to study (or admit to studying) inauthentic culture. Implied in notions of the inauthentic, the notion of invention constitutes an indictment of fabrication, falsity, contrivance, decadence, and insincerity (Thomas 1992: 213)—the inauthentic often represents the “morally suspect,” whereas the authentic is often associated “with ethically proper behaviour, if not virtue” (Shannon 2006: xxiii). By contrast, invention could be more productively understood in terms of creation: a culture’s creative engagement with its own heritage is real and sincere, as a number of scholars have argued.17 When I speak of invention and revival in relation to Byzantine chant in the monastic community at Mount Athos, I subscribe to these theories that understand traditions as a mode of cultural sincerity embedded in a constant process of change and reinvention. Rather than imprisoning authenticity behind preconceived ideas about inventions as inauthentic, we can most fruitfully understand authenticity as a value ascribed to cultural phenomena such as sacred music. The processes I address in this book on the revival of sacred music at Mount Athos might be characterized as a “modernization of the authentic.” Relating to the problem of authenticating traditions, the invention-oftradition school also sees cultural self-consciousness as something excluding the possibility of “real” tradition. As anthropologist Katja Kvaale argues, this view implies the notion of untouched cultures whose members are unable to realize how unreflectively traditional they are (2004: 307). Following the invention-of-tradition logic, monks’ consciousness about their musical tradition would disqualify it as genuinely traditional. This is problematic (read: nonsense), to say the least: First, how are we to say anything conclusive about self-consciousness in past (and present) societies regardless of historical evidence and fieldwork experience? Second, self-consciousness can hardly be guilty of transforming traditional societies into “violators of natural life” (Kvaale 2004: 307). And third, we might ask ourselves whether we really believe that consciousness (as a psychological property) did not exist prior to the modern invention of it. Cultures do represent and locate themselves, and they do so in discourses involving questions of identity, authenticity, and history. For example, the monastery of Vatopaidi has issued CDs with the revived musical tradition,

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and videos, books, and CD-ROMs about monastic life, Orthodox history, and spirituality. The monastery’s representation and self-representation should not be confused with or substitute for real social and spiritual life. Rather, these representations ought to be included in ethnomusicological and anthropological approaches to music as part of the social reality of those we study, if we truly want to move the study of musical tradition on beyond depictions of innocence sullied by strategizing and culturally self-conscious natives. The inclusion of cultural insiders’ modes of self-consciousness, their perception of the past and the ways in which history is claimed, narrated, and celebrated, merits ethnomusicological attention. What we need to look at, then, is why and how culture members (as well as scholars) profile specific traditional elements in order to claim authenticity.

MUSIC REVIVAL Music revival is a cross-temporal activity, a present-tense engagement with history that wishes to influence the future. Music revival is based on imaginary work: on how a group of revivalists imagine the past, and how it is expressed and embodied by assigning specific values to the revived practice and identifying with it. The group of monks remembers or learns to remember the otherwise waning musical practice anew in order to revive it. In an outline of a general theory, Tamara Livingston defines musical revivals as “social movements which strive to ‘restore’ a musical system believed to be disappearing or completely relegated to the past for the benefit of contemporary society” (1999: 66). The monastic brotherhood at Vatopaidi strives to restore musical practice beyond the reform of the Byzantine musical system in the early 19th century. This makes the revival a present, indeed a modern, activity, itself a part of the musical business at the monastery, aimed at specific historical moments in the tradition of Byzantine chant. How does one start to remember a nearly obsolete musical practice? The monks who undertook the task to revive Vatopaidian tradition were not heirs to this tradition prior to their arrival from somewhere else on the peninsula (see chapter 2). They “took over” and started identifying with the monastery by learning the tradition, or whatever constitutes the particular “Vatopaidian” way of doing things in the Byzantine, or Greek-Orthodox ecclesiastical, musical tradition. Thus, involvement with early recordings, musical manuscripts, early treatises on music theory, and so forth is a means of creating memory. Manuscripts, musical notation, and recordings most completely represent the past. In the pastness of musical objects such as these lies the assurance of their validity and aesthetic qualities (cf. Trilling 1970 [1942]: 192). Pastness, or

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Chapter 1

remoteness, is in fact part of the very act of perception of music in its unfolding (cf. Dalhaus 1997: 60). In order to achieve social significance, experience and ideas must be remembered (Hastrup 2004: 123). Every given performance has a biography and a history, because performers and listeners bring with them “their accumulated experiences with past performances and attitudes” (Shannon 2006: 197).18 To follow in the steps of the ancestors is a profound cultural act that continuously and repeatedly produces collective tradition, which little by little replaces or conflates with personal memory (Hastrup 2004: 121). Past composers, cantors, and others are kept alive in the memories of monks. In this sense, the music revival at Vatopaidi is a memory-project aimed at remembering music and things past, a project that must be based on a common musical practice. Remembering the past is a social act that always-already belongs to the present. In ritual life and performance, “an individual in the present [may] re-sing, re-hear, and re-experience the past” (Shelemay 1998). The aesthetic practice of musical performance plays an essential role in the conceptualization of community and cultural heritage (cf. Shannon 2006). Reviving a music is creative work, a work in which the musical past is imagined and reinvented. Music revivals are a characteristic feature of 20th- and 21st-century music history. Most commonly associated with music revivals are folk music and dance traditions, but Western classical music and sacred musical traditions have witnessed revivals, too. Studies of the early-music revival have been concerned with issues of material and formal authenticity, musical notation and historical musical instruments striving for original modes of production.19 The legitimacy of music revivals is grounded in authenticity, historical self-identification, and cultural, religious, and political values of the revivalists. Thus a music revival may often represent a counterculture, or an alternative, to aspects of the cultural mainstream. Music revivals often divide culture into modern and traditional, and often, as Owe Ronström argues, “revival is a process of traditionalization” (1996: 18). Traditional culture, therefore, is not mere heritage, but a product of modernity. It is “an idea evolved as a conscious point of opposition to modernity” (Eriksen 1993). It remains crucial to emphasize, however, that music-revival activities and conceptions of the Byzantine musical past are themselves contemporary and modern, and that the music revival—in its syncretistic way of fusing old and new—presents a specific version of history, adding new understandings and visions of the music in ways that transcend old concepts (Baumann 1996: 71). The nature of the Byzantine-music revival is that it is a creative, historical process: it defines itself in terms of the values from the past(s) that it identifies with. As Livingston emphasizes, “Bohlman (1988) has noted the tendency of revivalist discourse to collapse time and space in service to a ‘new authenticity’

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defined by the belief in the practice’s timelessness, unbroken historical continuity, and purity of expression” (1999: 69). The music revival could never happen randomly, but is based on the position taking and decision making of performers and others, involving changes in musical behavior, and in the cultural policy in which it is embedded, both leading to revaluation of the music. The behavior of music-revival groups is observable within the practice and structure of a cultural hierarchy, often constituting the smallest unit, but still connected to a higher level of local, regional, and national identity (cf. Baumann 1996: 71–72).

ON THE ETHNOMUSICOLOGY OF BYZANTINE CHANT AND HISTORY Historical identities are implicated in the shape that narrative and performance-practice tradition takes. The ethnomusicological study of a musical tradition such as the Christian Orthodox or Byzantine tradition, therefore, is ipso facto a historical study. As fieldworkers, ethnomusicologists relate to culture members’ practices, relations, and perceptions in the daily life that is shared during fieldwork; as historians, ethnomusicologists relate to the history of the studied culture through historical evidence as well as culture members’ understanding of history. In this book there is a dual focus at play in the sense that the monks study the same musical manuscripts that I study. This means that the manuscripts (historical evidence) cannot constitute a “checklist,” as it were, against which I would compare contemporary musical-performance practice. The monks’ performances are themselves partly based on this evidence. Instead, the ways that the monks interpret and relate to historical evidence become the central issue. The study of Byzantine music is traditionally a paleographic, philological, and historical study, like the study of early Christian (and other sacred) musical traditions, and it has been occupied mainly with musical documents and manuscripts from the Byzantine historical period to the early post-Byzantine era. Although the present study is based on ethnomusicological fieldwork, parts of it are not the exclusive domain of fieldwork. Studying musical manuscripts in a monastic library at Mount Athos would not by necessity imply ethnomusicological fieldwork. For example, the Danish philologist, Byzantinist, and linguist Carsten Høeg (1896–1961) made the dangerous journey by land and sea in the 1950s, with bulky equipment, to the southern tip of the peninsula of Mount Athos on behalf of the Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae. Høeg’s objective was to make microfilms enabling easy access to important and rare manuscripts for future music-paleographic study.

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Peter Jeffery has suggested that the ethnomusicological study of medieval chant can reveal information about the past involving “hypothetical analogies to other, more recent cultures” (1992: 52). While I agree that participation in contemporary or “recent” practices might well provide new impulses for historical imagination, I do find it important to ask exactly what past we mean to be dealing with. The premise of Jeffery’s hypothesis is a problematic homology between recent (“primitive”) cultural presents marked by temporal and cultural otherness (which are refused a place in history on their own terms) and a notion of an ideal Western past located sometime in an early stage of development. It is a fantasy to imagine that some contemporary (“primitive”) practices exist untouched by time, making themselves available for chronological comparison, and, equally, to suppose that medieval chant has existed in a static form throughout history. Perhaps a more fruitful application of ethnomusicological approaches to “historical” music is to shed light on the how and why of contemporary musical aesthetics and views on historically informed music-performance practices, rather than searching for “historical faithfulness to the past” (Kenyon 1988: 6). “Thus the early music movement, while drawing on music of the historical past, is powerfully informed by the creative impulses of its practitioners and the aesthetics of the present,” as Shelemay notes (2001: 9). Since the early 1990s, the notion of “historical ethnomusicology” (Widdess 1992) has become more and more fashionable.20 I am uneasy identifying the present study with “historical ethnomusicology,” although it is, certainly, both historical and ethnomusicological. It is a study of religion, of sacred music, of tourism and the production of heritage, and of ideas about authenticities and tradition, all of which is a result of the cultural encounter that constitutes my fieldwork, which has more than “just” a historical focus. The study of Byzantine music has always been historical and somewhat centered around monastic cultures with the high status of religious and cultural centers where manuscripts were copied, used, and stored. What is new in the present study is the focus on an Athonite monastery’s present perceptions of its own musical practice and work within the tradition. Byzantine musical paleography is still relevant, to be sure, but inasmuch as the book deals with Byzantine musical notation, the focus is on the production of meaning, and the assertion of value and actual use of early and modern musical notations in the living tradition. It is hard to find reasonable arguments that the historical aspect should be emphasized over other aspects of ethnomusicological research. On the idea of a historical ethnomusicology, Richard Widdess argued two decades ago that the separation of “historical” and “anthropological” musicology into distinct disciplines, on grounds of their respective diachronic and synchronic

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perspectives, may appear superficially convenient; but it does not work in practice, for the synchronic perspective is an illusion. Every musical tradition is subject to continuing processes of transmission, change and regeneration, representing in many cases the extension of historical processes that have given the tradition its present shape. Any understanding of the present that ignores its interaction with the past will be seriously incomplete. (Widdess 1989a: 1)21

Jonathan Stock has recently followed his lead: “After all, some work in that area also deals effectively with such enduring issues as identity, musical change or the musical construction of authority. Such research speaks directly to widely shared ethnomusicological (and musicological) ends; it deserves to be widely read, not marked off ” (2008: 198). People implicitly relate to their own history when they make and listen to music or reflect on it. Thus history is omnipotent, and the interesting part concerns discussing present agendas for reinventing or reenvisioning different pasts as either wanted (or true) or unwanted. History, as countless ethnographies on musical cultures around the globe show, is already an indispensable part of the discipline, history being one formative process among many others that brings music into being.

SENSE OF THE PAST The study of music must in some sense always be a historical study. It is historical at least in two ways. First, the creation of music is necessarily aware of its own past. The literary critic Lionel Trilling argues in “The Sense of the Past” about the poet and the poet’s relation to past and tradition: “The work of any poet exists by reason of its connection with past work both in continuation and divergence, and what we call his originality is simply his relation to tradition” (1970 [1942]: 190). What Trilling here notes for “work” and “poet” applies equally well to the creation of music. The musical performance of any monk exists by reason of his connection with past performers, both in terms of continuation and divergence. The notion of originality is put into historical perspective by the way the monk relates to tradition, to his teachers. The way each protopsáltis imagines his musical past often conflates with the way determined by the given monastery. Also, the historicity of every composition is important, as it signifies its pastness. “In certain cultures,” Trilling maintains, “the pastness of a work of art gives it an extra-aesthetic authority which is incorporated into its aesthetic power. . . . [T]here inheres in a work of art of the past a certain quality, an element of its aesthetic existence, which we can

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identify with its pastness. . . . the element of history, which, in any complete aesthetic analysis, must be taken into account” (190). The pastness in the imaginary of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music, for example, is a qualitative aspect of the music that influences the way it is listened to, and for the performances of early music on historical instruments it is absolutely vital. The pastness and material authenticity of the instruments render an aesthetic power of authenticity, in fact legitimate a new set of standards and aesthetics. Also in Byzantine music, the notion of the aesthetic power of manuscripts, for example, as well as the pastness of their aesthetic existence, are qualitative and vital aspects of today’s musical performances. Crucial to the formation of the imaginary of pastness in music traditions is the neglect, or refusal, of the historicity of cultural productions such as music. It is not only “historical” music that is culturally produced, but also musical historiography. Musicologist Leo Treitler defines historiography as a narrative bound to its own historicity. We cannot just know the past, Treitler argues, we know pasts in relation to presents and futures (1999: 361–62). The narrative of the real world, or of what happened, is relative. It describes our present relation to a past, a relation that necessarily changes during the course of time (Treitler 1989: 174). In other words, the past is sensed differently in different narratives. There might be differences in the perceptions of music from one age to another, in that music exerts in each age a different kind of power. Consider, for example, the shift in the perception of the term “Byzantine” music. It was quite unwanted in the years after the Greek War of Independence with its associations with what was perceived to be Eastern or Oriental (Romanou 1990: 93), but later it regained popularity in everyday speech and historiography because of its notion of coherence with the past of the East Roman Empire (Byzantium), a past extending beyond the unwanted past of Ottoman rule. At Mount Athos life can be said to have changed radically at various points in history relating to war, resistance, the new nation-state, the EU, modernization. Yet electricity was not installed in the monastic society until the 1960s, and even then only in a few places, as on the Greek islands and in many villages. This notwithstanding, modernity (understood as technological development) has once and for all caught up with Mount Athos as the infrastructure has expanded drastically during the 1990s, and modern toilets and hot showers were news around the new millennium. Signs of modernity are found in the musical, as well as in the monumental restoration techniques, the cell phones dangling in the belts of the monks, and the Internet access in the monastic offices—the dialogical editing of my fieldwork research has depended largely on e-mail correspondence. Yet some things appear to remain stable. For example, the typikón22 of each monastery, and the religious rite,23 are still followed in much the same manner as they were centuries ago, with

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only minor changes. If anything is inevitably associated with the conservative perceptions of tradition, Orthodox monasticism and Byzantine music are (Troelsgård 1997: 6). What this has meant to musical practices, and how it has been administrated in various pasts, Athonite monks, pilgrims, ethnomusicologists, philologists, and others must turn to their “historical imagination” (Trilling 1970 [1942]: 192; Treitler 1989) to puzzle with, as the past of Byzantine musical practices is always imaginary, multivalent, and negotiable.

NOTES 1. Field notes, June 2000. 2. “Vatopaidian” monks are monks dwelling at the monastery of Vatopaidi, and “Athonite” monks refers generally to monks from Mount Athos. There are other monasteries in Greece that are almost as famous, including the monasteries at Meteora (on the mainland) and on the islands of Patmos and Skiathos. 3. I am here referring to studies of Byzantine music by scholars who use philological, historical, and paleographical approaches, as for example those by Troelsgård (1997), Raasted (1962, 1966, 1995), Schartau (1994), Stathis (1975–1993, 1996), Giannelos (1987, 1996), Alexandru (2000), Wellesz (1998), Lingas (1996), Velimirovic (1973), Tillyard (1911, 1970), Touliatos (1989), and many others (some of whom were my own teachers) within the discipline, which has existed since the late 19th century. I only mention studies that I actually refer to in this book; the list is far from conclusive. Although the present study seeks to include a variety of approaches (including some of those mentioned here), it emphasizes ethnomusicological methods and material: it is the first research project to approach Byzantine music at Mount Athos (and in Greece) from an ethnographic point of departure; of other ethnomusicological approaches to Christian Orthodox chant elsewhere in the world, the studies by Shelemay, Jeffery, and Monson (1993) and Engelhardt (2009) stand out. Lingas (2003) deals with aspects of musical and liturgical renewed in contemporary Orthodox chant, mentioning the promotion of renewed pratices at the monasteries of Simonopetras and Vatopaidi. 4. Examples with musical notation are included in chapters 3 and 6. 5. In her article “The Ethnographic Present: A Reinvention,” anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup (1990) advocates the use of the ethnographic present as an answer to the critique that Johannes Fabian launched in his seminal Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (1983). 6. Of the countless introductions to Mount Athos and its inhabitants, history, and religious life, I have made particular use of Gothóni (1993, 1994), Chatzifotis (1995), Mantzaridis (1997b), and Sherrard (1960), among others. This is by no means an exhaustive list; see for example Gothóni’s work for further references. 7. In ecclesiastical matters, monks refer to Constantinople, and not to Istanbul, Turkey.

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8. The adjective coenobitic or cenobitic (koinós víos) refers to monastic “life in common,” that is, where monks follow a common daily routine, sharing the work. By contrast, idiorrhythmic (ídios rhythmós) means “own way of life” and refers to “a form of monkhood where the monks follow an individual daily routine” (Gothóni 1993: 178). Vatopaidi and Iviron were among the last monasteries to change to the coenobitic organization in the early 1990s. 9. Regarding the foundation of Mount Athos, see for example Gothóni (1993: 23), Morris (1996: 37–46), and Schartau (1994: 942). 10. Chrysobull (“golden seal”): A golden ornament representing a seal, attached to decrees issued by Byzantine Emperors and later by monarchs in Europe during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, which served as a diplomatic tool. The term was initially coined to refer to the seal itself, but it later became a symbol of the entire decree. 11. Psalmody may in a narrow sense be defined as the use of the biblical psalms in worship (Lingas 2003: 341); but non-biblical poetic settings are also part of the enormous Byzantine musical repertory. Yet due to “the fluid musical terminology” (Lingas 2003: 342), Greeks both earlier and today would use the term psalmody (psalmodía) in the broad sense of “sacred song” including settings otherwise known as hymn (ímnos), poem (poíima), ode (odí), sond (ásma), praise (aínoi)‚ and prayer (prosevchí). See Wellesz 1998: 179; Lingas 2003: 341–42. 12. Byzantine music theory operates with three génoi (sing., génos), or genera (sing., genus), of the tetrachord, the diatonic, the chromatic, and the enharmonic. (This theoretical practice is reminiscent of ancient Greek music theory.) The genera define within the tetrachord the size (to diástima) of the intervals created by the flexible notes (the second and the third—the first and fourth being fixed notes). 13. For further reading on Byzantine liturgy and rite, see for example Gothóni (1993); Taft (1988, 1992); and “Esperinos” (Vesper), “Orthros” (Matins), “Liturgy,” and “Byzantine Rite” in Sadie (2001). 14. I am greatly indebted to Trine Stauning Willert at the Department of Modern Greek Studies, University of Copenhagen, for our discussions about Greece and modernity, notably regarding the plural concept of modernity as it is brought to light in Prodromou (2004), Eisenstadt (2000), Faubion (1993), and Begzos (2007). See also Willert (2009). 15. The yellow flag with the black double-headed eagle is often mistaken for a symbol of the Byzantine Empire. The Byzantine Empire inherited the Roman eagle as an imperial symbol (and made it double-headed); however, the symbol was used in many designs and colors, and it definitely functioned as a dynastic symbol. The yellow/black flag that can be seen on Mount Athos and elsewhere in Greece today is the modern flag of the Greek Orthodox Church. 16. At www.macedonian-heritage.gr/Athos/General/History.html (accessed November 8, 2007). 17. See for example Linnekin (1990: 161), Jolly (1992), and Kvaale (2004). 18. See also Feld (1994: 89). 19. Examples of early-music studies I have in mind include Dreyfus (1983), Haskell (1988), Kenyon (1988), Taruskin (1988, 1995), and Shelemay (2001).

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35

20. See for example Blum et al. (1993). In the epilogue of this anthology, Daniel Neuman notes how reflexive and interpretative ethnomusicology may contribute to a rethinking of the study of music in history (among other modes), emphasizing how “history is less important for the telling of it as such, than for the meanings that can be construed for its participants” (Neuman 1993: 276). Shelemay used the term “Historical Ethnomusicology” in 1980 in an article in Ethnomusicology drawing on earlier and ongoing discussion on the relation between ethnomusicology and history (Shelemay 1980; see also Nettl 1958). At the Society for Ethnomusicology’s 52nd annual conference in Ohio in 2007, a special historical-ethnomusicology interest group was established, following other specialized sections within ethnomusicology that have emerged, such as medical ethnomusicology and applied ethnomusicology. This bears witness to an increased compartmentalization of the discipline, not only as a means for defining the discipline in new ways, but also as a consequence (if not a logical one, perhaps a necessary one) of the immense expansion of the field and the phenomena that are undertaken by ethnomusicology today. 21. More or less the same phrase is found in Widdess (1992: 219). 22. The Typikón, or book of rules, is the “customary” that regulates the use of the components of the feasts and seasons throughout the church year, and a prescription of monastic life and behavior in general; see for example Taft (1992: 17). The Typikón provides a summary of the full Ordinary and Proper for the services, though it does not bring together all directions for the execution of the various rites; see Levy and Conomos (2001). 23. The Byzantine monastic rites were formed in the period between the 8th and 12th centuries. However, they would appear to be based on much older practices, dating back at least to the 4th century; see Taft (1992) on the Byzantine rite and its history.

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•

2

•

Musical Blossom

Music is not . . . an optional relish that can be afforded only when there is an economic surplus: it is one of the essential foundations of human society. —John Blacking The first musical CD has already been published in the Series “Vatopaidi [Musical] Bible . . . ,” with Christmas hymns, and two more CD’s are to be brought out in 1996, with hymns for Epiphany and Holy Week. The first music manuscript . . . will also be published. . . . We wish to express our warmest thanks to all our collaborators and to the Piraeus Port Authority, which undertook to finance this new edition of the planned activities of the Holy and Great Monastery of Vatopaidi, thus showing their concern for the preservation of their national heritage. (Vatopaidi 1996: 9)

T

he quotation is taken from the publisher’s note on the hardback publication The Great and Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi: The Continuation of a Tradition, which is printed on high-quality 170 gram paper and contains the scheduled restoration work at the monastery of Vatopaidi, which, at the time, was already in process or had been projected. The note on the musical enterprise is interesting as it is listed together with the restoration plans for the old refectory, the kitchen, the gatehouse, the roofs, facades, and mosaics of the katholikón (the main church), and the 14th-century frescoes that have been discovered under more recent wall paintings, as well as plans for the restoration of the old cobbled paths and much more (Vatopaidi 1996: 8–9). The list also includes a computerized inventory of the monastery’s treasury and information about the issuing of desk calendars and the publication of illuminated Gospels and the historical artwork of the monastery. It is clear from the outset that the 37

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restoration work is understood as important, not only in terms of the preservation of Byzantine and Orthodox art, artifacts, buildings, ritual, and musical practices, but also in terms of the high value attached to continuity with the Vatopaidian traditional past. John Blacking’s notion of music as one of the essential foundations of human society not dependent on economical surplus (see the epigraph) holds true for the Vatopaidi case: Byzantine music seems to be one of the essential foundations of the revived monastery, creating and strengthening the sense of monastic and ecumenical community. Yet a restoration project of the dimensions of that undertaken at the monastery of Vatopaidi could hardly be carried out without substantial economical support. The revival clearly has an economic aspect to it, relating intimately to decision making about actions to be taken and visions concerning the restoration process.

MONUMENTAL RESTORATION AS METAPHOR FOR MUSIC REVIVAL The restoration of buildings provides a powerful metaphor for the monastic music revival (fig. 2.1). The Athonite buildings as they appear today are the result of continuous rebuilding, restoration, and new construction; they are a mixture of medieval pillars (some of them ancient, taken from earlier temples to Apollo), walls from the postmedieval period that served as protection against pirates (some with Venetian elements), and later large-scale kitchens and modernizations such as hot running water and electricity. On temple buildings in Nepal, resembling in some regards monastic complexes at Mount Athos, Richard Widdess notes: Such buildings, which take on an almost organic quality, provide, I suggest, a useful metaphor for traditions of “early music” that “survive” through being continually remembered, restored, revived, reconstructed and reinterpreted. The result is a fascinating, unique, creative, sometimes bizarre integration of old and new. Perhaps this perspective can help us to rethink the concept of “early music” in a global context. (1996: 373)

Like early buildings, the melodic material, music theory, and musical notation of the living Byzantine musical tradition are continually remembered, restored, and reinterpreted. One fascinating quality of this music is, then, that it is old and new, historical and contemporary, at the same time. Rather than being a monolith, the Byzantine musical tradition has gradually changed during its long history as it has been performed by monks, amateurs, and profes-

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39

Figure 2.1. Restoration site: Vatopaidi with a yellow crane, November 2001.

sional cantors and choirs in coexisting, multiple ways and styles that have often also provided ample opportunity for disagreement about right performance practice, right interpretation of notational signs, and right understanding of music theory. A very strong case for the comparison between the restoration of buildings and music is found in Katherine Bergeron’s study of the revival of Gregorian chant at the French monastery of Solesmes in the wake of the Revolution, where the (Catholic) religious orders were abolished, the church bankrupted, and buildings emptied and abandoned, then subsequently vandalized or left to fall slowly into ruins (Bergeron 1998). As the abbey of Solesmes was rebuilt, the Benedictine monks reconstructed “an ancient melodic corpus which they had found in ruins,” and they “developed a set of methods through which this very Gregorian reconstruction could again be broken down and analyzed in its smallest constituent parts” (Bergeron 1998: xiii). Bergeron describes the revived monastery and the music as “an immense monument erected in the face of ruins” (1998: 1), adapted to the ideals and imaginings of a modern age. “Thus renovated,” Bergeron argues, “the Abbey of Solesmes and its musical practice became medieval icons to enchant the secular world” (1998: 21). This aura of a medieval past that characterizes the Solesmes case is indeed comparable to the revival of Orthodox chant, in which the constant return to notions of modernization and cultural contamination (see below) offers the most complete expression of the aura of the authentic Byzantine past (cf. Bergeron

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1998: 19). The raison d’être of the Orthodox/Byzantine musical revival is to be perceived against the background of a Western ideal of modernity. The restoration of buildings is a delicate process where the claimants’ and the restorers’ influence is strongly present. “To restore,” archaeologist Peter Fowler argues, “involves decisions, historical, practical, ethical, about what to restore to” (1992: 12). The project of a music revival, as I discuss it here, involves similar decisions concerning what the music should be restored to. What should it sound like? What are its theoretical and historical bases? What are the guidelines? Who performs? Who teaches? Who makes the decisions? Thus the revived music must in some way and to some degree be imagined prior to its coming into existence in everyday sacred musical life.

THE MUSICAL PAST AS CONSTRUCTION SITE When Byzantine music of the past is treated as “a foreign country,” to use David Lowenthal’s famous allegory (1985), it is understood “to characterize unfamiliar aspects of the past” (Shelemay 2001: 5), something radically different from today’s practice. Egon Wellesz, in his History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography, marks the fall of Constantinople as crucial to the development (read: waning) of Byzantine music, notably its later “transformation into NeoGreek music” (1998: 249). An abundance of evidence shows that performance practices in the past were different from their modern counterparts. This does not, however, make them irrelevant to modern concerns. Modern ecclesiastical chant in Greece has not been granted continuity with the Byzantine past in Western music historiography. Thus “neo-Greek” practices are differentiated from the past, as scholarly knowledge of “the Byzantine Past” has been claimed by the West: those who have the knowledge of Byzantine culture exert power over “Byzantium.” In other words, Byzantium is an imagined philological past, an exclusive site for academic study. A central issue in the case of Vatopaidi is reterritorializing Byzantium. In contemporary practice the Vatopaidians are making claims to this past as sacred tradition—something radically different from musicological knowledge—and attempting to overcome the alienation of the sources of power otherwise marked by the otherness of anachronism (cf. Herzfeld 1991). Musical past for the monks is a construction site, “not a foreign country to be explored” (Munslow in Jenkins 2003: xiii).1 The conservative historical purism that generally prevails in the historiography of Byzantine music is challenged by the creative reconstruction work of the Orthodox monks. Simultaneously, this challenge reveals the shortcomings of the purist stance. The categorization of Byzantine music as “early” music, or the “historical” music of the Byzantine Empire, misses the point that even

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contemporary performance practices are historical and identify themselves as “Byzantine” in new and multiple ways. When scholars insist on brute chronology, reserving the term “Byzantine” for a specific historical period, they employ a false objectivity and exclude the people who identify with Byzantine music and live it from being the judges of what merits inclusion as “Byzantine.” During the many years of the Byzantine Empire, chant performance was hardly recognized as a musical tradition of the “Byzantine era,” since this was yet to be defined (it had, obviously, not yet come to an end). According to Wellesz, the term Byzantine was in use already in the 14th century, but mainly by Western writers “who saw in Byzantine literature a continuation of Greek classical tradition,” and regarded Byzantine civilization “as a coda to the ancient and the Hellenistic world” (1998: 29). The inhabitants of Byzantium called themselves Romans (Ostrogorsky 1957: 26), and not Greeks or Byzantines; Constantinople was known to them as the New Rome. Musical Byzantinologists conventionally understand the implementation of the “New Method,” as the new musical system was called, as a replacement of the old Byzantine musical system(s). The New Method, though, might be seen as revised and adjusted versions of the old system(s), or, in other words, as innovation within the existing system. Scholars have shown how ascriptions in manuscripts for certain parts of the repertoire make possible comparison between different notational systems, thus bearing witness to continuation between pre- and postreform musical practices (Schartau and Troelsgård 1997). If the aim is to understand the meaning of the reform of the Byzantine musical system, a fruitful way forward is to consider it not as an isolated event, but as part of a larger sociocultural whole. The reform is not solely a concern with music-notational signs and the obscurities that veil the methods used by the reformists. It is also a political and cultural project. The Enlightenment movement and the inauguration of a new era with Greece as a modern nationstate are important contexts that might suggest the possible meanings of the musical reform in the 19th century, the obscurities of which still lurk in Byzantine musical disputes in the 20th- and 21st-century Greek Orthodox tradition as well as academic musical historiography. This notwithstanding, the musical reform symbolically represents a barrier that the Vatopaidians try to break by turning to meticulous studies of musical sources, all the while, in practice, asserting the power of oral tradition with a new and reinvigorated sonic quality.

BYZANTINE MUSIC LESSONS Father Maksimos welcomes me with the news that he will not be my teacher as planned, as he has been appointed another diakónima (task or duty) relating

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to the restoration work of the many buildings of the monastery. In order to break the monotony, the monks are changing tasks every second year or so. It is the abbot who decides the diakónima of each monk. In his place, Father Agapios has been appointed the diakónima of music master, and he will be my teacher for the length of my stay. I am looking forward to the rather unique opportunity of having private lessons with one of the experienced psáltes at the Vatopedian mousikodidaskaleíon (music school); and, as my fieldwork takes shape, I come to add further names to the list of teachers, notably Fathers Bartholomeos and Nikodemos, both younger than I am, who are experienced psáltes and adept at music theory and notation. I have the blessings of the abbot not only to take music classes every day, but also to attend services and stay in the choir in the nave of the katholikón. So, as fieldwork begins (again), I look forward to some very busy weeks. One cannot just walk into a monastery and do fieldwork or make recordings. Monastic hierarchy and structure is a social determinant as to how fieldwork will proceed—if at all. Without the euloghía tou hegouménou, the blessings of the abbot, nothing will happen, and reversely, when granted, all doors open. As I have been to Mount Athos before, I feel acquainted with the customary ways of greeting and addressing a monk by calling him Páter (Father), and kissing his hand to show respect and reverence—a gesture that reversely allows the monk the opportunity to withdraw his hand, performing a gesture of humility toward the person doing the greeting. The first thing one will do in order to arrange for fieldwork at a monastery is seek an audience with the abbot, which I already did the previous year. Hence music lessons were already arranged for. At our first meeting, Father Agapios takes me to “cell of the géronta,” where the spiritual father of the Vatopedian community, Geronta Iosif, used to stay. This is where the music lessons proper take place, if not being held in the “music lab” on the second floor in the administration wing close to the library tower. The cell of the géronta smells of old books and is lit with a hard white light that starkly contrasts with the black chairs. Reproductions of some of the illustrations of the Byzantine modes made by the famous medieval Byzantine composer Ioannis Koukouzelis are on the wall. Bookcases everywhere are filled with all kinds of music books, such as the Anastasimantárion (a collection of hymns in syllabic style used in services every day) in three different editions, the Papadikí (a collection of hymns in the elaborate, kalophonic2 style), three volumes with compositions of the famous composer Bereketis, and much more. These are not books from the monastery’s famous library, where the monastery’s collection of priceless manuscripts, many of which contain musical notation, is kept. These are the “plain” everyday bookshelves in the cell of the géronta. They contain photocopies, homemade chant antholo-

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43

gies, plastic-covered tables of intonation formulas, and an indefinite number of theoretical treatises dating back to the middle of the 19th century—first editions all of them, with duplicates of many of them in reprint or revised editions also present.3 Conversations with the fathers (the monks) and other interlocutors about music, notation and theory, and other things in life mostly took place near the preliminary archondaríki (guesthouse) or in the courtyard after leitourgía (liturgy) in the morning or apódeipnon (compline) in the evening. Conversations or informal interviews came in many shapes and kinds, some merely short exchanges of remarks during services or in the breaks during rehearsals, others lengthy explanations at the oil press or in the Toyota pickup on the dirt road while going to the library of the Russian monastery for digital filming. Apart from his job as my new teacher, Father Agapios was also the head of the oil press. I, for my part, when not studying, assisted in cleaning the guesthouse, the toilets, and the dormitories. Working together made an excellent opportunity for talking and asking questions, and many of the conversations I refer to actually took place over piles of dirty linen or with a bucket of soapy water and a broom in my hands. On one occasion I helped fill small vials with agiasmó (holy water), and for a few days I assisted in the archondaríki welcoming other pilgrims with coffee, rakí, and loukoúmi—a task that made many believe I truly was a newcomer at the monastery, as I had decided to stay unshaved and wear black clothes like the monks, novices, and newcomers. I did so, as I thought in my naiveté, in order to “blend in with the locals” and observe things unnoticed in the shadowy stalls and the church darkness. On my first visits to the mountain, I’d had the uncomfortable feeling of “sticking out” in the choir as I was wearing a khaki-colored anthropologist-style survival outfit with many practical pockets. As every fieldworker has experienced, one’s presence and even one’s absence are never unnoticed, which I understood on one occasion when I arrived late to a service. One morning as I sneaked silently and invisibly (or so I thought) into the choir, Father Agapios remarked jokingly (he had the habit of calling me Mr. Flint): “You’re late again, Mr. Flint! And I took you for a serious musicologist!” Although I understood he was joking—and my watch was showing an early 5:05 a.m.—I nevertheless felt I had to excuse myself. I replied anxiously, “But I was studying until midnight for the next class! Musicologists also need sleep occasionally, you know! How am I supposed to . . . ?” At that point he stopped me, put a big smile on, and said, “Na mín anisychís”—“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anybody.” I found it difficult to make notes while cleaning or observing in the pitch-black space of the church, but the specificity of situations helped me remember what was done and said, and immediately after service or cleaning

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Chapter 2

I would record key words and phrases from conversations in my notebooks, which I was wearing like an extra piece of clothing. Without my notebooks I felt naked and unsafe. Writing provided a feeling of being at home, of doing something familiar, as fieldwork at the monastery was a radical experience of otherness, the omnipresence of which was marked by a fasting diet, limited hours’ sleep, and odd working hours. After scribbling notes, I would go to my cell, make a Greek coffee on my gazáki (a small primus stove), and study for the evening’s Byzantine-music lesson. Lessons took place almost every night after the apódeipno, every lesson being two to four hours long. Lessons were skipped only on a few occasions, once when the choir of Vatopedian Fathers was rehearsing, and once when Father Agapios went fishing for a couple of nights. He also went for the annual all-night vigil at the monastery of Docheiariou for two days, but in that case Father Bartholomeos replaced him and taught about the notational sign okseía and other signs (see chapter 3). Usually, it takes five years to become a fully educated psáltis, depending on one’s skill and zeal, so Father Agapios was curious about the purpose of one month of musical training.4 I told him in detail about my research project, which clearly interested him. As we got to know one another a little better and our mutual confidence grew, Father Agapios encouraged me in my efforts and would not infrequently make suggestions about what it would be wise to include in my research. Monastic teaching is based on a modern tutorial process. I hate to admit my surprise. I don’t know what I expected from a master-pupil relationship within a tradition based on oral transmission. I must have had certain preformed ideas in my head of what a modern oral tradition would or should look like. I had not anticipated that I would be studying a recently published introduction to Byzantine chant written by a layman—a specialist, admittedly, but a layman. Georgios Konstantinou’s tutorial book (1997), a signed copy of which was given to me by Father Agapios, was our basic reference work throughout lessons, and we would go through the theoretical introduction and as many exercises as I was able to complete within the limited time I had at my disposal. After a few weeks at the monastery, Konstantinou showed up, and we talked (fig. 2.2). I learned about his involvement in the music-revival process at Vatopaidi, the impact of which I had already experienced in my own musical training. Often during classes, Father Agapios would reach out for Simonos Karas’s grand treatise on Greek music, Methodos tis ellinikis mousikis (1982), “for more detailed theoretical explanations,” as he put it. After a couple of weeks, Father Agapios gave me—with the abbot’s blessings—a copy of this eight-volume massive work, which has later proved to be of considerable help in my studies (though I don’t recall how I managed to fit it into my backpack).

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Figure 2.2. Music lessons at Mount Athos. From left to right: Father Agapios, the author, and Georgios Konstantinou, November 2001.

“We can use any music book,” Father Agapios assured me, waving a pointing finger. “We have forty to fifty training books on a shelf over there in that bookcase. The exercises are more or less the same.”5 In addition to Konstantinou’s book and the theoretical work of Karas, our references soon included Chrysanthos’s much-debated Theoretikon mega tis mousikis (1832), or

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Chapter 2

Theoretikon mega for short,6 which I shall be returning to. Suffice it to say at this point that I experienced here a new meaning of Theoretikon mega, as compared to the one I was accustomed to from my years with Byzantine musical paleographical and historical studies. To scholars in Western university departments it is a historical document, but to the Athonite monks it is a work produced within the tradition. Both positions consider it a troublesome work that simultaneously marks a break with the tradition and a necessary continuation of it. My head is spinning. Learning Byzantine music exclusively in Greek, with Greek terminology, Greek explanations, is more demanding than expected. It will take a while to get used to it, as my vocabulary grows. I have had a terrible headache all day and night, but embarrassed to tell Father Agapios, and I didn’t want to end the lesson whatsoever. I guess I have to accept this pain in my skull as a mandatory part of the cultural acclimatization process, or whatever ethnomusicologists used to call it.7

These are notes from my field diary written late at night after the first music lesson. Things got easier, my headache vanished, and I started learning.

NEW BEGINNINGS With a new abbot elected, the Great and Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi turned coenobitic8 in 1990. Until then, the monastery had been idiorrhythmic since its foundation during the years between 972 and 980 (Gothóni 1994: 14), the earliest documents from the monastery dating from 985 (Bryer 1996: viii). There were only two cantors at the monastery in the years 1987–1989, Father Dorotheos in the choir to the right and the elder Father Germanos to the left. From 1990, when the group of new monks had arrived, Father Germanos chanted to the right until his death in 1995, and the new monks to the left. Father Dorotheos had already left the main monastery in favor of a solitary life in one of the monastery’s dwellings; he is remembered as a cantor with a somewhat rough, or hard, voice (sklirí foní). Father Germanos is considered one of the last characters in the chain of the “old and great Vatopaidian chanters,” as Fathers Agapios and Bartholomeos characterize him with reverence.9 He was the pupil of the skilled teacher (didáskalos) and composer (melopoiós) Romanos (1889–1966) from Jerusalem, who came to the monastery in 1919, and Father Romanos’s teacher was protopsáltis Zagkliverinos, famous all over Greece. In this manner, the genealogical chain of psáltes and teachers can be followed back into the history of Byzantine music to prominent figures such as Panagiotis Chalatzoglou and Petros Bereketis. I shall return to the genealogy shortly.

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About twenty monks left their kelliá in Nea Skiti—close to the skete of Agias Annis at the southwestern part of Mount Athos—and went to the monastery of Vatopaidi with the elder Ioseph as their spiritual father. They found the monastery in miserable condition, and since 1990 they have been organizing the restoration of the monastic buildings, including the buildings outside the walls of the monastery that are housing the many workers. There are 120 workers engaged in the restoration work, a considerable number in comparison with the 90 monks who live at the monastery.10 The kitchen, the guest wing, and some of the chapels (parekklésia) are examples of completed parts of the enormous restoration project. During my fieldwork at the monastery in November 2001, they were just about to finish the landing stage (arsanás), the overseeing of which was appointed to Father Agapios (see figure 2.3). Wanting to remain a “simple monk” (and not being a priest-monk),11 the elder Ioseph could not be elected as abbot. Hence Father Ephraim became the leader of the coenobitic brotherhood. Although the elder Ioseph does not have any formal ranking in the monastic hierarchy, he is respected as the spiritual father of the monastic family, and every week he would speak to the Vatopaidians—sometimes the visiting pilgrims would also be invited—at communal meetings (synaxíes) on the monastic struggle and themes from the Bible, centered on Orthodox values such as obedience, forgiveness, or the love of God.

Figure 2.3. ber 2001.

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Father Agapios attends the construction of the new landing stage, Novem-

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Chapter 2

Most of these speeches, or sermons, are recorded and sold at the monastery’s shop. Father Ephraim was one of the monks from Nea Skiti, as were also Fathers Agapios, Nyphon, and Theophilos, to mention a few of them. Since then many others have joined the brotherhood at Vatopaidi. Among the monks who came to the monastery recently are Fathers Nikodemos and Bartholomeos. The fact that music is of primary concern at Vatopaidi attracts some new monks and newcomers, while others find the choir to be too big or too “modern.” Chanting has not always occupied Vatopaidian monks at the advanced level it does today. In an idiorrhythmically organized monastery, every monk lives his daily life according to his “own rhythm.” By comparison, there is often more chanting at a coenobitic monastery, where every monk is following the same daily routine. Services are longer, and there are more agrypníes (all-night vigils), which demand more skill, discipline, and stamina of the choir. In 1993 a music teacher, Kostas Angelidis, visited the monastery, and soon he would be teaching the monks to chant in unison, rather than as a group of individuals. Thus the effort to improve the musical level symbolizes in a strong way the sociality of the coenobitic lifestyle; the musical activity is a means of creating and embodying a strong sense of group mentality and identity. Father Agapios describes Angelidis’s efforts this way: “Kostas taught us how to work more organized, and he taught us to chant monophonic hymns homophonically, many monks, each with his own voice, but as if we were chanting with only one voice!”12 Later, one of Angelidis’s colleagues, Georgios Konstantinou, also a protopsáltis and music teacher, got involved in the teaching practice at the monastery. Konstantinou is also organizing the digital photographing of the many Vatopaidian musical manuscripts, counting among others the manuscripts of the local composer Matthaios Vatopaidinos (born in the beginning of the 19th century), who is believed to have been crucial to the continuation of the musical tradition of Damianos of Vatopaidi (c. 1680–1710). Both Angelidis and Konstantinou are members of the Greek Byzantine Choir led by Lycourgos Angelopoulos at Athens. Angelopoulos himself was one of the first musicologists to frequent the Holy Mountain, recording the voices of monks. Copies of his recordings from the early 1980s are kept at Vatopaidi in the “cassetotheque” (kassetothíki), as the monastery’s musical archive is called. In their musical endeavor, the monks rely on multiple historical sources, both old and more recent, as a basis for formulating the revived tradition. In that sense, recording technology is of vital importance to both the definition and distribution of the revived musical style. Listening to early recordings and live performances of gérontes (elders) who occasionally visit the monastery is valuable to the monks in their work with the aesthetics and politics of authentic or “right” performance practice and the interpretation of musical notational signs past and present.

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Another urban Byzantine-music specialist has had an impact on the musical work at the monastery: the composer, protopsáltis, and Byzantine scholar Ioannis Arvanitis worked with the monks back in 1994.13 The Vatopaidian choir occasionally performs some of Arvanitis’s compositions, some of which have been included in the Vatopaidian Chant Book (VAT 2000) among other prominent compositions. Music-Revival Activities Musical training and rehearsal are important activities for the realization and continuation of the music revival in practice. Other revival activities at the monastery of Vatopaidi include the documentation of original sources, and digital filming of manuscripts at the monastery’s own library and at other Athonite monasteries. Paleographical studies (and other kinds) form the basis for mapping the musical genealogy of the monastery, one of the main historical concerns, more about which follows. As for the musical-performance practice, changes are visible and audible in the norms of performance in terms of the reintroduction of old notational signs, old modes, and intonation formulas, all of which I address in more detail in chapter 3. And finally, the production of music CDs and videos featuring music is a means of securing the continuation and dissemination of the revived practice, constituting a modality of change in terms of technical reproduction of locally recorded sound, which amounts to an extension of the social use of the music, as it has become available to uses—not excluding spiritual listening in private—outside the immediate liturgical context and beyond the borders of Mount Athos. These recordings might also be understood as musical missionary activism, as they might well be received as ideal examples of Athonite monastic chant, inspiring and influencing Byzantine choir singing elsewhere in Greece. On “Musical Blossom” and Other Terms Various terms might be used to describe or analyze the process of improving or revitalizing the musical standard at the monastery: music revival (mousikí anagénnisi) is one of them; another is musical blossom (mousikí ánthisi). The group of monks from Nea Skiti who initiated the period of change were Nea Skitian, so to speak. Upon arrival at the monastery of Vatopaidi they became the new Vatopaidians. As mentioned, this arrival coincided with the implementation of the coenobitic lifestyle. In his book Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise (2002), Sir Graham Speake, founder of the British-based Friends of Mount Athos, has characterized this turn to a coenobium as a renewal. When the newly arrived monks started working with the music, they thereby began to define the new

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musical style of the monastery. This might well be characterized as a process of renewal, to apply Speake’s argument to the case of the chanting. In my conversations with Father Agapios it quickly became clear that the monks themselves reflect on their engagement with the music and the massive restoration work of the buildings. They are well aware that their decisions and actions are answers to a monastery in decline. Yet Father Agapios does not approve of the terms revival (anagénnisi) and renewal (ananéosi):14 I think perhaps “blossom” [ánthisi]15 is a better word, because there was never really a break in the tradition in the sense that we had to revive it “from scratch” [using the English words]. We were also chanting in Nea Skiti, you know . . . If you look at the monastery itself, it is being restored, repaired, and rebuilt. It never really fell completely apart. But we are, in a sense, reviving certain elements of the tradition, or reintroducing them. And we are working systematically. For example, we are educating psáltes ourselves, and we are taking full advantage of the possibilities we have at our monastery.16

The monks would thus prefer the terms blossom (ánthisi) or reblossom (epanánthisi) to describe the music renewal—after all, they did bring a style of chanting with them from Nea Skiti, and these musical practices have served as a point of departure for the blossom, or reinvention, of a distinct Vatopaidian style. At this point the boundaries between notions of local monastic styles, an “Athonite” style and a “universal Orthodox” ecclesiastical style, begin to appear quite opaque. How is the Vatopaidian style distinguished from other musical practices at Mount Athos? What, if anything, is particularly “Vatopaidian” about it? Revival Discourse While reflecting on what the designations of “Vatopaidian,” “Athonite,” “Orthodox,” and “Byzantine” might mean to the monks, I realize that the ethnomusicological objective of my research should not be restricted to musical sound, practices, and manuscripts, but should also include the way the monks verbalize and conceptualize their chanting—in other words, the monastic musicrevival discourse. As Father Agapios argues, the monks did not introduce a totally new music. The new Vatopaidians cultivated the music anew, as a gardener an old garden, he explains, using an organic metaphor for the music. Father Agapios explains that the meaning of the term blossom is related to the value of coherence with the past to Orthodox tradition. Also, the monastery’s physical position in the Garden of the All-Holy Mother of Christ (to Perivoli tis Panagias) suggests that anything that grows here is spiritually as well as organi-

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cally connected to the divine heritance. In this sense, the musical organism has simply blossomed again at Vatopaidi; it could never be obsolete. As Father Agapios argues: “The monastery has experienced many musical ‘blossoms’ (pl. anthíseis) with composers such as Matthaios Vatopaidinos and Damianos.” As I sit in my cell in the guest wing and browse through the cover notes of one of the monastery’s CDs, the metaphorical language strikes me on the one hand as rather romantic, in the sense that it allows the musicoreligious tradition to be spoken about as an orange tree growing out of the dirt. On the other hand, this romantic wordage is paired with a technical, musicological way of speaking about the revival activities and the musical result. In the booklet accompanying one of the CDs, the English words revitalization and flourishing are used: The Holy Mountain of Athos, an ark of Orthodoxy for more than a thousand years, can truly be said to be a womb which brings forth and nurtures Byzantine musical composition and the cantor’s art [psaltiké techné]. Today, after a period of crisis and decline, the monastic community of Mount Athos, flourishing again, is shaping a new period based on the spiritual heritage and the religious charge of this place, and is cultivating that climate which rejoices the souls and gives rest to the spirit not only of each monk, but also of the visitor and pilgrim. It is in the spirit of this revitalization of the Athonite monasteries that the Mousikodidaskaleíon (music school) of the monastery of Vatopaidi, which for centuries gave monks their musical training, has started to function again. . . . [The] systematic study of music, which combines knowledge of the written with experience of the oral tradition of chant, has already begun to bear fruit. It is, moreover, the basis for the present undertaking . . . a CD for each day of Holy Week. These editions contain all the classic compositions . . . sung according to the old Athonite use.17

These words accompany the audible result of almost ten years of systematic monastic-scholarly labor. The notion of “old Athonite use” tends to blur the issue of the present-day cultivation of the music. By emphasizing the historical depth and the religious heritage, the CD produces a sense of authenticity by which the new Vatopaidians lay claim to the musical past of the monastery. However, the interpretation of how the monastery is profiled on the musical products, as I suggest here, does not stand unchallenged. The anonymity and emphasis on a timeless past is not, as such, new to Christian Orthodox tradition. Why should it be any different just because the monks made a record? The apolytíkion (dismissal hymn) of Easter Sunday, “Christ Is Risen from the Dead,” is in a poetical sense emblematic for the revival of the musical tradition at Vatopaidi and will serve as the first music example here (CD track 1).18

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MUSICAL GENEALOGY One late afternoon in November, Father Bartholomeos hands me a copy of the monastery’s first CD-ROM. Back in my cell, I check it out on my laptop. I’ve seen the videos and some books about the monastery, and I expect to see yet another example of how the monastery portrays itself to the surrounding world as a harbor of tradition. And, not surprisingly, it is such an example, as it gives emphasis to monastic handicrafts, pieces of art and precious relics, traditional ways of fishing, and samples from beautifully illuminated manuscripts. However, the CD-ROM (see figure 2.4) also contains valuable information in the shape of good old-fashioned historical facts and trivia about the monastery’s music teachers, composers, and psáltes going back to the 16th

Figure 2.4. Cover of the Vatopaidian CD-ROM, 2001 (courtesy of the Great and Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi).

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century. My vague idea that one of the central musicological concerns of the monks is to establish the musical genealogy of the monastery is confirmed as I browse the disc. What I have in front of me is a piece of local musical historiography, locally produced and based on systematic source reading, and put together in a framework defining the monastery as a key institution in Byzantine-music history. As the bits and pieces are put together on display, the most recent renewal of the musical tradition seems merely to be yet a further blossoming of the musical orange tree—the metaphor used in the CD. In this way, the disc almost becomes invisible as a medium for the message. Crucial to understanding the history (and historiography) of any musical tradition are issues of identity. Gilbert Chase once argued that history is a dialogue with the dead “in which the answers to the questions we ostensibly ask are prepared by us in advance in our own minds, conditioned by prejudice or by pre-established theoretical concepts” (1958: 1). If this holds true for any historical, and perhaps indeed academic, writing, it also holds true for monastic historiography, despite its overtly teleological nature. As the past is always imaginary, imagining the dead is of vital importance for the construction of Christian Orthodox spiritual identity at the monasteries, as it is, indeed, for mapping out the genealogy of the musical tradition. Mapping the Musical Tradition A vast number of the Vatopaidian psáltes, teachers, and composers are mentioned in detail on the Vatopaidi CD-ROM (2001), monks and musical masters some of whom lived most of their lives at the monastery. Like this CDROM, videos, music recordings, printed books, and other things produced by the monastery are important markers for the monastery’s self-image. The act of unraveling and documenting the long chain of psáltes at the monastery demands a thorough paleographical research, and is a detailed and careful piece of work, one result (out of many) of the Vatopaidian sacred musicological enterprise.19 My graphic representation of the genealogical tree (see figure 2.5) shows some of the Vatopaidian psáltes named on the CD-ROM, in juxtaposition with selected parts of Antonellis’s list (1956) of psáltes in the Great Church of Constantinople, Agia Sophia, and my own field notes.20 This musical family tree thus serves as an overview of parts of the Vatopaidian musical tradition, including the not-infrequent contact with masters from outside the monastery, past and present. The highly skilled protopsáltis Damianos Ieromonachos Vatopaidinos (c. 1680–1710) was the teacher of one of the earliest-listed protopsáltes in the Great Church in Constantinople, Panagiotis Chalatzoglou, who is respected as an “extremely talented psáltis with a voice as sweet as pouring milk and honey

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Figure 2.5.

Chain of Psáltes: Musical genealogy at the Monastery of Vatopaidi, select list (three pages).

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(Continued). Figure 2.5.

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(tréchei méli kai gála).” The story goes that a monk heard Chalatzoglou chant as a young boy and then advised his father to send him to the Monastery of Vatopaidi to study the art of Byzantine psalmody with Damianos Vatopaidinos. Another of Damianos’s students was later to be known as the “peak of peaks” (i koryfí ton koryfón) of composers of Byzantine church music: Petros o Glykis Bereketis.21 When Bereketis returned from his musical training with Damianos, he became protopsáltis in Constantinople, in the church of Agios Constantinos (Voutsinas et al. 1832: 487–88).22 A possible earlier contact between Vatopaidi and the Great Church might have been Arsenios o Mikros, who is believed to have been the teacher of Chrysaphes o Neos, the first master to appear on Antonellis’s canonical list. In the history of Byzantine chant, one rarely finds a list of protopsáltes as well documented as in the case of the Great Church in Constantinople. It seems reasonable to believe that there is a continuous transmission of tradition at least from the time when Chalatzoglou was protopsáltis there in the first half of the 19th century (possibly long before him) up to the very famous cantors in the 19th and early 20th centuries such as Nafpliotis, Pringos, and Stanitsas. The monks believe that Konstantinos Protopsaltis is one of the last truly great cantors, because he was educated by teachers who continued to chant from the old musical notation after the reform and the implementation of the New Method.23 This is central to the monastic belief in oral tradition. Even though musical notation was reformed and gave performers new directions, some performers nevertheless continued to use old notational forms and old ways of interpreting them, and passed on their “old-fashioned” antireformist performance practices to their students, against the will of the patriarch—the highest position in the Orthodox ecclesiastical hierarchy—who had commissioned and blessed the New Method. Via teachers such as Psachos, Karamanis, and, not least, Karas, the “old school” has “survived” in the practice of contemporary psáltes, composers, scholars, and teachers, among whom are to be found Tzamkiranis, Angelopoulos, Arvanitis, and others, but also Kostas Angelidis and Georgios Konstantinou, both centrally involved in the revival of the Vatopaidian musical tradition. To the monks it is regrettable that the Three Teachers did not care to explain what methods they employed in the reform work. The question remains then, how to define the old school while not, at the same time, suggesting possible solutions to this “problem.” Musicologist Leo Treitler has argued that musical notation is “transparent to the oral tradition that was its ultimate source” (1988: 575). In this case of Byzantine chant, the issue is somehow in reverse: oral tradition is believed to be transparent to the prereform musical notation that was its aide-mémoire in writing. This is no simple matter, first because consensus about ownership of authoritative oral tradition is almost nonexistent, and second because the reform was

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aimed at uniting a church music that had dispersed into numerous local and idiosyncratic notational and practical-performance practices. It hardly makes sense to speak of an authoritative tradition in the singular, since there were in fact many. The Byzantine-musical immediate prereform past must at best be understood as consisting of multiple practices. Claiming oral tradition today is therefore not (in that respect) problematic, since others might make the same claims just as legitimately. It is considered problematic because it challenges the authority of the reform and questions the musical translations that the Three Teachers were commissioned to carry out on behalf of the patriarchate. Alongside the continuation and transformation of the musical tradition, we therefore also witness ongoing debate about it. If music were not central to the identity of performers, congregation, and the church as institution, this would hardly be the case. Voices of the Past Since the spread of recording technology, oral transmission has functioned in two ways in relation to Byzantine chant, which we might understand in terms of “oral” and “aural.” First, it is understood as the traditional way of transmitting music orally, as in the master-pupil relationship, where the pupil will be corrected by the master during musical training. Second, aural transmission describes a recording-student relation, so to speak, where for example the psáltis (or the pupil) would listen to recordings and try to imitate a favorite master. Unlike the master-pupil relation, this is in a practical sense a one-way type of transmission. Along these lines, it can be said that Karamanis was a student of Nafpliotis, but he was also a “listener of” Pringos.24 In relation to the present study, the monks of Vatopaidi could be said to be “listeners of ” great masters outside the monastery, especially Pringos and Stanitsas, as the voices of these two maïstores (masters) exist on recordings that are studied by the monks. In the monastery’s kassetothíki there are several recordings dating from the 1950s. The aural training consists of analytical listening to their phrases (at times simultaneously following musical notation of the chanted piece) as a means of learning how they interpreted musical signs in a relatively near past, a past that is believed to relate orally to a more distant past ultimately leading back beyond the reform. In comparison, the earliest known recordings made at Mount Athos date from the 1970s.25 When used, these early recordings exert on the one hand a certain kind of conservative influence on the present musical practice and ideas about aesthetics and the right sound. On the other hand, the recordings are, simultaneously, deemed to provide a transparent window onto past authentic performance practices that opposed mainstream performance practices.

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Needless to say, this explicit concern with musical authenticity is unthinkable outside some kind of modernity discourse. Although the monks listen to urban psáltes, they often told me that they would never chant the way that soloists do in “the city” (meaning Constantinople—Istanbul, Turkey, in modern terms). At Vatopaidi and other Athonite monasteries, a less flamboyant style is believed to be better suited to the monks. Yet it makes sense to speak of a musical dialogue between the monastic community and the urban centers. The monks recognize the style and skills of their urban models—notably the interpretation of musical signs—and adjust the phrasing to choral practice. Contact with the chanting world outside the monastic walls and the Athonite border is customary, desired, and frequent. Perhaps this practice of a musical dialogue is not as much a modern invention as we might at first believe, although technology has changed the means of musical interchange between monasteries and urban centers. Apart from the vocalist heroes from the Great Church, the Vatopaidians listen to elder Athonite psáltes, either during in-person visits to the monastery or via recordings. Geronta Papa-Vasilis lives close to the monastery and occasionally participates at agrypníes (all-night vigils) and eortés (feasts) where he performs as soloist. The Vatopaidians hold him and his chanting very dear—it isn’t that he technically has a great voice like many young cantors or the soloists from the Great Church, but rather it’s because he has lived a long life as a monk with prayer: “He utters the words he chants with great reverence and love of God,” as a younger monk told me. “It is important for the young monks to experience such sweetness.” Other models are the elders from Mikris Agias Annis on the southwestern side of the peninsula, some of whom are known as the Thomades, those who follow Father Thomas, and the Danielaioi, those who follow Father Danielaios.26 Family of Fathers The fathers who lived and continue to live at the monastery, along with the saints and founders of the church, are often described in terms of a family. This includes also the bearers of the musical tradition, many of whom are named. On the family metaphor, Philip Bohlman argues: “The religious community assumes . . . metaphorical forms, notably that of the family. Sacred music, it follows, ensures the reproduction of that family, thereby providing through performance the agency through which the religious community’s genealogy unfolds” (2006: 9). In what follows I highlight parts of the musical genealogy of the monastery of Vatopaidi as it is unfolded in the monastery’s CD-ROM and CDs. Emphasizing the importance of the prominent local musical characters who are mentioned is a way for the

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monastery to create continuity with the present musical endeavor and its musical past. The Byzantine composer and teacher Matthaios Ephesios Vatopaidinos is a central figure of the Vatopaidian musical heritage. His compositions are performed regularly at the monastery, and some of the most important have been recorded on a CD in the local-repertoire series entitled The Vatopaidi Musical Bible,27 from which I have included a doksastikón (a hymnal praise performed as part of the doxology) of Good Friday on the CD (CD track 2).28 Matthaios was the pupil of Ioannikios Ieromonachos, who had received his musical training from the famous composer and chanter Petros Byzantios, who was chanting as árchon protopsáltis (first cantor) in the Great Church in Constantinople for a short period of time in the beginning of the 19th century. Matthaios also studied directly with Petros, as did Chrysanthos (who later became one of the Three Teachers behind the reform of the musical system and the author of the Theoretikon Mega). It has been argued that Matthaios continued the work of the Three Teachers, an argument based on studies of his personal letters.29 Matthaios passed on his skills and knowledge to Gregorios Monachos, the monk to follow in Matthaios’s footsteps as the leading proptopsáltis at the monastery. Two Vatopaidian monks who both chanted at the monastery in the second half of the 19th century, Spyridon and Theotokis, continued the tradition after Gregorios Monachos. It is worth mentioning here that Theotokis received his musical training from Chourmouzios (another of the Three Teachers), and Spyridon was the pupil of the famous composer Georgeos o Kris, who studied with Iakovos Protopsaltis, who preceded Petros Byzantios as protopsáltis in the Great Church. There seems to have been frequent contact in terms of education and oral influence between the monastery of Vatopaidi and the patriarchical center in Constantinople. The masters mentioned here were actively engaged in chanting and teaching at the monastery, and they are some of the most prominent and celebrated within the realm of Byzantine music and its history. The evidence points convincingly to the fact that Vatopaidian psáltes, teachers, and composers were in contact with the reformists; and the compositions of Matthaios Vatopaidinos in particular, so the Vatopaidians believe, might prove to be of importance for the study of how the musical signs were orally transmitted in the first half of the 19th century, at the time just before and after the reform of the musical system. The Vatopaidian monks have recently discovered interpretations of melodic phrases written in the margins in some of Matthaios’s manuscripts, in the shape of explanatory transcriptions that, allegedly, show possible ways of performing certain musical signs. During my fieldwork the monks were reluctant to discuss the precise contents of those writings, since they are subject to ongoing research by Georgios Konstantinou and others.

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The contents of the Vatopaidian CD-ROM and other productions bear witness to the Vatopaidian monks’ attempt to map the musical past in a search for links beyond the reform. It suggests that the monks are attempting to document that the chain of psáltes reaches far back into the monastery’s past, to great masters such as Matthaios Vatopaidinos and Damianos Vatopaidinos (17th century). As the genealogical tree shows, the monastery of Vatopaidi was housing—and was in frequent interaction with—several “peaks of peaks” of Byzantine-music history and had musical relations to the Great Church. Thus the Vatopaidian musical tradition is hardly limited to the space within the walls of the monastery, but engages the surrounding world—most recently in the form of specialists from Athens—in a lively fashion. Arguably, this is a way of placing the monastery at the center of the history of Byzantine music, which then becomes a means of legitimizing its reclaimed position as a leading voice in modern Byzantine musical practice. Claiming the past is a means of asserting authority in the present. In this respect, the ultimate task for the monks would be to trace back the chain of psáltes to the only Vatopaidian composer known from the late Byzantine period, Ioasaf Vatopaidinos (15th century),30 whose works are found in anthologies next to works of some of the greatest composers from the Byzantine era such as Ioannis Koukouzelis, Ioannis Kladas, Ksenos Vatopaidinos, and others. The fact that the works of Ioasaf Vatopaidinos are followed by the designation “Vatopaidian” is understood to indicate the genuine nature of the Vatopaidian tradition and the musical importance of the Holy Mountain in general, in ancient Byzantium as well as in the present. Two of Ioasaf ’s works exist in “transnotation” (metáfrasi)—they were transnotated into the New Method by Chourmouzios Chartophylax—in two manuscripts located at the National Library of Athens,31 one of which is a “Theotokion,” a hymn (tropárion) praising and honoring the “God-bearer,” the All Holy Mother of Christ. The Meaning of Orality to Tradition One day a monk accompanied me on the path between two monasteries. As we were walking, we were talking about the meaning of tradition, and he told me, “Everybody can buy a book today and learn to read it—but not everybody has tradition as we do!”32 Texts and the art of writing itself are often mentioned as central to Christian culture and history, yet oral tradition, in which sacred texts are actualized and given voice, is equally important. Texts are part of an ensemble of transmission practices (including manner of reading, vocal intonation, and so forth) that we might usefully conceptualize as oral. The emphasis on the past as oral (as opposed to the past as written) is prevalent, as Bohlman argues: “Frequently . . . it is oral tradition that allows a

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community or culture to believe that some core of musical practices from the past—some essence of the past—remains intact in the present,” therefore what counts is “the unbroken transmission from cantor to cantor, from daily service to daily service” (1997: 151). But what is the meaning of mapping out the musical genealogy of the monastery, its musical network? What is the significance of creating this documentary narrative of contact between these prominent figures of Byzantine musical history from the late medieval eras to the present? One fruitful way of addressing these questions—there are arguably many ways—began to take shape at a time far from fieldwork and, in fact, far from literature dealing with music. One day I came across a publication of papers on the conservation of buildings given at a conference in Bergen, Norway. Some of these papers addressed issues of authenticity and tradition, which caught my attention, and, upon reading, strengthened my belief in the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of the study of music revival. In this publication, historian David Lowenthal addresses the meaning of tradition, referring to the anecdote of the dilemma that Plutarch made famous as “the ship of Theseus”: “Brought into port for repairs, every old plank in Theseus’s ship is replaced by new planks. Is it still the original ship? If not, when did it cease to be?” (Lowenthal 1994: 40–41). The point of the anecdote of Plutarch’s dilemma is that all planks have been “in contact” with each other over a certain time span, and that it is and is not the same ship at the same time. Two contested assessments of authenticity are expressed here: shape ( formal authenticity) and substance (material authenticity). And we might add yet further assessments, such as issues about how the ship is supposed to be handled and what it is supposed to carry, that is, questions of seamanship and function (processual or functional authenticity), and the meaning, experience, and value of the ship to owners, users, and beholders (conceptual authenticity). Substituting terms from the field of music research for ship and planks, Lowenthal’s analytical dismantling of notions of authenticity inspired me to rethink music and tradition. I recollected from an earlier visit something that Father Tychonas at the Monastery of Simonos Petras had been trying to tell me about the crucial importance of physical contact to the meaning of tradition in Christian Orthodoxy. He explained that the ordination of Christian Orthodox priests is believed to be “a very long chain of touches, the laying on of hands, going all the way back to John the Baptist.”33 Here, notions of authenticity as form (expression, clothes, gestures), function (what priests are supposed to do), and material (humans, monks) merge within the spiritual worldview. I understood then that orality in Orthodox tradition can be compared to this image of a long chain of touches, specified as oral or vocal “touches,” which in present performances secure “contact” with all past

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masters of chanting. The act of constructing and emphasizing this history is inextricably a part of the musical-revivalist activities. Emphasizing the masterpupil relation and other professional relations in oral tradition becomes a way of highlighting definite and presumed moments of contact. If the tradition can be illustrated by listing the chain of chanters and masters and their pupils, then it will show an unbroken tradition quite like the spiritual-father system: a musical genealogy of oral transmission is put into play as historical evidence of authenticity. The significance of the Vatopaidian mousikodidaskaleíon (music school) is emphasized by the presence of prominent Byzantine masters: by relating to the great masters of the Byzantine musical canon, the prominence and excellence of the present local Vatopaidian musical tradition grows.

NEGOTIATING BYZANTINE-MUSIC HISTORY Both Westernization and influence from the Ottoman Empire have from time to time been of concern not only to scholars of Byzantine music but also to the heirs of the Byzantine musical heritage. The Vatopaidian monks show a similar concern about the influences that seem to have marked the reform of the musical system. In the remaining sections of this chapter, I try to sketch the historical understanding of the reform, as it is questioned at the monastery of Vatopaidi, all the while supporting and discussing this narrative with references that the monks are using. Understanding the present motivations for the monks’ troublesome studies and detailed work in the revived performance practice is tantamount to their historical understanding. The Three Teachers absorbed four elements of Western notation into the New Method; but unlike in earlier attempts by Hieronymus (mid-16th century) and Paliermos (late 18th century), they disguised them in Greek clothing (cf. Romanou 1990: 93): (1) the monosyllabic solfège system based on the first eight letters in the Greek alphabet, which replaced the older use of the polysyllables from the intonation formulas;34 (2) rhythmical subdivisions similar to Western notation, which were surprisingly close to those suggested centuries earlier by Hieronymus; (3) indication of tempi; and (4) the addition of chromatic accidentals. Chrysanthos’s Theoretikon Mega, published in 1832 in Trieste, is widely perceived as one of the main and most influential theoretical works on Byzantine music and an improvement on his earlier Eisagogi (with the cumbersome subtitle, here provided in translation, Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Ecclesiastical Music Written for the Use of Those Studying According to the New Method), printed in Paris in 1821. The first part of the treatise addresses Byzantine music theory and notation, whereas the second part is a general outline

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of music history, which, as Dimitri Conomos argues, was “an ambitious and unsuccessful attempt to present, in the form of a chronicle, a general history of music from the time before the Flood to his own day” (2001: 817). The treatise shows a number of examples of influences from Western music theory, which the Vatopaidians look upon with a measure of skepticism. Why would a musical phenomenon such as the faux bourdon and a chapter on harmony (Chrysanthos 1832: 218–22) be included in a theoretical work on monophonic hymnody? And why would a setting of four voices in Western notation be transcribed in a four-part setting in the New Method (a musical system unsuitable for polyphonic scores)? Another curiosity is Chrysanthos’s adaptation of an Italian song, which he found in a musical manuscript containing a collection of Greek music at the library of Vatopaidi, into Greek (Plemmenos 1997: 52).35 Due to the lack of references to sources, parts of the Theoretikon Mega must be characterized as borrowing. Georgios Papadopoulos (1890) has suggested that the reform of the Three Teachers was the outcome of a sequence of improvements started in 1756 by Ioannis of Trebizond, followed by his students Georgios the Cretan and Petros Peloponnesios, followed by their students, which ultimately makes a link to the Three Teachers, Chourmouzios Chartophylax, Grigorios Protopsaltis, and Chrysanthos of Madytos. As for why it fell upon these teachers to carry out the reform and not others, it counts in favor of Chrysanthos and his collaborators that they are positioned in a chain of highly distinguished teachers, as, for example, Byzantine-music teacher Dimitris Nerantzis (2001) suggests.

European Influence A little less than a century after the reform, in 1910, parts of the Theoretikon Mega were reprinted in the Greek journal Forminx (Romanou 1990: 100). That only selected parts were reproduced might have contributed in part to the widely held misunderstanding that the treatise was exclusively addressing Greek ecclesiastical chant. (Those parts that didn’t were omitted in the reproduction.) Arguably, renewed interest in the treatise came in the wake of the musical commission during the late 1880s, at a time when monophonic chanting was gradually regaining popularity over four-part singing. Four-part singing had been very popular in Greece since the 1870s, spawned by a newly founded conservatory at Athens that played a major role in this respect by introducing harmonization of Byzantine hymns in tetraphonic Russian Church style—already Europeanized. As an antithesis to the widespread and popular “Europeanization” of Greek Church music, the

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School of Byzantine Music—favoring monophonic chanting and traditional folk song—was founded in Athens in 1903, mainly due to the efforts of Psachos, the school’s first teacher (Romanou 1990: 100). This work was later continued by Simonos Karas (see below). The first publications of Greek hymns in Western harmonization were made as early as 1844–1845 in Vienna; and even though the practice was condemned by the patriarchate soon after—in an encyclical the Patriarchate characterized as “a sinful mistake” (Encyclical 1846)36—it gained in popularity in the last quarter of the 19th century. Yet four-part singing had already increased in popularity, and continued well into the 20th century (Kallimopoulou 2009: 36), and traces of this practice are still audible in many parish churches and villages with respect to certain parts of the repertoire. For example, the hymn “Phos ilaron” (“Hail, Gladdening Light”)37 and the Akathistos hymn38 (performed regularly at the apódeipno at Vatopaidi) are performed with second voices. This preference for parallel thirds might be a remnant of the so-called Venetian practice, which also had its impact on the Greek national anthem (from 1864). A notational system suggested by Georgios Lesvios (1994 [1840]) was based on staff notation, but it was condemned by the patriarchate in 1848. According to Psychopedis-Frangou, Western art music and composers were by and large “importiert und behauptet ihren selbständigen Platz neben der byzantinischen Kirchenmusik und der Volksmusik. Sie wird sowohl von den aufsteigenden bürgelichen Klassen wie auch vom Staat (durch das Königshaus) gefördert” (1995: 1676). Western music had generally entered the Greek musical landscape both at the court and at the public theaters, and a fashion for concert- and opera-going was known to exist in Athens at the time. The streets echoed with military marches and romantic promenade concerts, and the pianoforte had found its way into the private musical sphere and had become a well-established practice at conservatories, where ecclesiastical music and folk song were taught. However, in the midst of this enthusiastic modernization of Greek culture and embrace of European art, the ideological struggle with traditionalism and conservatism gradually intensified, along with a growing Greek national consciousness: Um das nationalen Bewuβtsein zu stärken, wurden kulturelle Eigenheiten hervorgehoben—sprache, Religion und Musik (vor allem das Volklied und die Kirchenmusik). Dabei kam es in allen Bereichen zu idelogischen Auseinandersetzungen: Zwischen den Vertretern der byzantinischen Kirchenmusik und denen, die polyphone Gestaltungsprinzipien (wie z.B. die mehrstimmige Harmonisierung der Kirchenmusik) einführen wollten. (Psychopedis-Frangou 1995: 1677)

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The Musical Reform and the Rise of the Greek Nation In the beginning of the 19th century, Katy Romanou argues, “Byzantium was more despised than appreciated. It was considered to be more or less a decadent civilization, a shameful contrast to the glorious antiquity” (1990: 93). Byzantium was a mix of Hellenistic culture, Christian religion, and Roman imperial apparatus (Ostrogorsky 1957: 25ff.); but in line with Western classicist ideals, the Ottoman rule was seen by the Greeks as the continuation of a waning Byzantium, and thus antiquity came to represent something glorious, a past that lay beyond an increasingly orientalized Byzantium. In the period of Greek enlightenment the revival of classical texts helped shape the imaginary of a pure Greek origin. Chrysanthos proved himself as an Enlightenment musical intellectual in Greece with his Theoretikon Mega. Seen in this light, it is perhaps not at all surprising that his theoretical work was printed just three years after the end of the War of Independence and during the formation of the modern Greek state. The printing of his work was easier to carry out in Trieste, Italy, since Constantinople and the entire Macedonia region, including Mount Athos, were still under Turkish jurisdiction. If we are to speak of a revival of Greekness in the beginning of the 19th century, it is twofold: it is a turn toward European Enlightenment ideals and it is also a religious revival, since Orthodoxy came to represent what was ultimately Greek and untouched by the Ottomans. Crysanthos’s treatise bears linguistic evidence of this tendency: Turkish musical terms were replaced by Greek terms (Romanou 1990: 94), many of which were reintroduced from ancient Greek music theory. In the growing national consciousness, the revival shows the forming of a Greek nation that had turned to Western Europe in terms of both politics and culture, a Europe that itself had become engaged in the freedom and independence of Greece. “Ancient Greece” might also in this respect be understood by and large as a Western object of desire and identity, claimed by Western archeologists and fortune hunters. Contemporary claims among Athonite monks, as well as within Byzantine-music circles, that Byzantine music is to be understood as archaía (ancient) might be due to the influence of Chrysanthos’s work. In other words, Byzantine music is argued to relate directly to the Greek antiquity, with Byzantium as a mediating period (Psychopedis-Frangou 1995: 1677). John Plemmenos links classical revivalism with a series of similar attempts in the Byzantine era, such as Psellus (11th century), Bryennius (14th century), and Chrysanthos’s contemporary Stefanidis (early 19th century), who “endeavors to show the continuity of Greek music from classical Greece to Byzantium to his time” (1997: 55–56).39 That Westernization is a sign of cultural contamination is a common perception shared by Greek-revivalists and Western scholars alike when they

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mourn the loss of “authentic” cultures. According to the French scholar Le Père J. B. Rebours, active around the fin de siècle, Chrysanthos led Byzantine music to its “massacre” with a variety of innovations that were based on the Western system (1906: xiii). Yet Westernization in Greece could hardly be the result of one man’s work alone. As Plemmenos argues, the Greek intelligentsia had at least since the 1770s been attempting to allow Western thought to “infiltrate” Greek culture, forming what today is known as the Greek Enlightenment (1997: 56). Chrysanthos was familiar with European music, including German music theory and aesthetic theory from the French Enlightenment, as Plemmenos has shown (1997: 58–62). Moreover, as Maureen Morgan (1971: 86–87) has noted, Chrysanthos played both European flute and Arabic nay, in Greece known as the floghiéra (Anoyanakis 1991: 149). Romanou mentions Chrysanthos’s lack of “musicological training” (1990: 97), but it is hardly fair to measure Chrysanthos’s work by modern musicological standards alone. Chrysanthos’s work was not solely concerned with Byzantine music theory; his was an attempt to position Greece and Greek musical heritage in the light of the new, great, and modern nations of Europe and to generate awareness of its position. The publication of Chrysanthos’s treatise, coinciding as it does with the establishment of Greece as a kingdom on a European model, symbolizes the Western orientation of the time. The Patriarchal Musical Commission (Epitropís) Certain historical moments of importance in the revival of the Vatopaidian musical tradition tend to occupy the monks’ attention. One of these is marked by the musical reform, and another by musical commissions established to confirm the reform. In this section I direct my attention to one of these provisional institutions, perhaps the most important. Xenophonía Almost seventy years after the implementation of the reform, the so-called Patriarchal Musical Commission (epitropís) of 1883 was put together with the purpose of revising and reaffirming musical rules in the Byzantine musical system, motivated by the (unwanted) influence from Western Europe. The decisions of the commission were published in the shape of a musical statutory. In the introductory statement of the work, issued in 1888, the purpose of the commission is described as “to bring order in the system of our holy music and to clean it from foreignness,” a point which is repeatedly emphasized in the work (Epitropis 1888: 7ff.).40 In another paragraph: “One aim of the present work is . . . to salvage the substance of the sacred chant (to ieró mélos), transmitted to us by oral tradition, which is now endangered by xenophonía” (4). The term xenophonía (or ksenophonía), so eas-

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ily confused with the meaning (and spelling) of xenophobia, points to foreignvoicedness rather pejoratively. Later, in the continuing debate over chanting, this religious-nationalist line is followed by writers on Byzantine music such as the cultural fundamentalist P. S. Antonellis, who agitates aggressively against the “enemies at home [in Greece],” who advocate for “the foreign idiom . . . of harmonized polyphony,” and thus “offend . . . moral, national and religious feelings,” despite finding it “comforting to note that Church and State, also private organizations, have consistently opposed the tide of that kind of invasion” (1956: 208, 210). The commission notes, as elements of the tradition common to the Eastern Orthodox churches, the use of the three genera (diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic) according to the diatonic intervals, alterations according to the rules, and the eight modes and their subgroups. These are the standard elements of the tradition believed by the commission to have been maintained in its “pure form,” that is, without Western influence, in the following countries: Syria, Romania, Serbia, the Greek mainland (Epirothessalía), Crete, the Holy Mountain (Mount Athos), Palestine, Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Peloponnisos (Epitropis 1888: 12). Most interesting are perhaps the places not mentioned: the major Greek cities, Athens and Thessaloniki, and Constantinople, as well as the Greek islands. It is worth emphasizing that the commission’s concern about xenophonía primarily focused on the influence from the West, and not from Asia Minor (Palestine and Syria are mentioned by virtue of being nonWesternized areas). The project of rescuing and reconstructing the true Greek national ecclesiastical music (and folk music) was later taken up by Simonos Karas with extraordinary perseverance from the 1920s to the 1990s, through theoretical writing, teaching, ethnographic recordings produced for the Society for the Dissemination of National Music (founded by Karas himself ), and music broadcasts on the state radio, where he was director of the Department of National Music for more than three decades. Like the commission and individuals such as Psachos before him, “Karas rejected the Europeanization of church music” (Kallimopolou 2009: 36) and turned to the Near East, especially Turkey, where he believed Byzantine musical elements (mainly homophony) were thriving uncontaminated—much along the lines of the Musical Commission of the 1880s. In Eleni Kallimopoulou’s words, “Turkey emerges as a farmhouse where the seeds of Greek music have been planted and preserved,” and “is the living space of the past of Greek music” (2009: 39). These ideas and concerns about Greekness and music influence the revival of Byzantine chant at Vatopaidi. Not only is Karas’s Method of Greek Music a central reference work in the education of psáltes at the monastery, but the two specialists who assist the monks in their sacred musicological endeavor, Georgios Konstantinou and Kostas Angelidis, are as core revivalists—as well as students of

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both Karas and Angelopoulos—heirs of Karas’s way of approaching Byzantine monophony with his ideas of “musical and liturgical restorationism” (Lingas 2003: 351). Pure Form, Decline, and Exact Interval Measures The aims of the commission (Epitropis 1888: 7ff.) were to study the contemporary state of the ecclesiastical music first and foremost to shed light on possible causes for its decline, of which the commission defined three. The first cause of decline was a matter of general change and social progress. The second was the prominent position of Western music in theaters, music schools, the army, public concerts, and private homes. The third cause was formulated as ignorance and incompetence among psáltes concerning the correct and precise performance of the holy chant. Furthermore, “the Commission also regrets that teachers of ecclesiastical music do not listen to the old and classical melodies, but instead are bringing new material and melodies into the existing repertoire following their own taste, giving chant an artistic value in itself; thus chant is distanced from the sacred melody, originally characterized by greatness and simplicity in style” (Epitropis 1888: 7). The commission clearly makes a distinction between European music and Byzantine ecclesiastical chant, and argues that the system of well-tempered halftones does not correspond to the intervals of “Eastern music” (anatolikí mousikí), ecclesiastical music (ekklisiastikí mousikí), or the “sacred music” (ierá mousikí) of the “Anatolian” or “Eastern Church” (anatolikí ekklisía), as the commission variously terms the music (Epitropis 1888: 8, 9). Further down the prologue it is stated that “[i]t is well known that the ecclesiastical music is retained until now almost only through oral tradition” (9). The importance of a genuine oral tradition was thus recognized at a time when it had been under increasing influence from a Western European musical idiom, a fact that apparently revealed the inconsistencies of the written Byzantine musical system: it did not, as it would seem, render the “mysteries” of oral transmission efficiently enough. This happened at a time when psáltes educated in the old system(s) in the years before the reform—the last firsthand witnesses of the orally transmitted musical phrases hidden in the so-called great signs often written in red ink41—had become a dying generation. The performance of these group-signs relied on oral transmission, but these signs were notated “analytically” in the New Method, that is, they were “translated” from their prereform notations into the New Method. The Greek terms metáfrasi (translation) or exégesis (interpretation) are often used to describe this process. Some understand this process as a mere change in notation without any significant impact on the tradition,42 whereas the Vatopaidian monks find the process problematic, as it is not clear exactly what form these phrases had when they constituted the bases for the Three Teachers’ metafráseis (translations). Therefore the monks often talk about these signs as containing “hidden musical phrases” (apókryfes fráseis).

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On the one hand, the commission admitted that Chrysanthos’s Theoretikon Mega was the very basis of the Byzantine musical system as it was approved in 1814 by the patriarchate in Constantinople, Patriarch Cyril VI and the Holy Synod (Morgan 1971: 90). On the other hand, the commission took a critical stand toward the mathematic accuracy of the treatise. “The work of the Three Teachers was truly great, though, in spite of this, it in no way rectifies the basic insufficiencies the Eastern [Church] music is suffering under today” (Epitropis 1888: 9). The faults that the commission refers to concern primarily the sizes of intervals. One of the main purposes of the commission, therefore, was practical in the sense that they set out to determine the sizes of the intervals by measuring them and, once and for all, bring an end to the doubt and dispute (Epitropis 1888: 11ff.). Needless to say, it seems highly paradoxical to want to measure the intervals of a music that at the same time was still believed to be transmitted in “pure form” in numerous places, as I mentioned earlier. What was the purpose of these “exact” measures? According to the commission, the genuine ecclesiastical intervals that were about to disappear were actually still alive and well in the performance practice of the gérontes, the elder teachers of the church, who were “able to transmit the tradition in a true and faithful way to the younger generations [of psáltes]” (Epitropis 1888: 11). Overall, the commission’s work seems to be problematic for a number of reasons, not least in relation to the measuring of intervals. It is clear that the commission presumed that the oral tradition of Byzantine music was rendered untouched by the passage of time, as also noted skeptically by the French (Catholic) monk and scholar Jean-Baptiste Thibaut (1898: 245).43 The commission did not consider the influence that Chrysanthos’s system already might have had for about six decades on musical practices. The Missing Instrument Several pages of the prologue address the measuring of intervals based on the use of a unique musical instrument invented for the occasion (Epitropis 1888: 14–26). This instrument, the so-called psaltírion, was, ironically enough, constructed with the European orgue as model (Epitropis 1888: 27, 30).44 Built in the shape of a Western organ, the instrument had seventy-three different keys forming two octaves, enabling it to provide the intervals of the Byzantine tradition as transmitted orally (though only one protopsáltis, Georgios Violakis, was asked to demonstrate the intervals); in addition it had eight base tones that would supply the íson, or drone (Epitropis 1888: 29). As nobody knows what became of this instrument, it is—in the minds of many performers of Byzantine music—perceived to be mere myth, if not a joke. In the opinion of most at the monastery of Vatopaidi, not even a single fragment of the instrument survives.45 Whether the psaltírion existed or not, the determination of intervals based upon measuring them with a key instrument

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would in one way or another imply preconceived ideas of the interval sizes one set out to measure in the first place. Thus, the aim of measuring intervals with an instrument remains unclear. The psaltírion must have been something very much out of the ordinary with its odd number of keys and tuning, compared, at the time of the committee’s work, to the ubiquitous Western pianoforte. The practice of demonstrating intervals with an instrument, as part of ecclesiastical musical training in general, has not been limited to urban music schools and conservatories. Though they are deemed of minor importance only, they do exist at the Athonite monasteries. At Vatopaidi the monks keep a keyboard (a synthesizer) and a Greek (fretless) lute, and at the monastery of Iviron computer programs are used as a pedagogical aid. The Tradition of Negotiating the Past The work of the commission in the 1880s, along with later disputes, bears witness to the inconsistencies that exist between musical-performance practices and different readings of Byzantine music theory. The basis of these discussions seems to be located in the fact that the Three Teachers did not provide a key to the method they employed in the reform work: how they translated the notational variations into one standard system remains unclear. This uncertainty has left traces in learned Byzantine musical circles even today. As Father Agapios frequently asked rhetorically when we were discussing the issue: “Why did the Three Teachers not secure that a key to their reform was passed on? Why did they not describe how they interpreted and transcribed the old systems and each of the musical signs?”46 The reform of the Byzantine musical system marks a potential interruption of the tradition, a moment of discontinuity, which explains the monks’ desire to break the “impenetrable barrier” (Strunk 1977: 60–61) of the reform47 and reach beyond the historical tyranny and obscuration of oral tradition it represents. The key to the mysteries lies in oral tradition, perhaps not least because of the notion that “[its] power to connect present to past lies in its invisibility” (Bohlman 1997: 152). Both the work of the commission in 1883 and the recent sacred-musicological labor at Vatopaidi monastery rely on oral tradition as a source for answers that relate to the questions that arise from the nontransparency of the reformists’ methods: Both enterprises show a firm belief in the stability of oral tradition. The authority ascribed to oral tradition reveals, from an ethnomusicological perspective, a strong wish to control it, either in order to assure nonchange, or to assure the correct change. Western xenophony is a kind of influence that both the 1880s commission and the contemporary Vatopaidi monastery are concerned with avoiding. It is therefore ironic that the measuring of intervals in 1883 was based on a Western organlike instrument, and that the sound of the revived practice at the Monastery of Vatopaidi has been characterized as

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non-Athonite and modern and, by some of my fellow (Greek Orthodox) pilgrims, even as “secular” in style. The Vatopedian monks might agree with the ethnomusicologist’s view that the task of reenvisioning their own past is not without problems and risks. But in their musical endeavors they nevertheless stand on the shoulders of earlier attempts to renew the musical practice, notably that of Karas, and relate critically to the authority of the reform and the later Musical Commission, both commissioned by the patriarchate. In other words, as they challenge the ecclesiastical authorities of the past, the monks continue the negotiation of possible musical pasts and presents, a negotiation which itself seems to have become part of the tradition.

NOTES 1. See also Jenkins (2003: 4, 11, 38). 2. Part of the Byzantine musical repertoire is said to be kalophonic (kalí foní), which means “beautiful voice,” or “pleasant sound,” or the “art of ornamented chanting,” and refers to melismatic or embellished melodies (contrasting with syllabic hymn settings). Kalophonic chanting demands great vocal skill from the performer(s). Despite differences in spelling conventions, the term can be compared to calligraphy (kalí grafía), which refers to the “art of beautiful writing” or “ornamental penmanship.” Spiritual aspects relating to the melismatic repertoire are addressed further in chapter 6. 3. Field notes, November 2001. 4. Field notes, November 2001. 5. Field notes, November 2001. 6. Field notes, November 2001. 7. Field notes, November 2001. 8. The adjective coenobitic or cenobitic (koinós bíos) refers to monastic “life in common,” that is, where monks follow a common daily routine, sharing the work. By contrast, idiorrhythmic (ídios rhythmós) means “own way of life” and refers to “a form of monkhood where the monks follow an individual daily routine” (Gothóni 1993: 178). 9. Field notes, November 2001. 10. These figures are unofficial; field notes, November 2001; conversation with Fathers Nyphon and Agapios. Speake (2002: 169) registers the number of monks living at the monastery of Vatopaidi as follows: 1903: 966 monks; 1959: 129 monks; 1968: 83 monks; and 1971: 74 monks. This decline forms a general tendency at the monasteries at Mount Athos in the first three-quarters of the 20th century. 11. A monk is not necessarily also educated as a priest, hence the distinction between a “simple monk” (monachós) and a “priest-monk” (ieromonachós). 12. Field notes, November 2001. 13. Field notes, November 2001. 14. The Greek term ananéosi can be translated in a variety of ways, including renewal, revival, and change.

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15. Bloom (noun), in the sense of a blossoming time, might be another translation of ánthisi. 16. Field notes, November 2001; my translation. 17. The quotation is taken from the booklet to VAT-CD5/00: 14–15. The English text (the text also appears in Greek and in French) is by Nikos Dionysopoulos, Director of Musical Publications, Crete University Press. 18. The poetic text of the hymn “Christós anésti”: “Christ is risen from the dead / By death hath He trampled down death / And on those in the graves hath He bestowed life” (VAT-CD6/00: 20; translation from the booklet). 19. No references are included on the CD-ROM chapter other than the relevant manuscripts. The information is based partly on the monks’ own research, and partly on the codicographical work of Gregorios Stathis (see Stathis 1975–1993, 1996). 20. Field notes, November 2001. 21. Field notes, November 2001; interview with Father Bartholomeos; VATCD2/96: 42. 22. Field notes, November 2001. 23. Field notes, November 2001; interview with Father Bartholomeos. 24. The expression to be a “listener of ” somebody is owed to Ioannis Arvanitis, who used it (in English) in our correspondence, pointing to the importance of aural (rather than oral) transmission. 25. Field notes, November 2001; conversation with Angelidis. The Danish philologist Carsten Høeg made a few recordings either in 1957 (Høeg attended a conference in Thessaloniki that year) or in 1960, originating from an Athonite monastery, probably the Great Lavra, when he visited Mount Athos to microfilm manuscripts; but the recordings’ poor technical condition and the lack of detailed information speak for their limited value. 26. Field notes, November 2001; conversation with Fathers Germanos, Bartholomeos, Agapios, and Maksimos. 27. The Vatopaidian CDs are listed in the discography as VAT-CD1/96, VATCD2/96, and VAT-CD3/97. 28. The poetic text of the doxastikón from the Vespers of Good Friday: “Glory be to the Father and the son and to the Holy Spirit / Now and ever, and unto the ages of ages / Amen / Joseph with Nicodemus took Thee down from the Tree / Who deckest Thyself with light as with a garment / And looking upon Thee dead, stripped and without burial / In his grief and tender compassion he lamented, saying: / Woe is me, my sweetest Jesus! / When by a little ago the sun saw Thee / Hanging on the Cross / It wrapped itself in darkness: / The earth quaked with fear / And the veil of the temple was rent in twain / And now I see Thee / For my sake submitting of Thine own will to death / How shall I bury Thee, my God? / How shall I wrap Thee in a winding sheet? / How shall I touch Thy most pure body with my hands? / What song at Thy departure shall I sing to Thee / O compassionate Saviour? / I magnify Thy sufferings / I sing the praises of Thy burial and Thy resurrection, crying: / O Lord, Glory be to Thee” (VAT-CD3/97: 53–54; translation from the booklet). 29. Angelidis’s introduction in the booklet of the CD; VAT-CD3/97: 39–40.

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30. The oldest notation by Ioasaf Vatopaidinos dates back to 1425 in the manuscript MS Iveron 925. 31. The two manuscripts are known as MS EBE 706 and MS EBE 731. 32. Field notes, October 2001. 33. Field notes, June 2000; Field notes, November 2000. 34. See for example Chrysanthos (1832: 29–33). 35. The manuscript referred to is: MS 1428 (dated 1818): 303, Library of Vatopaidi Monastery, Mount Athos. 36. The Patriarchate officially condemned the practice of four-part singing (tetraphonía) in the Orthodox community in Vienna. The original Greek encyclical (i.e., official letter) was reprinted in the journal Kivotós in 1952. This reprint of the document and an English translation can be found at www.stanthonysmonastery.org/music/ encyclical.pdf. 37. Also known in translation as “O Gladsome Light,” “O Joyous Light,” and “O Gracious Light.” 38. The Akathistos hymn is a famous kontákion (liturgical poem) chanted in honor of the All Holy Mother of Christ while the congregation stands (akáthistos means “not seated”). The poem possibly dates from the 6th century, whereas the earliest notated melodies (in highly melismatic soloist styles) are from the 13th century—though earlier versions of melodies, assumed to be orally transmitted, probably were of more simple and syllabic style. 39. Stefanidis’s work was originally written in Latin (in 1791) and later rewritten in Greek in 1819 during the years of the reform of the Byzantine musical system, though it remained unpublished until 1902, when it was eventually published by Violakis (Stefanidis 1902 [1819]). 40. All translations of this document are mine. 41. These signs are often named “the great signs of cheironomy,” as the performance of these group-signs (they consisted of two or more signs) relied on oral transmission, and they were indicated by the use of hand gestures (cheironomía). 42. Grigorios Stathis clearly expresses such a view in a lecture he gave at Oxford University in 1970, recently published in an edited version (see Stathis 2008). Here he speaks of the Byzantine musical tradition as “uninterrupted,” and says that the change in the notation caused “no change in the chant.” 43. See also Morgan (1971: 92–93). 44. For an illustration of the psaltírion, see Epitropis (1888: 30); and the back cover of the 1999 reprint. 45. Field notes, November 2001. 46. Field notes, November 2001. 47. Strunk (1977) initially applied the expression “impenetrable barrier” in the context of the study of oral tradition in Byzantine music in general, and not particularly in connection with the reform movement.

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•

3

•

Sacred Musical Transorthography

The space of the musical past is not infrequently a contested space, and the impact of that contestation on the present may provide palpable evidence for the fieldworker to interpret the past. —Philip V. Bohlman

M

y shirt is soaking wet from trekking over the mountain ridge carrying a facsimile of one of the monastery of Vatopaidi’s own medieval manuscripts published by Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae (MMB) in Copenhagen in 1975.1 The monastery never received a copy, and as I bring it along with the greetings of the current head of MMB, Christian Troelsgård, I feel like an ambassador taking part in the exchange of important documents between two traditions, a sacred and an academic, which might both benefit from an exchange of publications on Byzantine chant. The experience of Father Maksimos’s reaction as he stands in what the monks call the “music lab” with the facsimile in his hands makes the extra weight it added to my backpack worthwhile: “Oh my . . . Kýrie eléison [Lord, be merciful], this is our manuscript!”2 In this chapter I aim at illustrating how the musical revival at the monastery of Vatopaidi takes place at the level of musical signs, modes, intonation formulas, drone-practice, and cheironomy. What Isar (2000) notes for the icon—that it is not simply a representation of God to behold but a site where one participates in God—is also highly relevant to understanding the monks’ concern for the “right” graphical representation of the melodic movements. The okseía sign is iconic for specific vocal or melodic gestures, and can therefore not merely be replaced by other representations, just as the icon cannot be replaced. I will discuss these iconic gestures below, understanding them here in relation to a concept of musical orthography or orthopraxis, which is related 75

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to ideas of the right way of participating in chanting, which I explore further in chapter 5.

THE REVIVAL OF MUSICAL-NOTATIONAL SIGNS The power of notation, unlike oral tradition, to connect the present to the past lies in its visible materiality and historical provenance. As graphical representation, musical notation needs to be reproduced in performance in order to be realized in the present as sounding music. Studies of musical notation alone do not tell how a given hymn is performed—or how it was performed at different moments in the past—and do not reveal anything about the power different pasts may have exerted on it. Yet there are examples of musical manuscripts with later insertions or ascriptions added by second or third scribes, and there are cases where a hymn has been located in different manuscripts as variations or alternative versions. Diachronic comparative analysis of such material can point to instances of stability and flexibility, and patterns of variance within a musical genre over time (see for example Troelsgård 1995). Depending on the specific oral tradition a cantor might identify with, the “encoded” version of a chant in musical notation might be interpreted in innumerable ways. It is misleading here to speak of music performance as a mere “decoding” of notation. There is no reason to assume that any given performance practice in the past is more “correct” than the other performances. A number of questions are important. First, we need to ask the following questions: In what past? Correct in what way, and in relation to what? Byzantine chant has not been performed in timeless pasts, but rather at specific moments and places. It might therefore be useful to speak of a plurality of pasts rather than a singular past that may be elusive or arbitrary. Contrasting music of the past—that is, a music that stopped sounding— with the present implies that we pretend we can hear it, which is an act of objectifying and exoticizing music. But what if the people we study claim that they have access to the sound of the music of a past? That this might also be an act of exoticizing music is not the most interesting point to be made; rather, it is the issue of identification with certain musical pasts that becomes interesting: How is the past narrated as a past of Self ? Who is making these claims? How do spiritual and musical pasts conflate in these narrations? What pasts are important and why? Has the way of identifying with the past changed within a given tradition? During fieldwork at Mount Athos I tried to grasp how Athonite monks relate to their liturgical and musical past. It is important to note that these liturgical and musical spaces are only partly contested, since some parts are

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not at all negotiable, such as discourses on clerical authority and divine truth, whereas other parts apparently are, such as the interpretation and use of musical-notational signs as well as other domains of performance practice. “The otherness of the past as an experience in which one did not participate is often inseparable from the selfness of the past as an experience to which one draws closer through its narration” (Bohlman 1997: 149). What this means is that the selfness of the past is a contrived, constructed, imaginary experience. The point here is that involvement with historical music is an issue of identity construction that tells us more about the present performers than it does of the past. It is in this sense that the past can be seen as a construction site. The question we ought to ask present performers is not whether they are right or not. Instead we should ask why they do what they do. Present historically informed performances of Byzantine music at the monastery of Vatopaidi might be compared to those of the modern earlymusic movement. How present musicians relate to the past of Western early music has been characterized by Richard Taruskin in ways that are extremely useful for understanding other music cultures: I am convinced that “historical” performance practice today is not really historical; that a thin veneer of historicism clothes a performance style that is completely of our own time, and is in fact the most modern style around; and that the historical hardware has won its wide acceptance and above all its commercial viability precisely by virtue of its novelty, not its antiquity. (1988: 152)

Katherine Bergeron’s (1998) study of the systematic labor of the Solesmes monks on their musical tradition, Gregorian chant, reveals many similarities with the musical research work of the Vatopaidians on Byzantine chant and the concern with the conditions of oral transmission and interpretation of old musical notation. The monks search in their own library and at other Athonite libraries for indications—such as early versions of melodies, or insertions in musical manuscripts—that can tell them something about how past Vatopaidian fathers interpreted the musical signs. These indications reflect back on the musical performances at the services, adding historical depth and authenticity to their performance. Besides glorifying God, the historical research and the musical activities at Vatopaidi are a means of glorifying their musical forebears, as well as the present state of the monastery. Seen from an ethnomusicological viewpoint, however, such historicizing activities have a problematically teleological dimension. Monks write their own history based on their own research in their own material to create a desired past constructed in terms of present agendas. This is why I speak of the monks’ musicological research in terms of “sacred musicology,” to borrow Bergeron’s term (1998: 92).

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TRANSCRIBING BYZANTINE MUSIC Before I turn to the revived notational signs in detail, I find it important to address some of the premises and problems of transcribing Byzantine music, as the methodological approach to transcription is rarely, if ever, reflected critically upon within the study of Byzantine chant. By the same token, this section will also serve as a brief introduction to some of the basics of Byzantine music theory and notation. Transcription is not a straightforward matter of replacing one set of notational signs with another. Rather, transcription of Byzantine music is an implicitly comparative process involving interpretational moves on the transcriber’s part regarding how to communicate Byzantine musical ideas and sounds in a highly sophisticated graphical form. Anthropologists and ethnomusicologists are, these days, keen to discuss problems related to various kinds of cultural representation; transcription is no exception. Throughout the history of the discipline, the study of Byzantine music has principally been a paleographical encounter with the historical period of Byzantium, the post-Byzantine era, and more recently also the period following the reform of the Byzantine musical system. Maria Alexandru (2000) and Giannelos (1987, 1996), among others, endeavor to study an oral tradition believed to have left its traces in Byzantine musical notation; and as such these are really theoretical studies of notational practice in relation to ideas about oral phenomena and music theory, rather than studies of specific local musicperformance practices. In the study of Byzantine music, transcription has primarily been associated with decoding early notational systems by transliterating them to either an alphabetical system or staff notation. A standardized transcriptional format was advanced by Egon Wellesz and H. J. W. Tillyard, two of the principal scholars behind the Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae (Tillyard 1970 [1935]; Wellesz 1998). This format resembled in principle the one advanced by Hornbostel and Abraham at the beginning of the 20th century in the field of comparative musicology,3 also referred to as the International Phonetic Alphabet. Until the 1950s the establishment of methodological consensus in the field of transcription was one of the discipline’s ultimate aims (Olsen 1974: 42). In this respect, Byzantine musicology was following the general tendency of Euro-American historical and ethnographic music studies. The distinction between orality and notation is purely theoretical. Musical notation rarely communicates much about how performers use (or used) it. As early as 1936, one of the pioneers within the disciplines of both Greek language and Byzantine music, Carsten Høeg, argued that a full understanding of the rich and nuanced Greek language requires investigation from both ends of its historical continuum—the “learned” and written language at the one end,

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and the spoken, with all its dialects, at the other. If scholars failed to do this, the study of Greek as a whole would suffer: “It is of the utmost importance that we do not, as many scholars tend to, construct a division between living language and dead language. There is no clear divide” (Høeg 1936: 17–18, translation mine). Høeg’s arguments have equal importance for the study of Byzantine music, which should consider both ends of a continuum that covers more than one thousand years of Byzantine musical practices and should include material from past and present. Much along these lines, Byzantinologist Milos Velimirovic later stated that “[one] can only hope that future studies will eventually establish a continuum starting with the medieval Byzantine musical heritage, and follow its evolution through subsequent centuries to its present incarnations in contemporary Greek practice” (1990: 148). Important here is the imagination of a “continuum,” one that should not have the effect of neglecting discontinuities and ruptures, but, rather, should have the effect of dismantling the artificial divide between “historical” and “contemporary” Byzantine musical traditions. I have found the idea of such a continuum particularly useful in my own research. Music practice and discourse at Mount Athos, broadly considered one of the epicenters in the history of Byzantine music, are drenched in historical markers of all sorts, spanning from the anecdotal to the practical and the empirical. The overall sensation of the presence of past and history at an Athonite monastery such as Vatopaidi is enormous. The monks’ understanding of their spiritual and musical practice is historical through and through. Western staff notation works well as a more or less precise aide-mémoire for musicians playing a piece of notated music as written. However, when used for transcription of music it was never intended to graphically represent, it inevitably falls short. Transcriptions of Byzantine music are notoriously erroneous in the sense that they render all melodic steps as fixed and absolute. Early transcriptions such as those produced by Hatherly (1892), Adaiewsky (1901), and Rebours (1906) appear culturally ignorant by today’s measures. But there are exceptions: as early as 1826, Guillaume-André Villoteau understood the inadequacy of Western notation in representing the music he was studying in Egypt. He explained this as a defect in the notational system he was using, not in the music he studied, and he was one of the first researchers to devise symbols to increase the precision of intervals in Western staff notation (Villoteau 1826: 41–42).4 Also, L.-A. Bourgault-Ducoudray (1877) demonstrated, for the time, a relatively sensitive approach to determining the size of intervals in his study of Byzantine music, recognizing intervals as other than halftones and whole tones. His transcriptions reveal quite clearly that he paid attention to contemporary musical performances. Transcriptions of Byzantine music to adjusted staff notation have become more common owing to the

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increase in comparative studies of contemporary Byzantine chant and Turkish and Arab music,5 and in notational studies of the New Method6 (Giannelos 1987, 1996). However, these studies all avoid addressing the problems of transcribing Byzantine musical signs into staff notation. A distinction must be made between mode understood in terms of scale and structure, and mode as it is created in the course of performance. The distinction is in part rooted in an incongruence between theory and practice, and in part rooted in the practice of so-called melodic attraction (élkseis), where different conditions determine the alteration and elasticity of notes between the dominating ones. In a Byzantine musical scale, steps I, IV, and V are fixed, whereas steps II, III, VI, and VII are flexible. This problem calls for application of specific “Byzantine accidentals” in the transcription to indicate that they should be read not as fixed but rather as flexible notes. Obviously, the implied cultural comparison in the transcription of nontempered music into staff notation causes a further problem, one already well known: when transcribed, Byzantine music, like other non-Western music, comes to be understood first and foremost in terms of difference and deviance; its attributes are viewed as defects (Ellingson 1992b: 156). It is the peculiar diacritical signs that attract attention, if not as difference then as exotica. Such signs become objects to satisfy scholars’ notational fetishism, coupled with a nostalgia for categorical precision. This is not to say that transcription is not a powerful means of illustrating musical detail graphically. Although transcribers are often innovative when it comes to constructing accidentals in order to render a more appropriate picture of the transcribed music, transcription remains (also) an act of exotization, as it establishes or ascertains difference. Comfortable as it is, all structuring is basically binary (King 1974: 103; Herndon 1993)—high-low, left-right, short-long—but the meanings of the structures and the practices they depend on are always culturally and historically situated. Metaphorical indications that pitches should be read “slightly lower or higher,” as has been customary in ethnomusicology and Byzantine-music studies, might at first be advantageous as they allow flexibility. However, this rhetoric is unfavorable when the performed intervals are precisely as small or big as they are supposed to be according to the performer, as Poul Olsen maintains (1974: 40). The point to be made is that the notational signs are arbitrary, and scholars, when neglecting the arbitrariness of notation, turn our transcriptions into a biased cultural critique as we come to read the transcribed music in terms of how it does not fit into our predetermined cultural categories. The unfortunate idea of other cultures produced by the graphic representation of difference is that their main characteristics as deviant, exotic, and capricious are allowed no alternatives.

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Transcription and the Untranslability of Media Transcription is a transposition of musical phenomena between different media. Either it is a transposition between two different notational systems (texttext, or visual transcription), or between sound and graphic form (sound-text, or aural transcription). In his Discourse/Networks 1800/1900, Friedrich Kittler discusses the untranslability and transposition of media: A medium is a medium is a medium. Therefore it cannot be translated. To transfer messages from one medium to another always involves reshaping them to conform to new standards and materials. . . . Whereas translation excludes all particularities in favor of a general equivalent, the transposition of media is accomplished serially, at discrete points. Given medium A, organized as a denumerable collection of discrete elements EaI . . . , its transposition into medium B will consist of reproducing the internal (syntagmatic and paradigmatic) relations between its elements in the collection. Because the number of elements n and m and the rules of association are hardly ever identical, every transposition is to a degree arbitrary, a manipulation. It can appeal to nothing universal and must therefore leave gaps. (1990: 265)

An example will illustrate the relevance of Kittler’s argument to Byzantine notational systems (see figure 3.1). Characterized in terms of number of elements, the Byzantine notational sign okseía consists of one element looking rather like the graphic shape of the French accent aigu. By comparison, the graphical representation of the okseía sign in staff notation requires a larger number of discrete elements, including the staffs; an implied starting note; the two quavers and the crotch, each with head and neck; and finally a legato sign. Other elements could probably be added to the list. In aural transcription, the transposition between media in a Kittlerian sense is no less complicated. How are the number, density, and nature of elements in a musical phrase (sound, timbre, and gesture, among other parameters) supposed to be defined in relation to dots and dashes on a piece of paper? It is clear from Kittler’s notion of the untranslability of media that any transcription is an essentially arbitrary and manipulative act of reshaping perceptions and ideas about music.

Figure 3.1. The “untranslability” of the okseía (one element) to the staff notation (at least five elements).

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This, however, does not mean that communication of cultural understanding by the use of transcriptions is impossible, or not desirable. Like any other communication form, notation (whether understood as a graphic representation of sound or of another notational form) is dialogically constituted in cultural and social contexts. Transcriptional convention is preconditioned by a musicological monoglossia (a centripetal dynamics) ensuring that scholars and others can communicate ideas on a basic level, which is why transcription has a function despite the ever-pressing methodological issues, some of which I have raised here. Analytically speaking, I understand transcription not as “descriptive notation,” as it is customarily labeled in opposition to “prescriptive notation” (see for example Seeger 1958), but rather as a third type that one might identify as “conceptual transcription,” which “seeks to portray musical sound as an embodiment of musical concepts held by members of a culture,” as Ter Ellingson writes, arguing that this change in the work with transcription “reflects a general trend in ethnomusicology away from objectivist intercultural discovery procedures towards problems of conceptualization seen from within a culture” (1992a: 110–11). However, transcription can never result in mere representation of others’ cultural concepts; rather, it is the result of a series of interpretative moves that enables the transcriber to show what he or she wants to show. The music studied is not reducible to writing or graphic representation. The transcriber adds radical new understandings of the culture within the theoretical, notational, and analytical framework employed. Olsen views transcription as an act of transforming music performances into the “understanding of [musical] ideas” (1974: 50). Thus transcription can be a useful means of entering into dialogue with the studied music and getting to know it in intimate detail. Olsen thereby directs attention to the process of transcribing rather than to the product of the transcription itself. In addition, Peter Winkler (1997) has forcefully argued for processual transcription, and demonstrates how subsequent listenings to the same minute musical fragments change the graphical representation in the hands of the transcriber. To Winkler, the process of transcribing never comes to a closure; there is never a final product to show, other than the one we decide to use—if we do not throw it away, to follow Winkler’s emancipating, yet radical advice. Echoing Olsen’s assertion that precision in transcription should in fact be avoided, since such precision would not have any normative significance (Olsen 1974: 44), Kittler’s argument points to the contingency and open-endedness implied in the negotiation of the translated message, while emphasizing the necessity of leaving gaps in transcriptions, since there can be no final appeal to an ultimate objectivity.

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Practical Remarks on Transcriptions The inclusion of transcriptions in this book contributes to a mapping out of small parts of the contemporary Byzantine musical soundscape and performance practice at the monasteries. I have chosen an adjusted notation suitable for the transcription purposes in the examples included in this book to show what is happening to Byzantine melodies and to illustrate how scales are explained theoretically. For the aural transcriptions, melodies are notated with simple rhythmic values, and for the isokrátema (the drone) I apply a one-line system invented for the purpose (in effect, a reduced staff notation). For the visual transcriptions, the original notation is provided above the transcription system in order to facilitate comparison, and accidentals are used according to Byzantine music theory. One advantage of working with a contemporary musical tradition is that a notated melody and a performance based on that notation can be juxtaposed in the analysis and serve to illustrate the interrelation between oral and written transmission. On Interval Sizes An octave in modern Byzantine music theory is constituted by (approximately) 72 small entities called mória. In comparison to the Western well-tempered scale, this means that a Western whole tone equals 12 mória, and a halftone 6 mória. In theory, Byzantine music operates with a variety of interval sizes: the intervals of 4, 6, and 8 mória are all considered “halftones,” and those of 10, 12, 14, 16, and 18 mória all “whole tones.” In the course of musical performance other interval sizes are created, and some scholars and practitioners, including those at the monastery of Vatopaidi, explain this practice as the principle of melodic attractions, known in Byzantine music theory as élkseis. Intervals thus created are mostly smaller than a Western halftone, having the size of 1, 2, 3, or 5 mória, in Western terms known as microtones. I deliberately describe the terms whole tone and halftone as “Western,” since in Byzantine music these are multivalent and always dependent on repertoire, mode, and actual performance. On the Problem of Meter Greek music teachers often make use of transcriptions into the Western staff notation in their musical training books as a means of explaining rhythmic figures.7 In modern training books such as Georgios Konstantinou’s (1997), the notation of meter has become a conventional pedagogical device influenced by Western notational practice introduced along with the New Method in the 19th century. But even in Western music theory, the issue of meter is complex (Clayton 2000: 29). In Byzantine chant the strong beat follows the accentuation of the text, often stressed by “local peaks” in the melodic contour. To apply the bar-line to represent Byzantine melody would in many cases violate this practice, taking away focus from the rhythm or meter of the poetic text and directing it to an assumed standard set

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of a “strong” beat followed by a number of “weak” beats. The “association of bar-lines with metric structure,” Martin Clayton writes in a footnote, “became widespread in Europe only in the seventeenth century” (2000: 28). So the application of meter in notation to Byzantine music is of a later date.

THE REVIVAL OF NOTATIONAL SIGNS A number of musical-notational signs were abolished during the reform of the Byzantine musical system in the beginning of the 19th century by the Three Teachers.8 Some of these have been reintroduced into written practice at the monastery of Vatopaidi since Kostas Angelidis’s and Georgios Konstantinou’s involvement in musical training at the monastery in the middle of the 1990s. These include three diastematic signs known as the petastí, the okseía, and the isáki, and four phrasal signs, the psifistón, the streptó, the paraklitikí, and the píesma. The reintroduction of these signs suggests that the so-called musical “energies” (mousikí energía) believed to inhabit these signs originally have regained their proper form in notation. The term “musical ‘energy’” refers to the instructive or communicative message inherent in each musical sign, suggesting on a practical level what the cantor is supposed to do with his voice other than merely moving stepwise through the melody. One could argue that the revival of these signs is not so much a Vatopaidian invention, but, rather, something that seems to relate to the persistent influence of the “Karas School.” The musical-notational signs discussed in what follows are all revived in practice at Vatopaidi, but they are also present in Simonos Karas’s eight-volume theoretical treatise on Byzantine music (1982). As the current practice at Vatopaidi could be understood as a revived tradition musically authenticated by the views on music history held by Karas and his followers—counting among others Angelidis and Konstantinou—the evidence seems to suggest that the revival of the Byzantine musical tradition at the Athonite monasteries is not a phenomenon confined to the geographic territory of the monastic community at Mount Athos. Byzantine-music revival is connected to a more general theoretical debate in Greece, involving lay Byzantine-music experts (here considered monastic “outsiders,” although they may be musical, spiritual, and cultural “insiders”) and local monks who are often educated in music and theology in Athens, Thessaloniki, or elsewhere prior to taking the vow and becoming monks. Insiders, conventionally speaking, are never born into the monastic tradition. Yet in Orthodox spirituality, tonsuring, or ritual initiation, is considered a man’s second birth. The seven musical-notational signs in question were abolished during the reform, but were reintroduced during the 1990s at Vatopaidi following the

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work by Karas and Konstantinou, among others. Even if I characterize this as part of a specific Athonite musical revival, it is clear that the phenomena relate to specific intellectual strands within Greek Byzantine musical historiography and practice from outside the borders of Mount Athos. The signs belong to the old notational system, and reviving them causes controversy, as “mainstream” Byzantine musical performance practice throughout Greece follow the guidelines set by the reformists in the New Method. The monks at Vatopaidi, though, align themselves with the views held by Karas and Konstantinou, as they believe that the musical “energy” of these signs has survived in oral tradition at specific monasteries at Mount Athos, especially Vatopaidi, at a few Orthodox monasteries in the Middle East (in Lebanon and Syria), and in the Great Church in Constantinople (Istanbul). Moreover, as mentioned above, it is believed that these “energies” were given other forms of written expression by the reformists. Vatopaidi-monastery and contemporary specialists like Konstantinou and others thus form an elitist opposition to what is understood, in however vague and generalized a fashion, as “mainstream” Byzantine musical performance practice. But why reintroduce old notational signs if these “energies” are alive and well in contemporary performance practice? Why is proper musical writing important? The reason for this musical-orthographic concern is a matter of graphical authenticity and increased awareness of orthopraxis. This is not a mere cosmetic concern, I suggest. Rather, it is spawned by the idea of the similarity between image (musical sign) and vocal movement, in the same way that icons are holy images of saints: the icon of a saint is the saint (Isar 2000), it is a depiction of a concrete object (Kapchan 2007: 68). In this way, the sign okseía might be understood in terms of a musical depiction of a specific set of concrete vocal gestures (more about this in what follows). Therefore it cannot rightly be represented graphically by combinations of other signs. The aim is to reunite the musical “energies” in play with their “right,” or “authentic,” notational shapes—and thus “free the musical ‘energy’” from the form in which it has falsely been kept hostage since the reform of the Byzantine musical system. I characterize this dynamic in terms of retrospective musical transorthography, which refers to the act of rewriting specific musical “energies” according to orthographical rules that predate the reform. In the music revival at Vatopaidi, we thus see how “right belief” (orthodoxy) and “right (musical) practice” (orthopraxis) converge with the concern for “right (musical) writing” (orthography). The reintroduction of the okseía and other signs is a small-scale orthographical revision of the 19th-century reform of the Byzantine musical system. As I will show, this process is not uncontroversial. The following paragraphs provide examples of notational signs, though I shall limit the focus here to the two diastematic signs only, namely, the

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petastí and the okseía. Later in the chapter, I turn to other examples of revival activities, including an old mode, the intonation formulas, drone practice, and cheironomy. Ascending Seconds The simplest sign for an ascending second in post-Byzantine and postreform chant is the olígon (see figure 3.2). The olígon demands of the performer a simple ascending second with no turns or embellishments. It is the essence of what in Byzantine chant might be termed a “quantitative sign”: it informs the performer about the diastematic value of the melodic movement, that is, the dimensions of the intervals (pl., diastímata), not note-length quantities or rhythmic patterns. The exact measure of each interval (sing., diástima) is determined by the mode of the given hymn or psalm, though the term interval is usually passed over in favor of voice ( foní), which here means melodic “step.” Out of three signs for an ascending second, the reformists favored the olígon, the logic of which seems to be that when a musical “energy” was needed in a melody to supplement the stepwise ascent, this would be indicated by additional signs, resulting in the forming of compound signs. The two other signs for an ascending second, which were omitted by the reform, were the okseía and the petastí. Like the olígon these two signs indicate the quantitative measure of one ascending step or voice ( foní), that is to say, they specify the size of the interval (here the interval of a second). But they each have a specific qualitative trait indicating more vocal action than mere melodic ascent, which is why they are also known as phrasal signs: They indicate the ascending second and the special musical quality with which the melodic step should be performed, such as vocal embellishments. In what follows, I address these two notational signs in more detail. The Petastí With a solid background in Byzantine musical paleography based on studies with Gregorios Stathis at Athens and Christian Troelsgård, Jørgen Raasted’s successor, in Copenhagen, I felt well prepared to embark on my first lessons at Vatopaidi, believing that I already knew the anatomy of the musical signs. As it turned out, I knew very little about notation’s relation to practice. In retrospect, my initial transcriptions of hymns in Vatopaidi drew heavily on my university experience. I had merely been producing theoretical transcriptions

Figure 3.2. second.

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The olígon sign for an ascending

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of written melodies—plausible melodic skeletons. But music in theory is one thing; in performance it is something else. Father Bartholomeos first introduced me to the “energy” of the petastí, and subsequently to the okseía. In what follows here, the discussion of each musical sign is illustrated with musical examples from the music lessons and transcriptions of these into staff notation. The transcriptions follow the musical examples of Father Bartholomeos’s demonstration of each sign, exemplifying their possible execution in Vatopaidian musical practice. The quality with which the ascending second is prescribed by the petastí is a “throwing” (petáo, “to throw”) of the voice a further ascending step, followed by a descending step back again, ending on the note intended (figure 3.3). Eager to know just how the cantor is supposed to perform this “vocal

Figure 3.3. The petastí sign: transcription of notation and of Father Bartholomeos’s performance.

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throwing,” I am delighted when Father Bartholomeos actually suggests performing the basic ways of analyzing (i.e., interpreting or reading) the petastí, and allows me to record everything (CD track 3). An extra microphone check assures me that the gear works. I come to understand that there are several ways to “throw the voice,” some even transcending simple “petastí-energy” by “throwing the voice” two further ascending steps above the diastematic value. The petastí is often combined with other signs, even though it is itself a phrasal sign (already consisting of combined vocal actions), as already mentioned. When combined with, for example, the tsákisma—another musical sign reintroduced at Vatopaidi—the vocal effect is a combination of the “shattering” (tsakízo, “to shatter, or break”) of the tsákisma and the “throwing” of the petastí. The performance of the notational signs depends not only on their nature, but also on their relative position in the melodic phrase. The interpretation of the musical notational signs—what kind of information a particular sign might deliver at a given point—is determined by the musical context. Furthermore, the positions of the various signs and combinations of signs are determined by orthographical rules, some of which derive entirely from the process of written transmission. The Petastí as Phrasal Sign When the petastí combines with other signs such as the apóstrofos (descending step) or isáki (“small íson,” indicating a portamento effect), its diastematic or quantitative function is often subordinated, yet its “energy” might still have an effect on vocal performance; hence, as has been noted, the petastí is also known as a phrasal, or qualitative, sign. When placed below the íson, the petastí fills out the duration of the repeated note, either by emphasizing the tone with a vocal accent, or by turning it swiftly upward and back again. What I mean to illustrate here is that the effects and qualities of the petastí and the okseía occasionally overlap. This notational redundancy might explain, at least in part, why the Three Teachers found the okseía expendable. However, as I will show in the following, the okseía has further potential “as it brings further richness and beauty to the art of chanting,” to appropriate Father Agapios’s phrase. The Okseía Like the petastí, the diastematic function of the okseía is to prescribe an ascending second. Okseía means “high” and indicates two or even three ascending steps beyond its diastematic function, followed by a number of descending steps. The okseía is often understood as an acute accent, a way to stress impor-

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tant words, and the sign omalón as an early conjunction of an okseía and a vareía (an acute accent followed by a grave accent). But there is much to say about the okseía, which will be the focus of what follows. At Vatopaidi a relatively simple performance of the okseía is generally preferred (figure 3.4), but one will also experience the powerful and dominant character of this musical sign, as Father Bartholomeos demonstrates on the recording (CD track 4). In combinations with other phrasal signs (such as the psifistó, the tromikón, the streptó, and the paraklitikí), the okseía unfolds all its potential. When other signs combine with the okseía, they “take the energy of the okseía,” Father Bartholomeos maintains.

Figure 3.4. The okseía sign: transcription of notation and of Father Bartholomeos’s performance.

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Father Bartholomeos explains how in the reform the okseía was replaced by combining the olígon with the sign psifistón, suggesting that this has a similar effect on the melodic or vocal gesture. The overlapping effects of these two signs can be illustrated by juxtaposing two versions of the same hymn. Comparison of the first line of “Kyrie ekekraksa” (Lord, I cry unto thee), words from Psalms 140–41 used in the esperinós (vespers), will serve as illustration (see figure 3.5): The two versions are taken from two different editions of the Anastasimantárion of Petros Lampadarios Peloponnesios.9 The first version in the example is taken from the edition of Petros Manouel Efesios (EFE 1820), and the second version from the edition of Ioannis Lampadarios (ANA 1858). Both editions date from after the implementation of the reform in the Fourth Patriarchal Music School (1815–1821) in Constantinople; but the former was printed before the publication of Chrysanthos’s Theoretikon Mega (1832), the latter after. As Chrysanthos was centrally involved in the reform work, his publications are widely believed to be crucial historical turning points, as they were an attempt to formulate and disseminate some of the main points of the New Method. Father Agapios’s fingers run over the pages as he shows me how the okseía is extensively used in Efesios’s edition of the Anastasimantárion, but is absent in Ioannis Lampadarios’s, which is generally accepted as the authoritative edition for contemporary practice throughout Greece. To Father Agapios and the other monks it remains a curious fact that the okseía continued to appear in printed musical notation after it was officially omitted, and, Father Agapios emphasizes, Efesios’s Anastasimantárion was the first printed edition with Byzantine musical notation to see the light of day. When I ask him why he thinks the okseía is used in the Efesios edition, he appears apologetic about

Figure 3.5. Two versions of Kyrie ekekraksa: Ioannis Lampadarios’s version (ANA 1858) above and Efesios’s version with okseía (EFE 1820) below.

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the fact that no explanation of this difference is provided in later editions, “as one would often expect from editors of musical books.” I suggest that it might have to do with the inertia with which change in notational practices is fit into existing practices. Father Agapios and the other monks are convinced that inconsistencies between different opinions about performance and notational practices are crucial when it comes to understanding the reform and how it was received: that the reform was only slowly disseminated might explain a degree of skepticism among composers, teachers, and cantors who only reluctantly—and perhaps not entirely—accepted the changes. This skepticism is still very much present in discussion about the significance of the reform. The hymn “Kyrie ekekraksa” is of particular interest for the study of Byzantine music and oral tradition. The comparative transcription of the two editions mentioned (see figure 3.5) reveals information about the okseía and other musical signs that is of relevance to their vocal realization. In Ioannis Lampadarios’s edition, the okseía is replaced by olígon with a psifistón, as already mentioned. Thus it would seem that the okseía-energy is somehow related to the psifistón. The example shows that important parts of the poetry can be emphasized in different ways, either by melodic embellishment, as indicated by the okseía, or by borrowing material from other modes by applying modal indications. For example, where Ioannis Lampadarios makes extensive use of modal indications (phthoraí), they are rare in Efesios’s edition. In the diatonic modes (the “Kyrie ekekraksa” exists in all modes and in variations of different lengths), the chromatic phthoraí are often applied as a means of word-painting, as on the word “sinner” (amartolós), which appears in the verses of the psalm in Ioannis Lampadarios’s version (figure 3.6). Once at an esperinós I experienced the choir to the left, who opened the hymn (instead of the choir to the right—usually considered the principal), following Ioannis Lampadarios’s notation, and the right choir Efesios’s. Whether intended or not, the coexistence of different versions of a hymn alternating between the verses in the very same performance seemed not to create any practical problems. Not surprisingly, editions with and without the okseía sign thus seem to be working together well in the ritual context. As the difference is rarely audible, only those who know the melodies will recognize it (and I

Figure 3.6. Chromatic word-painting on the word armatolós (“sinner”).

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only figured this out once trying to transcribe it). Whereas, on the one hand, musical orthography seems a central concern, my observation suggests that the transorthographical concern is purely academic and relates to the visual aesthetics of the notation, and values like musical richness, plenitude, and notational tradition. But why revive the okseía, if its effects on melodic movement have been supplanted by other musical signs since the reform, which works well in practice? The concept of transorthography may help us understand some of the reasons. To Father Agapios, the debate over the use of the right musical signs not only concerns their diastematic raison d’être. It is a matter of musical richness and of sincerity in relation to the tradition. The okseía sign enriches the musical notation and performance with nuances that other signs are incapable of. The okseía is one of the oldest signs recognized in Byzantine musical notation, dating back in its earliest known form to the so-called ekphonetic notation of the 10th century (see Høeg 1935: 19ff.), and it is therefore imbued with historical authenticity. Furthermore, according to Father Agapios, it is a matter of notational simplicity: “the fewer signs it takes to describe a melodic movement, or ‘energy,’ the better. No sign indicates okseía-‘energy’ better than the okseía sign itself !” The notion of simplicity here seems at first sight paradoxical since adding new characters to a musical system hardly makes it more simple; quite the contrary. But Father Agapios is not speaking of simplicity in terms of the total number of signs available in the system. Compound signs, in his view, compromise and complicate the system.10 The okseía symbolizes not only the simultaneity of simplicity and richness of nuance in Byzantine music. It is a notational sign anchored in a past that reaches far beyond the reform, a reform that in the eyes of the Vatopaidian monks (and others) has cast a shadow over the decades and centuries that preceded it. The Romantic historian’s dictum, “the older the better,” seems to be relevant here in the sense that the okseía is considered much closer to the origins of Byzantine musical writing than the various notational substitutions that the New Method came up with in the 19th century. To sum up, the debate about the okseía (and other revived signs and modes) seems to relate to issues of historical authenticity and theory as well as to questions of the relation between music writing and performance practice. The monks at Vatopaidi comply with the fact that the reform and the New Method have themselves become a part of the Byzantine musical tradition and left an indelible mark on the modern development of it. It remains an open question whether the reform was an attempt to renew the Byzantine musical system, or reinvent it. That the Three Teachers did not leave a single clue behind them in terms of their mode of operation or notational “translations” supports the argument that the reform marks a break in the notational

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tradition and therefore also forms a transitional period of change, a moment of discontinuity in the history of Byzantine music. In this way the reform can be seen as an early attempt at modernizing the tradition. Yet the emphasis on oral tradition grounds the argument that some cantors did not comply with the reform: they did not change their habitual modes of interpreting signs and performing Byzantine music, as mentioned above. Old musical-performance practices have most likely coexisted alongside the New Method and its dissemination throughout the educational system. The reform draws a historical line, allowing Western scholars to claim exclusive knowledge of the paleographical musical past, leaving the (later, inauthentic) New Method to the modern Greeks. Simultaneously, attempts by modern Greeks to claim that they were continuing the tradition across this line provided a way to reimagine the historical circumstances surrounding what arguably might be characterized as one of the most troubling periods in the history of Byzantine music. To the Vatopaidians, musical manuscripts from around the period of the reform (shortly before 1814–1832 and shortly after) will eventually prove to be of enormous value for the study of the okseía and other signs and their interpretation in performance practice. The issue of whether the 19th-century reform of the Byzantine musical system represents a change within the tradition and stands as an impenetrable barrier between pre- and postreform musical practices is far from settled. The Byzantine musicologists Bjarne Schartau and Christian Troelsgård (1997) have shown how notions of continuity (particularly in the syllabic repertoire) are plausible through the translations between early notations and the New Method and by studying the ascriptions (in musical manuscripts) of a single scribe proficient in both notational forms. The Vatopaidians aim to break this barrier and transcend the historical tyranny it represents, and not to do so with only a musicological agenda. The key to the mystery, the power to connect the present to the past, lies in the invisibility of oral tradition, and not in the visibility of writing. Oral tradition “is a seductive means of approaching the past,” Philip Bohlman suggests (1997: 152), as images, gestures, and sounds created in the present come to be understood in terms of actions from a distant past repeated in an unchanging manner. The monks’ advantage is that they have (the right to claim) oral tradition. Yet both academic and monastic scholars try to track the imprints of oral tradition in notational ascriptions, and in that way render oral tradition palpable and visible. Ethnomusicological fieldwork allows an investigation of the conditions under which positions and identities in the historical narrative compete (Bohlman 1997: 149). The reintroduction of the okseía sign today is but one example of such an issue, one that causes considerable tension. When it comes to interpreting musical signs, there are divergent opinions about orthopraxis,

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that is to say, how the signs should be practiced and interpreted correctly. This issue relates as much to ideas of which sound is the right sound to communicate between worldly and spiritual spheres as it does to identifying with the past in different ways. As musical objects, notational signs represent the past. In the pastness of works of art, including musical objects and performance practices and gestures believed to be old, lies the assurance of their validity and aesthetic qualities (cf. Trilling 1970 [1942]: 192). The pastness, or remoteness, thus ascribed to music is part of the very act of perception of music in all its unfoldings (cf. Dahlhaus 1997: 60).

A NEW OLD MODE? The reintroduction of musical notational signs is a central part of what constitutes the music revival at the monastery of Vatopaidi, but other elements play a role as well, such as old modes, intonation formulas, and cheironomy. I shall be returning to these later; in this section I focus on the reintroduction of a subsidiary mode, known as the náos mode, that is being brought back to life at Vatopaidi monastery. A subsidiary mode relates to the eight basic modes in Byzantine musical modality (the four authentic and the four plagal modes), as a kind of variation. One cold morning after service in one of the small chapels of the monastery, Father Agapios tells me that a hymn I have been studying for some time was not originally performed in the mode that I and my Western colleagues habitually believe. I have been telling Father Agapios about my transcriptions of the syllabic hymn “Ton tafon sou, Sotir” (“Thy Tomb, O Savior”), which has been of interest to me for some time now, because it is usually performed in a chromatic mode while it is notated in a diatonic mode (more about this follows). At first I am surprised: “I’ve never heard of it,” I tell him, and I can’t stop myself posing the somewhat redundant question, “Does such a mode exist?” He replies by giving me a stern look, though he promises that he will demonstrate the mode one day. Meanwhile, back in my cell, I learn my first lesson on this new-old mode, náos, from a careful study of the booklet accompanying one of the Vatopaidian CDs! This mode is said to originate from the Byzantine Era.11 So, as with the revived notational signs, specific modes are also imbued with historical value that legitimates their reintroduction into practice. As I have already been reassured that the hymn “Ton tafon sou, Sotir” is an example of a Byzantine repertoire that is believed to exist and has existed in multiple versions due to oral-transmission dynamics, this new-old mode that Father Agapios is talking about would seem to strengthen my “multiple version” thesis.

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Figure 3.7. The náos mode created on basis of the 1st mode.

In late-Byzantine music theory the náos mode is often referred to by recourse to a cryptic theoretical appellation, such as the “first díphonos chromatikós-mode” or “first díphonos fthorikós” or some other such term. Whereas these terms remain “all Greek” even to many insiders, they basically point to three things, namely, that the náos mode is based on the first mode, that it is a mix (or remix) of diatonic- and soft-chromatic-scale material, and that the finalis of the mode (the ending note) is on the third step instead of the first, which is usually the tonal center (see figure 3.7). Some Greek theoreticians compare the mode with the Turkish makam sabâ, which is considered a mode well suited for melodies of the dawn, or the morning.12 According to the Vatopaidians, the hymn mentioned above, “Ton tafon sou, Sotir,” from the morning service on Saturdays, was originally performed in the náos mode, indicating the possible influence or inspiration of Turkish makam practices. Although this hymn—like other autómela13—is always performed in its own mode, Orthodox liturgical practices do not prescribe any use of specific modes suitable for specific hours; the practice of the oktoechos (the cycle of chanting of a whole week in each of the modes) follows the liturgical year. Whether the náos mode is transmitted orally from a distant past or a more recent borrowing from Turkish music material, or is theoretically reconstructed, is not an issue to be decided here. To be sure, both knowledge of music theory and experience from oral tradition have influenced the revival of the musical tradition at the monastery. Father Agapios directs my attention to Karas’s work. Karas asserts (1982: 316–20) that “Ton tafon sou, Sotir” is correctly performed in the náos mode, though throughout Greece it is mostly performed in the “second soft chromatic mode” (and notated in the first mode with a chromatic indication). At Vatopaidi it seems to have become tradition to perform this hymn in both modes. As Father Agapios reflects: “The náos might be the original and most correct mode, but we have all performed “Ton tafon sou, Sotir” in the first [that is, the “second soft chromatic”] mode all our lives. It has become part of tradition, too. . . . Besides, not everybody knows how to perform the náos mode, but many fathers know the hymn by heart in the first chromatic mode.”14 Father Agapios’s successor in the “monastic music

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department,” as he called it one day, later sent me a CD with a recording of his own performances of the hymn in both modes for aural comparison; this recording is included on the CD that accompanies this book (track 5 for the náos mode and track 6 for the chromatic mode).15 That this particular hymn exists in a number of versions suggest that in oral transmission certain versions have coexisted with the written ones: the monks “know it by heart,” as Father Agapios mentioned. Moreover, there seem to be different ways to theoretically conceptualize the mode of the hymn, which again suggests that the hymn existed in various forms in performance, rather than as one original version. Music theory here seems to be retrospective, rather than anticipating musical practice. The notion of a náos mode challenges conventional performance practices that have been subject to theoretical ex post facto rationalization. Among other things it has led to the (questionable) theory of the “imported melody” (epeísakton mélos). The Vatopaidian monks oppose this theory, maintaining that it has nothing whatsoever to do with actual musical-performance practices. They base their understanding of the náos mode on historical grounds, even though it might prove to be yet another attempt at a theoretical explanation of—that is, an attempt to discipline and control—what is basically an oral phenomenon. Byzantine musical skill in administrating this tradition depends on different kinds of knowledge. It demands knowing about theory, about notation, and about practice. Konstantinou, who teaches the monks theory and choral performance, maintains that for each piece of music, the written melodic outline is singular, but the possible interpretations of that melodic outline in practice are multiple.16 This way of thinking makes an adequate basis for judging between good and bad music notation, Konstantinou argues: The correct books are based on written notation. Writers of bad books confuse interpretation with the melodic outline. Thus they present an interpretation of a melody instead of the melody itself. And this starts a chain of faults. Imagine what happens when a psáltis makes an interpretation of such melodies! The result, what you are hearing, is an interpretation of an interpretation. It’s a mess! That is why it is so important to know theory and notation. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between theory and practice.17

THE CRIME OF REINVENTION In Greece there are Byzantine-music teachers and cantors who do not accept the alterations of existing theory and notation determined by the

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reform and the musical commissions. One day in the “cell of the géronta,”18 Konstantinou explains the different positions of scholars in relation to the reform. In his view, those who oppose Karas’s (and his own) ideas believe that the reform unified the church and made the musical system comprehensible: it became possible not only to imagine but to see in notation that the Orthodox tradition was one. “They feel that the Vatopaidian monks and their teachers, including myself and Kostas, are complicating things anew,” he tells me. “And they are dead serious! . . . Let me show you. . . .” Konstantinou reaches out for a paper and shows me a copy of a memo (dated 1 June 2001), which looks to me like an indictment, formulated in an aggressive tone and addressed to the archbishop of Athens, arguing that severe sanctions must be upheld against Konstantinou simply because of the fact that he reintroduced seven notational signs in his book (Konstantinou 1997), including the okseía. The indictment suggests that the book, along with other Karas-inspired tutorial material, be withdrawn from teaching programs, and that the issue be presented before the Holy Synod and the Ministry of Education and Culture. The indictment explicitly maintains that the rules ratified by the Patriarchal Musical Commission of 1881 (see chapter 2) form the basis of contemporary musical and pedagogic practices; they must be followed, and no deviations permitted. Temporarily speechless, I wonder how such trifling issues over musical notation can ever become a matter of concern for the Holy Synod or a national court of justice, should the issue ever go that far. Konstantinou, who does not seem too worried about these accusations, shakes his head and comments: “What is striking with this piece of paper is the lack of knowledge about the history of Byzantine music on the accusers’ part. I have not introduced anything not already mentioned by either Chrysanthos [1832], the Commission of 1881 [Epitropis 1888], or Karas [1982], and many others in between.”19 The indictment shows that when monks and specialists, filled with philological and theoretical zeal, turn to the study of the sacred music, it is often related to intense debates over paleography, performance practice, and authority (cf. Bohlman 2006: 10). Much more than “neumes” are at stake in the construction of Orthodox musical identity. The variety within the appellation of the mode of the morning hymn “Ton tafon sou, Sotir,” and the different ways of performing it, shows how in parts of the Byzantine musical repertoire, the written text does not correspond to actual performance; rather, notation is simply a guide for the performer.20 This is a conception that points to the phrasal freedom that exists within the otherwise tightly controlled space of Byzantine musical performance practice.

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INTONING THE PAST An intonation formula is a short melodic incipit or phrase that demonstrates the main characteristics of the mode of the hymn about to be performed. The Greek term for intonation formulas is apichímata (sing. apíchima). In the first edition of the New Grove Dictionary a different spelling, epechemata (sing. epechema), is used, but in the second edition this has been changed, and the term échemata (sing. échema) is applied throughout (Velimirovic 2001: 862– 64).21 Milos Velimirovic points out that a “hymn in any given echos [mode] is preceded by an Echema (intonation formula). This indicates the echos and was probably sung by the precentor before the chanting by the choir. Intonations are accompanied by syllables sung to their melodies” (2001: 862). There is a curious shift in this citation between grammatical past and present tense: the past and present of Byzantine musical performance practice seem to intermingle. Notated prescriptions of intonation formulas are not necessarily followed in performance. In contemporary practice in Greece, there is no consensus about the correct way to perform the apichímata today, just as there is no consensus as to how they were performed in the past. Listening to intonation formulas as they are performed at concerts, at services, or on recordings reveals a variety of different ways in which the intonation formulas are practiced. One method is a choral, unison execution of the intonation formula, a style I have observed in practice at the monastery of Simonos Petras, which can also be heard on a series of recordings from the monastery.22 The Vatopaidian monks argue that a chorally performed intonation formula neglects the function of the formula, which is to intone the mode. Consequently, at Vatopaidi, it is usually the task of the protopsáltis in charge of the particular performance to perform it alone, a practice that is characteristic of the Vatopaidian recordings. Another frequently used method is to use a single syllable, such as “ne,” as indication of the central tone and isokrátema (drone), regardless of the mode. Again, the recordings from the monastery of Simonos Petras provide living examples of such a practice. Until recently, the Vatopaidians chanted “ne” or “agia” (i.e., “holy”) for all the modes, in a manner similar to what is practiced at many other monasteries and parish churches in Greece. Now the monks have reintroduced what Father Bartholomeos describes as “the traditional practice.”23 The notion of a traditional practice echoes Konstantinos Psachos’s studies of the apichímata in the “ancient notation” (1978 [1917]: 152–56). Possibly, the studies of Psachos and Karas have influenced the revived apichímata-practice at Vatopaidi. Today, the performance of the apichímata is accompanied by syllables, or “names,” that function as aide-mémoires for each of the modes. These are known

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as intonation-syllables: ágia (fourth mode), ánanes (first mode), néanes (second mode), and so forth. Each intonation formula corresponds to a relative tonal center indicated by the ending tone of the formula. Some intonation formulas exist in variations, such as short apichímata generally for the short and syllabic repertoire, and longer versions for the long pieces, often in slow tempo, and typically constituted by the repertoire from the Papadiké, such as the cherubic hymns (which I address further in chapter 6). I have occasionally heard the Vatopaidians intone hymns not with the apichímata but with an “amín” (i.e., “amen”), although the practice of using simple words like ágia and amín, and syllables like ne, is considered “incorrect.” As Father Agapios argues, “It does not make any sense to use other words than the adequate intonation syllables for each mode. In fact, what does ‘ne’ mean? It could refer to any mode! Which one is the ‘ne’-mode?”24 Again, a central concern of the music revival seems to have been generated by a heightened sense of correspondence between music notation, theory, appellation, and practice. The proceedings of the Patriarchal Musical Commission of 1883 prescribe that the modes should be preceded by a “short line indicating and characterizing the mode, called apíchima” (Epitropis 1888: 49, translation mine). Thus, according to what must best be understood as authoritative prescription for Byzantine musical practice, a single “ne” will not do. The fact that the commission felt compelled to make a statement on acceptable intonationformula practice suggests that this was not common practice around the 1880s. The “traditional” apichímata-practice that the monks are referring to was, perhaps, not the only practice after all, suggesting the possibility of coexistent and competing practices. On the other hand, the commission must have had some idea and knowledge about how intonation formulas were practiced in what they refer to as the “vocal tradition” (phonitikí parádosi), presumably relegated to a past before the reform. The apichímata-practice is one example of a traditional element in the musical-performance practice at the monastery of Vatopaidi that flourished— and set new standards for urban, semiprofessional, and amateur Byzantine choirs throughout Greece, of which an increasing number show interest in history and authenticity and perform in an “Athonite” chanting style (the nature of which I discuss later; see chapters 4 and 5).25 On the CDs issued by the monastery of Vatopaidi, the apichímata play a role in disseminating a sense of the “right way” of intoning Byzantine chant. The prominence of intonation formulas is further emphasized on one of the monastery’s videos. Some of the music examples featured on the video consist of apichímata only, as the audio tracks are faded down before the actual hymns are intoned;26 thus the intonation formulas themselves are marked as the epitome of the right sense of the past and orthopraxis.

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In the nave of the katholikón at Vatopaidi, a plastic-coated sheet of white paper containing the apichímata in notation for all the modes (see figure 3.8) assists the chanters during services. One mode, the barýs mode, had mistakenly been left out but was added later at the bottom of the sheet. Examples of performances of the intonation formulas from this sheet, the first and second, and the plagal first and plagal second modes, are included as music examples (CD tracks 7–10). Transcriptions of these are included here for illustrative purposes (figure 3.9). During fieldwork observation and transcription of the apichímata at Vatopaidi monastery, I have aimed at summarizing some general characteristics of the intonation formulas in practice. Although not conclusive, the following provides an idea of their use and function in the ritual context. Sequence in Practice Usually, chanting is initiated in a service following a reading. The mode is announced aloud by the kanonárchis (the monk reciting the canon or other poetic texts), and this is immediately followed by the vocal intonation of the mode with the proper formula by the protopsáltis. Then the isokrátema (drone) is established and the isokrátes (the drone-keepers) take over. Subsequently, the melody is initiated by the choir members, directed by the protopsáltis. Occasionally, I heard the announcement of a mode even though the hymn was not performed musically, but read aloud instead. In either case, the announcement serves as a musical cue to the protopsáltis (cantor) or the diavastáris (reader). The Apichímata Table At Vatopaidi, the performance of apichímata follows the notation relatively closely (see figure 3.8), though at times the intonation formulas are considerably altered due to personal or local styles. I have experienced visiting lay cantors and monks pronouncing their apíchima according to the practices they are accustomed to. Thus, notational prescriptions—whether plastic-coated or otherwise—are not necessarily used. When used, the prescriptions function more like guidelines than norms. Syllables The intonation-syllables facilitate determination of the actual mode of a given hymn—for example, “ananes” for the first mode, “neanes” for the second mode, and so on. However, amin or single syllables such as ne often replace these; these do not contain any information about the actual mode, though they still serve to provide the isokrátema. Function The primary function of the intonation formula is to give the protopsáltis an opportunity to demonstrate the intervals of the hymn and settle the isokrátema. In cases where unison choral performance of the intonation formulas is used, this function is virtually dissolved, and the intonation formula seems rather directed at the audiences—not because they need to know the

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Figure 3.8. Apichímata (intonation formulas); photocopy of a plasticcoated sheet from the main church of the monastery (courtesy of the Great and Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi).

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Figure 3.9. Transcriptions of intonation formulas for the 1st mode, 2nd mode, plagal 1st mode, and plagal 2nd mode (two pages).

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mode, but rather for the appreciation of their “traditionality” and beauty in themselves, as it were.

DEBATES OVER DRONES In the following I turn to the practice of íson, or isokrátema, the drone. Although the drone is understood in rather simple terms as a sustained bass note, when it comes to Byzantine musical practice, the matter is not as straightforward as it might at first seem. How is the drone performed? What are the historical connotations? How are we to understand the meaning of the drone in the spiritual context? Etymologically, the term drone has a range of related meanings (Politikens Etymologisk ordbog 2000: 188): “humming” (in German), “throne” (in Greek), or the “male bee” (in Sanskrit). These meanings all relate to the musical content or nature of the term: “humming” refers to a (deep) sustained note associated with the humming, or buzzing, of the bees; and “throne” refers metaphorically to where the melody is “seated,” the basis of the melody (often the tonal center of the mode). As regards bees, the “male bee” (the drone) is understood to be not moving, in contrast to the busy and “humming” working bee. The drone sits still (safe for eating and mating with the queen bee), which makes it a beautiful metaphor for the musical context. The drone does not move; instead it is the constant in service of the moving melody. In Byzantine music the drone does move, though, which I shall return to shortly. The French musicologist Bourgault-Ducoudray, who in 1875 was sent on a musical mission to three Hellenic centers—Athens, Smyrni, and Constantinople—on behalf of the French government (Bourgault-Ducoudray 1878),27 laments the “irritating monotony” and the “poor embryonic harmonic qualities” of the isokrátema, which “makes the modern ear despair” (Bourgault-Ducoudray 1877: 67).28 Despite the bias Bourgault-Ducoudray so openly displays here, we might nonetheless learn something from his observations. The notion of monotony suggests that the practice of íson in these “Hellenic centers” at the time most likely consisted of a simple sustained note. In everyday speech, the monks at Vatopaidi use the terms íson and isokrátema interchangeably for the drone in Byzantine music. I follow this practice, though I will use the term “íson-practice” in order not to confuse the term with the notational sign íson (sign for repeated note). The term isokrátes (sing., isokrátis) refers to chanters performing the drone. In medieval

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manuscripts these are often referred to as vastáktai, literally “holders” of the drone. The íson-practice is commonly understood as a postmedieval and postByzantine phenomenon that can be traced with certainty to the 16th century (Schlötterer 1982: 25), though presumably it is much older. It is possible that the isokrátema has a connection to the drone-singing practice from Epirus (western Greece and southeastern Albania), or derived from the instrumental drone known from the Macedonian bagpipe, the gáïda.29 Evidence to support these suppositions, however, is scarce. Yet, as Olsen has argued, it seems unlikely that the one kind of drone should have nothing to do with the other (Olsen 1974: 111). Traditionally, íson-practice is not considered a polyphonic element in ecclesiastical music, whereas in Greek folk-music scholarship it is considered one of the oldest forms of polyphony (Anoyanakis 1991: 200), a notion that might suggest the need for a distinction between different kinds of drones. However, such a distinction should not be regarded as an ontological given. It may have been encouraged by the early church in order to further the divide between sacred and popular musics. The isokrátema is orally transmitted and has never found notational expression (Schlötterer 1982: 19). However, a brief look at the notation styles of Byzantine composers from the mid-20th century (such as that of Athansios Karamanis) contests this argument, as does my study of the contemporary ísonpractice at the monastery of Vatopaidi, at least up to a certain point. Here, the isokrátema is notated with Greek letters written above the musical-notational signs of the New Method. Letters used are the so-called parallagí (solfège) syllables: pa, ga, ke, and so on, or the first letters of these syllables only: P, G, K, and so forth.30 The use of solfège syllables forms an alphabetical isokrátema notation, which probably derives either from performance practice with larger choirs (as a means to guide those who “read ahead” in the musical text and anticipate the eventual shifts in the isokrátema), or from a relationship to the socalled harmonic isokrátema, which demands more detailed notational prescriptions due to the many “harmonic” shifts. Generally, theory on isokrátema does not include notation, although these exist as a means to support isokrátes (the drone keepers) during performance. Further studies of contemporary practices will likely reveal a certain degree of variety in the ways that the isokrátema is performed, contextualized, and notated. During fieldwork I have frequently observed the leading isokrátis in the choir writing down the isokrátema in the notation of longer pieces prior to a service, or even during service prior to a specific performance.31 The harmonic isokrátema with its many shifts is considered neither “Byzantine” nor “traditional,” but is believed to be of more recent date

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and possibly of Venetian influence. During a music lesson, Father Agapios demonstrated the harmonic shifts: “Let me tell you about the harmonic isokrátema. . . . We do not like it. The thing is . . . he, Karamanis, wants to create harmonies (symphoníes), that kind of thing. We don’t do that; we consider it very extreme.”32 The term symphoníes used here is not equivalent to the classical-music work known as a symphony; in strict (neo-)Byzantine theoretical terms it rather refers to the intervals of the fourth, the fifth, and the octave (Konstantinou 1997: 215). The isokrátema is conceptualized neither as polyphony nor as a second voice. Only the late—and now obsolete—harmonic ison-practice as found in Karamanis’s compositions seems to contest this view. As mentioned above, Bourgault-Ducoudray falsely understood the isokrátema as an example of a primitive state of harmonic development (Bourgault-Ducoudray 1877: 67) within the evolutionary musical-historiographic paradigm that shaped his worldview, which, for the time, was rather common among traveling scholars in the southeastern corner of Europe. Also, it is worthwhile remembering how two-, three-, and four-part singing, the so-called cantata-style,33 had impinged on ecclesiastical musical practices in Greece by and large at the time, which might have created a certain expectation of what to hear.

THE DOUBLE DRONE There are different ways of performing the isokrátema. Either the isokrátema is performed as a sustained tone on a vowel, usually a or o, or, in the syllabicdrone style, it follows the syllables in the text articulated in the melody (in other words, one performs the íson by “reciting” the text). The isokrátema can be simple, with no, or only a few, tone shifts, or it can be “harmonic,” defined by frequent tone shifts and guided by a set of harmonic principles. It could be argued that both the syllabic style and the harmonic style mentioned above compromise the whole idea of a “drone” when understood in terms of a sustained note. At the monastery of Vatopaidi the monks prefer the simple, nonsyllabic style with a single sustained tone and few shifts. The type of isokrátema used is not only a matter of style or preference. The drone would also have to follow the internal logic of the given composition. For example, the isokrátema change according to the “modulations” of the piece. A curious drone phenomenon is what I call the “double isokrátema,” which is a drone consisting of two notes in fourths, fifths, or octaves. BourgaultDucoudray addresses the phenomenon and uses the term “double ison” to

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describe the “primitive stage” of Greek ecclesiastical harmonization (1878: 21), whereas I use the term quite differently. Yet Bourgault-Ducoudray’s observation suggests that a phenomenon identifiable with the double isokrátema was part of the soundscape of the Greek church in the 1870s. The intervals mentioned above (the fourth, the fifth, and the octave) correspond to the technical terms triphonía (a “four voice” interval, or tetrachord), tetraphonía (a “five voice” interval, or pentachord), and eptaphonía (a “seven voice” interval, or octave), all of which adhere to the concept of symphoníes, known in German as Zusammenklange (Konstantinou 1997: 215–16). I experienced this phenomenon for the first time when I attended an esperinós at the monastery of Simonos Petras.34 When I later asked Fathers Maksimos and Bartholomeos about the nature of this performance practice, they told me that they had never experienced it themselves.35 Later, when I was listening to one of Father Maksimos’s soloist performances on one of the monastery’s own recordings, my full attention was attracted to the protruding sound of a double isokrátema beneath Father Maksimos’s musically eloquent voice (CD track 11). As I noticed only later, the double isokrátema is even notated in the musical notation in the booklet that accompanies the CD with Father Maksimos’s solo performance on it.36 These are illustrative examples of the variety of ways in which the isokrátema is performed. Kostas Angelidis believes that the double isokrátema is of relatively recent origin and most likely a reminiscence of Greek polyphonic psalmody from the last decades of the 19th century.37 Thus the air of pastness that envelops the Byzantine drone practice seems to go hand in hand with its modern reinvention.

CREATING MEANING: THE BYZANTINE ISOKRÁTEMA AND THE VEDIC OM Although the drone is important to Byzantine chant, descriptions of its spiritual significance —whether in writing or transmitted orally—are hard to come by. As everything seems to be imbued with meaning in Orthodox spirituality, it seems odd that the meaning and function of the isokrátema should be purely technical. I have located two relatively recent descriptions that point to the significance of the drone. Constantine Cavarnos maintains that the drone practice goes back to the early Christian period and the drone emphasizes and enriches the melody, and adds solemnity and power to psalmody (1974 [1956]: 21). He states that “Byzantine sacred music employs, instead of polyphony and the accompaniment of the organ or some other instrument, a finer, more spiritual means: the isocratema or holding-note” (20–21, emphasis in the original).

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Thus the drone stands as marker for sacredness, a means for making a distinction between sacred and worldly music. There is, though, also a spiritual and disciplinary potential to the drone. As the isokrátes hold the drone, keeping the music together, they might metaphorically be seen as “holding” the monks’ spiritual attention, serving the virtue of “inner wakefulness.” As Cavarnos notes, the monks should not be languid or lazy while devoting themselves to psalmody and prayer (15–17). Panagiotis Antonellis portrays the isokrátema along similar lines, asserting that it “reveals the melody in its . . . modest beauty and noble simplicity,” adding that the isokrátema is like a “guardian” of the melody; “it pre-exists and coexists with the melody itself. It is, in a word, the holding note: the soul of the melody” (1956: 209). In what follows, I turn to some similarities between Hindu Vedic chant and Byzantine chant concerning the articulation of the drone. In Vedic chant, the articulation of the central tone, sa (or sam), means the articulation of the sound of the universe known as the sacred syllable om (or aum). The om forms a sustained tone and does not shift. It is there before the actual improvisation begins, it is there when it ends, and it is present in the silence that follows (Rowell 1992: 36). The central idea of the syllable om is that it ties the universe together, as it holds the musical improvisation together. For example, all pitches in the improvisation are related in specific ways to the central pitch of the sa. Likewise, in Byzantine music, the drone forms the basis upon which cantors create specific intervals, as they relate their sense of tonality to the drone. Whether the drone in Byzantine chant has any specific spiritual meaning remains an open question. Here, I simply suggest a certain likeness between the two phenomena. As Lewis Rowell argues, the utterance of audible sound is invested with a heavy load of symbolic associations, one of which is the notion of “vital breath,” which emphasizes “the important point that the ancient Indian conception of sound is essentially human, vocal sound” (Rowell 1992: 36–37). Again, the similarity with the musical understanding at Vatopaidi is striking: Father Agapios told me that the best a man can do with his voice is to praise God by chanting to his glory. Because Byzantine music is understood as sacred sound and as prayer, the sound and the words must find their way to the heart of the psáltis (as well as the listener), and this can only be achieved by the vocally articulated sound:38 “The voice is the instrument God gave man to communicate with other men about practical and common things in our lives. But man cannot communicate with God using the voice alone. If you want to speak with God, you must speak with your heart. But you have to start somewhere, and chanting seems a good place to start.”39

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SILENCE: BREATH AS PRAYER The isokrátema could be understood like the om: as an invocation to God—a celebration of his creation. As in Indian thought, silence has a crucial role in Orthodox mysticism. The Orthodox concept of hesychasm (quietude) touches upon the space between audible sound and ultimate silence. As the monks often reminded me, the aim of reciting the Jesus Prayer40 aloud to oneself (and to others) is to let the heart be filled with the spirit of God, and to reach the ultimate state where every single breath itself becomes a prayer. Ultimately, this thought is extended to the point where every heartbeat becomes prayer. In turning to an early Indian account (the Maitri Upanishad), Rowell discusses how silence is possibly heard: “By closing the ears with the thumbs they hear the space within the heart” (1992: 38). Silence is not absence of sound as such, but absence of words. In this line of thought sounds are transformed into wordless silence. There is only breath, and then, via the flow of blood, every heartbeat becomes a prayer. The relation between voice and silence describes a metaphorical movement toward the “within” of the human anatomy: from the lips and mouth, where sound is articulated as a volitional act, to the movement of lungs (breath) and the beating of the heart (the blood, the circulatory system), both of which are controlled by the autonomous nervous system (see figure 3.10). To borrow Rowell’s description of early Indian music, it could be said that the (audible) sound of Byzantine music has “become a means of knowledge because of its ability to reveal the inaudible” (1992: 38). Elsewhere, commenting on Hegel’s The Philosophy of Fine Art, Rowell argues that one of

Figure 3.10. The anatomy of prayer.

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the unique abilities of music is “to represent the ideal in sensuous, immaterial, audible form. It liberates by negating the restrictions of matter. And because music is able to express the inner life of the soul, it can represent man’s entire emotional universe” (1983: 125). The notion of the “entire emotional universe” is obviously applicable to other cultures and encapsulates well the spiritual and religious aspects of Orthodox experiences and sentiment.

HAND GESTURES In this section, I turn to the practice of Cheironomía, or cheironomy, which refers to a visual system of hand gestures. It can be understood as a kind of nongraphic notation, and the gestures are often, in everyday speech, referred to as “cheironomía signs.” Hand gestures of the protopsáltis imitate the musical signs according to a specific kinesthetic system and thus anticipate the action of the voices that are meant to follow the gestures. The use of cheironomy is also found elsewhere, in Egypt, in South Asia, in Jewish traditions, and in Western chant. Written evidence is, however, scarce.41 Hand gestures in the Christian Orthodox tradition are based on unwritten rules, as in many other traditions. In order for a system of cheironomy to work in practice, the choir must be familiar with the visual and kinesthetic system of gestures and know which notational signs the gestures correspond to. That is, the choir must know the relation between notation and nongraphic notation (gestures), and the correspondence between the sound and the signs and gestures. In order to work, it is important that the system remain consistent and stable. When using the cheironomía system, the choir leader can add or suspend a musical effect in relation to the written notation. In his treatise, Karas lists thirteen cheironomía signs, all of which are phrasal signs (1982: 180–228). Where a cheironomía sign is notated in the melodic line, the protopsáltis has the choice of showing with his hands the desired effect, omitting it, or changing it. Father Bartholomeos described the simple principle as follows: “The protopsáltis has to make a decision as to what kind of análysis is to be sung at specific places during the performance. If I have five persons around me, they expect me to show them what to sing. I need to give them some sort of a sign, a movement with my hand so they will all understand what we will sing.”42 Cheironomy is a way of “touching the divine singing,” as Katherine Bergeron describes the Benedictine cheironomy used for Gregorian chant at the abbey of Solesmes (1998: 118). The hand gestures mediate between notation and oral performance and give the notational signs what might be described as audible shapes and forms (cf. Clayton 2000: 34). And, conversely, the musical sounds possess a visual form in the

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nongraphical notation of the hand gestures. Similarly, the concept of “painting” the course of the melody in the air has been applied by Western scholars, and it has been shown that rather than referring to improvisatory composition, cheironomy practices indicated specific intervals and melodic figures in rather stable systems (see Moran 1986: 38). Hand gestures, or so it has been suggested, might have given the notational signs their form and names (Moran 1986: 42–43). In a sort of reverse process, the contemporary cheironomía in the reinvented system practiced at Vatopaidi is based on the shapes of the written signs. Indications strongly suggest that cheironomía was commonly used in the Byzantine musical past (Moran 1986: 6, 38–43). However, due to the absence of detailed evidence of the hand gestures, their relation to the notational signs, and their effect on the voice, the matter remains largely unsolved (Moran 1986: 46; Gerson and Hiley 2001: 557–58). The cheironomía practice at Vatopaidi is a reinvention. Angelopoulos, Konstantinou, and Angelidis all make use of a similar cheironomy system. On cheironomía, Karas argues that psáltes and didáskaloi (teachers) from the Great Church in Constantinople, Konstantinos Byzantios, Ioannis Lampadarios, and Stefanos Domestikos, attempted to add analyses of cheironomíes (hand gestures) into printed books with musical notation. These masters were all chanting from the old notation, that is, notational forms in use before the reform, and tried to rescue the “authentic articulation” of the tradition of Byzantine music. The modern use of hand gestures probably originates in the so-called Karas school, but according to Father Bartholomeos, nobody knows exactly when this practice was reintroduced into contemporary practice.43 Thus far, the reinvented cheironomía system has remained a professional secret. I asked Fathers Agapios and Konstantinou for a demonstration of the hand gestures for scholarly purposes, but in vain. The only thing left to do, then, was to participate in the choir and observe the gestures during service. I have thus been able to identify the gestures for the okseía (a rising hand, like throwing an object into the air) and the tromikón effect (a shaking, horizontal movement), but these are rather easily discernible. My observations also suggest that the practice of cheironomy today consists in part of notational signs simply being “drawn in the air” with gestures much like their written shapes. The okseía and tromikón and other signs according to Karas (1982: 180–181) and from my own observations44 will serve to illustrate the principle (figure 3.11). My observations have not been confirmed by the monks, but Father Bartholomeos supports my thesis: “When cantors know each other well, as we do, we know what the fathers usually do when they are leading. Our system is easy. When the protopsáltis wants the choir to perform a tromikó, for example, he just moves his hand in a certain way showing the energy of a tromikó!”45

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Figure 3.11. Drawing musical signs in the air: examples of cheironomía signs.

During my conversations with Father Bartholomeos, he mentioned a unique, local practice at the Souroti nunnery, located in the same region as Mount Athos, in Halkidiki: Kostas [Angelidis] also teaches at the monastery of Souroti. They are very systematic, and perform specific signs in the various styles of different famous protopsáltes. Assisted by Kostas, they have invented their system primarily from listening to cassette tapes—and with Kostas’s assistance. But only they understand what anályses correspond to which hand gestures: the petastí of this cantor, the tromikón of another. They did not invent a cheironomy system as such, I would say, just very small movements which imply specialized knowledge of the performance of each sign and its análysis.46

There are a number of observations to be made from Father Bartholomeos’s description. First, the Souroti nunnery provides another example of revival activities within Byzantine musical practices, reminding us that the Byzantinemusic revival is a broad phenomenon in Greece, and not confined exclusively to Mount Athos. The Souroti practice illustrates how parts of a musical

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tradition can be constructed on the basis of a patchwork of different (nonSourotian) composers’ anályses of notational signs combined with the use of a locally invented practice of hand gestures. A premise of such use of cheironomía indeed depends on well-trained and well-organized ensembles and protopsáltes, as well as an organized analytical approach to listening to and studying musical notation.

VOCAL SWEETNESS On the Vatopaidian CDs, a variety of Byzantine musical styles are represented: from syllabic to elaborate, from fast to slow, from choral to soloist styles. As I move toward the end of this chapter with its relatively compact level of detailed information about the contemporary musical practice at Vatopaidi monastery, I’d like to conclude with an example that serves to summarize some of the central points. The transcription of a soloist hymn featured on one of the CDs illustrates the relation between musical notation and its vocal execution (figure 3.12; CD track 11).47 At everyday services, monks only perform solo pieces on occasion, and only rarely in the particular soloist manner that Father Maksimos presents in this example. During all-night vigils, though, the monks would more often perform verses or entire pieces solo, both to contribute to the level of musical variation in the prolonged service (often the duration of an all-night vigil is more than fifteen hours) and to let the others rest their voices. The transcription of (the beginning of ) the Eastern hymn “O Theias” (“O Thy Divine”) in the kalophonic, or elaborate, style points to many of the important aspects of Byzantine chant and Athonite tradition that I have addressed in this chapter: the intonation formula, the double-drone practice, the modal signatures, the notational signs, and the phrasal freedom of soloist interpretations of notational signs (and thus the capaciousness of the Byzantine musical system); and, finally, the smoothness and flow of Byzantine melody making, contrasting with the purely theoretical scale. The purpose of the intonation formula on this recording is to determine the isokrátema for the group of isokrátes performing the basis of the solo performance. The soloist in his performance turns, breaks, and glides the notes that in writing are represented as sustained; thus both mode and melody are created in the vocal realization of the notated music. This practice suggests a clear divide between scale and mode, notation and melody, emphasizing the importance of the interrelation between theoretical, written, and oral tradition in Byzantine music. The performance of melodic leaps; turning notes; the “shattering” (from the tsákisma), “bending” (from the lýgisma), and “throwing” (from the petastí ); and so on depends largely on

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Figure 3.12. Transcription of “O Thy Divine” (two pages).

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two things (besides mode): tempo and repertory (which often also determines tempo). The slower (and longer) the pieces, the more freedom to elaborate and to explore the potentials of the energy of the musical signs. Solo performances and solo pieces allow for an even greater degree of phrasal freedom than in choral performances. As with any other transcription, the transcription I provide here is not conclusive. It is, rather, a process, brought to a temporary conclusion the moment I believe it has served its purpose. It is the result of transcribing on the basis of subsequent listening, which in my eyes, and to my ears, has resulted in an increasingly refined notational picture. I have continuously changed the transcription during the process, according to the way my listening has changed, as my attention has been directed at various details in and parameters of the music. Also, as the transcription aims at illustrating the relation between the notation and Father Maksimos’s performance of it, its final shape is defined within the constraints of what I want the analysis to convey, and with detail limited so readers can actually follow the transcription (figure 3.12) while listening (CD track 11).

THE SECRETS OF TRADITION After Mass, I head for the cell of the géronta for a lesson with Father Agapios. It is the middle of November, but the sun is still warm. I find Father Agapios in a somewhat different mood than usual. We have been working together for some time now, but I have still many questions to ask, and I have the feeling of having learned only a minimum about the meaning, techniques, and beauty of the art of chanting at Vatopaidi. My questions are stumbling. Father Agapios seems baffled about what exactly it is that I want to know. Fearing that my Greek is not sufficient, I try to rephrase my questions. He stops me, hesitates, grumbles a bit, and then says, “Mr. Flint [his name for me], what is it exactly that you want to know?” Seeing my big chance to get to the heart of it, I put it as straightforwardly as possible and answer, “I want to know how the fathers of the Great and Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi interpret and perform all the different musical signs. I want you to tell me about the Vatopaidian tradition!” Father Agapios gives me a silent look. Then he puts on a big smile, and soon his beard is moving vividly and the cell of the géronta echoes with a roar of laughter. He then stretches out his right arm, making a movement with his hand quite like the movement I have seen the taxi drivers in Athens and Thessaloniki do so often, the palm of his hand upwards, saying, “Now you start to pay: dukáta!”48 I do not quite understand what he is getting at. Father Agapios tells me that he is referring to an old phrase from a musical manu-

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script, the point of which is that the student ultimately must pay his teacher in ducats (money). He takes me to the library, finds the manuscript (dated 1795), and lets me spell my way through it: “He who wants to learn music / . . . [N]eeds a lot of patience / Needs many days / Needs to be disciplined / To be God-fearing (pious) / To honor his teacher / Ducats in [his] hands / Then the pupil will learn / And become perfect.”49 He wants to tell me that my overeager approach will fail. Secrets of this kind do not come cheap. I have not time enough, I realize, and it is not likely that I will get any information of this sort out of Father Agapios or anybody else. Dissatisfied with the direction my fieldwork is leading, I start thinking about the limits of the insight and knowledge one can actually achieve in fieldwork. I also begin to feel for the first time during my stay at Vatopaidi that being non-Orthodox puts certain limitations on the level of insight into the performance and meaning of the music that I can possibly achieve. How can Father Agapios teach me to chant when my approach and interest are ethnomusicological, that is, fundamentally of a nonspiritual kind? The spiritual context defines one set of limits, which promises that insiders will have access to a kind of understanding, spiritual in nature, that is barred to the outsider. Yet another set of reasons for this secrecy about the musical tradition has to do with the oral nature of that information, which in a sense promises the same thing, only relating not to metaphysical but to musical experience. The musical tradition has been carefully transmitted from father to father during the course of many centuries, forming the accumulated “musical core” of generations of fathers. Seen in relation to the Athonite proverb, “The past is always present,” it means that the monks who passed away long ago are still present, and their words and deeds are treated with heartfelt respect and loving care. A couple of months of Byzantine-music training does not give a rookie like me access to the secrets of the musical tradition. Usually, it takes many years to achieve that kind of insight, because it is not taught, it is lived. I could stay a year and progress only little. Father Agapios explains: “It is not something we simply give to a music student. The student has to figure it out for himself by staying near his master, and listening and learning to imitate. But not even this will guarantee a successful transmission, because the monk needs to pray and remain a humble servant of God to receive that gift.”50 You cannot bargain for it, which proved to me Father Agapios’s warm wit and good sense of humor when he said that he wanted dukáta for telling me. I must have had quite a dispirited look on my face, but Father Agapios was keen to show his concern and was only trying to comfort me. Jokingly he concluded our conversation: “Next time you pay our monastery a visit, bring some Baileys [referring to the well-known cream liqueur]. We like Baileys. Dukáta was in the past, today it is Baileys! Then I’ll tell you a few secrets . . .”51

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NOTES 1. The publication in question is a facsimile (photographic reproduction) of the manuscript Triodion Vatopedi 1488 (probably dating from the first half of the 11th century), published by Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae: Vol. 9, Triodium Athoum, Pars Principalis et Pars Suppletoria, edited by Enrica Follieri and Oliver Strunk (Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1975). 2. Field notes, October 2001. 3. See for example Stockmann 1998; List 1974; Ellingson 1992a. 4. See also Ellingson 1992a: 115, 116ff. 5. See for example Zannos 1994; Mavroeidis 1999. 6. The “New Method” (Nea Methodos) was the name given to the new musicalnotational system invented by the Three Teachers as a result of the reform in the beginning of the 19th century. The New Method was taught at the Fourth Patriarchal Music School in Constantinople in 1815–1821, following the patriarchal final acceptance of the New Method in 1814 (Lingas 2001; Levy and Troelsgård 2001: 739); and Chrysanthos’s Introduction (to the New Method) was published in 1821 and the complete work, Theoretikon Mega (which included a reprint of the Introduction as opening chapter), in 1832. The coming into existence of the New Method and Chrysanthos’s publications are addressed further in chapter 2. 7. See for example Papadimitriou 1928: 75–78 and 87–88; Papadimitriou 1931: 239–40; Margaziotis 1958: 21–22, 59–61, and 74. 8. See note 6 in this chapter; the Three Teachers were Chourmouzios Chartophylax, Grigorios Protopsaltis, and Chrysanthos of Madytos. 9. The Anastasimantárion contains hymns for the esperinós (vespers) and Sundaymorning órthros (morning service) and other hymns, in the eight modes. 10. A compound sign is when two or more signs form a notational unity together, as in the case of the olígon and the psifistón shown in figure 3.5. 11. See VAT-CD5/00: 49–50. In the booklet (49), the term difonía in the English translation is falsely translated as “melody for two voices.” Rather, the term correctly refers to the “third” melodic step of the first and plagal first modes, that is, “two voices” (dío phonés) or two steps above the basis of the modes. 12. See among others Karas 1982: 316–20; Konstantinou 1997: 207; Mavroeidis 1999: 148. These theoreticians are not necessarily concerned about the fact that the term probably originates from the name of the Arabian province (the biblical “Sheba”) and not the word for “morning,” sabah. 13. Autómela (sing., automelon) are model melodies that serve other poetic settings (tropária, as opposed to biblical psalms), known as prosómia (equivalent to contrafacta in Western traditions); a textual incipit refers to the autómelon in which a given text is chanted. By contrast, an idiómelon (“own melody”) is poetic text with its own melody. An idiómelon has no prosómion or contrafactum. 14. Field notes, November 2001, conversation with Father Agapios. 15. The poetic text of the hymn Ton tafon sou, Sotir: “The soldiers keeping watch over Thy Tomb, O Savior / Became as dead men in the presence of the shining angel / Who proclaimed the Resurrection to the women / We glorify Thee, for Thou hast

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destroyed corruption / We fall down before Thee, risen from the tomb / Our only God” (VAT-CD5/00: 33; translation from the booklet). 16. Field notes, November 2001. 17. Field notes, November 2001. 18. I remind the reader that the “cell of the géronta” (to kelí tou géronta) is the room for music rehearsal and teaching and so forth (see chapter 2); the name refers to the elder Iosif (the spiritual father of Vatopaidian brotherhood), who used to stay there. 19. Field notes, November 2001. 20. Field notes, November 2000. 21. See also Raasted 1966. 22. See for example the recording from the monastery of Simonos Petras IMSP108/1999. 23. Field notes, November 2001. 24. Field notes, November 2001. 25. The extent of this trend and its detailed working, however, awaits further ethnomusicological research. 26. See (and listen to) the video: VAT/Video1 1997. 27. See also Baud-Bovy 1982: 154. 28. Quotations from Bourgault-Ducoudray 1877 translated from the French by the author. 29. See Olsen 1974: 111; Schneider 1969: 48; Anoyanakis 1991: 198–200. 30. See Karamanis 1955; VAT-CD6/00. 31. Field notes, November 2001. 32. Field notes, November 2001, conversation with Father Agapios. 33. The Greek term kantáta is a borrowing from the Italian. 34. Field notes, June 2000. 35. Field notes, November 2001. 36. VAT-CD6/00: 105–7. 37. Field notes, November 2001. 38. Field notes, November 2001. 39. Field notes (Father Agapios), November 2001. 40. The “Jesus Prayer” consists of the following words said aloud (or in silence within): “Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner.” It expresses repentance and a call for protection against evil. Ultimately, the aim of the prayer is to concentrate the mind on God. Gothóni (1993) addresses the Jesus Prayer, in its practical uses and spiritual meaning, extensively. 41. See for example Gerson and Hiley 2001. 42. Field notes, November 2001. 43. Karas 1982, vol. 1: 3; Field notes, November 2001. 44. Field notes, November 2001. 45. Field notes, November 2001. The aid of a video camera would certainly provide a much more solid basis for comparing hand gestures with notation and vocal movement, shedding light on local practices of cheironomy. However, video filming is prohibited at Mount Athos, and visitors are not allowed to bring video cameras or other motion-picture equipment across the border.

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46. The term análysis, as it is used in Greek, means “interpretation” or “vocal execution” of a musical sign, or groups of signs. 47. The poetic text of the kalophonic hymn performed by a soloist on Easter Sunday: “O Thy divine and most sweet voice / Thou hast promised that Thou wouldst be with us unto the end of the world, O Christ / And we faithful rejoice / Having this as an anchor of hope” (VAT-CD6/00: 37; translation from the booklet). 48. Field notes, November 2001. 49. VAT 1397: fol. 9r; translation mine, field notes, November 2001. In Greek it reads: “Ο θελων μοσικην μαθην / και θελων [παινεισθενε;] θελει πολλας υπομονας / θελει πολλας ημερας / θελει καλον σοφρονισμον / και φοβον του κυριου / τιμην προς τον διδασκαλον / δουκατα εις τας χειρας / τοτε να μαθει ο μαθητης / και τελειος να γενη.” In transliteration: “O thelon mousikin mathin / kai thelon [paineisthene?] thelei pollas ypomonas / thelei pollas imeras / thelei kalon sofronismon / kai fovou tou kyriou / timin pros ton didaskalon / doukata eis tas cheiras / tote na mathei o mathitis / kai teleios na geni.” 50. Field notes, November 2001. 51. Field notes, November 2001.

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•

4

•

Producing Mount Athos Byzantine Chant, Pilgrimage, and Tourism

Some of the passengers on the boat destined for the Garden of the Mother of God are not first-timers, judging from the black-knitted skoúfoi (caps) they are wearing. They have been to Athos before. I notice a pilgrim who must be German. Only a German would wear white tennis socks and sandals in a freezing Greek March. As I approach him, I realize my mistake: he is speaking Danish. It’s quite a laugh when Louis, as he is called, tells me that he took me for being German, too: “You dress like a German mountaineer!” When we, the pilgrims, disembark at Dafni, we will spread out, each of us going to the monastery with which we have already made an appointment. We are expected. But right now, the ferryboat looks like any ferryboat in Greece, except, of course, for the fact that there are no women, no kids, and no young couples kissing. So this is something different. If they are not pilgrims, the passengers are either monks or workers. The Greek pilgrims are wearing leather jackets and perfectly ironed jeans; they drink cold Nescafé and smoke cigarettes. Some of the guys have not been on this boat before. Cell-phone conversations bear witness to their anxiety about the trip. They talk to mothers, wives, and girlfriends in voices so loud that anybody who cares can hear every single word they say. What is it like out there? Will we eat? Will we have to walk? Some proclaim that they do not have a particular religious purpose for going; they just want to see what this odd place is like. “We are just curious,” they say. I am curious myself, and though I want to study Byzantine music, the purpose of my trip is not primarily of personal religious concern either. Yet, as a monk told me on my previous visit, “Nobody ever visits the Garden of the Mother of God by chance. The Mother of God led you here,” he insisted. At this moment I realize that some of the monks also have cell phones. A year ago they didn’t.1

121

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M y recollections and experiences from fieldwork at the monasteries and

from the ferryboat point to two converging worlds: cell phones and trekking gear from one world, the intervention of the Mother of God from the other. The cell phones are strong symbols, visually and audibly, of the fact that “the world” and Mount Athos cannot be fully comprehended in terms of a world of technological and secularized modernity on the one hand, and a separate world of tradition and spirituality on the other. Like cell phones, so too the power of the Mother of God reaches beyond the borders of Athos.

NOTES ON PAPER Often this is the most tangible shape that fieldwork takes while fieldwork lasts: notes, notes on paper. On a warm afternoon in Ouranoupolis I check my recording equipment, which lies scattered around on the bed in the room I have rented. I am practicing sentences in Greek that I will use to describe the purpose of my fieldwork to the monks. I read the first pages of my field notebook, already filled with notes: important phone numbers of monasteries, notes on Byzantine musical notation, thoughts about central topics to focus on, and so forth. To be sure, my fieldwork has begun as notes on paper, written days, weeks, and months ago when I started planning fieldwork and made my reservation for entry to Mount Athos. Early tomorrow morning, I will go to the pilgrim’s office in town and receive my diamonitírion, my visa, which will grant me permission to visit the monasteries. Everybody who visits the Holy Mountain is a pilgrim. Even though the purpose of my stay is to do fieldwork, the monks will not infrequently remind me that all visitors are pilgrims, regardless of whatever else they might be doing. Perhaps my fieldwork can be described as an ethnomusicological pilgrimage? Out at sea, there is no return. The sheer distance by ferry from Ouranoupolis to Dafni (the main harbor at Mount Athos) marks the transition from the World to the Holy Mountain in a very tangible sense. As I reassure myself with the idea that fieldwork does not start at one particular point, a new question takes shape: where and what is Mount Athos? Where does it begin? At its geographical borders? Or, rather, in travel guides, home pages, and studies of Byzantine music from the mountain? My initial interest in Byzantine chant was paleographical, spawned by a fascination with calligraphy and the riddles of musical-notational systems. My present approach feels like a totally different world as I step out of the Pullman that brought me from Thessaloniki to Ouranoupolis and pick up my luggage. An older man with a stick, a black-dressed giagiá (grandmother), and a young

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man with a cap catch my arms, all trying to persuade me to rent their rooms. I choose Kyria Soultana’s residence for the nice balcony and the view toward the famous tower at the harbor. I am a tourist in town. I am on my way to do fieldwork, but so far I am doing nothing that a tourist wouldn’t do. I include here some of my impressions of traveling through and staying in Ouranoupolis, on the way to do fieldwork. There might seem to be quite a distance between tourism and the tradition of Byzantine chant. Yet it is here in Ouranoupolis, through which most pilgrims will eventually pass, and where they will eat and spend a night, that the presence of Mount Athos strikes me. Although I have not yet arrived at my destination, I realize that the place is infused with “Mount Athos.” The term “Athonite” is a discursive trope that produces reveries and images of authenticity in tourists’ and visitors’ minds, in scholarly studies and dictionaries, in CD cover notes and popular writing. “Mount Athos” is produced both by scholars of Byzantine chant and by the tourism industry, along similar discursive lines. Inspired by Eleftheria Deltsou’s (2000) study of how the space of tradition is constructed in a Greek village, I question here the concept of Athonite tradition as territorially circumscribed, viewing tradition as spatially constructed through discursive and bodily (and other sociocultural) practices. This approach, Deltsou argues, “demonstrates that in the construction of a ‘traditional, local’ space, an embedded ideology of separation from other spaces eventually Otherizes the notion of ‘tradition’” (119). In this chapter, I take a closer look at how “Athonite-ness” is to be understood. Rather than being, as it were, an ontological “given,” I show how it is constructed and mapped in Greek national and local tourism and pilgrimage around Mount Athos. In the next chapter, I follow this line of thought and examine the musical meanings adhering to the term Athonite: how, and by whom, is the Athonite style of chanting defined musically, spiritually, and otherwise? How is it discernible from other traditions and performance practices? To speak of a distinct tradition of chanting at Mount Athos conventionally implies that this particular tradition is identified with the territory defined by the border and the shorelines of the Athonite peninsula, and exists independently of other territories and their respective traditions. Here, though, I am concerned with the construction of the place of this musical tradition.2 This is no simple matter. As Deltsou asserts, a “community . . . does not start and/ or end at the limits of a territory. . . . The meanings of a space and the agents actively engaged in its production may extend well beyond the geographical boundaries of a geographical locality” (2000: 120). In the study of music as part of culture, “we cannot seem to escape . . . a collection of interrelated notions . . . that include nostalgia, tourism, folklore, nationalism, exoticism, authenticity, leisure and heritage,” as Mark DeWitt

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notes (1999a: 6). Understood as culture, Byzantine music partakes in such processes in many ways. One of the modern musical realities of the Athonite Byzantine-chant tradition relates to the process of making, producing, and disseminating musical recordings for the market. This market has an impact on how the Holy Mountain as monastic community, historical site, and musical tradition is perceived and imagined in the world surrounding it. In this chapter I show how Byzantine music and Athonite tourism partake in creating the territory of Mount Athos beyond Athos as a unique historical and spiritual place. The ethnomusicologist’s first experience of this place is, to an extent, shaped by the Greek tourist industry. The study of tourism began in the sociology of the 1960s and 1970s.3 “[In] the 1970s and 1980s,” Timothy Cooley notes, “the uncomfortable similarities between ethnographers and tourists were noted” (2005: 7).4 The parallels between the touristic and anthropological desire for authenticity have been convincingly demonstrated in the work of folklorist Regina Bendix (1989, 1997). In music studies, tourism’s relation to folklore and folk-music festivals, national identities, and other related issues have been addressed by a number of studies, for example in the journal The World of Music, which launched a special issue on music and tourism,5 preceded by a few other studies on music and tourism.6 Recently, a growing number of ethnomusicological monographs by, for example, Margaret Sarkissian (2000), Katherine Hagedorn (2001), and Timothy Cooley (2005) “recognize the study of tourism as essential for understanding certain musiccultural practices” (Cooley 2005: 7). I share this recognition in my attempt to understand the relation between the Byzantine/Orthodox Christian musical tradition and the production of Athonite authenticity, a relationship in which Mount Athos tourism plays a significant role.

THE PILGRIMAGE FLOW Beginning in the 12th century, when Slav monks and pilgrims started to frequent the monasteries at Mount Athos, Athonite monasticism slowly developed into the pan-Orthodox center we know it as today (cf. Gothóni 1994: 173). Mount Athos was considered the foundation of Eastern monasticism by Russian monks among others, and the peninsula slowly became inhabited by monks from different parts of the world. In the 19th century Athos became an object of Russian czarist imperialism, and the Russian support of the monastic community caused a dramatic increase in the Russian population;7 but with the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the following decades of communist rule in many eastern European countries, the number of visitors and newcomers from this area diminished drastically as pilgrimage (like other kinds of trav-

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Figure 4.1. Ouranoupolis tourism: “Mount Athos Corner,” June 2000.

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eling) became virtually impossible. In 1993 there were only thirty Russian monks at Mount Athos. The numbers have remained static due to discrimination against Russian monks by the Greek authorities (Speake 2002: 185). As a result of the Hellenization process of the Athonite heritage, which according to Gothóni (1994: 175) had already begun in the 18th century, seventeen out of the twenty ruling Athonite monasteries are Greek, one is Serbian (Chilandari), one Bulgarian (Zografou), and one Russian (St Panteleimonon). The geographical areas of monk recruitment and pilgrimage movements coincide (Gothóni 1994: 176–83). Until the millennium celebration of the foundation of the Holy Mountain in 1963, the vast majority of pilgrims and newcomers came from Greece, the Balkans, and eastern Europe. After 1963, however, in addition to an increase in regional pilgrimage—including, recently, from Romania, and from the Greek diaspora (notably that in Austria, in recent years)—there has been an increase in the number of pilgrims from the United States and from western-European countries such as Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. These pilgrims constitute the late-modern rediscovery of Athonite pilgrimage.

“ATHOS CITY” Virtually no traveling today, ethnomusicologists and others have argued, escapes the broader contextualization of tourism.8 As a way of looking at and experiencing the world, it is often criticized, at least in the academic literature. Tourists themselves rarely enjoy recognizing themselves as such, and find other—contrasting, and supposedly more “serious”—ways of designating themselves (as “travelers,” “pilgrims,” and so forth). However, I am inclined to resist such dichotomizations. In the Mount Athos context, I would argue, the distinction between tourist and pilgrim is particularly hard to sustain. It is clear that, in certain formal respects, visiting Mount Athos must be distinguished from being a tourist elsewhere in Greece. The visitor needs a diamonitírion (visa) testifying to his status as pilgrim and to the fact that, accordingly, his purpose for visiting is of the contemplative and spiritual kind, meaning, in practice, that he will venerate icons and holy relics, and attend services at the monasteries he visits. And having arrived at the monastery, the behavior of most visitors is regulated by the standardized expectations of the monasteries. A certain kind of transformation, from tourist to pilgrim, might be considered to have taken place. If being a tourist means buying stuff (tourism being defined in terms of consumption in a market), then pilgrims, as they travel, sleep in hotels, and eat

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at restaurants, are—in a quite literal and simple sense—tourists before they get to the ground of the Holy Mountain. Pilgrims eventually buy things that relate to the overt purpose of the journey: postcards with images from Mount Athos, maps, guidebooks, small icons, and so forth (fig. 4.1). And thus a certain kind of reverse transformation also might be considered to have taken place: the pilgrim becomes a kind of tourist. But when a pilgrim participates at services or venerates icons, is he still a tourist, and, if not, when did he cease to be? Is this distinction meaningful, or helpful? Are all kinds of traveling expressions of an “inner tourism” (Llambas 2001; my translation)? Is all tourism “secular pilgrimage” (Stokes 1999: 141)? Are alternative, or intermediary, identifications possible? Under what circumstances do these categories of identity overlap? These questions will be at play throughout this chapter. It is hard to deny the argument that the driving force behind the changes that have taken place in Ouranoupolis, the village on the Athonite border,

Figure 4.2. “Athos City,” the main street of Ouranoupolis, June 2000.

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since the middle of the 1990s can be attributed to the tourist industry (figure 4.1). Ouranoupolis has benefited enormously by supporting spiritual tourism on the border of Mount Athos; these changes are of a commercial kind (Malm and Wallis 1988: 186). In Ouranoupolis, pilgrims and tourists can sleep at “Hotel Athos,” eat at “Taverna Athos” (figure 4.2), and make travel arrangements at “Athos City Travel.” “Athos City” is neither Athos, nor Ouranoupolis; it is an imaginary locale that draws on the idea of Athonite heritage, producing what Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1995: 377) calls “hereness.” In a word, “Athos City” is the commercial synonym for Ouranoupolis. “Athos City Travel” offers, along with other tourist agencies, a guided tour on boat around the Athonite peninsula (figure 4.3). The sheer inaccessibility of the Athonite peninsula and its historical heritage is a tourist best seller itself, and a bonus to locals. This, more than anything, creates curiosity, one of the main motivations for both tourism and academic scholarship. In Ouranoupolis, foreign pilgrim-tourists (non-Greek, non-Orthodox) are easily distinguished from conventional tourists with their walking sticks, hiking boots, practical clothing, and state-of-the-art survival gear, and they often come in small, all-male groups only. By contrast, conventional tourists often come as families, with kids and beach toys; they are wearing flip-flops and shorts, and they visit Ouranoupolis only in the summer season. Athos tourism proper (as opposed to pilgrimage) actually never brings its clientele to the place of its destination, which in part explains the drive to produce an

Figure 4.3. Flourishing tourism: daily cruises, not exactly to the shore of Mount Athos, but close, June 2000.

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Athonite “hereness” in Ouranoupolis. There is plenty to buy at the Athos tourist market, and there are beautiful sand beaches. When the real pilgrims arrive at the landing stage upon their return from pilgrimage, the real tourists are waiting there; they are able to get a glimpse and a snapshot of a real monk.

RELIGIOUS TOURISM Katherine Hagedorn describes spiritual, or religious, tourism in the Cuban Santería religion, and how the cost of an initiation ceremony changes drastically for foreign visitors in comparison with the price for such a ceremony in their home countries (2001: 220–21). Athonite monasteries sponsor initiation ceremonies, specifically baptisms. The baptized individual does not have to pay a large sum, although donations are welcome. The monetary gain from religious tourism destined for Mount Athos is in the surrounding community— a bonus to the communities on the pilgrim road to Mount Athos, notably Ouranoupolis, but also Ierissos, some villages on Halkikidi, and, of course, Thessaloniki. In Greek Orthodox understanding, the proskynitís, or pilgrim, is axiomatically distinguished from the tourist, who is a “mere visitor.” Within tourism, though, a religious tourist is a special tourist. Under the rubric “special forms of tourism” at the Hellenic Republic Ministry of Tourism / Greek National Tourism Organisation’s website,9 one finds a category of “religious tourism” next to other special forms of tourism on the list, such as “sports tourism,” “therapeutic-spa tourism,” and others. The official Greek tourism website recognizes that The monuments of the Greek Orthodox religion are an integral part of the national heritage and attract a considerable number of visitors. The Byzantine and post-Byzantine churches with their important iconography, mosaics, murals and rare icons, the imposing cathedrals, the chapels and the shrines of the countryside, the monasteries, metochia (monastic dependencies) and sketae, the unique monastic state [sic] of Mount Athos (Aghio Oros) and the Meteora monasteries (Thessaly) speak for the intense dedication to our traditions and the close interconnection of art with religious worship through the centuries.

The emphasis on monumental and iconographic art and Byzantine history is striking, as it contrasts with common understandings of pilgrimage as a spiritual journey. Even though the visitor to Mount Athos is a pilgrim by definition once having obtained his visa at the Holy Pilgrims’ Office, official tourism strategies in Greece specifically aim at attracting religious tourists. Mount Athos is

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a pilgrimage destination saturated with shrines and relics, but it is also defined as a tourist site of historical and cultural interest. Even though initiation, or baptism, into Orthodoxy as such is a rare event in the monastic community, Mount Athos has since the second half of the 1970s become a primary destination for pilgrimage and spiritual or religious tourism. Mount Athos is considered the Orthodox spiritual epicenter of the world—the “powerhouse of Orthodoxy,” as Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia has called it10—an authentic source of Orthodoxy, but also, in a wider (Christian) sense, a source of inspiration for the spiritual seeker. As I try to illustrate, categories of pilgrimage and tourism overlap. While the monasteries do not offer touristic performances of rituals, music, or the like, the bringing out of relics for veneration (usually after service at the monasteries) might be compared to a display of exotic rarities for the touristic gaze. However, this gesture is entirely an issue of participation for the devoted faithful in the Orthodox religious world. The commodification of Orthodox objects (rosaries, CDs, holy water, icons, and so forth), along with other aspects of Athonite heritage, is facilitated by the many shops in Ouranoupolis. However, the small shops located within the walls of every monastery, too, market Orthodox and Athonite commodities. The integration of tourism on pilgrimage routes and destinations is, perhaps, obvious. My point in drawing attention to tourism in a study of the revival of Byzantine chant is to offer an interpretation of Athonite-heritage production that considers contexts other than the immediate religious or musical contexts. Like pilgrims, tourists are attracted to the Athonite border village because of the historical and spiritual aura of Mount Athos that envelops the place. In his work on Athonite pilgrimage, René Gothóni (1994) has studied the travelogues of pilgrims from as far back as the early 15th century to contemporary pilgrims’ accounts, including travelers’ tales from the 17th and 18th centuries, where intellectuals and scholars “set out in search of the roots of the western intellectual tradition and its lost Classics . . . and rediscovered the Byzantine culture, of which Athonite monasticism is the last outpost” (46). Ever since Athos became a destination for people other than the monks who lived there, a complex of spirituality, history, myth, and gossip has marked the place as a tourist/pilgrim destination.

ATHOS AS WORLD HERITAGE SITE UNESCO designated Mount Athos as a World Heritage Site in 1988,11 together with another Greek Orthodox monastic complex, the Meteora, in Thessaly. No fewer than fifteen ancient Greek sites are listed. What a monk

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would identify with Orthodox heritage is, in the UNESCO context, understood in terms of cultural and national heritage. UNESCO “seeks to encourage the identification, protection and preservation of cultural and national heritage around the world considered to be of outstanding value to humanity.” This is embodied in an international treaty called the Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and National Heritage, adopted by UNESCO in 1972. The concept of world heritage on UNESCO’s home page is defined thus: “Heritage is our legacy from the past, what we live today, and what we pass on to future generations.”12 The idea of world heritage is to be understood as universal in its applicability, and the possessive pronoun “our” speaks to a globalized audience of heritage stockholders, generating a sense of common interest and identity. The World Heritage List defines the heritage of Mount Athos as a shared concern for humanity. This probably explains the popular characterization of Mount Athos as a living museum, as it increasingly legitimizes a concern for the site as a place of archaeological, historical, paleographical, and botanical interest, among other scholarly concerns. The monks who live there are very much engaged in how that heritage will be passed on “to future generations,” to echo UNESCO’s definition, and their goal is that it be, above all, understood as the Greek Orthodox heritage. One advantage of Greek membership in the European Union (1981) and the designation of Mount Athos as a World Heritage Site is that these factors have “made the monasteries eligible to apply for substantial grants,” which, although channeled through the Greek government, come mainly from EU sources (Speake 2002: 183). The interest in Mount Athos and Athonite monastic life from the surrounding world is shared by ethnographers and paleographers and many others whose representations tend to repeat the habitual Athonite cultural-identity markers: remoteness, traditional life, and spiritual atmosphere. As Cooley argues in his study of tourism and ethnography in Podhale, Poland, historically and socially situated fieldwork and writing affect the people and the cultural practices studied. Cooley suggests that the work of both ethnography and the tourist industry might be an important motivation for maintaining cultural identities (2005: 8). On the one hand, Athos is a relatively isolated region; on the other hand, it has for more than a thousand years been a destination for pilgrimage, traveling, and settlement. A vast number of travelers’ tales account for the place and the people living there (see Gothóni 1994). Writings on Mount Athos and Orthodox monasticism play a significant part in extending Athonite “territory” far beyond the geographical area. The outside interest in (and invention of) the authentic Athonite heritage and cultural identity create a motivation at the monasteries not only to maintain their unique status

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in history and guidebooks, but also to reproduce the historical and traditional image of the place in monastic self-representations on CD-ROM, video, and CD productions. On the other hand, like many other important places in the history of Christianity, the history of Mount Athos is also entangled with sacred texts— biblical, liturgical, hagiographic. Many of these texts were written there and specifically address spiritual experience and life at the Holy Mountain. They also therefore partake in the “multiple layers of representation” (Cooley 2005: 8) that constitute Athonite identity, alongside the historical travelogues and tourist guides and representations in digital technology. For tourists, pilgrims, and scholars alike—as for others—such representations constitute the monks as “others” in a variety of senses: they are spiritual others, social others, sexual others, and ethnic others, even temporal others when denied (and denying) a place in modernity. Expressions often used by travelers to characterize monks, as I noted during fieldwork, include, for example, “the monks live a secluded and austere life”; “monastic life is an alternative to modern urban life”; and “monks pray incessantly and ‘have tradition.’” Such discursive acts of othering are by and large shared by anthropology and ethnomusicology when, in ethnographic writing, they constitute members of the culture studied as “others.” I argue that it is not only Greek society and the pan-Orthodox world that like to view Athonite monks as a distinct and remote group. It is also in the interest of the clergy and the patriarchate to maintain a distinction, for reasons that are political and cultural, as well as religious. The remoteness of Mount Athos is, then, emphasized repeatedly by the Orthodox community, by the tourism industry, by the press, and by academic scholarship alike.

MOUNT ATHOS AS A “REMOTE AREA” In a globalized world, the notion of remoteness has not become less significant. “The process of globalization generates an increased number of ‘remote areas’—whose prime feature it is to stress their own singularities” (Hastrup 1995: 156). Understood in the sense Edwin Ardener theorizes “remoteness,”13 it is possible to perceive Mount Athos as an “imaginary” as well as a “real” place. It is to some extent imagined, yet it is located in a limited and specific place (cf. Ardener 2007: 213). In this way of conceptualizing remote areas “it is obviously necessary that ‘remoteness’ has a position in topographical space, but it is defined within a topological space whose features are expressed in a cultural vocabulary” (Ardener 2007: 214). At Mount Athos the monks frequently use the term “in the world” (ston kósmo) when referring to what

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is going on beyond the Athonite border. By extension, the layman is known as a kosmikós, meaning a man “from the world.” Pilgrims often describe the journey to Mount Athos in terms of “leaving the world” and being temporally distanced from their ordinary social lives. Réne Gothóni, during his first field research, met a young Greek pilgrim who was visiting Mount Athos for the first time, and he told him that he felt like he was “going to the moon” (Gothóni 1993: 147). In this way, the Holy Mountain is to some degree discursively maintained and imagined as a “remote place” and the monks as spatial and temporal others. But, as I return to in what follows, Mount Athos is also, in some respects concerning ecclesiastical, spiritual, and musical matters, quite the opposite of “remote.” In the process of globalization, old meanings of Mount Athos and the Athonite heritage are stretched to perform new tasks, and the “definitional space is transformed accordingly” (Hastrup 1995: 156). The “Athonite” has come to mean new things as modernity in its various unfoldings and definitions closes in on the shores of the Holy Mountain. Marginality becomes a means of acquiring symbolic capital, of creating a symbolic resource (cf. Hastrup 1995: 156). Mount Athos is not only in need of protection as a cultural site of global interest; it also needs protection to maintain its “remoteness,” as well as the monks’ position as “remote others.” As I have mentioned in the section entitled “‘Athos City,’” the production of Athonite “hereness” that takes place in Ouranoupolis is a way of imagining what life is like out there. We might now take this notion a bit further, if only to emphasize its paradoxical character: following the line of Ardener’s thought, the production of Athonite “hereness” can be understood to identify, while simultaneously exaggerating, the “remoteness” of Mount Athos. Looking at the Athonite musical style this way around, it is the sound of “the remote.” Yet Athos chanting is also located at the very center of Orthodoxy: with respect to spiritual and ecclesiastical matters, it is a “dominant zone” (Ardener 2007: 222–23). Both center and margin add to the musical style an air of exclusiveness and authenticity, which become an inextricable part of how we listen to and evaluate Athonite musical performances and recordings. As the voice of Christian Orthodoxy, the music makes Orthodoxy heard as a powerful and tradition-saturated culture in modern Europe. This might not be a concern for the everyday life of a monk or a spiritually motivated pilgrim visiting a monastery. Different meanings of Byzantine chant or psalmody coexist at different levels. For reasons that are historical and cultural, Mount Athos attracts tourists and pilgrims from all over the world, though mainly from Europe. The status of Mount Athos is politically maintained within the EU, ensuring continuity for both Orthodox spirituality and Athonite tourism. Various cultural expressions, among which chant is a highly significant element,

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participate in the construction of Orthodox religious identity. It does so by engaging the listener to imagine through music and accompanying booklets the musical, spiritual, and historical past—in other words, the Byzantine heritage as a distinctive southeast European and Orthodox culture.

THE MUSICAL MARKETPLACE: RECONTEXTUALIZING CHANT When a monastery releases a CD of its own music it becomes part of the commercial music marketplace. The CDs can be purchased in the manner of any other commodity for sale at the monastery. Byzantine chant, like other kinds of mass-distributed music, does not evade the circulation of capital. The Vatopaidian CDs, videos, and CD-ROM (fig. 2.4) portray the monastery, its history, it spirituality, its inhabitants, its musical style, and its revivalist enterprise.14 The products are sold from the shop at Vatopaidi, now expanded and moved to newly restored rooms close to the monastery’s main gate. The shop is open a few hours every day outside service hours, and here the visitor can also find the usual Athonite souvenirs such as icons, praying books, rosaries, local wine, and Orthodox literature. By releasing chant from its written sources, musical recordings from Vatopaidi liberate the chanting from its immediate liturgical and performative contexts (cf. Bergeron 1998: 96), and at the same time make it available for a new kind of reception in a variety of new contexts. The CDs are part of the monastic musicological enterprise (fig. 4.4). It is both an intellectual and creative labor, as I show in the chapters that follow. Most importantly, the CDs might also be thought of as having been produced for spiritual purposes, literally as a means of dissemination, of “spreading the word” in “the world” (i.e., in Athonite terms, the world beyond the Holy Mountain). Geographically, Mount Athos is secluded from society, but the monastic brotherhood depends on the outside world, and the monasteries offer something in return. CDs, videos, and CD-ROMs are all examples of new ways to protect the revived musical-performance practice, to ensure continuity of the tradition and the revived practice, and also to influence musical practices outside the monastery. Modern machinery and modes of mediation are thus a means of ensuring the future of the tradition’s history (cf. Bergeron 1998: 131). By extension, the prominence of technological know-how and production testifies to the Athonite heritage, its continuity, and its vitality in the present. With high-standard music recordings and carefully designed CDs, the Vatopaidians claim their own interpretive authority over the entire field of Byzantine music.

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Figure 4.4. Two CD covers with chanting from the Holy Week: Easter Sunday (2000) with the classical Easter repertoire, top, and The Vatopaidian Musical Bible, vol. 3, with local compositions (1997), bottom (courtesy of the Great and Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi).

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AUTHENTICITY AND MODERN PERFORMANCE The emphasis on history and heritage is striking in the presentation of the Vatopaidian CDs and the layout of the booklets. The Vatopaidian style is not an alternative to modern chanting, as it is modern itself in many respects. In the research-based interpretation of musical signs and performances of Vatopaidian compositions, in the aesthetic quality of the sound production of the recordings, and in live performance in services, even the homophone choir singing is oriented toward professional standards and ways of working with choral performances.15 All these can be seen as improvements of the musical tradition that set new standards for Byzantine musical performance. Vatopaidi is not alone in making musical improvements and disseminating the result by means of modern technology. Other monasteries at Athos exhibit a similar concern for the future of Byzantine musical performance practice. Over the last couple of years, the number of Byzantine choirs with an interest in historical, authentic, and local performance practices, notably the Athonite, has been growing throughout Greece.16 Some critics argue that Vatopaidian chanting17 has undergone a transformation toward a professionalization of the chanters and the choral performances. In this view, the central role of the Athenian specialists, Georgios Konstantinou and Kostas Angelidis, is itself an indication of a professionalization process. During fieldwork, I met a group of urban Greek chanters and a couple of other visitors who, off the record, characterized the professionalization of the musical-performance practice as a sign of secularization.18 Note how the notion of secularization conflates with ideas of modernization. Such a viewpoint is not as radical as it seems at first glance. It perceives choral precision as a sign of deviance from a romantic-conservative ideal of rural musical-performance practice, and thus it sees a lack of choral precision as a virtue (Bergeron 1995: 4). By implication, untrained performers and poor performances are excused because of their traditionality and lack of self-consciousness of their authenticity! Such an understanding exoticizes the nonprofessional musician. To some audiences, clearly, the research-based performances of the Vatopaidian fathers smell too much of academicism and reconstruction. It is difficult to tell the difference between a bad performer and an authentic peasantlike voice without implying that it is possible to define authenticity without imposing moral judgment. The criticisms raised against the Vatopaidian style of performance are based on the assumption that elsewhere on the mountain (as well as in the past) monks neither practice nor make decisions about music or performance—as if, indeed, their music is “naturally” or “unconsciously” transmitted. Culture has never been closer to nature than it is in the imaginary of the musical authentic. An enduring metaphor of au-

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thenticity is the premodern countryside, the peasantlike. This naturalization process is not only located in understandings of primitive culture or of folk music, but also in ideas that people have about Byzantine chant as a written musical tradition. The musical changes on Vatopaidi might relate, in part, to a change in the monks’ background. In the past, the vast majority of the monks came from a rural background; today, newcomers are well educated. In terms of technological progress, after some delays, a process of modernization has been taking place at Mount Athos. This transformation might be described as the emergence of “bourgeois” or “academic” monks and a decline of a monastic “peasantry.” Within this transformation, nonetheless, “the discourse on ‘authenticity’ as a desirable state of being or acting” (Bendix 1997: 25) has a certain relevance in relation to the Athos case. Although it is broadly believed that the “civilizing process” of Athonite monastic society does not, as such, imply a corruption of the sincerity of Orthodox spirituality (“electric light is not a sin”), a reverse dynamic is simultaneously in play—namely, a concern for finding a way back to the authentic state of Athonite monasticism in order to build a new polity, combined with a “fundamentally anti-modern anxiety of loss” (cf. Bendix 1997: 26). Hence, the restoration of Orthodox spirituality, buildings, and music inevitably unfolds within a discourse of authenticity.

ON LONGING AND EXPECTATION Although Byzantine music is (believed to be) ancient, the Vatopaidian monks do not perform “early music.” Rather, they have cultivated an Athonite style of their own: it is indeed possible to speak of a Vatopaidian style based on research and training, and, at the same time, implying reliance on oral tradition. One should not question whether the revived Vatopaidian chant is the “real thing.” The Vatopaidian fathers do not chant to satisfy ideas others might hold of Athonite authenticity. The monks themselves do not identify with the notion of professionalization. Father Nikodemos expressed it this way, when we were discussing the matter: “We are not professionals. We are skilled amateurs. We don’t have an examination paper or díploma (i.e., certificate) that verifies that we are chanters!”19 The cultivation of Byzantine music at Vatopaidi is a result of the synergy between Athenian professionals and the monks. These two positions in Byzantine chant are not opposed. Monks are certainly insiders at the monastery, but they are raised and educated elsewhere in Greek urban, rural, and island society and in the Greek diasporas (mainly Australia, Europe, and North America). The views they hold on music and other matters are influenced by a variety of sources from a variety of directions. This is

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why it makes sense to educate psáltes at the monastery. As for the Athenian musical specialists, they are outsiders and insiders at the same time; outsiders because they are not monks but laymen, insiders because they are protopsáltes and members of the Orthodox community. Moreover, interaction between the monks and the teachers from Athens, when they are not present, takes place via modern and technological means of communication. So boundaries between insiders and outsiders collapse and overlap. Many pilgrims, expecting authenticity, express disappointment when they realize the extent to which Athonite monastic life has adjusted to modern life (cf. MacCannell 1973: 600). Again, such romantic ideas of a temporal other tend to interpret all modern things as signs of secularization. The logic implied here is that a monastery should ideally be a counter to the modern. Hence, the romanticization of monastic life expresses only what (antimodern) visitors themselves have lost and expect to rediscover at Athos: their own selves in the past tense. This longing—implicated in the production of modern subjectivity—is formed on the basis of the imaginary of places and of history, and is recognized in most forms of tourism (Llambas 2001). In her book On Longing, Susan Stewart addresses “the capacity of narrative to generate significant objects and hence to both generate and engender a significant other” (2007: xi). Narratives on Athonite spirituality, tradition, and authenticity are plentiful, occurring as they do on Internet sites, in travelogues, on CD covers and in CD booklets, in photographic itineraries, in tourist guides, and even in scholarly books. The narrative of Mount Athos and monastic life in which all these partake is based on its capacity to create otherness, and hence specifically to create a site to which the pilgrim can withdraw to experience spiritual transformation. This narrative, at the very least, shapes the pilgrim’s expectations. If the narrative creates otherness, then it generates an expectation of what awaits the pilgrim in Athonite society. When expectations are met, the narrative is confirmed (“it really was like so and so . . .”); expectations not met lead to an experience of disappointment (“the chanting was not at all authentic because . . .”), which would then lead either to a disqualification of specific experiences or monasteries so that the narrative did not lose its truth value, or to a renegotiation of the entire narrative. It is part of the aim of this book to allow Athonite spirituality and musical practice a place in modernity, all the while deconstructing romantic narratives of Athos and Athonite monasticism as a temporal other—and to do so even when the monks themselves are actively implicated in the reproduction of such self-images. What is it that makes literally every visitor or pilgrim expect that he will sense the pull of history when he visits Athonite monasteries? Is it not because the historical significance or the time depth of the place is already implanted in his imagination, and that depth of history is emphasized as a specific value

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of Orthodoxy? The problem with emphasizing the past as a value in itself is that it assumes people were more religious in the past. This idea is bound up with conventional distinctions between secular modern society and the unself-conscious religiosity of traditional society. This rhetoric implies a linkage of faith with the past, of secularization with the present: a picture of the Fall steeper and deeper than ever. This picture is, needless to say, highly selective in the way it copes with temporality, and it does not do any justice to contemporary Orthodox expressions. Christian spirituality is part of contemporary human experience—this is what the present sound of the music and the voice of the readings in the church at Vatopaidi reminds us. It remains an ethnographic fact that monks and pilgrims continue believing in God, regardless of how many 4x4s and cell phones they own, or how modern their kitchen is! This is indeed true for a monastery like Vatopaidi: the monks drive cars and use cell phones as everybody else does, they have access to the Internet, they have a modern kitchen installed, and at Vatopaidi the photocopying machines are newer and better than those in my university department back home. Books about the monastic way of living at Mount Athos often focus on the traditional elements—leaving out signs of adjustments to contemporary life—and are often illustrated by photographs of monks performing traditional gardening and handicrafts.20 It seems to be the case that these representations are either unable or unwilling to keep pace with the modernization process at the monasteries, and with how contemporary monks actually live. The Mount Athos they depict is located in a much-wanted past. The traditional way of life might be true for some sketes and eremitic huts on the southern part21 of the peninsula where the majority of pilgrims will never go, but at the present twenty ruling monasteries this is far from the whole truth. Mount Athos has more than fifty thousand visitors every year.22 During Holy Week (megáli evdomáda, i.e., Easter), monasteries such as Vatopaidi and Iviron have more than three thousand visitors each. One can just imagine the amount of cooking, floor cleaning, and washing of sheets that has to be done! The huge number of visitors also means a huge congregation at liturgy, resulting in prolonged services that demand more of the monastery’s choir and clergy; there is, thus, a practical aspect to the educating of the psáltes and inviting visitors to assist in the choir. In modern Athonite pilgrimage, the idea of traveling back in time and experiencing something more genuine than what everyday modernity has to offer is striking, and this imaginary would seem to be largely shared with the tourism industry. In this respect, pilgrimage seems to be about escaping the present and seeking a strengthened spirituality in an (imagined) past, through the medium of a highly exoticized monastic other. Orthodox musical revival at Vatopaidi proposes that while spiritual life and worship through music and prayer are very

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much part of contemporary society, they are also an appropriate vehicle for the modern pilgrims’ longing to rediscover their authentic selves.

ATHOS AS VIRTUAL SPACE The cultural products such as the CDs and videos from the monasteries play a significant role in the formation of the Athonite imaginary, or, a usage I prefer in this section, the Athonite “virtual space,” especially for those who never get the chance to experience the place themselves. Listening, reading, and watching these productions, many are able to get a glimpse of something that they will never actually see. As women are not allowed entrance at Mount Athos, the CDs, videos, and CD-ROMs might at best be seen as an attempt to open up the monastery toward (women in) society, although what the spectators experience is, of course, a highly staged image of how the monastery wants itself to be seen. Viewers see a cultural, spiritual, and historical profile, exemplified by emotionally appealing and carefully selected pictures of monks, icons, and natural surroundings, all of which tend to emphasize the historical and spiritual tradition and the peacefulness of the monastic life. Viewers will never see a crane, or a concrete mixer, or the famous Vatopaidi elevator built to serve prominent guests. Unless they know of this elevator, visitors in the guest wing will not even notice it, concealed as it is behind a beautiful, traditionally carved wooden door. In addition to a carefully selected self-representation, the CDs and CD-ROMs provide detailed and useful information about the monastery, its treasures, and its history, and, of particular relevance to this study (and already discussed in chapter 2), a detailed list of Vatopaidian music teachers and composers. The soundtrack on the videos and the CD-ROM is not exclusively Byzantine chant, as I had naively assumed would be the case for the soundtrack of a video made by a Greek Orthodox monastery. Traditional Greek instrumental music—of a kind most certainly not practiced at Mount Athos—is heard as a background to the panoramic views on the videos. (One might imagine this relationship, of course, in reverse.) The Greek popular instruments one can hear include the lýra (lyre), the laoúto (lute), and even the klaríno (clarinet), to the accompaniment of local birdsong.23 For a representation of an Athonite monastery, such a choice not only emphasizes the Orthodox traditional practices and pan-Orthodox values; it also highlights the Greekness of the place. When I asked Father Bartholomeos, who had been actively involved in the production of parts of the CD-ROM, why they had chosen laoúto music over Byzantine chant, he replied that the fathers simply

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liked it. It would seem, then, that the monks’ musical landscape contains far more than chanting. Modern Monasticism as a “Living Museum” “[M]useums and tourism are largely in the business of virtuality, but claim to be in the business of actualities—of real places, real things, and real experiences. ‘Hereness’ . . . is not given but produced” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1995: 377–78). The tour of Athos along its coastline on a guided boat tour produces, for tourists, a sense of having been there, and a sense of having been taken back in time. The tourist gets as close as possible without really getting there, but nevertheless feels the pull and excitement of this unique place, and an exotic sense of otherness: another world, another time, another way of life generated by the mythical narratives told and retold on guided boat tours and by tour guides. As Kirshenblatt-Gimblett puts it, the “production of hereness, in the absence of actualities, depends increasingly on virtualities” (1995: 378). Let me illustrate this point. On one of Vatopaidi’s own videos (VAT/Video1 1997), a slow-motion sequence shows a monk who opens a window and looks out at the rain pouring down—as if the slow-motion effect epitomizes how time is sensed differently in the spiritual life at Mount Athos. The Athonite monastic society is often described as a “living museum.” A few examples will illustrate this point. The first example is taken from the official Mount Athos home page of the Center of Eastern Orthodox Monasticism, where the Internet surfer—or, perhaps, the virtual pilgrim?—is informed that “Mount Athos is today the largest museum of Byzantine art in the world,” that it is full of “authentic artefacts from Byzantium,” and that “in the monasteries, Byzantium lives forever.”24 The claim for cultural and historical authenticity on this home page is striking for the way it celebrates the value of the historical Byzantine Empire, which came to an end in the 15th century. The second example, taken from Matt Barrett’s Travel Guides on the Internet,25 shows a picture of a monk with a broad sun hat carrying a big basket with mail for his brethren. Under the picture the caption says “Mailmonk,” thus exemplifying how heritage, tourist, and travel sites celebrate a premodern image of monastic life as traditional and backward, as if life there were indeed conducted in slow motion. Today mail is mostly delivered by 4x4s and motorized boats. What does the notion of a “living museum” mean? In rather bombastic language, the Greece Travel website promises the pilgrim nothing less than a heavenly adventure: Provided you are a man and have secured the [necessary] papers you are in for the experience of a lifetime. Mount Athos is simply one of the most beautiful places on earth, more like a fantasy than what we know of as

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Chapter 4 reality. Enormous monasteries, like castles or fortresses dot the coast and appear on the mountain slopes . . . . There are caves that still house hermits as they have for thousands of years and many simple houses or keli[a] that have several monks in each and a small church. There are churches with more gold than some countries have in their vaults and icons that perform miracles. There are virgin forests and animals that are found nowhere but on the Holy Mountain . . . . For spiritual seekers Athos has the appearance of heaven on earth.26

The use of the words “fantasy” and “spiritual seeker” are telling. They seem to address Western tourists rather than pilgrims. Words like “miracle,” “virgin,” “simple,” “heaven on earth,” and so on are all used in service of creating this image of Mount Athos as a mythical, peaceful, and unworldly place. Most monasteries have established air-conditioned museums where parts of the monastic treasury are exhibited. But the talk of Athos as a living museum is a different matter. There is a contradiction between the characterization of Athonite monastic society as a Byzantine museum on the one hand, and the proclamation that Byzantium lives “forever” on the other. This is a way of denying living monks a place in the present. The “museumlike,” as Douglas Crimp argues, “describes objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying. They owe their preservation more to historical respect than to the needs of the present” (1985: 43). This argument is supported by Raymond Williams, who maintains that “a culture can never be reduced to its artefacts while it is being lived” (Williams 1960: 343). Although displayed in the monastery’s museum, many of the religious items or artifacts are actually still used in services. So the monks in fact continue to have a vital relationship to these objects. We might also reverse the optic: when not actually in use in liturgy, many of the religious items and artifacts are on display in the museum for their value as pieces of art in the history of Orthodoxy. The value of these artifacts is not only symbolic, or of a religious kind; the artifacts are recognized as having a historic value beyond the immediate context of ritual and religious service.27 History sells, and on the music market, as well. The aesthetics of the products, with color prints of musical notation and photographs of the monastery, nevertheless give the impression of a staged authenticity (Malm and Wallis 1988: 183; using MacCannell’s term, 1973), forming a particular image of the Byzantine musical tradition (cf. Bergeron 1998: 86).28 The notion of a staged authenticity might, arguably, be extended to the museum, where the authentic tradition is staged through an exhibition of remnants, relics, and ruins, spiced up with old photographs. The vast number of constantly reprinted books, with reprints of old black-and-white photographs of Athonite monasteries and monks,29 act alongside other representations in the forming

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of an imaginary of the monastic society. Nostalgia is at play in the numerous recent photographic editions, especially, which imitate the aesthetics of the old black-and-white photographical itineraries.30 Here, the recourse to a time when the technical photographic standard was black and white becomes a means of narrating, in pictures, contemporary Athonite spiritual life as historical. The black-and-white photograph itself becomes a sentimental vehicle (more sentimental than the color photograph, in any case) for rendering the authentic modern. With black-and-white photography, visiting Mount Athos becomes a kind of virtual time travel into an authentic past. The Treasures of Mount Athos Byzantine chant is not performed by Athonite monks in public other than at services, primarily within the monastic walls and Athonite borders; and, to my knowledge, there exists no Athonite or Byzantine music festival involving performing monks. As Sir Graham Speake argues, somewhat polemically, the Athonite brotherhood has been strongly opposed to proposals by populist and nationalist politicians to turn the Holy Mountain into a kind of “theme park” (2002: 183). Yet the Athonite heritage was indeed on display when the second largest city in Greece, Thessaloniki (Thessalonica), once co-capital of Byzantium, was proclaimed the Cultural Capital of Europe in 1997, and attracted international attention to the Athonite monastic culture at a major exhibition entitled “Treasures of Mount Athos.” Treasures from the monasteries were displayed, including medieval manuscripts with musical notation, along with a voluminous 675-page catalog in Greek and in English (Treasures of Mount Athos 1997). An entire chapter of this catalog is dedicated to musical manuscripts (Stathis 1997: 555–73 in the Greek version). This catalog has been characterized as a veritable treasure in itself (Speake 2002: 192), a notion that brings attention to the representation of the treasures as an object of desire itself. Four monasteries actually “refused to contribute on the grounds that their ‘treasures’ were liturgical and devotional objects and that it was inappropriate to take them out of their religious contexts and treat them as secular exhibits in a museum” (Speake 2002: 192). These monasteries thus actively opposed the idea of Athos as a “living museum,” simultaneously insisting on defining their own way of life as a living spiritual community. Nevertheless, the monasteries that did contribute to the exhibition have definitely participated in “raising the profile of the Holy Mountain,” as Speake puts it, since the exhibition put Mount Athos on the world map, and the Thessaloniki event attracted wide coverage in the media, serving “to bring the message home that Athos is a uniquely valued treasure-house and a dynamic and vigorous witness to the traditions of pan-Orthodox monasticism” (Speake

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2002: 193). In this sense, the Museum of Byzantine Culture must certainly be said to have contributed to the production of traditionality and authenticity of the living monastic tradition, as the foreword in the exhibition catalogue testifies: As it moves through the second millennium of its uninterrupted life, vital and flourishing, despite the earth-shattering upheavals taking place in the world around it, Athos remains true, sheltered by its guardian Our Lady the Mother of God, to its raison d’être, as a place of silence proper to monastic renunciation and ascesis, but also as a centre of culture, learning, and artistic achievement. (Treasures of Mount Athos 1997: xii)

The raison d’être of the mountain mentioned here has not always been as clear-cut as what is suggested by the notion of “uninterrupted continuity.” Rather, it is a matter of political and cultural negotiation. For example, during the era of Turkish rule up to 1912, the raison d’être of the monastic society was understood in terms of its function as the “‘ark’ of Hellenism” in a broad sense, as a major contribution to the preservation of Greek language, literature (including secular literature), and religion (cf. Speake 2002: 194). The decline of monastic society following the political changes in Greece in the 1920s testifies to a struggle to redefine its role and identity. Hence, its present raison d’être is very much the result of the modern revival of Orthodoxy and the reinvention of the Athonite heritage in practically all aspects of monastic life. One very significant, and audible, aspect of this revival is its musical practice. Virtual Pilgrimage Shopping and browsing in supermarkets when a tourist abroad provides an excellent vantage point on local everyday life. The supermarket in Ouranoupolis provides tourists, locals, and pilgrims with their daily needs, and it is an excellent site for fieldwork. Among the sun lotion, batteries, soft-porn magazines, and biscuits, a number of cassettes and CDs are scattered across the shelves. A CD entitled Byzantine Music from Mount Athos: Heavenly Music from the Holy Mountain has a blurred front cover portraying a monk holding a candle. Another CD, called One Thousand Years, Inaccessible: Rare Sound Documents from the Garden of the Mother of God, plays with the idea of the peninsula’s “deep history” and remoteness. A third CD with Religious Songs, Chanted by a Choir from Trikala depicts the bell from the Monastery of Simonos Petras on the cover—the Trikala choir ascribes authenticity to their performance by an appeal to a commonly shared Athonite imagery. Next to the very popular music series called Play Bouzoúki there are cassettes such as Hits from Greek Films and Dance with Zorba! and one with the alluring title Authentic Greek Music: Idyllic

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Moments.31 This is to say that within less than a meter’s worth of shelf space, examples of practically every stereotypical trope of Greek tourism, represented in the form of music and record-cover design, are piled up: history, authenticity, religion, patina, romance, folk dance and folk music—notably associated with the bouzouki—and, last but not least, the film version of the famous writer Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek. Music plays a significant role in the tourism industry, and Greek music, in tourism, is an emblem of Greece itself. Bergeron (1995, 1998) differentiates between two types of records: on the one hand the popular or clichéd, and on the other hand the elite or recherché. Whereas recordings such as Play Bouzoúki would fall into the first category, the Vatopaidian CDs fall into the latter. Byzantine music might have limited popular appeal as traditional, religious, classical, recherché music. Yet because of Byzantine chant’s association with tradition and heritage, it might be said to offer a religiocultural space “in which performers and listeners mutually construct what it can mean to be modern” (Shannon 2006: xviii)—and Orthodox—in Greece today. Byzantine music needs to be understood not only as a Byzantine art form or the sacred music of Orthodoxy, but also as a body of mediating practices that construct modern conceptions of Greek Orthodox self in a modern European society. With the monastic sound products, the pilgrim/tourist can take a virtual trip to Mount Athos. What the Vatopaidian CDs with Byzantine chant also offer is the means of conducting a virtual pilgrimage through music. The pilgrim can follow the last steps of Christ contemplatively in his—or her—own mind (cf. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1995: 375).32 In this sense, Katherine Bergeron’s argument on recordings containing Gregorian chant applies equally well to those with Byzantine chant: it “is a form of spiritual tourism. It promises the contemporary soul a virtual reality, a virtual sanctity” (1995: 8). Pictures of beaches, archaeological sites, and archaic artifacts, and photographs of Orthodox monks, seem to be favored by the tourist industry as emblematic images of Greece. During the summer of 2001, the Danish travel agency for seniors, 65-Ferie, was advertising a cruise to eastern Europe. The agency is located fifty meters from the Department of Musicology, in the center of Copenhagen, where my office is currently located. Centrally pictured on the front page of the catalog was—I was informed—an Orthodox monk of Bulgarian origin (figure 4.5). The application of images of monks in travel brochures is of course a means of feeding the tourist imaginary and putting authenticity and tradition at the top of the agenda, creating a longing for authentic life and a curiosity for the “other.” The work of imagination is a constitutive feature of modern identity construction, Arjun Appadurai argues. Electronic media, he asserts, “transform the field of mass mediation because they offer new resources and new disciplines

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Figure 4.5. A Bulgarian Orthodox monk decorates the summer 2001 travel catalog for the Danish seniors’ travel agency 65Ferie (courtesy of 65-Ferie).

for the construction of imagined selves and imagined worlds. . . . Electronic media mark and reconstitute a much wider field, in which print mediation and other forms of oral, visual, and auditory mediation might continue to be important” (1996: 3). In discussing the way technology is able to motivate imagination, C. A. Breckenridge argues that it is capable of creating “an imagined ecumene (in much the same way as Benedict Anderson [1991] talks about print media

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creating imagined communities underlying the nation-state)” (1989: 196, parentheses in the original). Through the telescoping of Byzantine music into digital-audio bytes, the idea of Mount Athos is transformed in new public and private contexts, forming new virtual ecumenes, and bringing new inspiration to existing ones. My first meeting with Mount Athos was through manuscripts, tourist guides, anecdotes, and old photographs, together forming an exotic imagery of the Athonite, which raised the question of how “Mount Athos” and “Athoniteness” are discursively produced and imagined in tourism and scholarship beyond the Athonite borders. In this chapter I have dealt in detail with this question, which then raises the question of possible meanings of Athonite chanting as they are also produced from within the monastic society itself. This I will explore in our next chapter, concerned, as it is, with views on the socalled Athonite chanting style, spirituality, prayer, and performance practice, as well as the imaginary of the Athonite authentic.

NOTES 1. Field notes, October 2001 and November 2001. 2. Literature on the social construction of space and place and how music is involved in the processes is extensive: important titles include, for example, Lefebvre 1991 [1974]; Bourdieu 1977; Certeau 1984; Giddens 1990; Herzfeld 1991; Stokes 1997; Feld and Basso 1996; and Stewart 1996; and examples from the more recent anthologies within the field of popular-music studies include Whiteley et al. 2005; and Biddle and Knights 2007. 3. See for example Nuñez 1963; MacCannell 1989. 4. See also MacCannell 1989: 173–79; Kaeppler and Lewin 1988; KirshenblattGimblett 1988. 5. DeWitt 1999a and 1999b; Stokes 1999; and Titon 1999 are all examples from the same thematic volume of The World of Music. 6. See for example Suppan 1991; Kaeppler and Lewin 1988. 7. In 1907 the population of Russian monks in the Athonite community amounted to three thousand. 8. See for example DeWitt 1999a; DeWitt 1999b; Titon 1999; Stokes 1999. 9. At the website www.visitgreece.gr/, go to the top menu entry “Explore” and then category “Religion” (accessed August 19, 2011). 10. Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia and Timothy Ware, “Tradition and Renewal in Greek Monastic Life: The Case of Mount Athos 1968–2008,” paper presented at Orthodoxy and Innovation in the Greek-Speaking World from Byzantium to the 21st Century, Interdiciplinary Symposium, June 5–6, 2009, Modern Greek Studies, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. 11. At whc.unesco.org/en/list/454 (accessed September 23, 2009).

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12. At whc.unesco.org/en (accessed December 16, 2007). 13. The anthropologist Edwin Ardener was the first to theorize remoteness in this kind of way. The article referred to here was first published in 1987 in Anthropology at Home, edited by A. Jackson, American Society for Anthropology Monographs 25 (London: Tavistock), 38–54. 14. See for example VAT-CD1/96–VAT-CD6/00; VAT/Video1 1997; VAT/ Video2 1999; CD-ROM/VAT. 15. Byzantine monody is often described in terms of homophone chanting, yet homophony seems more to be the musical ideal rather than describing reality in many cases. The point I try to make here is that the choir of Vatopaidian fathers is actually putting an effort into making their chanting sound homophonic in practice. A common reaction among listeners (visiting pilgrims/parish cantors) is that the result sounds “professional.” 16. In particular, the imaginary of the Athonite “authentic” style among young and skillful choirs deserves scholarly attention. 17. Here the term “Vatopaidian chanting” is used in order to specifically address the critical portrayal of the musical-performance practice at this monastery as noncomparable to prevailing ideas about the Athonite style of chanting, which I address in detail in chapter 5. 18. Field notes, November 2001. 19. Field notes, November 2001; reproduced in Father Nikodemos’s own English. 20. For a picture of monks making soap in their backyard, see for example Chatzifotis 1995: 271. 21. A skete is an assemblage of a few houses and a small chapel where smaller groups of monks live. These are typically placed at some distance from the ruling monasteries to which they adhere. An eremitic hut is a very primitive dwelling, usually placed in the érimos, “the desert” (at the southern part of the peninsula), where typically a hermit lives by himself in quietude and only rarely sees other people. See also the glossary at the end of the book. 22. René Gothóni reports that in 1970 there were 3,000 visitors to Mount Athos, and in 1992 the number was approaching 40,000 visiting pilgrims (1994: 155). In addition, traffic has increased: in only eight years, between 1984 and 1992, the number of lorries nearly tripled (from 233 to 679 in 1991), and the number of cars rose nearly twentyfold (from 63 to 1,146). Since 1992 the increase in number of visitors, lorries, pickup trucks, and tractors has continued. 23. The videos in question are VAT/Video1 1997 and VAT/Video2 1999. 24. See the home page at www.inathos.gr/athos/en/MonkOffer.html (first accessed 2003, then August 18, 2011, on the new official website of Mount Athos). Other more recent examples include the guidebook by Dana Facaros and Linda Theodorou (2003: 575); the e-traveler at www.web-greece.gr/agiooros.htm (accessed August 2009); and Lloyd Godson’s article at www.thetravelrag.com/docs/travelstory .asp?article_id=10159 (accessed August 2009). 25. At www.greecetravel.com/thessaloniki/athos.html. 26. Quotation from www.greecetravel.com/thessaloniki/athos.html.

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27. Monastic life is contemporary and modern, and as part of the renewed music expression, faith and spirituality must be taken into account as part of modernity. As mentioned in chapter 1, James Faubion (1993) and Michael Herzfeld (2002), among others, speak of a multiplicity of modernities in the Greek context, and argue for the possibility of a modernity of religious character. 28. Katherine Bergeron makes a similar argument in her study of the Gregorianchant tradition (Bergeron 1995, 1998). 29. For illustrative examples of black-and-white photography of monks and Mount Athos dating from the 1930s through the 1950s, see the books by Angelos Seraïdáris (1995 [1935]) and Spyros Meletzís (1996). 30. Of the extensive number of photographic itineraries from the 1980s onward, see for example Filotheïtou 1997; Kosc and Zinniker 1988. 31. Field notes, June 2000. 32. Although I deliberately stick to describing the pilgrim in the male gendering of the third person singular throughout the book, I here make an exception: as we talk about virtual pilgrimage through music, female listeners should definitely be included and the otherwise so heavily gendered pilgrimage in the Orthodox context be challenged; the debate arguably deserves much more attention than allowed for in the context of this study.

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•

5

•

“The Monks Have Prayer” On the Athonite Style of Chanting

The word “music” has its origins in Greek religion: music is the only art named after a divinity. —Walter Wiora1

Long before I first walked through the gates of a monastery at the Holy

Mountain, the phenomenon of the “Athonite style,” or “hagiorite style” (“agioreítiko ýfos”),2 of chanting had caught my attention. For many years I had been listening to recordings from Mount Athos, studying the manuscripts and reading about the life of monks in the Orthodox community of the Holy Mountain. So while the notion of a local style continues to have a certain ring, it relates largely to my own long-standing preconceptions about monastic life. Later, having experienced the monks chanting “live” in the course of my everyday pilgrimage/fieldwork over many months, I began to think of the “Athonite style” of chanting in rather more inclusive and elastic terms. This chapter, then, develops the ideas of chapter 4 concerning the more general production of an Athonite identity within the monastic community itself, as well as beyond its borders. The idea of an Athonite musical style, I will argue, is polysemic, multivalent, and contested. The idea that there is “an” Athonite style of chanting is widely accepted among scholars, ecclesiastical personnel, and laypersons alike, even though some, as we shall see, are opposed to the idea. In daily talk about Byzantine chant outside the Athos peninsula, “the Athonite style” is a common discursive trope. It is reproduced in Byzantine musicology and leading scholarly dictionaries, in commercial recordings and urban choir performances, and in popular writing such as in guidebooks and tourism Web pages, as a means of establishing a certain kind of authenticity. 151

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My aim is to get closer to some kind of understanding of what it is that provokes people to identify “Athonite” qualities in Athonite chanting. At around the time of my fifth or sixth visit to Mount Athos, I began to query the prevailing view of this supposedly homogenous Athonite musical style. To my ethnomusicological ears, performance practice clearly differs from monastery to monastery. So it is important to reflect on the plurality of possible meanings covered by the expression “Athonite style.” Why this insistence on Athonite chanting as homogenous? How is Athonite chanting defined? As I discuss these issues, I view the chanting at Mount Athos as a musical practice that allows for flexibility in performance, but also as one that takes place in a contested cultural space defined by different claims to musical orthopraxy and knowledge of the past. Once one starts looking for it, diversity in Athonite/ Byzantine chant is everywhere, and it shows in terms of performance style, aesthetics, conceptualization, and sound.

UNIFIED VOICE AS ECCLESIASTICAL IDEAL In his critical account of the privileging of unity over heterogeneity in music analysis—originating in the repression of otherness—Kevin Korsyn suggests an analysis, inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogical thinking, that would begin from the apparently unified and move “towards heterogeneity, activating and releasing the voices of a musical heteroglossia” (1999: 64–65).3 When applied to the notion of Athonite style, such a dialogical analysis begins from the apparently unified and moves toward the identification of a plurality of voices. This plurality adds to the richness of Orthodox musical and spiritual expression and, one might argue, allows for disagreement on theoretical and practical issues within the tradition. Yet the identification of such a plurality also challenges the view of a unified or commonly shared ecclesiastical style of chanting, as the embodiment and practice of the Orthodox Church in its idealized conception (namely, as a strong and unified institution within the state and the pan-Orthodox world). For this reason (though there might also be others) some monks, and others, doubt, or even deny, that there is such a thing as a distinct Athonite style. Philip Bohlman (1997) plays with the idea of doing fieldwork in the past as a means of invoking historical and musical memory, suggesting that pasts can be understood in a plurality of modalities while employing a wide range of approaches for addressing persistent historical issues. The administration of the Byzantine musical tradition at Mount Athos points to the fact that the musical past itself is imagined, remembered, and put to play in different ways, calling for an approach to issues of contemporary performance practice that is

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sensitive toward history and how history is produced. Pluralistic history and history writing are means of opposing the idealist passion for unity and calling historiographical authority and cultural hegemony into question. In music research, plurality might be seen “as a means to dismantle the singularity of hegemony” (Stobart 2008: 19; with reference to Bohlman 2008). When I here challenge and dismantle the notion of Athonite chanting as a unified voice, this study might be understood as a contribution to a pluralistic historiography of Byzantine music.

DIFFERENT USES AND UNDERSTANDINGS The term Athonite (“from Athos”) refers in common speech to the chanting style of Mount Athos, and is synonymous with the Greek term to agioreítiko ýfos (“the style from the Holy Mountain”).4 The term is used as reference to different things: a composition, a scribe, or a particular version of a hymn may be called “Athonite.” In paleographical studies,5 the designation has a workcentered focus when used in reference to the place of origin of compositions or manuscripts. As Grigorios Stathis’s goal is to seek the “the purely Athonite musical creation,” he is faced with the problem that the term is often applied in an “imprecise or localist manner,” and to both “ancient and modern, celebrated or less familiar” composers, even including scribes that are not actually Athonite (1996: 310). These are common ways to use the term, but there are other understandings of what might constitute the designation “Athonite.” During fieldwork, I paid a short visit to the monastery of Ksenofontos and talked with the guest master. As it turned out, he himself was a psáltis, and he had particular ideas about the Athonite musical style: The great choir is not a tradition here at the Holy Mountain. Mostly, chanting consists of one cantor (psáltis) and a helper (voithós). It is a beautiful thing, the choir. However, it is not a tradition here at the mountain . . . like they have it at Vatopaidi . . . that is a contemporary thing; it is modern. In Constantinople they have a tradition for choral chanting. You should go there if you want to study Byzantine music performed by a choir. Here, you will only find one or two psáltes and a couple of helpers. That is more the way we do things.6

While most monasteries only had a couple of psáltes at times due to relatively small numbers of inhabitants, this does not mean that chanting in the community at the Holy Mountain was always so. Looking at the total number of monks living at the mountain at different periods, it is fair to argue that choral performances have always been part of everyday performance practices,

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although the sizes of choirs may have differed considerably from monastery to monastery. Today, it is not only Vatopaidi that has a well-trained choir of educated protopsáltes. Others have too, even if they are smaller, as for example the monasteries of Iviron, Simonos Petras, and Dionysiou. From where does the ideal of simplicity as the authentic Athonite practice originate? One possible answer links the cantor-helper practice with idiorrhythmic7 life at the monasteries, a practice that ceased to exist at the ruling monasteries in 1990 when Vatopaidi turned coenobitic. However, in the more simple monastic dwellings (sketes), where only a few monks live together, services are performed by only a single or very small number of psáltes. But it would be erroneous to characterize all performances at sketes as “simple” only because numbers of performers are small: for example, the fathers of the skete of Agias Annis are well known for their skilled chanting in the monastic community, as well as among lay enthusiasts. And so two ideals of Athonite chanting conflict here. The first is the ideal of the peasantlike monk with limited theoretical knowledge, chanting as best he can with the assistance of a helper. The figure of the peasant is the key metaphor for authenticity here: the premodern, the rural, the pristine, and so forth, conflated with the Romantic notion of the uneducated youngster growing up in the countryside of Greece before the age of electricity. It is true that in the past the majority of Athonite monks came from a rural background, which made the monks physically, as well as mentally, able to cope with the solitude that the idiorrhythmic life demanded. However, today most monks arrive highly educated in all kinds of fields of expertise, some with university degrees, and the modern Athonite-monk population does not correspond to the ideal of Athonite monastic life as simple or rural. The second ideal is the ideal of skilled, soloist-like protopsáltes with advanced knowledge of music theory and notation, who have cultivated their vocal gifts to excellence. Many of these are grand masters of Byzantine-music history, some of whom have been canonized, as for example the famous 14thcentury composer Koukouzelis. Both of these ideals are frequently mentioned as central to the Athonite chanting style. What these two ideals share is the idea of monks as naturally gifted by God with dexterous voices and a zeal to cultivate their gifts and their talents according to his liking. They are models to follow: obedient, humble, and pious, and not afraid of hard work. Moreover, the ability of the cantor monks surpasses that of secular protopsáltes: they pray incessantly and to a level that laymen would never be able to reach due to the social demands of everyday Greek urban life. Kostas Angelidis makes the long journey from Athens to the Holy Mountain and visits the monastery every second week or so. The monks tell me that Angelidis is the architect behind the reestablishment of the music

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school and the organization of the musical training, the rehearsals, and the production of CDs at Vatopaidi. As I meet him one evening in the monastery yard after a rehearsal, I ask him what he believes is special about the musical tradition at Mount Athos. Angelidis: There are good choirs and chanters in Athens. There are good choirs and cantors many places in Greece. But there is a great difference between a monastic choir and a professional choir or a skilled amateur choir. And that is the monastic attitude: prayer. Lind: Is prayer a specific monastic characteristic? I mean, don’t you as an Orthodox pray when you chant with the Byzantine Choir at Athens? Angelidis: Not nearly as much! Not nearly! The monks “have prayer” (échoun proseuchí). How should I put it? They are specialists at praying. That’s a world of difference. Lind: And as a kosmikós [i.e., a man from the world, a layman] you are the musical specialist? Angelidis: Well . . . , yes! You might put it that way. Lind: So, what do you get in return for teaching music at the monastery? Do you learn something yourself? Angelidis: Yes, . . . I learn to pray. I teach the monks to get organized as a choir, I teach them one or two things about theory they do not already know, and . . . they teach me how to pray.8

What makes Athonite chanting special and distinguishes it from chanting elsewhere is not primarily a matter of vocal technique or theoretical skill. It is, rather, a question of spiritual ability and aptitude. In its essence this is the meaning of Byzantine music, and this makes matters of performance style a subsidiary matter to some. The meaning of chant and chanting is discursively generated by recourse to rather dominating and ossified understandings of monastic life. Angelidis defines the difference between a worldly cantor and a monk in suggesting that prayer is an intrinsic property of monkhood, and a way of maintaining distinctions between monks and laymen, between monastic and worldly musical styles. TO CHANT BEFORE GOD The many conversations I had with monks would often at some point touch upon the monks’ perceptions of what makes a good psáltis. According to Father Athanasios from the monastery of Iviron, “good psálsimo [chanting] does

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not show off. A psáltis with álpha-foní [i.e., an excellent voice] who listens to himself and says, ‘Ah! I chant beautifully,’ he is not a good psáltis. A good psáltis has a dexterous voice, a strong voice, and, first of all, sticks to the rules of performance, and does not make use of a pseudo-voice.”9 Father Athanasios goes on to specify what he means by “rules of performance”: A good psáltis . . . knows the musical system. They have a very strong and homogenous style in both Lebanon and Syria––Orthodox monasteries where they chant in Arabic. There they stay very strict to the Byzantine musical tradition and practice, and they know theory better than you and I. They keep their practice very close to the characteristics of the modes and the rules of élkseis [melodic attractions].10

There is a clear divide between scales used in exercises and the construction of mode that takes place in the course of chanting. Father Agapios: “A scale is a scale, nothing more. A mode is based on a scale but has melodic attractions [élkseis] which give life to the dead scale. When the psáltis chants, he creates the mode.”11 Both at Vatopaidi and Iviron the monks describe the psáltes from the Middle East with heartfelt respect. Father Agapios (Vatopaidi) agrees with Father Athanasios’s rejection of “pseudo-voice.” He explains: “A psáltis must have a strong voice, and open his mouth, and chant! Not a ‘soft voice,’ or falsetto, or voix-mixte, or ‘pop’ . . .”12 Though not so sure that we share the same understanding of what pop means or refers to, I think he makes his point clear, figuring that he favors a vocal style with equal measures of masculine strength, courage, and God-fearing humility. The two fathers from the monasteries of Iviron and Vatopaidi respectively share ideas about the “right” conduct of a cantor. Father Athanasios: “A psáltis must always remember that the words he chants are prayer for those who attend and listen. First we hear the music, then the words, and therefore we should not exaggerate the music––especially those with big voices should know how to control themselves.”13 His use of the word “control” is telling, as it points to aspects of chanting that relate to spiritual and monastic discipline. I shall be returning to this issue in what follows. One day Father Athanasios asks me to walk with him down to the little fountain close to the sea by Iviron monastery. A simple chain fastens the steel cup to the wall, and the water we drink from the spring is clear and clean, tasting of minerals and metal. We sit down in front of the ocean, and he recounts a story about a monastery near Alexandria in the Middle Ages. The story [as I recall it later] goes as follows: A novice, a newcomer at the monastery, was sent to town to sell the trade of the monks, hand-carved crosses, candle lights, that sort of thing. There,

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in Alexandria, he heard for the first time in his life chanting in the church, which they did not practice at all at his monastery. Overwhelmed by enthusiasm he hurried back to his elder, the abbot, and said, “How beautifully they chant in church! All those beautiful tropária! We should do the same, Father!” At the monastery they used to read the psalms and say a few very ancient prayers. The abbot replied to his novice: “In the town, people do not know how to pray. The meaning of the music is to get their attention, to persuade them to go to church. But, alas! Would that they’d just listen to the words!”14

Father Athanasios ends his story by comparing contemporary people—monks and laymen alike—to the people in the Alexandrian past: “There is plenty of chanting at the monasteries, but nobody listens to the words. Everybody should make an effort to listen beyond the sound of music, and hear the words.” I have the feeling that he is addressing this allegory to me, though in a very subtle manner, as my ethnomusicological research tends to focus more on musical style than spiritual content. What is central to Byzantine chant, I learn on this day, is the meaning of the words chanted. These are to be taken to heart and lived. Hence I open my definition of Byzantine music in this book (see the introduction) by emphasizing this aspect: at Mount Athos, Byzantine chant is the lived life of monks. Hymnody (another word for Byzantine chant) is a vehicle for the praying congregation: in order to be a help to the praying congregation, the psáltis must express “modesty, gravity, and simplicity (semnótita, báros kai aplótita) . . . solemnity (ierótita).”15 As Father Agapios argues, “if the musical expression is too grandiose (megaloprepís) or impressive (entyposiakí), or if it is too poorly performed, people will stop praying, either because they are impressed by the voices or because they are disturbed by them.”16 Also, the attitude of the cantor must be right for the sake of his own spirituality: Also for his own sake, the psáltis must control his voice and skills. First of all, he must chant as if God himself was standing right in front of him. How would you chant, if God was right in front of you? . . . Hm? You would chant with a high morale, yet with servility. You would do your best, but keep yourself “down” (na eísai káto [i.e., “be humble”]).17

To Father Agapios, one practical way for a psáltis to “keep a low profile” in the choir is to make small mistakes: “It is fine if a psáltis can perform a whole service without making any mistakes at all, but it is better for him as a monk to make a couple of mistakes, so he won’t get ‘ideas into his head.’”18 Keeping oneself “down” is a metaphoric gesture that points to the primacy of verticality in Christian Orthodox thought, complementing the iconic gesture of physically kneeling down. “Metaphoric gestures,” Deborah

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Kapchan notes, “are those gestures that make an abstract notion concrete, interpreting one thing in the terms of another” (2007: 66). The cantor who keeps himself “down” acts out the virtues of obsequiousness and obedience by restraining his vocal use and abilities in performance, volitionally subjecting himself “to the power of another” (Kapchan 2007: 66). The sign of servility here points to chanting as ascesis and disciplinary control, of controlling one’s actions while letting go of control and allowing God to take over. On the one hand, making small mistakes is a way of not drawing too much attention to the mediation of the message, the musical performance itself. On the other hand, however, techniques relating to musical-performance practice are a central concern, as the chanting is meant to cater to prayer and therefore must be of a certain quality and match ideals of vocal aesthetics. This complex suggests that the psáltis who by discipline has achieved a certain level of musical mastery and subjects himself to the power of God himself becomes empowered by God in his appointed task (as cantor) to serve and guide others in their prayer and struggle with subjecting themselves to God’s will. To attain musical mastery, the psáltis ought therefore balance his attitude and skills: A psáltis who is well educated and knows theory, but is raised without any connection to oral tradition, is a half psáltis. Likewise, a chanter who is raised in oral tradition and does not know theory or notation is a half psáltis. He might be a better psáltis than the first, but he does not know exactly what he is chanting, if you asked him. So, a good psáltis is raised in oral tradition, but is conscious about what he chants due to his knowledge of theory and notation. This is a balance. . . . The physical abilities of the chanter and his zeal for learning will determine how good a chanter he will be. . . . That has to do with his gifts and the will of God.19

The Byzantine/Orthodox style of chanting could be described in terms of conventional vocal qualities, such as lacking vibrato, or being somewhat restrained, which, for the monks, is often contrasted with operatic singing, or the “show-off ” styles of some urban churches, or the use of the voice in ways that the monks associate with Gregorian chant, which they characterize as ungrounded, false use of the voice (using the term falsetto in English). Jeffers Engelhardt suggests that the vocal Byzantine ideal, in the Estonian Orthodox setting, is “ascetic,” rendering historical authenticity to modern claims for orthopraxis (2009: 45). The notion of vocal ascetics points to chanting as a disciplinary act, a way to practice Christian and monastic virtues. The vocal technique has often been characterized in the West by a nasal singing style, yet it is often difficult to know exactly what Western scholars in the past have meant by this. For example, one of the fathers of Western Byzantinemusic studies, Henry J. W. Tillyard, mentioned that 19th-century travel-

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Figure 5.1. Allegory of chanting (from the bottom up): palate, cupola, firmament.

ers frequently witnessed a nasal style of chanting (1937: 205). In an earlier article, his disdain for this phenomenon shone through his own experiences of Byzantine musical practices at the beginning of the 20th century. Clearly annoyed by what he heard, he described in sarcastic tones the “endless nasal whine” that drowned rhythm, mode, and intervals (1911: 89). In the monks’ understanding, the psáltes would sing into the roof of the mouth, or palate, in Greek known as the ouranísko (“small heaven”)—which mirrored the cupola of the church, again an image of the firmament (fig. 5.1). Hence the effect is, actually, a palatal sound.

PARTICIPATION AS MIMESIS AND ORTHOPRAXIS The religious and ritual content that forms the “emotional core” (Bohlman 1988: 31) and the dogma of Athonite monastic society and, more generally, Christian Orthodoxy is largely intact, with the disagreements mostly appearing to relate to orthopraxis (issues of right practice and right sound). However,

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distinguishing between text and context in sacred musical traditions seems to be an unfruitful path to follow as long as the participants themselves are concerned about just how Orthodoxy is rightly performed and lived, the fulcrum of which is the crucial interdependency of sacred text and sacred sound. The fact that struggle is present itself suggests that ideas and performance of right sound matter profoundly. “We try to imitate the angels when we chant,” Father Bartholomeos replies, when one day I ask him about the aesthetics that determine the chanting at the monastery. It seems to be meaningful to speak of a musical orthopraxis bound up with the theological, a right way of acting vocally by imitating angels (see also chapter 6). Engelhardt demonstrates in his study of Estonian Orthodox chant that “knowing about the propriety of sounds . . . is tantamount to knowing about the right way of being in the world and relating to God” (2009: 32).20 As Engelhardt puts it, “the ideal of right singing expresses beliefs about the efficacy of sound and style that are also beliefs about religious truth. . . . Right singing creates the correct unity of doxa (belief) and praxis (practice) that is the conservative essence of Orthodox Christianity” (36). “The human voice is the ideal source of Orthodox sound because of its nature as a creation of God, its intimate connection to language and efficacy in prayer, and the way it enhances audition and affective experience” (42). Chanting in Orthodoxy is the resounding of divine prototypes, similar to the way that icons are representations of prototypical images. The honor rendered to the image vocally is passed to the prototype rather than to the performer. In her contribution to a general outline of a theory of participation in the image, specifically the icon, Nicoletta Isar argues for the similarity or likeness between the seer and the seen: “Participation is a function of desire, desire for God, whose ‘site’ is the icon” (2000: 57). This idea applies well to participation in sound (whether as performer or listener): the sacred sound of chant becomes, much like the icon, a sacred “site” for communicating desire for and identity with God. It is an act of both being present before God and presencing God. The crucial point here is the nature of participation. Participation in the act of presencing God results in a merger of the liturgical and the ontological: participation in logos becomes true participation in life (Isar 2000: 67). According to this logic, Byzantine music is not to be listened to solely in an aesthetic mode as “music for its own sake.” Byzantine music knows no audiences. Instead “it invites and insists on participation” in the same way that an icon is approached by the devoted worshipper (Isar 2000: 70). Highly conventional, determined by tradition and bodily habit, the iconic gestures of chanting “do more than represent meaning: they actually enact it. They are performative” (Kapchan 2007: 68).

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In Favor of a Common Style Many monks whom I met do not believe that there is a distinct Athonite style. Rather, they refer to a Byzantine style or ecclesiastical style, a metastyle, so to speak, ecumenically shared by the Orthodox Church. This is a unitary view, in which issues of notation and style are played down in favor of conservative traditionalism expressed by theological notions of the common spiritual functionality of ecclesiastical music. In this sense, the Athonite monks merely have a central position as administrators of the musical tradition at the Holy Mountain. Yet a general agreement seems to prevail that the chanting style of Mount Athos differs in some way from music-performance practices outside Mount Athos, “in the world.” Although these should not be confused with secularized ecclesiastical styles, Mount Athos is, by and large, regarded as a place that is distinguished by its living oral tradition and spirituality, as Father Agapios implies in his descriptions of the preconditions of a good psáltis, mentioned above. Outside Mount Athos, the Athonite style of chanting is a rhetorical marker of spiritual sincerity and historical authenticity, and might even be epitomized as “the Byzantine style,” or the “Byzantine chronotope,” which itself has become a prototypical model in the revival of “right chanting” in Byzantine choirs throughout Greece. This is also true elsewhere, for example in the Estonian Orthodox context as described by Engelhardt (2009), where the ecclesiastical music revival comes about by recourse to an idea of the Byzantine authentic. The “Byzantineness” of Athonite chant marks Mount Athos as a temporal space to which contemporary performers of Byzantine chant have recourse in their imagination of the historical as well as the spiritual authentic. A Reverie of Athonite Origins During a short stay at Athens between fieldwork sessions, I came across a study of Byzantine music by Ella Adaiewsky (1901), written in French and published in an Italian journal, that focuses on the “Athonite origin” of the chants of what she describes as l’Église Greque-Orientale. Adaiewsky’s study is remarkable for a number of reasons. Byzantine music studied by a woman is extraordinary for the time (around 1900), when Byzantine music was performed and studied exclusively by men. She is also one of the first, at least to my knowledge, to focus on Mount Athos as a place of special significance for the Byzantine musical tradition, a place where one would expect to hear Byzantine music in its “most pure and original form”: “C’est là où les chants sacrés de l’Église Byzantine peuvent être entendus dans leurs pureté, leur dignité originaire” (68).21 Adaiewsky then goes on to present a number of aural transcriptions from performed hymns, some of which are designated by locality of origin: “Version du Mont Athos” (73, 579ff.). Adaiewsky is likely one of

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the first scholars to deal with Byzantine music based on performance—she is not at all concerned with Byzantine notation, as were her contemporaries, for example Bourgault-Ducoudray (1877), Hatherly (1892), and Rebours (1906). “Nous les avons entendu ces chants,” as she writes: “We have listened to them, these chants.” It is unlikely that Adaiewsky visited Mount Athos herself since access for women was also restricted then. (Women are not allowed entrance by rules that were most recently ratified upon Greece’s accession to the EU in 1981.) Although Adaiewsky mentions a disciple of Father Barthélemy Koutloumousyanós (i.e., “from the monastery of Koutloumousiou”) who dictated a number of chants from Mount Athos (1901: 70), it is not clear whether he wrote them down or instead met with Adaiewsky somewhere outside Mount Athos and performed the chants for her to transcribe. (Trained as a pianist, composer, and musicologist, Adaiewsky should arguably have been capable of making the transcriptions herself.) It is not clear either what the (French) designation “version du Mont Athos” is taken to mean—whether it indicates a special oral version originating from the peninsula, or simply refers to the fact that the monk was from Athos. Although she displays in her study an insight and knowledge of Byzantine chant that are unusually revealing and refined for her time, Adaiewsky is, of course, also bound to the discourses of her time. Her praising of the Athonite hymns as a source of Byzantine musical origin expresses only too clearly early musicology’s quest for authenticity, and it is exemplary of the kind of reveries or fantasies that are still produced in both scholarly and Orthodox traditions more than a century later. Reconsidering Firfiris as Epitome of the Athonite By convention, in dictionaries and academic research, the Athonite style of chanting has been identified with monks (often recorded) possessing excellent musical skill and personality. Dionysos Firfiris, better known at Mount Athos as Diako-Dyonisos (?1912–1990), who lived and worked in Karyai (Mount Athos’s main town), has been identified with the so-called old Athonite chanting style in the leading German dictionary on music, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Schartau 1994: 944). This characterization is wildly simplified, I contend, exaggerating the impact of Firfiris’s (otherwise unique) soloist chanting style on a highly variegated monastic musical tradition. Firfiris’s style is more adequately understood as the style that has been dominating public reception of Athonite chanting and ideas of distinct “Athonite” or “Karyai” styles. Whatever it is, it is but one version among others, since many other skilled cantors have performed in Karyai throughout its history. One monk (who wishes to remain anonymous) put it to me that “Firfiris was actually chanting Firfiris style, not Athonite style. Some chanters have tried to imitate

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him, but it sounded ridiculous!”22 This statement supports the view of Firfiris’s style as unique, yet neither specifically Athonite (in terms of a regional style) nor Karyai-style (in terms of a local style). But why has Firfiris so widely been identified with the Athonite style? Father Bartholomeos (Vatopaidi) draws attention to the fact that Firfiris is widely recorded: There were many chanters like Firfiris who had a unique style of their own. He was not the only one—but he was the one who was recorded here [at Mount Athos] and at Athens. I have heard elder monks saying that Firfiris was not as special as many tend to believe today, not when compared to many of his contemporaries. But they were not recorded.23

When the recordings of Firfiris were begun in the 1980s by Lykourgos Angelopoulos (the teacher of Kostas Angelidis and Georgios Konstantinou), Firfiris was an old man, and his voice was not as dexterous (eulégistos) as when he was younger. Some psáltes at Vatopaidi actually heard Firfiris chanting “live,” among those Father Germanos: “I heard him chant, I experienced his gifted voice. Even at an old age he was chanting beautifully, though it was nothing in comparison with his abilities when young.”24 That Firfiris became the voice that personified the Athonite style is an example of the impact that sound recording and music production have on the historiography of Byzantine music. The voices that happen to be recorded establish, over the passing of time, their own presence and assume disproportionate importance. The myth of Firfiris lives on in general (nonmusicologist) accounts on Mount Athos, such as in Sir Graham Speake’s recent work Athos: Renewal in Paradise. Firfiris is the only psáltis mentioned by name (see Speake 2002: 197), not because he is the only one worth mentioning, it goes without saying; rather, it is due to the fact that Firfiris’s name is on everybody’s lips because they heard his voice on Angelopoulos’s recordings. The Athonite style of chanting by far exceeds the reputation and achievements of an individual cantor. As Konstantinou puts it, the Athonite style (here still understood in terms of soloist mastery) is probably best defined as “the sum of many, many great masters . . . past and present.”25 I heard Father Papa-Vasilis chant at Vatopaidi on a number of occasions while he was visiting the monastery, especially at all-night vigils and important feasts. The examples of his chanting that are included here (CD tracks 12 and 13) are recordings from an all-night vigil, the feast of Agios Dimitrios, at Vatopaidi. In the first, Papa-Vasilis’s voice contrasts with that of the young kanonárchis who recites the verse, and on the second, his soft and subtle voice makes the isokrátis (the drone-keeper) immediately adjust and lower his voice. Is Father Papa-Vasilis an example of Athonite style? Judging from the attentiveness of the Vatopaidians during his performance, most certainly he is! How,

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then, is it possible, in musical terms, to determine the “Athonite” grain of his voice? The Vatopaidians’ answers that I recorded just after the vigil revolved around the fact that Papa-Vasilis has lived his entire adult life as a monk, and that he has the experience of a lifetime of prayer and chanting. In one of the monks’ words: “Papa-Vasilis lives the words he chants. He is Athonite style! The music comes from within; every breath of his is a prayer. You can hear it! He is no longer analyzing musical signs. He breathes Byzantine music.”26 This passionate understanding and appreciation of Papa-Vasilis’s chanting bears witness to the fact that defining Byzantine chant and Athonite style is not possible solely in musical terms, as the meaning of the musical performance is entangled with Orthodox virtues and the praise of God’s grace.

SYKIOTIS’S ATHONITE LITURGY One day Father Agapios showed me a small printed book with musical notation, a colored edition containing a liturgy by the hand of the Elder Meletios Sykiotis from Karyai (SYK 1985), one of Father Firfiris’s contemporaries, and entitled Small Athonite Divine Liturgy (Mikri Athonias Theias Leitourgias). Sykiotis’s work is interesting for a number of reasons, first of all because of the reference to the liturgy as “Athonite.” Second, the book is written in the hand of an eighty-year-old monk, and contains numerous examples of analyses of notational signs, such as the petastí, the okseía, and others, written with red ink above the proper musical notation, which itself is written in black. The colors of the original manuscript are preserved in the reproduction. These analyses most likely refer to Sykiotis’s interpretations of notational signs. In other words, Sykiotis’s Small Athonite Liturgy might prove to be written evidence of actual oral interpretations of these musical-notational signs as they were performed at Karyai, at least by Sykiotis himself, and of how they were taught, by Sykiotis, at the Athoniados Academy. On the back of an old postcard depicting Sykiotis chanting with six pupils who are standing around him in a circle (not included here for reasons of copyright), one finds the following: “The tradition continues. The Elder Meletios monk chants with pupils at the church of the Athoniados Academy.”27 Third, the Small Athonite Divine Liturgy contains a number of interesting details. For example, one often finds Turkish names for the modes (that is to say, the use of makam terminology),28 strongly suggesting that they were commonly used as points of theoretical and practical reference well into the 20th century. Also, the liturgy contains sixty-four different versions of the hymn “Aksion estin” (which honors Panaghia, the All Holy Mother of Christ), which is an even higher number than in the Vatopaidian liturgy book (VAT 2000),

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pointing to the immense popularity and widespread use of this hymn in modern Athonite musical practice. In the main, the material forming the contents of Sykiotis’s work is copied from other chant books; yet in the Leitourgiká section, containing the choral responses in the liturgy, such as Kyrie eleison and Aksion estin, a reference to an unusual source appears. One elaboration of a hymn is, apparently, “worked out from the radio.”29 In other words, Sykiotis was listening to broadcast chanting. Not wanting to take credit for the composition, and presumably not knowing who wrote the piece, he simply refers to the medium, the radio, as his source. Sykiotis’s work also contains references to compositions by the famous cantors from the Great Church in Constantinople, Pringos and Stanitsas,30 and references to composers like Filanthidis, Firfiris,31 Petros Efesios, and others. Containing references to composers outside Athonite territory as well as some of the greatest soloists of modern Byzantine psalmody (mainly from the Great Church in Constantinople), Sykiotis’s liturgical compilation widens the meaning of the term “Athonite.” Here it is applied rather inclusively to refer to chants performed and listened to at Athos, but not necessarily originating from there.

ATHONITE IN THE PLURAL Having addressed the plurality of meanings of the Athonite chanting style, the claim that a soloist like Father Firfiris personifies the chanting style of the entire monastic community cannot be sustained. In Athonite (or hagiorite) chanting, chronotopes of authenticity range from the locality of origin to locality of performance, from ideas about simplicity, spontaneity, and rural monkhood to musical mastery, and finally to a chanting style marked by the spiritual attitude of monks. The latter category stands out as the overarching criterion of Athonite authenticity. What these meanings seem to have in common is that they make a distinction between the monastic community and the “world,” between monks’ chanting and chanting in parish churches and urban centers. At Mount Athos, the monks speak about life in the surrounding society as life “in the world,” a discursive gesture marking Mount Athos as otherworldly, and this, by extension, marks Athonite chanting as simultaneously marginal, desired, and central. Performers, composers, scholars, and listeners have different opinions about and understandings of this characterization, and some reject it. Father Athanasios, for one, maintains that there is no distinct Athonite style as such, but, instead, one common Orthodox, ecclesiastical style.32 Here, the significance of a particular musical style is played down. According to this view, Orthodox belief is not first and foremost a matter of style.

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Another, complex, criterion of Athonite musical identity is the size of the choir. As I mentioned above, the largeness of a choir, such as that at Vatopaidi, is often linked with conceptions of modernity and professionalism, and this, in turn, implies the “nonspiritual.” Spirituality is associated with notions of the old, the traditional, the authentic, all concepts ideologically distanced, in conservative Greek Orthodox perception, from “modernity.” The choral style of a large monastery choir such as Vatopaidi must merit inclusion at least in some definition of Athonite. But if the Vatopaidian choral practice is not Athonite, then what is it? History is in favor of my argument. It is reasonable to suggest that in past times, where the Athonite population was much bigger than it is today, large choir performances would seem to have been the norm. Hence, the dominant ideas about tradition are fostered by images of a relatively recent past mediated by black-and-white photography depicting monks and monastic life from the 1930s on. These images—which the monastery of Vatopaidi itself in fact participates in producing—constitute a contested temporality, because other contradictory fragments of the past “remain in the everyday of the present” (Bohlman 1997: 140). Historical evidence points to the fact that musical-performance practice before 1990, when the monastery was still idiorrhythmic, often consisted of a cantor with a helper, a fact in concordance with then dominant notions of simplicity. The emergence of a choral performance practice with a relatively large number of choir members at the monastery during the music revival was a significant development. The main Vatopaidian choir numbers some forty monks, perhaps more, many of whom are fully educated cantors (protopsáltes). But the large-choir practice did not constitute a new aesthetic norm, and I am distinguishing it here from the smaller choirs that provide the music on specific occasions. In fact, as I noticed during fieldwork, a number of liturgies would be performed simultaneously at the many chapels located around the Vatopaidi monastery. This meant that the main choir would often break up into “teams” consisting of one or two cantors and a number of helpers. This practice alternated on a weekly basis with the common performances in the Katholikón. So current performance practice at Vatopaidi actually involves a number of different performance styles, bringing an element of variety to everyday ritual life. If we count the pre-1990 performance style and the solo performances at Vatopaidi, such as those of Papa-Vasilis, all of the categories mentioned above may be said to coexist at Vatopaidi. And if one looks beyond liturgical practice to recording, it is worth noting that Vatopaidian CDs include a number of solo performances of the more elaborate repertoire that are unsuitable for large-choir performance, in that they require a great deal of individual vocal and technical skill.

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Vatopaidians participate in a contested musical and discursive space comprising various competing claims to authenticity and authority, in the form of other choirs and conflicting theoretical and performative stances. Boundaries between different musical styles, different uses and understandings of notational signs, and theoretical differences are not ontologically given but generated within the contested discursive and performative spaces of Byzantine music. Such factional struggles are not confined to the geographical territory of Mount Athos, but have ramifications far beyond. The identity of Byzantine chanting at Vatopaidi derives from the synthetic effects of vocal training and chant practice. This is a process that both aesthetically and metaphorically constitutes the performance of a unified congregational body and strengthened monastery. Even though all monasteries share and celebrate the same epic, spiritual, and traditional past, and the same classical repertoire and liturgy, musical practice and understandings of music theory are diverse and polyvocal. Implicitly recognizing this diversity and polyvocality, Vatopaidi claims to uphold the true Athonite chant tradition, a claim congruent with the unitary and centralizing discourse about performance practice advocated strongly by Simonos Karas and his followers. The timelessness, or remoteness, of musical objects and practices that were already recognized in the past lends authenticity to tradition. But who owns the right to interpret the past? Who has authority? As Pam Morris argues, the authoritative word demands that we acknowledge it quite independently of any power it might have to persuade us internally: “we encounter its authority already fused to it.” And she continues: “The authoritative word is located in a distanced zone, organically connected with a past that is felt to be hierarchically higher. It is, so to speak, the word of the fathers. Its authority is already acknowledged in the past. It is a prior discourse” (1994: 78). These words apply directly to the authority-constituting discourses of Greek Orthodox monasticism. The authority of Athonite monks in matters concerning sacred chant is, in Morris’s terms, a “prior discourse.” The uniqueness of the place, saturated as it is with spirituality and history, ensures its moral superiority. More than anybody else, Athonite monks have the authority to claim authenticity. What is usually left out of the picture in Byzantine-music history is the ongoing negotiation between monasteries and urban teachers of what the “true” and “right” musical tradition ought to consist of. That the meaning of “Athonite style” is contested and ongoing, producing a variety of understandings of the term, is perhaps the strongest indication of the profound importance of Mount Athos and Athonite monasticism to Byzantine chant in the Greek Orthodox tradition.

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CODA: ATHONITE TRADITION IN EXILE One late afternoon in November, Father Agapios takes me to the library tower. We have been discussing variants of modes and hymn versions, and he wants to show me a manuscript, dated 1714, containing a version of “Ton tafon sou, Sotir” (“Thy Tomb, O Savior”; see chapter 3). The hymn is notated in the 1st mode with no chromatic indication.33 To Father Agapios this is evidence of the existence of an older Athonite, or perhaps specifically Vatopaidian, custom of performing the hymn in a manner differing from the norm.34 The following is the story of the formation of an “Athonite diaspora,” as I suggest we call it. In the middle of the 18th century, a group of monks, today known as the “kollyvádes,” were forced to leave Mount Athos due to a controversy over the frequency of Holy Communion and memorial services.35 The kollyvádes refused to comply with what they believed to be novelties, and they were characterized as traditionalists, who, in the midst of an antiecclesiastical Greek Enlightenment movement in the 17th and 18th centuries, secured the survival of what they believed to be “the true Orthodox spirit in the Church” (Mantas 2002: 35). The “true spirit” mentioned here refers to the principle of philokalía, which centers on obedience. In the Orthodox spiritual tradition, obedience is crucial when a monk embarks on the spiritual path toward deification. “The borderline between the innumerable temptations and the misuse of freedom and choice is extremely narrow. Therefore obedience is considered the main initiatory virtue and the best medicine for inadequate or weak self-discipline” (Gothóni 1993: 110). The philokalía was compiled in the 18th century by two of the monks who came from Mount Athos, St. Nikodimos of Athos (1749–1809) and St. Makarios of Corinth (1731–1805), and describes obedience as a prerequisite of spiritual insight (see Gothóni 1993: 110–11, 142). The aim was to reunite life in the church with the “true Orthodox spiritual tradition,” by teaching newcomers and reminding monks about humility, love of God, and the idea that the Son of God, through his own obedience, has freed mankind from sin. Obedience is the path to freedom, and the pupil (typically the novice or younger monk) will learn to walk this path in the spiritual-father system from his own spiritual father, whom he will obey (Gothóni 1993: 110–11). Bringing with them their ritual practice and their musical manuscripts, these ex-Athonite monks settled down at the Monastery of Evangelistria at Skiathos, and their way of performing Byzantine music, often involving idiomatic versions of hymns, became known as “kollyvádika” (meaning “in the style of the kollyvádes”). The presence of the kollyvádes on the island of Skiathos had a significant impact on the spiritual tradition as well as the musical tradition, which later attracted devout Orthodox composers such as Alexandros

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Papadiamantis, Alexandros Moraïtidis, and Georgios Rigas. Rigas himself reports that he transcribed all the melodies that are contained in his collection Melodímata Skiáthou (“Melodies from Skiathos,” published in 1958) by ear. Rigas was, quite literally, on a sacred quest to save this repertoire: These ancient chants were passed on to me verbally by the older monks, and especially by Archimandrite Andreas Bouras and the two Alexanders, Papadiamantis and Moraïtidis. Unfortunately, in our days, the march of progress sweeps away much that is old and replaces it with new chants according to today’s tastes. The old chants of Skiathos are in danger of falling into [oblivion]. As Divine providence willed . . . I should be the one to preserve them. (RIG1958: 6)36

Thus a dystopic and threatening modernity makes itself felt in Greek Orthodox island life in the 1950s, and salvation lies in preserving ecclesiastical music, the music representing more strongly than anything the spiritual voice—one not of the present, but of the past. Rigas, himself an agent in the transmission of the tradition, feels the pull of history and faith while saving the Skiathos repertoire from the impact of a corrupted and secularized modernity. The revival of this repertoire comes to symbolize the salvation of true Orthodox spirituality. Rigas’s anthology makes the hymns known to a wider public, and petrifies the notion of a “kollyvádes tradition” (RIG1958: 5; Mantas 2002: 35), the authenticity of which is generated by reference to the spiritual, ritual, and musical connection to the Holy Mountain. The belief that the kollyvádika have been transmitted in a temporally isolated “pocket” produces Skiathos as a living historical site of authentic Byzantine music. What one needs to do is simply open this pocket, so to speak, in order to retrieve the past uncontaminated. At the time of writing (in 2010) there are, however, only three monks living at the monastery of Evangelistria, which seems to suggest that this repertory is alive mainly in professional choral performance and recording. When I visited the monastery in the summer of 2010, the sound of Arvanitis’s CD filled the yard as it blasted out of a church window at high volume. The interest in this local repertory coincides with a generally renewed interest in Athonite monasticism and its traditional arts—icons, wood carvings, and music. This renewal began in the middle of the 1970s, followed by the great boom of the 1990s. That the kollyvádika are performed and recorded by Arvanitis in 2002 speaks volumes when considered in relation to the general trend among professional and other choirs throughout Greece of performing historical repertoire and Byzantine music as “early music,” drawing, as they do so, on the imaginary of the Athonite authentic. This example illustrates how “Mount Athos” is produced and maintained musically, not only in the monastic community but

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also far beyond Athonite territory, and it emphasizes how understandings of an Athonite style of chanting indeed must include musical practices and performances by non-Athonite laymen.

NOTES 1. Although Wiora (1965) addresses the muses of ancient Greek mythology, and not Greek Orthodox Christianity, there is a certain level of general applicability in the connection he identifies between music/voice/sound and religion. 2. The term hagiorite is a common English version of the (transliterated) Greek agioreítiko, meaning “from the Holy Mountain” (to Agion Oros being the Greek term for the Holy Mountain). 3. Bakhtin’s dialogism speaks of homogeneity and the homogenous. I prefer to use the terms unity and unified, though still in opposition to heterogeneity and heterogenous. See Bakhtin 1981; Holquist 2002. 4. Other local traditions (paradóseis orisménou tópou) are known, for example agiopolítikon (from Jerusalem), agiosofítikon (from the Great Church of Agias Sophia in Constantinople), and polítikon (from “the City,” i.e. Constantinople). In the same manner, the specific localization of Athonite hymns is expressed in adjectives based on the monasteries, such as vatopaidinón (from the monastery of Vatopaidi) or lauriótikon (from the monastery of Great Lavra). In an unpublished paper presented in Birmingham, UK, in 1994, the Danish Byzantine paleographer Jørgen Raasted addressed some of the questions relating to the meaning of the term Athonite (or agioreítikon). The term might easily suggest that all twenty monasteries at Mount Athos have been using the same melodies—though this is not plausible, as the term in fact occurs in variations, with a variety of meanings, in a vast number of manuscripts, one of these occurring as early as 1336 “for a specific melody that was long and ornamented” (Raasted 1994: 4). 5. See for example Stathis 1975–1993, 1996. 6. Field notes, November 2000. 7. Idiorrhythmic and coenobitic monastic lifestyles are also addressed in chapters 1 and 2; see also the glossary. 8. Field notes, November 2001. 9. Field notes, November 2001. 10. Field notes, October 2001. 11. Field notes, November 2001. 12. Field notes, November 2001. 13. Field notes, October 2001. 14. Field notes, October 2001. 15. Field notes, November 2001. Father Agapios used the English word solemnity for translating ierótita (holiness, sanctity). Other equivalents for expressing holiness or right spiritual attitude would include episimótis (solemnity) and sovarótita (seriousness). 16. Field notes, November 2001. 17. Field notes, November 2001; conversation with Father Agapios.

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18. Field notes, November 2001. 19. Field notes, November 2001. 20. Other studies address issues about the right way of being in relation to religious beliefs. See in particular Nelson (2001) and Hagedorn (2001). 21. Translation (my own): “It is there [at Mount Athos] where the sacred chants of the Byzantine Church can be listened to in their purity, their original dignity.” 22. Field notes, November 2001. 23. Field notes, November 2001. 24. Field notes, November 2001. 25. Field notes, November 2001. 26. Field notes, November 2001. 27. The quotation here is from an old postcard found at Vatopaidi, June 2001 (no details). 28. See for example SYK 1985: 120, 199, 238, 262, 281. 29. See SYK 1985: 113, 382. 30. SYK 1985: for example 54, 293, 300 for Pringos; 42, 59 for Stanitsas. 31. Firfiris and Sykiotis in fact lived in the same dwelling in Karyes. 32. Field notes, October 2001. 33. The Vatopaidian musical manuscript VAT 1374 (dated 1714), fols. 134v–135r. In addition, the manuscript VAT 1254 (18th century), fol. 276v, contains a version of this hymn. The hymn is usually performed in the 2nd chromatic mode. 34. A version similar to the one Father Agapios is showing me is to be found in Father Georgios Rigas’s collection of chants from the monasteries on the Greek island Skiathos (east of the Greek mainland in the Aegean Sea, far southwest of Mount Athos)—of which Vatopaidi also owns a copy. This version, a prosómion (i.e., the same melody as “Ton tafon sou, Sotir,” but with a different text), “O megas strategos” (“The Mighty Captain”), was recorded by Ioannis Arvanitis and his Byzantine choir Hagiopolitis in 2002. 35. Kóllyva is a traditional sweet dish, principally made of boiled wheat, sugar, and cinnamon, and often mixed with pomegranates. It is usually offered at memorial services and funerals and shared by the community after the common meal. 36. The translation of Rigas’s text is taken from Mantas 2002: 36.

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•

6

•

Spiritual Silence, Sacred Sound

God is peace, beyond all tumult and shouting. Our hymns, accordingly, ought to be angelic, without tumult. —St. Gregory of Sinai It is warm and humid. I am heading for the monastery of Iviron. Here the path is rocky, dusty, and dry from the early summer sun; there it bends and turns into cool shade and soft soil under the trees. The smell is wet mold, rotten bark, and pine. As I stop to pause, lower my pulse, and take a sip of water, I realize how silent it is here on the path. The insects’ buzzing and the birds’ twitter are drowned only by the sound of my throat as I drink. Then I hear the faint sound of a distant chainsaw. The monastery can’t be far away.1

T

his chapter discusses the meaning of spiritual and ritual silence, wordless jubilation, and prayer within the broader sonic space of the monastery. I address the spiritual meanings of the so-called nonsense syllables (teretísmata) in the elaborate repertoire of Byzantine chant. I suggest understanding them as “meaning free” rather than meaningless, and pursue this understanding with reference to chanted examples from the Divine Liturgy. I show how religious sentiment is learned through discipline and practice, and aim to come closer, in the process, to an understanding of what participation in both ritual music and ritual silence means to the monks.

173

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THE SOUNDSCAPE OF THE HOLY MOUNTAIN Approaching the monastery by foot one notices the changing soundscape. Arriving by car, the audible experience consists mainly of the rumble of the road and the engine of the vehicle. I have tried both: the former takes time and effort, yet it is pleasing in itself; the latter is expensive (unless one is offered a lift by the monastery), yet by far the fastest and easiest way to get to one’s destination. The sounds of cars and other machinery have in one way or another become a component of the Athonite soundscape. Yet Athonite nature, and the silence one might find there, is still spoken of as an attraction to pilgrims. Some monks also consider nature in the “Garden of the All Holy Mother of Christ” (to Perivóli tis Panagías) to be “undisturbed.” It is indeed true that biologists have located floral species there not found elsewhere on the planet. On my first visit, I met a novice at Iviron, Father Nikolaos, and asked him about the meaning of Byzantine music. He opened the window and said poetically: “Byzantine music? Listen to the sound of the river, the birds, and the leaves—that’s Byzantine music. Go out there in the woods. It’s another world. Stay a while and you feel reborn.”2 To the monks, the “Garden of the All Holy Mother of Christ” is a holy place—nature imbued with the spirit of God. The wall marks the outer rim of the monastery, and the gates are usually locked at sunset. Especially during summer, the sounds of birds, cicadas, and jackals fill the yard and cells. Nature’s sounds blend with those produced by the spiritual community. In the yard one hears noises from the kitchen and the daily sounding of the tálanton (wooden plank) calling monks to service. Inside the buildings one hears the usual office sounds, such as computers, telephones, and low-voiced conversations; behind a door somebody is chanting. Whereas these sounds are important identifiers of everyday life, not all of them are imbued with sacredness in the same way that chanting is. Yet loudspeakers have been installed for those monks and helpers who cook and work in the kitchen early in the morning (or late at night). Monks would come to service, leave, return again later, and so on, indicating that service and action elsewhere are taking place simultaneously. In the early stages of fieldwork, I would normally stay in church for the entire length of the service; but as I began to feel more comfortable, I would leave the service once in a while—moving about just like the monks—to get some fresh air and to see if I could get a glimpse of what was going on. There was not much to see out there in the unlit yard, but in the dark the sonority of the monastery was all the more clear. Often, chanting would be flowing not from the church (doors would be closed), but from the open kitchen window, thus allowing chant to mix with the sounds of the everyday duties. In summer, the windows of the church would often be

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left open, and monks and pilgrims would attend service outside the windows in the shade under the trees or leaning against the wall. The katholikón (the main monastic church) and the parekklísia (the chapels in the monastic complex) are central loci of the sonic space of the tradition. Byzantine music, readings of the Holy Scripture, and the sound of the small bells of the censer enter into sensory relation with scents, light, darkness, icons, architecture, and ritual gestures. All of these define, during performance, the presence of God. The church space mediates between the physical, tactile, olfactory, and audible and the spiritual, and is thus a medium for experiencing the eternal space of God. It is also to be grasped as a metaphor for the relation between worshipper and God. Music and sacred readings represent both the living and the saints of the specific sacred space of the monastery; sacred meaning accrues to its church and chapels through the voices that fill it (cf. Bohlman 2006: 6). As discussed in chapter 5, Byzantine music not only represents the voice of God, but also “presences” him. Broadly speaking, a complex soundscape made up of Byzantine music, readings, the sounds of everyday labor, and the sounds of nature is at play in this book, just as it is in the presencing of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox sacred space. The Church Space The smell, sound, and feel of the katholikón at Vatopaidi (and, indeed, at other monasteries at Athos) always suggest to me, every time I enter, that it has been in constant use for a very long time.3 This experience is certainly influenced by the fact that I know it is old, and it has been used incessantly, since its foundation, for the same purpose as it is today. The katholikón, as noted, is the main church of the monastery (fig. 6.1), and there are no fewer than nineteen parekklísia spread around the monastic building complex. Some of them are actually in the same building as the katholikón: two are on either side of the church, and three are on top of the lití and mesonyktikó of the katholikón (on the second floor), next to the ikonofylákio (icon storage) of the monastery. The main entrance leads from the exonarthex, which at Vatopaidi is found outdoors, into the esonarthex, or the lití. Monks and pilgrims would make the sign of the cross a number of times when passing through each room of the church, always starting by venerating the icons and wall paintings on the right side of each room. Venerating here means simply to “make the crosses and kiss the icons.” If the hegoúmenos (abbot) was sitting in the room––he was always positioned to the right of the (main) entrance to each room—people would greet him by kissing his hand; and when he entered the church, people would stand up, and then go to his seat and kiss his hand in hierarchical order. Priests and elder monks would go first, then the younger monks and novices,

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Figure 6.1. Ground plan of the main church at Vatopaidi.

and, finally, the visitors and the ethnomusicologist. Often the line was so long that the hegoúmenos had left his seat to attend to his tasks before I reached him. Nothing happens at random in an Orthodox monastic service, nor do people sit where they please. The pilgrim should only sit if appointed a seat, and one is expected to stand up if a monk claims the stall. It is, of course, the done thing to show a passing monk that you are ready to leave your stall for him, only to be politely urged by the monk to keep the seat. Some monks

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tend to occupy a specific seat, and one should always be careful not to take the stall of an elder. And a visitor must never sit in the first stall or first seat to the right in any room. In the nave, this seat is called the “throne of the despótis” and is decorated with wood carvings, gold leaf, and purple velvet. Only a visiting bishop (despótis) or other prominent guest from within the Orthodox Church would sit there, and only on rare occasions the hegoúmenos himself. At the naós (the nave), visitors normally do not sit beyond the line of the “throne of the despótis.” Visitors do not occupy the stalls by the two choirs unless they are specifically invited to participate at the service. I was invited to stay in the right choir with my teachers, Fathers Agapios, Maksimos, Bartholomeos, and Nikodemos, and others. Not that I was chanting much—I would on occasion be supporting the drone keepers (isokrátes)— but the monks were aware of the duration of my stay, and the most suitable spot to observe and make recordings was deemed to be in the choir. This gave me the advantage of being able to direct questions concerning the service and chanting to the monks, and of being able to observe and participate as much as I (as a non-Orthodox person) was allowed, regardless of how crowded the church might be. The heavenly hierarchical order is illustrated on the inner walls of the nave. The Pantocrator (Pantokrátoros, Christ the Almighty) is placed on the inside of the cupola, whence he looks down on everybody and everything with serious eyes. “You cannot hide yourself, nor your feelings and thoughts, from him,” one monk tells me as he lays a firm hand on my shoulder. Next in the hierarchy are the angels and the apostles. The apostles are placed between the windows just below the cupola, looking out of the window, symbolizing the fact that they are spreading the word of Christ around the world. Then the evangelists and the greater saints are depicted. On the floor, the living congregation is thus surrounded by the entire “family” (oikogéneia) of the Orthodox Christian tradition, a term frequently used by the monks themselves. The heavenly hierarchy is thus pictured on the walls vertically. The hierarchy is also depicted horizontally. The first church room, the exonarthex (placed outdoors at Vatopaidi, as mentioned), marks the border separating the unfaithful from the catechumen, those who prepare for baptism. At the lití, or the esonarthex, the wall paintings depict the lesser saints and martyrs (osíoi). The next room, the mesonyktikón, takes its name from the services held there, that is, the midnight service, and the first hours. For practical reasons, the midnight service is held today immediately before the órthros (morning service). The Royal Doors lead into the naós, where the life of Christ is pictured under the evangelists. The Holy Doors lead into the ieró, the holy altar room, which is hidden from the sight of the attendees behind the “wall,” thus dividing the naós in two. There are two rooms on either side of the altar. To the left of the

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altar is the proskomidí (offertory), where the priest makes his preparations, and, to the right, the skevofylákio (sacristy), where the sacred vessels and utensils are stored. Only priests enter the ieró. Sensing the Sacred Space The church is spatially saturated with notions of tradition, sacredness, and hierarchy, and with a certain sensuality. Bodily gestures, the smell of oil and beeswax, the kissing of the icons, the lights being lit and blown out, all allow participants not only to act but sense faith and perform the divine present in a state of spiritual attention. My use of the term sensuality might best be understood from the point of view of my experience of the (Danish) Protestant Church, the church room of which consists of white walls scarcely decorated with modern spiritual art, and electric “candle lights.” This protestant room, stripped of hierarchy and tradition, celebrates and facilitates worshippers’ individual relationships with God. By contrast, the space of the Orthodox church reminds the worshipper—through its rich sensory ordering—of his place in the heavenly order, as well as in the immediate social, monastic order. At my second visit to the monastery of Grigoriou (May 1997), Mount Athos is still new to me. A newcomer, a young man with a beautiful black beard and vivid eyes, approaches me. He tells me that my eyes give away my innermost longings: he can see that I am searching, longing for something. Perhaps I want to talk? I tell him about my interest in Byzantine chant and how I see Orthodox spirituality appealing to the bodily senses in a way foreign to me. I also tell him how I was deeply moved by experiencing the monks, even the elders, with tears in their eyes at the end of the Mass earlier this day. I was touched to see these serious and bearded faces crying. He asserts that their eyes were touched by divine breath, as the Holy Spirit showed its presence very strongly today. Perhaps that is why I, too, have been “touched” (dakrýzo) or “moved” (syngkinó)? I am looking for the grain of the Byzantine voice, I answer him, and I believe I’ve heard it, though I do not know the words to describe it yet. The novice, though, believes I am looking for something else. By approaching Byzantine chant, he insists, I am approaching true faith and the All Holy Mother of Christ. In Protestantism, he argues, there are only Father and Son, and he is certain that I am here at the mountain looking for the mother and her “children,” the big family of saints. Our conversation is taking a turn, I notice, and I reply that if the spirit of God is there, why would anybody need icons of saints and brass candelabra and stuff to fill the space of the church? Only later I understood how much I was talking like a true protestant, regardless of how little or much of a religious person I consider myself to be.

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But here I am, talking about the spirit of God as the essence of faith, making it all too clear how Protestantism shapes my cultural background. I realize also how my own experience as a church musician shapes my preconceptions of “other” Christian traditions. There is no neutral position from which to grasp religious tradition and sacred music—even as I claim the position of a rational academic, my biases impinge on any attempt to understand. What meets my eyes, ears, and other senses when I enter the katholikón at Vatopaidi is a striking contrast. Besides the wall paintings there are icons everywhere on the walls, at the ikonostásia and the chorós, the latter being a huge brass ring hanging from the roof above the center of the naós. Lights are significant: candles and oil lamps are everywhere, some small, some huge. These are lit and blown out according to the rules and rhythm of the rite. The huge oil lamps are called polyeleoi, a name that at some monasteries has a double meaning: it refers both to the all-merciful God and to “much oil” (polý ládi), an allegory of heavenly richness. Semantics would reveal the incorrectness of this, but semantics would also miss the point here: there is a phonetic likeness between the words, which emphasizes the sacred significance of olive oil. The smell of heated and burned olive oil is prominent in the church, like the fragrance of the incense and the candle beeswax. For the sense of taste there is the bread and wine offered at the Holy Communion. And for the sense of touch, pilgrims and monks kiss the icons, light candles, and make genuflections or prostrations, an act of kneeling down while worshipping, kissing the floor or touching it with the forehead. Finally, the sense of hearing is engaged by the everyday performance of live chanting, the Byzantine music, the readings and prayers. One day I met with Father Nikodemos. We talked about chanting and the notion of sensibility in Orthodox Christianity, and he said: We know from the Old Testament that God likes three things: Beautiful sound, light, and fragrance. . . . But, Alas! Sometimes the smell of the incense is not very nice, and often we don’t chant as beautiful as we are able. Kýrie eléison! . . . One censer sounds and looks like a little locomotive, “tf-tf-tf,” as it runs through the church and makes a lot of smoke.4

The faithful participate in the spiritual rite by hearing it, seeing it, smelling it, touching it, and tasting it. In this sense, the Orthodox Church as space offers a radical experience of otherness, of sacredness. The appeal to the senses invites the participants to experience the mysteries of Orthodox Christianity in their bodies. Thus they come to understand the importance of the Orthodox hierarchy and its embodiment in the hierotopy (Lidov 2004), the sacred space of the church.

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QUIETUDE: SPIRITUAL SILENCE Spiritual silence, known as hesychia, or isichía, is something quite different from the silence I experienced on the paths in the midst of the Athonite wilderness. Frequent poetic and spiritual references to undisturbed nature and the isolated desert, however, suggest certain metaphorical and pragmatic resemblances. To Father Iakovos at the monastery of Iviron, contemplating God’s creatures in the wild, such as watching birds, is an implicit way of “listening to God.” Being an amateur ornithologist myself, I would often talk with Father Iakovos about birds, their singing, and the beauty of their feathers and flight. Once he took me with him to the spot where he used to watch the local Athonite variant of the Buteo buteo (common buzzard) foraging. We heard its call cutting through the wind and stayed there for a while, doing absolutely nothing other than contemplating, listening, hoping to see and hear the bird of prey once more. It didn’t show. Silence is a spiritual concept in Orthodox Christianity, and denotes a special attitude toward God. In one of his publications, the abbot of Iviron, Father Vasileios, describes spiritual silence thus: “Hesychia: . . . It is the ‘mental quietude’ or ‘inner tranquillity’ of Orthodox spiritual tradition, the ‘solitude of silence’ of the heart when thoughts (logismoi) do not trouble it. . . . Not simply ‘silence’ but an attitude of listening to God, and of openness to him” (Vasileios 1996: 7, n. 2). Quietude is something other than silence. Silence is the absence of words. Quietude refers to a condition undisturbed by anthropogenic sound. It describes an inner stillness related to the absence of physical sound, which the monks would honor by not speaking, by not producing vocal sounds. Applying this to the spiritual understanding of the term, a monk would practice quietude when alone, and often in a remote area. The southern tip of the peninsula, the most inaccessible part of Athos, is called the desert (érimos). Silence does not imply a soundless world. Living in quietude means to dwell in nature, letting oneself be embraced by nature’s multiple sounds and one’s own breath and pulse, and, in a modern sense of the word, being distant from the noises of machinery, cars, and even—at least for modern Mount Athos—the disturbance of electric light. In a practical sense, it also implies absence from one’s brethren, and being released from the obligations that living in a coenobium demands. Spiritual quietude thus involves immediate separation from social groups, and societal and communicative sound. In a word, quietude is an internal state in which the monk must face God alone and wordless. In quietude the monk examines himself, “fighting his passions more deeply and purifying his heart more fully, so as to be found worthy of beholding God,” as

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Georgios Mantzaridis (1997a: 42) has it. Hesychía, therefore, implies a silence that is both intended and desired. During fieldwork I never had the opportunity to visit hesychasts (i.e., practitioners of hesychía), as the hermits living in solitude and silence are called. However, I experienced elder monks coming to the monastery to which their dwellings adhere for feasts, vigils, and weekend services—a practice revealing that the solitary life is balanced by community life. In his study on hesychasm and psalmody, Alexander Lingas identifies this practice as “neo-Sabaitic” (i.e., first adopted at Athos in the late 12th century), saying that it “accommodated a variety of monastic forms of life, and was therefore arguably better suited in the long run to the realities of the Holy Mountain than the tightly organized Stoudite monasticism that had been imported by St. Athanasios the Athonite” (1996: 158–59).5 Lingas mentions the famous Byzantine composers Ioannis Koukouzelis and Gregorios Palamas as two solid examples of the 14th-century practice of hesychasm. They were both protopsáltes at the Great Lavra monastery. However, they would spend weekdays outside the monastery walls, practising hesychía while composing (Lingas 1996: 155, 159). What is gained from chanting and listening to chanting? Although practicing hesychía by withdrawing to the desert is recommended only to spiritually adept monks (and only by the blessing of the abbot), the forerunners of hesychasm have recommended that hesychasts also go to church on saints’ feast days, attend agrypníes (all-night vigils), and listen to psalmody. As a result, as Lingas paraphrases Theoleptos, “one’s soul will find healing and salvation” (1996: 156).6 Yet psalmody should be practiced both in choir during services and “alone in one’s cell at night with a quiet voice” (Lingas 1996: 157). The agrypnía (probably of Palestinian origin), with its lengthy recitation and (from the first half of the 14th century) kalophonic (i.e., highly melismatic) psalmody, can thus be seen as an ascetic exercise, which was also its original meaning, involving the recitation of the entire biblical Psalter in the course of one night.7 Byzantine psalmody and hesychasm are deeply connected. It seems that “neo-Sabaitic” hesychast monasticism was synthesized with what has been referred to as the “flourishing renaissance” of Byzantine music (Conomos 1985: 68) or even the Byzantine-musical “ars nova” (Williams 1968: 388).8 Hesychast monasticism resulted in what is commonly understood today as Athonite or “hagiorite” (meaning “from the Holy Mountain”) monasticism (Taft 1992: 78), which is also the beginning of the last chapter of the formative period of the Byzantine rite.9 Whereas much remains to be said about silence, in the next section I want to elaborate further on the meaning of one particular aspect of the kalophonic style of chanting, the so-called nonsense syllables from the melismatic repertoire. Rather than speaking of non-sense, I suggest that the meaning of

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these syllables is to be found in the spiritual context (in extrasyllabic domains), where they conflate with notions of silence and the experience of divine beauty, the expression of which is only possible in a realm lying beyond intelligible speech. Making Sense of Nonsense Syllables In Byzantine-music studies much has been said about the “nonsense syllables” in melismatic chant originating in the 14th-century Byzantine “ars nova.” These are extra syllables added into the words of the poetic text. The results are repetitious and nonsensical, as the musical pronunciation of these is considerably prolonged. In his study of Ottoman detailed poetic settings, Owen Wright refers to a similar phenomenon as “prolongation syllables” (1996: 465). The term nonsense syllables is generally applied by Byzantine scholars to describe textless vocalizations known as kratémata or teretísmata.10 This is also the term the monks use; whereas these vocalizations are only on occasion described as anóites syllavés (“meaningless syllables,” in everyday speech). But what is the function and what is the meaning of these syllables? Since Milos Velimirovic, giving free reign to his imagination, suggested the phenomenon was a “scribal joke” (1973: 179), more light has been brought upon the issue. There is often a practical aspect to chanting: “The title Kratemata is derived from the function of these so-called nonsense syllables in Byzantine chant: that is, to prolong or to keep the melody from moving” (Touliatos 1989: 239).11 Based on extensive studies of the mid-14th-century musical innovations of Koukouzelis, Edward Williams describes the melismatic style not only as a new style distinguished by vocal virtuosity, but also as a musical reform, which functioned as a “vehicle for prodigious singers” to practice their “virtuoso art” (1968: 298).12 Diane Touliatos suggests that the function of the teretismata in mid-15th-century Byzantium is no different from that in antiquity, namely, that they served as an oral substitute for instrumental music (1989: 241). Such a formalistic comparison presumes a shared set of meanings and practices between the two very different cultural, political, and religious contexts, the one Greek pre-Christian polytheism, and the other Christian Orthodoxy. The presumption is not entirely unproblematic. That performance practices in both cultures involve “nonsense syllables” might of course point to certain similarities, but hardly implies similarity in the meaning or significance of the syllables. As Lingas in his study of the relations between hesychasm and psalmody argues, these descriptions do not do much to define the spiritual and liturgical context (1996: 156). So what, then, is the significance of these so-called nonsense syllables?

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In Byzantine spiritual practice, prayer is related metaphorically to the heart, not to the intellect. The notion of “nonsense” therefore fails to comprehend the possible meanings of these syllables to worshippers in the Byzantine/ Orthodox tradition. Viewed as structural units, the syllables themselves have no lexical or semantic meaning. They certainly create fantastical polysyllabic words, but that does not render them musically or spiritually meaningless. The syllables point to spiritual meanings beyond themselves, and this is why they must be considered in close relation to the spiritual context. The conjunction of the wordless and sacred silence is aptly described by the typikáris at Iviron monastery, Father Christophoros: Humans communicate with words. When we pray, and use our voice to praise the Lord, we have taken the first step toward the reunion with him. However, the next step is to let the prayers, the word of the Lord, dwell in your heart permanently. Then you “speak” to God without words. Words are not important. And the teretismata in the music symbolize precisely that kind of wordless communication. When you experience divine light, it is so beautiful that you do not know what to say. Words become insignificant. This is the second step on the ascension toward the reunion with God. As for the third step, well . . . man has not reached so far yet.13

The words themselves are insignificant. Yet they make plenty of sense in Orthodox spirituality. I increasingly think of the syllables in terms of meaningfreedom, rather than meaninglessness. The kratémata help the faithful to pray and spiritually prepare for Communion, for the reunion with God. Hence meaning-free syllables might well be understood as sacred language “encoded” in music, which have, at least since the 14th century, contributed to the cultural and sociolinguistic (i.e., beyond words) basis of religious experience (cf. Bohlman 2006: 9). Hence, the function of the kratemata is not only to cater for prayer and fill out the time during processions or Communion. They are themselves a way of sounding spiritual meaning, a symbolic utterance of the heart’s longing for God as expressed in the divine ritual. Athonite monks perceive themselves as imitating or mimicking the angels and the cherubs, striving for perfection, just as the heavenly Father is considered to represent perfection. This is a common way for the monks to describe monastic efforts to cultivate God-given talents. With reference to the 17thcentury Cretan monk, Gerasimos, Touliatos points to the Christian concept of “wordless jubilation” by those “who attempt to imitate the singing of angels.” As the historical Gerasimos phrased it, the “terere” refers to “the angels who chant with wordless sounds” (Touliatos 1989: 240).14 An angelic imitativeness is at play here, supporting the interpretation of the meaning-free syllables as an expression of wordless jubilation. Here the mimicking of angels is concretized

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in the musical performance of the wordless syllables. But more than representing a spiritual meaning without the mediation of speech, the vocal realization of these syllables actually enacts the spiritual, rendering it in concrete form. They show in performance how to speak with God without speaking. It is therefore most productive to conceptualize the syllables as performative (cf. Kapchan 2007: 66, 68), and not as text to make sense or nonsense of. Lingas characterizes the meaning of the syllables as ecstatic confession for the love of the Mother of God (1996: 163). It is beyond argument that the invention of kratemata or teretismata profoundly altered the reciprocity between words and melody in Byzantine chant. Lingas shows in his study how melismatic singing––what I term meaning-free syllables above––is related to hesychasm with their common denominator “in the artistic, liturgical, and even spiritual freedom presupposed by the music” (1996: 168). Furthermore, Lingas’s overview “of the relationship between hesychasm and psalmody in 14th-century Byzantium has shown that psalmody in its various forms was considered an important monastic virtue which always held the possibility of being infused with true contemplation, provided that it was practised with the mind and heart set on God” (Lingas 1996: 167). As Lingas concludes: “Hesychasm insists on God’s direct accessibility to mortal men in this life” (1996: 168). This idea is supported by Father Vasileios’s definition of hesychía (quoted above) as an inner tranquillity where thoughts, or words, do not trouble men. Put differently, it is a means of learning how to open up the heart––a symbolic location where rational words are no longer meaningful––and communicate with God. Turning things upside down in this way, intelligible words become nonsense in divine communication, and meaning-free syllables become a way for man to free himself from worldly concepts, in fact a means to insist on a paralinguistic relation with the divine. The meaning-free syllables in the teretismata or kratemata can therefore be understood to represent the attitude of “direct listening” to the sweet voice—not the words—of God. Fieldwork focusing on music and musical meaning often turns into a search for words: words to explain, words to describe, the interlocutors’ own words to add color and authenticity to the ethnographic analysis. In the field, the desire for words rarely passes unnoticed. Father Agapios reminded me from time to time not to focus so hard on finding words to explain everything in Byzantine music: If you want to speak to God, you must speak with your heart. . . . Love! You must find love. Don’t waste your time looking for words. . . . You must learn how to pray—first with the right words, then without them. . . . And here we are, talking about music theory! You see, studying Byzantine

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music without living the words is like, how should I put it, studying theology while drinking and smoking . . . you have to live it!15

These words might be enjoyed for their beauty, but they also point to the limitations of my research, as I am not baptized into the tradition. Therefore, as Father Agapios explained to me, I would never understand the music spiritually. To put it more technically, I would never succeed in the “acquisition of appropriate dispositions” (Asad 1987: 193) that might enable me to know the music that way. Father Agapios’s words also express a striking insistence on the sacredness of chant, and this, I believe, might not have been so clearly expressed had my position as religious outsider changed. Thus the tension between the scholarly pursuit of musical meaning and the monastic interest in baptizing the scholar might be understood as a highly productive one, though it was not always, in practice, unproblematic or sustainable. The Cherubic Hymn: Meaning-Free Syllables in Practice The cherubic hymn (cheroubikón) is an example from the Byzantine musical repertoire with a plenitude of such meaning-free syllables. The example I explore here is taken from my own fieldwork recordings and illustrates the issue well. It is also full of information about the relationship between musical notation and performance. The cheroubikón of Bereketis is performed in a variant of the first plagal mode, pentáfonos, a mode which, according to the composer, is also known as the Turkish makam acem (figure 6.2; CD track 14). Father Nikodemos assured me that this modal variant is relatively rare at Mount Athos.16 The first plagal pentáfonos mode is a mixture of soft and hard diatonic genera manifested in the two disjunctive tetrachords. The íson is at the tonal center (D in the transcription), at the basis of the soft diatonic genos. The “ruling note” (despózontos fthóngos) of the B-flat (halftone) is a prominent feature of the hard diatonic genos (for example, the syllables “Oi ta” at 00:17), creating what in Western terms is an interval of a minor sixth that predominates throughout the piece, and is found in the lowermost and uppermost parts of the mode (for example, the syllables “che-rou” at 01:27). The cheroubikón is chanted at the heart of the liturgy, the Holy Communion, when the host and the chalice are brought to the altar in procession. At this point in the liturgy, the drama is performed in chant and gesture while the Eucharist is prepared by the priest. The following is an English translation of the example, known in English as the Cherubic Hymn: Let us, who mystically represent the Cherubim / And chant the thrice-holy hymn to the life giving Trinity, / Put away all worldly care so that we may

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Figure 6.2. A performance-based transcription of Bereketis’s Cherubic hymn: Empty spots mark the phrases that were cut out.

receive the King of all. [Oi ta Cherouvím mystikós eikonízontes kai ti zoopoió triádi ton triságion ýmnon prosádontes, pásan tin viotikín apothómetha mérimnan, os tov Vasiléa ton ólon ypodeksómeni.] (Elias 2000: 137–39).

At this point the Cherubic Hymn is interrupted, and the procession of the Great Introit takes place, representing the funeral of Christ. The choir rarely completes the hymn, and the protopsáltis usually recites the remaining words swiftly and in a quiet voice. The priest or the deacon then says, aloud: “May the Lord, our God, remember us all in His Kingdom, now and forever, and from all ages to all ages.” This initiates the sacred moment, where the worshippers, “recalling Christ, Who of His own free will suffered and died on the Cross for our sins, stand with their heads bowed in awe and reverence, make the sign of the Cross and pray the words of the penitent thief: Lord, remember me in Thy Kingdom [Mnisthití mou, Kýrie, en ti Basileía Sou] (Luke 23:42)” (Elias 2000: 138–39).

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Then the priest enters the sanctuary and places the Holy Gifts on the altar symbolizing the tomb of Christ. He covers the gifts with the kálymma, or cloth-covers, also called the “air,” an act that symbolizes the burial of Christ. Then the choir completes the cheroubikón, saying out loud: “Invisibly escorted by the Angelic Orders / Alleluia. [Tais angelikaís aorátos doryforoúmenon táksesin. Alliloúïa]” (Elias 2000: 140–41). The cheroubikón is a central spiritual part of the Orthodox rite, and it is one of the musical high points of the Mass, often involving performances of some of the most grandiose and elaborate Byzantine compositions. There is a higher degree of freedom in the decision making at this point, in comparison to other parts of the service, concerning the style and character of the composition. The “classic, but very romantic style” of Bereketis’s compositions, as Father Nikodemos characterizes them, are an example.17 In general, the compositions of Bereketis, whose teacher was Damianos Vatopaidinos (see figure 2.4), have a special status at Vatopaidi due to his affiliation with the monastery.

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I was told that the actual performance would follow the original musical notation, a copy of which I was presented with as a gift. In attempting to follow the lines of Byzantine musical notation, I noticed that entire sections of the notated piece would be skipped during the performance, which explained why I kept losing my place. I came to know the piece better by listening to my recording of it carefully and transcribing it. In the transcription of the first two minutes of the recording (figure 6.2), I have marked the skipped parts with a blank space (since they were not performed), and only included the original notation to illustrate what was skipped. Either the protopsáltis must have pointed out the relevant lines in the book during performance, or the monks decided what to cut prior to performance. I have included the example to illustrate the dynamic relationship between notation and performance practice. Notation, this example shows, does not represent actual performance. This is especially true for the kalophonic, or melodically elaborate, repertoire of the Papadiké, such as the cheroubiká. These pieces are rarely performed in their entirety; they are usually adjusted to fit the duration of the procession and other liturgical elements. During the performance of the Cherubic Hymn the monks gather in the right choir, leaving space for a procession that starts from the left of the offertory door, then moves to the middle of the nave, after which it turns toward the altar. Figure 6.3 is a photograph showing the monks placed in the right choir during the performance of a cheroubikón.

Figure 6.3. Vatopaidian Fathers performing a Cherubic hymn at the Divine Liturgy in the main church, November 2000 (courtesy of Toptsidis Photo).

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Father Georgios, in the middle with his hands raised, is the leading protopsáltis here. To the left are the psáltes; some of the monks on the right are isokrátes. The photograph shows the relatively small size of the music book, the number of monks, their distance from and their acute angle to the lectern. The monks standing in the second and third positions may actually be unable to read the musical notation.18 These monks would probably be following the melodic movements of the leading cantors and the hand gestures of the leading protopsáltis. Two aspects of this situation make it easier for the choir to follow a hymn even when unable to read notation: first, the hand gestures, and second, the fact that Byzantine music consists to a high degree of melodic formula. Once these are at play in performance, an experienced choir will know exactly how the melodic phrase is supposed to move and end. In everyday speech, monks often refer to such phrases as “classical melodic lines” (klassikés melodikés grammés), “phrases” ( fráseis), or “formula” ( fórmula).19 The Chronotope of Religious Time The concept of the chronotope (Bakhtin 1981: 84ff.), notably the chronotope of religious time (Weisethaunet 1998: 2), is especially helpful to the study of sacred music such as Byzantine chant.20 This circumscribes the relational, temporal, and spatial field of action, where spiritual sentiments are embodied. Chronotope literally means “time-space” (chronos, “time”; topos, “place”), and describes the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships. But the chronotope is also a bodily category: it locates performance in time, place, and the body. By including two examples from the Divine Liturgy, notions of silence and meaning-free syllables and spiritually saturated moments at the service are brought together. In the chronotope of religious time, the present dissolves into the past, and the past becomes real and embodied, thus acquiring significance. As monks today would put it, in Orthodox spiritual terms, we (those present and participating) are the ones who witness the Crucifixion, we deny our true selves, and we express our devotion to the son of God who took our sins upon his shoulders for our sake, showing a path toward salvation. In line with this view, sin is a precondition of humanity. According to Orthodox belief, as Father Christophoros explained to me one night at Iviron monastery, “ever since the Fall man is born a sinner, and he must cultivate all his talents and gifts in the best way possible, and pray continuously, every day, for forgiveness.”21 Born as sinners, the best human beings can do with their voice is to chant God’s grace while praying, “speaking” with the heart without the mediation of speech. In the chronotope of religious time, comprising music, liturgy, and spirituality, time is not important; it is suspended. What matters is life and the afterlife. Besides combining spatial and temporal factors, the

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chronotope also evaluates their significance or meaning as judged from a particular point of view. “What marks the necessary presence of a human subject in both is the assumption that time and space are never merely temporal or spatial, but axiological as well” (Holquist 2002: 152). Thus chronotopes are tied up with values, meanings, and judgments about particular times, particular places, and particular individual characters. Virtuosity and Authority What does the performance of the cheroubikón mean? Bereketis’s cheroubikón is authoritative and musically compelling. The monks perform in a virtuosic manner. When viewed as part of the larger whole that constitutes the Byzantine/Orthodox tradition, the performance is not merely a performance of Byzantine music, but part of a process of creating social and spiritual life in time and space and, by extension, a living spiritual community. The Athonite monks bring their bodies into performance: they chant, pray, and move around in the church according to strict rules of ritual performance, with an air of devotion and a solemn attitude. They adorn icons, kiss the hand of the abbot, light and put out candles and oil lamps. They bring together their bodies with the divine order of things that forms the sense of the divine presence. The procession of the cheroubikón is a commemoration of the funeral of Christ. But the funeral of Christ did not only take place in the past; it takes place here and now, as the monks initiate their performance. After the funeral, the priest will enter the “tomb” in the church, symbolized by the Holy Gifts placed on the altar—the body and blood of Christ. The solemnity and seriousness of the funeral of Christ become elements of its aesthetic experience that we identify as its pastness (cf. Trilling 1970 [1942]). Those who are present are witnesses. The experience and meaning of Christ’s funeral are inscribed into the present, expressed in bodily movement and vocal sounding. The Byzantine musical system is tight, and the elements of elaboration are strictly controlled by the leading protopsáltis. There are limits to improvisation and the negotiation of multiple meanings in the performance of the cheroubikón. Opportunities to do so decrease as the monks make their authority felt in the performance. Their task is to mediate the complex relation between community and God, empowered as they are, by God, to facilitate the task through iconic, metaphoric, and embodied gestures. The chronotope of religious time relates to collective ritual time-place categories that have a significant relevance in the context of this study of Byzantine music. Ritual performance not only reflects social organization and an experience of time, but constructs it (Weisethaunet 1998: 175, 177). It also constructs memory. The creation of the world by God in seven days, the fall

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of man, the Gospels, the lives of the saints and of monks who have lived their lives and passed away: these are examples of what the monks commemorate and live every day. In that way, the experiences, values, and meanings of multiple pasts (ever since the ultimate past) are inscribed into the present—in the chronotope of religious time—and promise that the future will be linked to the same past. This is an important trait of Byzantine musical tradition and of Athonite monasticism in particular and Orthodoxy in general. The timelessness ascribed to Byzantine music forms a fundamental, epic discourse implying a supposedly unbroken historical continuity and a purity of expression, which creates the “time depth” of Byzantine music and forms its aesthetic and ethical code (cf. Livingston 1999: 69, 74).22 The monks interpret the past through performance in order to transform their bodies and the spiritual space that they occupy (cf. Bohlman 1997: 155). When praying and chanting in the katholikón, both monks and pilgrims behave according to the monastic hierarchy, which ascribes performative roles in the rituals, in the articulation of sacred texts, in the remembrance of the words and deeds of the saints and martyrs, and in the gospels and the mysteries. The interaction of ecclesiastical space, Byzantine music, and Orthodox ritual on the body is profound, and all partake in the shaping, or reshaping, of the chronotope of religious time. Thus music lends meaning to the spaces of the past through performance, which Philip Bohlman, among others, emphasizes as a bodily, a physical, meaning expressed by the physicality and concreteness of performance (Bohlman 1997: 154ff.). Performance is a means of producing locality (cf. Appadurai 1996: 178–99), of creating a cohesive sense of community among those who stay at the monastery and take part in the service. The cheroubikón is performed in ritual and spiritual contexts, in the chronotope of religious time. But ritual practice (or, rather, the performance of sacred time) overlaps with the musical narration of the past (or the performance of historical time) and the social time in which it is embodied and situated. These temporalities are, as Andre Gingrich emphasizes, “partially connected,” and the heterogeneity of such temporalities “is rarely unstructured, but rather is ordered in hierarchies of values and contexts” (1994: 176). Religious music, woven into the everyday by congregational practice, constantly provides different ways of entering and exiting the experiences of history and metaphorically proffering them sacred significance (cf. Bohlman 2006: 10). As the Cherubic Hymn is performed in the space of the church and the monastery participates in the production of locality and sociality, each performance produces simultaneously Vatopaidiness, Athoniteness, and Orthodox spiritual identity, creating community by uniting monks and visitors in a shared experience of the sacred moment.

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The Performance of Ritual Silence Silence is related to Byzantine chant in a number of ways. The spiritual implications of the meaning-free syllables in melismatic melodies have been discussed above. Other examples include moments in the service that call for humbleness, to the utmost of the participants’ power, in performance, attitude, and conduct. At Vatopaidi, services are occasionally held at the monastery’s nineteen small chapels (several services are run simultaneously), and not in the katholikón. On such occasions the psáltes split up into smaller groups, causing a natural decrease in the sound volume in each chapel. In addition, the psalmody is performed in a simpler manner, with only one or two leading voices and one or two voices to keep the isokrátema. Silence is central to the Holy Eucharist. What happens when the fieldworker records silence? The following example serves as a kind of experiment. It attempts to capture the experience of silence and attitudes of humility in the Divine Liturgy following the Cherubic Hymn. The hymn “Se ymnoumen” (“We Praise Thee”) is, in terms of its poetry, a relatively simple hymn of thanksgiving performed during the Holy Eucharist, in the second part of the Divine Liturgy. In the recording (CD track 15),23 we hear the voice of the hegoúmenos Ephraim of Vatopaidi; the hymn is chanted by a solo monk. The Holy Eucharist is consummated by an extensive prayer, known as the Eucharistic or Thanksgiving Prayer. Parts of this prayer are read aloud by the priest; other parts are chanted by the choir. As the ritual reaches the moment of consummation, the priest intones as follows (CD track 15): Take, eat, this is my Body, which is broken for you, for the remission of sins. . . . Drink of it all of you, this is my Blood of the New Testament, Which is shed for you and for many, for the remission of sins. [Lávete, fágete, toutó mou ésti to sóma, to ypér ymón klómenon eis áfesin amartión. . . . Píete eks autoú pántes, toutó ésti to aimá Mou, to tis Kainís Diathíkis, to ypér ymón kai pollón ekchynómenon eis áfesin amartión.]24

The priest then lifts up the gifts, making the sign of the cross, signifying that the sacrifice of the altar is the sacrifice of the Cross: “Thine own of Thine own we offer to Thee, in all (time) and for all (kindness to us). [Ta Sa ek ton Son Soi prosféromen katá pánta diá pánta.]” The consummation of the Holy Eucharist is a moment in the Divine Liturgy marked by its solemnity, as the ritual at this point invites those present to participate in the anamnesis of the sufferings of Christ, his death, and his resurrection. Before the priest invokes the Holy Spirit to come upon him and the holy bread and the chalice are blessed, the choir performs the hymn “Se ymnoumen” (CD track 15, 01:10): “We praise Thee, we bless Thee, / We give

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thanks to Thee, O Lord, / And we pray to Thee, O our God. [Se ymnoúmen, Se evlogoúmen, Soi evcharistoúmen, Kýrie, kai deómetha Sou, o Theós imón.]” I have frequently experienced this hymn being chanted at a somewhat lower volume than the habitual full-bodied performance in the katholikón at the monastery. At the more simple services at the chapels of the monastery, where the room is smaller and all the people present are physically close to one another, even the chanting is, in a sense, more intimate. Performing the hymn sotto voce must, to the best of my knowledge, be understood as a rather recent practice. It has, though, found its way into Elias’s Divine Liturgy Explained, which informs the reader that the thanksgiving hymn is to be performed in a “melodic and reverent tone” (2000: 165). The pious quality of this performance does not seem to have much in common with traditional attitudes toward Byzantine chant in Greece. However, monks and pilgrims at Vatopaidi find it beautiful and sincere, and cherish it for its spiritual sensitivity. Silence, at or surrounding such moments, is not at all “silent.” It is, rather, a modality of spiritual attention and participation. Here is how I recalled in my diary the experience of what I recorded: There are creaking sounds from the old, wooden stalls and the wooden parts of the floor of the chapel. The sound is caused by monks and pilgrims kneeling down. Some monks are bending over their knees, which are resting on the floor. The experience of silence is thick. Nobody makes a sound but the creaking wood and the clothes that cover the moving bodies. Silent bodies.25

I was trying very hard, at that moment, to avoid making a noise while handling my coat and microphone, all the while participating in the genuflexion exercise on the floor. Listening to the sounds on the recording, I am struck by the fact that the bodies present were not silent in any simple auditory sense. Winter clothing makes a great deal of noise at such moments; the floor creaks as devout bodies move. The “silent” quality of the moment is, rather, to be understood in terms of a radical leveling. The monks wear a black cowl at services, which covers their long hair (usually taken up at the back of the neck). The only time the monks take off their headgear, which distinguishes monks from everybody else, is at this point during the Eucharist. They let it rest on one shoulder while performing the act of prostration and veneration. In this liminal moment, as we are all positioned down on the floor together, contemplating Christ on the cross, monks, laymen, and pilgrims are all equal, a fact symbolized and embodied by the bareheaded monks as they bow before the son of God. In retrospect, I realize I have participated in a socially shared spiritual moment, a moment of “silence” so intense that I hardly dared to breathe.

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Spiritual sentiments and affects, such as beholding and being moved by the grace and beauty of God, as shown in this example, are not raw, precultural, and universal substrates (Appadurai 1996: 147). They are, rather, learned through the practice and simultaneous appropriation of Christian Orthodox virtues such as humility and obedience proffered by audition. What Talal Asad and Peter van der Veer have argued for medieval monks, that the formation of Christian virtues required a particular program of disciplinary practices “aimed to construct and reorganize distinctive emotions—desire, humility, and remorse—on which the central Christian virtue of obedience to God depended” (van der Veer 1989: 460), serves equally well to create an understanding of the complex interplay of spirituality, emotion, and authority in contemporary Orthodox monastic practices. That nothing is said in moments of silence (cf. Hastrup 1990: 51) does not imply that all understanding ceases. There is plenty to understand in that which is not said, in that which has no immediate textual meaning, but is perhaps implied through mimicry or gesture or, for example, in the experience of silence or of wordless jubilation in music, or the experience of a group of people trying to be silent, to express silence in their bodily attitude and gesture. Silence, gesticulation, and experiencing the limits of understanding are familiar issues to the ethnomusicologist. The fieldworker seeks an understanding by living with other people, sometimes in conversation, but often also in silence. Martin Buber, another theorist of dialogue, emphasizes the dialogical character of silence, or silent being: “Dialogue can be silence. . . . We could sit together, or rather walk together in silence and that could be a dialogue” (1988 [1965]: 165). The very fact that (musical) anthropologists have to write cultures in order to communicate their understanding of the other implies that we verbalize silence and the unspoken, which is only possible by a creative coauthoring with the culture one studies in order to allegorically invoke the context of silence for the purpose of facilitating the imaginary of the reader. In the real world, according to Kirsten Hastrup, silences remain unspoken; no speech act or event is constituted that can be represented. “Ultimately,” Hastrup argues, “this is why we can never actually represent other cultures, only evoke them. In language we can encircle the lived reality, but it remains a shadow in our text. Life is no text, and is not reducible to one” (1990: 53). This is why the writing of culture is a creative process, and not mere translation. As ethnomusicologists we can only conjure musical cultures and spiritual silences into being by telling them, or recreating them in our own language, using allegories and other signifying practices based on our fieldwork experiences. Etymologically, liturgy means “work for the benefit of the community” (i.e., Gr. leítos, meaning “public” or “common,” and érgon, meaning “work”). Since the time of the New Testament it has been known as the “Divine Lit-

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urgy,” signifying that the service “is filled with memories of our Lord’s Life and teachings from His Nativity to his Ascension into Heaven” (Elias 2000: 3). In remembrance of the sacrifice of Christ, he (Christ) has offered or instituted the Eucharistic Sacrifice, and commanded of his apostles: “Do this in remembrance of me.” [Toúto poieíte eis tin emín anámnisin] (Luke 22:19). The Holy Eucharist is the repetition of the Last Supper and the Sacrifice of the Cross sacramentally repeated. Repetition, Elias emphasizes in his guide for English-speaking Orthodox Christian worshippers, means “once again made actual and present to us living today, 2,000 years after the Crucifiction” (2000: 10). The Divine Liturgy is thus the central act of Christian worship, in which worshippers show their obedience to the command of God by participating in the Holy Eucharist, which “is the highest form of Thanksgiving to God that man has in his power to render” (Elias 2000: 8). Participation in the Divine Liturgy, as illustrated above, is a powerful example of how obedience, spiritual silence, and humility are formed by cultural practices of mental and bodily discipline. Those who have confessed their sins prior to the Divine Liturgy will receive Communion, and truly participate in the divine present. Byzantine chant, then, might be understood as a practice of group discipline representing and embodying Christian virtues in musical practice. Musical practice in this context consists of musical gestures that are inscribed upon the bodily habits of the monks and visitors (cf. Asad 1983). The revived musical-performance practice can be seen as the result of common monastic group discipline and volitional disciplines of self-control (cf. Appadurai 1996: 147–48), yet musical practices are not solely to be defined in terms of inscription upon bodily habits. It is important to note that the revival of a musical tradition requires historical and musical imagination—a set of ideas, mental habits, about what to revive, and what the revived music should sound like. Such mental habits are subject to change. This way of seeing things provides a means of understanding the heated controversies that prevail in Byzantine-music performance. These might be seen as resulting from the meeting of different bodily and mental habits, different ways of “knowing” and identifying oneself with ritual, historical, and musical practice. Despite a shared cultural, musical, and religious framework, the musical tradition of the Orthodox church is, thus, embodied and performed in a complex variety of ways. The monks and visiting worshippers at a monastery show a “willingness to obey” (van der Veer 1989: 459) as they submit to discipline. From here, disciples and monks embark on a process of transforming themselves, their emotional life and habits. Far from being primordial sentiments, emotions are learned and cultivated through discourse and practice. They are culturally constructed and socially situated (Asad 1987), often lying beyond verbal concepts (Gingrich 1994: 176).

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SPIRITUAL SILENCE RECONSIDERED: ANTITHESIS TO HUMANLY PRODUCED NOISE? To monks today, the spiritual concept of silence is often conflated with the notion of silence as an antithesis to modern “noise,” traffic, and people. Some monks find it ironic that the monasteries themselves produce an increased level of technological or mechanical noise as a result of their increasingly modernized way of life. In the contemporary world, silence has become a rarity, and is turned into an ideological object of desire. Silence is often understood as a negation: absence of voices and sound, meaning that silence cannot be possessed (you cannot possess something that isn’t there). It can only be experienced. So it is a rhetorical oddity that silence can be deemed to be lost, in the way that one might lose a favorite hat. Silence, I argue in this chapter, is an Orthodox spiritual concept of inner peace and dialogue with God. Spiritual silence is never in itself; there is always somebody to whom silence speaks or means. Silence is personally and locally experienced, and socially performed as an act of group discipline. The experience of silence is chronotopic: it is experienced in time and space where it works on and is expressed by the human body. It is not surprising that disturbance of the physical silence on the peninsula comes to mirror a concern for the disturbance of spiritual tranquillity. Again, modernity understood as humanly produced noise comes to symbolize the nonspiritual, nonnatural, and nonbeautiful. The concern for silence expresses a longing that is multivalent and omnipresent, a longing for undisturbed peace and quiet, for spiritual absorption, and for an understanding of the meaning of life in God. The meaning of life in God, and the significance of the sacred in Byzantine musical practice was not, at the outset, part and parcel of my ethnomusicological approach. When I initiated fieldwork, I was focusing on tradition, revival, musical notation, and historical awareness. It was the monks’ reactions to my research, albeit hard to fathom for a rookie ethnomusicologist, that slowly made me realize I had to widen and redirect my focus—if I wanted to maintain that my aim was to understand the meaning of Byzantine music as sacred music, and understand it in its spiritual and ritual context. I conclude this chapter with an example of a reaction from a monk pointing to the differences that often exist in fieldwork between a researcher’s preconceptions and those of culture members, whose life this fieldwork is all about, and who demand to be taken seriously. On my first visit to Mount Athos in 1997, I had a conversation with Father Vasileios (figure 6.4), the guest master at the monastery of Great Lavra. He was puzzled by the fact that, having demonstrated an interest in Byzantine music, I did not wish to be baptized. At the time I was not focusing on the

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Figure 6.4. Conversation with Father Vasileios at the monastery of Great Lavra, March 1997 (courtesy of Bjarke Lund Sørensen).

spiritual implications of chant. The fact clearly did not escape Father Vasileios’s attention: I don’t understand . . . if you don’t want to be baptized, and if you won’t chant for others in Denmark, then learning Byzantine psalmody is pointless! What you are doing, young man, does not make any sense. You cannot describe the music outside the spiritual context. If you do not believe, the music does not mean anything; you have to live the music, let it into your heart . . . like faith in God.26

NOTES 1. Field notes, June 2000. 2. Field notes, May 1997. 3. This paragraph is based on field notes, November 2000. 4. Field notes, November 2001. 5. Neo-Sabaticism refers to a revised version of the Typikon of St. Sabas of Palestinian origin, and is more “loosely structured” (Taft 1992: 79) than the urban Stoudite monasticism in Constantinople (5th century); see Taft 1992: 79–83. St. Athanasios was the founder of the first monastery at Athos, Great Lavra, in 963.

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6. Lingas refers to Theoleptos of Philadelphia, whom Gregory Palamas mentions as one of his forerunners in hesychasm; see Lingas 1996 for further references. 7. See also Taft 1988: 188, 1992: 80; Lingas 1996: 160. 8. See also Lingas 1996: 155. 9. I encourage the reader interested in the long history of the Byzantine rite to consult the extensive publications on this subject elsewhere; Taft 1988 and 1992 provide a good overview and references to further reading. 10. See for example Williams 1968; Velimirovic 1973; Touliatos 1989; Conomos 2001. Owen Wright uses the term nonsense syllables for an Ottoman poetic repertoire; see Wright 1992, 1996. See also note 14 below. 11. I understand Touliatos’s phrase “to keep the melody from moving” as a way of expressing how the melody does not progress through the poetic text as long as it lingers on the same syllable and the “nonsense syllables” are applied to prolong the piece. 12. Lingas addresses these aspects in his work on hesychasm and psalmody; see Lingas 1996: 156, n. 4; 162. 13. Field notes, June 2000. 14. The word terere (from teretísmata) has a striking resemblance to the Ottoman Turkish word for refrain (terrenum). “Nonsense” syllables were common in the Ottoman lyric musical tradition of the 16th and 17th centuries, as Owen Wright has shown (see for example Wright 1992); Laurence Picken’s study of Folk Musical Instruments of Turkey also includes the mention of the “nonsense” syllable “lu” from ancient Sumer religion (see Picken 1975); further studies would eventually shed light on the possible and plausible relations between Byzantine and Ottoman musical practices relating to the use of “nonsense” syllables. 15. Field notes, November 2001. 16. Field notes, November 2001. 17. Field notes, November 2001. 18. Field notes, November 2001. 19. It is beyond the limited space here to go into further detail concerning melodic formulas and their significance in the interplay between written and oral transmission. A further task for future study would be to provide more detail of the significance of melodic formula and cheironomía for performances of contemporary choral practices. 20. The Bakhtin expert Michael Holquist has written extensively on the concepts of Bakhtinian dialogism, or dialogical theory. For an introduction see, for example, Holquist 2002: 109–15; and Dentith 1995. 21. Field notes, June 2000. 22. Livingston (1999) credits the notion of “unbroken historical continuity and purity of expression” to Bohlman 1988 [no page], and the notion of “time depth” to Thomas Turino [unpublished manuscript]. 23. My own recording from a service at Vatopaidi, November 2001. 24. The English translation of the liturgical text used in this example is taken from Nicholas M. Elias’s The Divine Liturgy Explained (2000: 163–67). 25. Field notes, November 2001. 26. Field notes, March 1997.

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•

7

•

Conclusion

There is neither a first nor a last word. . . . Even past meanings . . . can never be stable (finalized, ended once and for all)—they will always change (be renewed) in the process of . . . future development of the dialogue . . . . Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming festival. —Mikhail Bakhtin1

I

n this book I have tracked the local transformation of performance practice in the Byzantine musical tradition at the monastery of Vatopaidi—its embodiment in the sacred space of the church, in musical writing and theory, and in its technological reconfiguration in high-quality recordings. In the process, I have discussed how concepts of sacred tradition, music revival, modernity, and musical aesthetics intertwine, and how imaginations of the past intermingle with spiritual, narrative, gestural, and musical poetics. The circulation of the music on CDs and through other media creates new ontologies that come into existence simultaneously with the ways of being that inhere in the Orthodox service, as commodification and the dissemination of these commodities creates new ways of listening. These new ways of listening spawn new Athonite imaginaries. The fact that the Vatopaidian CDs are luxurious, high-standard technical productions and based on meticulous music research positions them at the top of the Byzantine musical hierarchy. As the series title, The Vatopaidi Musical Bible, suggests, the CDs are not just recordings of Byzantine chant. Thousands of such recordings circulate in cassette, LP, and CD form. It is, literally, a recitation of holy musical scripture, with both written and audible content. The written part contains musicological explanation of notation, lyrics, and musical notation, and the audible part recordings of musical performances. It is the result of the Vatopaidian fathers’ 199

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and their urban allies’ labor, a labor that is as much scholarly as it is sacred in its aims and scopes. Moreover, the CDs in this series are presented not exclusively for a Greek audience, but also for a French- and English-speaking audience, and thus they are intended for the global market. It represents in sound and words a reaching out into the world, by which strategy, instead of closing in on itself and remaining an exclusive domain for Orthodox Greeks, it opens up and reaches into the other Europe, into the world. In this sense the CDs might be seen as a means of missionary activism. Bringing Orthodox chant into the mediated realm of global sacred music might be seen by skeptics, critics, and fundamentalists alike as a waning of the ritual world that the music originally inhabited. The CDs present an objectification of the revived sound, but one that is separated from the ritual gestures and the sacred sensorium of smell, touch, darkness, and light, and taken outside the space of the church where it partakes in the forming and sounding of the ritual. Listening to a CD is something else, and even though it might serve spiritual purposes for a devoted listener and facilitate prayer or help the devotee focus on the words of God, it also defines a new musical ontology. To invite, as the CDs do, French- and English-speaking listeners into the listening experience is not only a way of making present the monastery itself, but also a way of profiling Orthodoxy as modern, educated, aesthetically and technologically competent. It does not sound old, it sounds modern. I am not arguing for the policing of the Vatopaidian style of chanting; nor am I arguing against the production of CDs containing sacred music. I am merely emphasizing that traditions change due to changing demands, needs, and desires, in the monasteries themselves as well as in the surrounding society. Discourse about Byzantine music does not simply reflect the historical realities of chant revival. It actively creates its identity, all the while claiming the musical past in specific ways. To speak of tradition is itself a means of claiming historical continuity. The monks’ claim to the “right” notational and performative practice must therefore be understood as an ideological project. “There is a pervasive notion that the traditional is ‘out of our time,’” Michael Herzfeld argues, and when understood in context of music revival “the label traditional is both glorifying and marginalizing” (2002: 202). Byzantine chant and Athonite spirituality is thus celebrated for its glory and sincerity, and for the way it creates a space for Greek Orthodox identity in the European context. Simultaneously, though, in constructing itself as an “other” to European modernity, it participates in its own marginalization. The traditional is perceived as something from the past, while it is realized only in the present and the future. The traditional has little to do with “actual” history. Structuralist paradigms have long dominated the study of Byzantine musical notation in the West. In this tradition of scholarship, notations are

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viewed as works of art, as compositions. The focus on structural aspects of such compositions in this tradition has often acted as a counterbalance to this “othering” of Byzantine-music history. It has brought to the study of Byzantine chant techniques of analysis that connect it to Western music. But there has been ambivalence. As Eleni Kallimopoulou points out, early Byzantinologists, in the sway of ideas about the Hellenic origins of the West, also viewed the Byzantine past as “suspiciously eastern” (2009: 16). This ambivalence is reflected in scholarship in the monasteries. The Vatopaidians might be said, on the one hand, to participate in their own exoticism and simultanously, on the other, to claim a European self aligned with an Orthodox modern, traditional self. Both at Mount Athos and in the Orthodox Church more generally, this ambivalence is subject to negotiation, debate, and at times even denial. Perceptions of Athonite chanting are shaped through the production and consumption of the Athonite heritage in sound, narratives, and imaginings. If music is a way of knowing or perceiving the world (Kapchan 2007: 237), then monks, pilgrims, and those who never experience the chanting of the Athonite monasteries at the monasteries necessarily perceive the world in different ways, and these different perceptions are unlikely to change at the same time and in the same way. Even between the monasteries and different scholarly positions in Greece, “variation” and “disagreement” are appropriate terms to describe the way the musical past is known, performed, and sounded. I have examined, in this book, the revival of a sacred musical tradition at a particular monastery at the Holy Mountain, while referring to other monasteries as well. It establishes some new ways of understanding this revival that complement others in circulation. My view of things is fundamentally of an ethnographic kind, in that I have based my observations and interpretations on fieldwork encounter with monks, pilgrims, and others, while keeping in focus theoretical concepts such as tradition, modernity, revival, heritage, authenticity, and historiography. The main narratives of this book concern how monks today administer and imagine tradition, and how the musical reform of the 19th century is rearticulated in performance practice in the ritual context, and through other processes of musical mediation and theoretical debate. The vigor of the revived musical tradition at Vatopaidi is embodied in the musical practices described in these pages. It is also on display in the digital-media productions, the illuminated editions, and the guides and books that not only accompany the commercial recordings, but also provide a framework for them of historical authenticity, meticulous scholarship, and spiritual sincerity. The success of Greek tourism in this region depends on such labor. Byzantine music might not be the first thing to be associated with tourism, yet, as I have illustrated, the Athonite heritage is itself a major draw for tourism in the Halkidiki region, notably to the coastal villages close to the border of

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Mount Athos, even though the ordinary tourist never gets to that particular destination. Thousands of pilgrims pass through these villages on the way to the mountain, whether going there to see a relative who has taken the vow, or being attracted to the place, as I was myself the first time, by the dominant images of Athonite monastic society. In short, tourism and CDs with sacred music are connected in the production of the Athonite heritage and imaginary. Revoicing history emphasizes how contemporary performance practice and revival discourse form the Athonite imaginary, and attests to the power of performance to respond to and create cultural and political shifts at various levels through “the harnessing of affect-laden aesthetic forms” (Kapchan 2007: 238). I argue in this book that Byzantine music is tantamount to prayer communicated vocally and in a particular musical idiom. In Orthodox worship the mediation of the message is not separable from the message itself: even when performed internally and muted, prayers imply a sonic practice. This is why vocalization, chanting, and musical technicalities matter; this is why the monks—and with them the ethnomusicologist—show a concern about music-performance practice that extends to the most intricate detail, such as tiny musical signs and ideas about the right way of performing the drone. The monks take great care to control the performance, the sound, to make it serve Orthodox belief in the “right” way, to make it sound the Orthodox world the “right” way.2 A paradox emerges from the conundrum of belief and practice that reveals a concern for ethics and ways of listening. On the one hand, the music should be cultivated and practiced in a manner elaborate enough for listeners to take delight in it and thereby understand the beauty of God’s wisdom through beautiful sound; and on the other hand, the music should not overshadow the message and disturb the attention of the listener.

CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING The arguments presented in this book took shape in the dialogical encounters of fieldwork. In the ethnography of Byzantine chant, the ethnomusicological “fact,” like the historical fact, is an interpretation, in which both the monks and the ethnomusicologist play a central part. Understanding culture “is not a mechanical process of translation, but a highly complex process of understanding and re-enactment,” as anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup argues (1990: 55). Or as Hans-Georg Gadamer formulates it for hermeneutics: “Every act of translation is at the same time an interpretation” (1975: 384). What the interpretative study of music acknowledges is that culture is interpretation, and the

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interpretative facts that ethnomusicologists go to the field to find are themselves interpretations (Rabinow 1977: 15). In this book, facts, thus conceived, would include my own observations of musical behavior, my recordings, my conceptualizations about music, and various other observations deriving from the process of living and working with the monks during fieldwork. The culture and cultivation of Byzantine chant does not rest on objective facts if we understand culture as “an analytical implication” (Hastrup 1995: 17). Cultural translation is not a matter of representation or of replacing one discourse by another, but an active engagement in the creation and interpreting of meaning. Meaning can be “understood to come about as the articulation of values” (Holquist 1990: 158). Music partakes in the articulation of values, and responses to cultural phenomena that we understand as music, and these are “as diverse, unstable, and open-ended as the multitude of contexts in which music defines itself ” (Subotnik 1996). Byzantine chant articulates various values simultaneously, and at different levels. First, it represents the unified voice of the Orthodox Church, or, more precisely, it portrays the ideal of homogeneity as it is discursively constituted. Second, the monastic musical soundscape represents various approaches to how this voice is best produced; thus it articulates heterogeneity at the level of performance practice and aesthetics. The monastery of Vatopaidi might be unique, but it is just one realization of the “right” sound, one possible articulation of this ideal. Voices from outside Mount Athos also participate in this play of possibilities and influence the production of the sound of modern monasticism and sacrality. Third, the sacred sound of Byzantine chant engages the many-voicedness of modernity in Europe, all the while insisting on the possibility of its coexistence with an authentic, and not merely commoditized, spirituality.

THE PRIMACY OF PASTNESS AND HISTORY No study of Byzantine music can entirely avoid considering the historical dimension, especially not an ethnomusicological one: the everyday of Orthodox monastic musicking is in constant dialogue with its own pasts. Every aspect of Orthodox tradition, performance, and culture itself is permeated with history and various modes of looking at the past that are imagined and experienced as real. When monks explain how they perceive and work with Byzantine music, they refer to, and rely on, these imagined and experienced pasts—oral and written pasts, traditional pasts, religious pasts (cf. Widdess 1989b: 71). Byzantine music has not remained unchanged since the Byzantine Empire in the Middle Ages, or beyond. Changes have taken place: new

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intersections in the service following old rubrics, new compositions set in classical melodic phrases, revived musical neumes, modes, and intonation formulas. These changes are based on paleographical studies at the monastery of Vatopaidi; they are also a product of the monastery’s oral tradition. In this study I have referred to this type of research as “sacred musicology,” a teleological project that involves the risk of letting findings meet their interpretative ends too neatly. Monastic scholarship is guided by principles other than those dominating academic paradigms; this fact has never bothered me. Monks and their allies play an active role in constructing their own pasts and cultural heritage, as in all other occupational cultures, including those of academia. The present shape and practice of musical traditions always interact with the past. Various traditions may emphasize this interaction with the past more or less openly. Studying the Vatopaidians and their interaction with the Byzantine past, one is struck by the conscious process of decision making in relation to the present musical practice and behavior. The revival of Byzantine chant at the monastery of Vatopaidi in the 1990s expresses not so much a radical invention, as an ongoing musical tradition reinvigorated by new administrative procedures, modern teaching pedagogy, and associated adjustments to aesthetics and performance practice. The Vatopaidian and other Athonite musical traditions are modern in the sense that moments of the past are rewritten and revoiced, challenging previously existing—and dominant—versions of the past (cf. Jameson 2002: 41). The mediation of Byzantine and Orthodox values by means of modern technology creates new contexts that open up a wide range of new possibilities. The monks take advantage of these to showcase Byzantine music, Athonite monasticism, and Orthodox Christianity as a sacred modernity. Music is one way of making the traditional past both visible and audible. The question, then, is how music communicates this pastness. It depends in part on how music is defined and conceptualized. Throughout the chapters of this book I have pointed to a range of practices that in different ways display and play with pastness and the historically authentic, such as the renewed interest at Vatopaidi in the monastery’s musical genealogy, the reinvention of intonation formula and drone practice, and the reintroduction of notational signs predating the early 19th-century reform of the musical system. The presence of old musical manuscripts and old records in the monks’ musical labor and publications produces in various ways a sense of a vocal pastness, a sense that the sacred texts were vocally embodied and reified. Yet the voices of the Vatopaidian fathers on contemporary CDs are not made to sound old—they do not sound like early recordings; rather, what one hears is a modern, state-ofthe-art, studio-engineered sound.

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Music understood in terms of performance is bound to the present of the actual performance itself and the ways the past is put to play in ritual action. On every recording, a specific, local musical moment is “frozen” into magnetic streams or laser-technological bits and binary codes that make replay possible in a variety of contexts outside the immediate ritual context. When music is understood as an imaginary object (Cook 1998: 51–73), music recordings enable performers and producers to package the message of pastness and influence the ways that the past is imagined. How and whether or not the message works, though, is a highly complex matter, and one tied to listeners’ ideas, expectations, and values. State-of-the-Art Techniques as Authentic Monastic buildings are restored by modern building techniques. So too is monastic music maintained, studied, and revived in a context defined by modern techniques and technologies. While some view this as compromising the authenticity and immediacy of the ritual performance, one might ask the question, why should the monks use old techniques and technologies? Have monasteries not normally made use of currently available technologies? Were the monasteries’ manuscripts “less authentic” when they were handwritten, simply because that was the currently available technology? A scribe’s copy of an earlier manuscript becomes “of historical value” to monks simply when it is old enough, and not because of the technologies associated with it. The ways notions of authenticity are asserted today is indeed a modern way of valuing the past, one that is foreign to the past itself. Byzantine chant is no less authentic when practiced according to modern, professional, technologically contemporary standards. “‘Authenticity’ is a domain of debate and contradiction,” as Jonathan Shannon notes of Syrian artists and intellectuals (2006: 197). It is also true of Greek Orthodox monks and Byzantine specialists. In this context, too, the domain of authenticity cannot easily be abandoned “because it is related intimately to a wider debate over modernity” (Shannon 2006: 197). This study reveals that everything that is going on within the Byzantine musical tradition today is brought about by decisions made by monks and urban Byzantine-music teachers—to whom the music and its history have specific meanings and values. This is merely to repeat the classic ethnomusicological insight that music revivals and musical change do not simply “happen,” but unfold in a context actively defined by the decision making and the historical imagination of a core group of revivalists and enthusiasts. This is true in many contexts, but it is particularly so in the Byzantine musical tradition, which is commonly considered to be among the oldest and perhaps most conservative and “traditional” religious musical practices in Europe.

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Athonite Heritage In this book I argue that the Athonite style of chant performance is not only inherited from the musical practices of Mount Athos itself, but also shows influences from a variety of other places, institutions, groups, and individuals. Ideas about the Athonite musical heritage vary according to subject position. European scholars have habitually referred to one famous monk from Athos as the source of the characteristic Athonite chanting style, a notion challenged by fieldwork at Athonite monasteries; hence the call, here, for reconsidering the meaning of the term “Athonite.” When one starts to get into musical detail, disagreement concerning the “right sound” prevails. Most would agree that the virtues associated with Athonite chanting are, by and large, solemnity (episimótita), humility (semnótita or tapeinosýni), and honesty (eilikríneia). But the question of how these are embodied musically is a different matter. Greek scholars have applied the term “Athonite” when referring to the origins of manuscripts and compositions, while some monks bluntly reject the idea, stating that it is meaningless to speak of a distinct Athonite musical style. Instead they simply refer to “one” Orthodox style of chanting, one that is distinguished from its western European counterpart.

DIALOGIC EDITING Dialogical imagination (Bakhtin 1981) marks the writing of ethnography based on cultural encounter, participation, and conversation, driven by the ambition of understanding a group of people, their music, and their world. “[Were] the ethnographer in the position of knowing the truth better than others, fieldwork would either be unnecessary or would turn into a form of indictment,” Philip Bohlman (1997: 142) argues. Therefore, ethnographers have to put their own worldview at jeopardy, and question their own categories of understanding and making sense of the studied world. Or, as Steven Feld argues, “a dialogic imagination helps reposition ethnographic writing beyond its overt trajectories and toward critical readings” (1990: 239). In that way it may be possible to maintain the unexpectedness and uncertainty that from the beginning of fieldwork have constituted the dialogical relation with the other. As this study is constituted by a dialogical relation with Greek Orthodox monks and laymen, the contents are local, provisional, contestable, and open for debate. Allowing the monks a say in the process of writing means that the dialogue is neither closed, nor has it reached a level of unity, despite the fact that, as a text, it comes to an end with the last page. Dialogues are not like the pages of a book. The very idea of “the ‘unity’ and ‘identity’ of a discourse,”

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Steven Crowell argues, “appears to derive from the fact that texts, of whatever length, come to an end. . . . there are still the graphological conventions (the period, the paragraph, the blank ‘end paper’) that provide the experience of reading with a relative closure not found in dialogue and that sustain a certain sense in talk of the text as an ‘identity,’ as a ‘fixed quantity,’ as a ‘unity of meaning.’ In dialogue, on the other hand, it makes no sense to speak of such a unity” (1990: 348). In the second edition of the seminal ethnography Sound and Sentiment, Steven Feld (1990: 240ff.) launches the concept of “dialogic editing,” which refers to the process of evaluating culture members’ evaluation of the ethnographic process. This allows them to challenge the authority of the author, and contribute to a reevaluation of the research and the continuation of the dialogue. “Going back to the field” marks the site of fieldwork as a place to which the fieldworker returns (often on numerous occasions) to catch up with friends, acquaintances, and participants in the inquiry. There are plenty of reasons for going back, for example to qualify information previously obtained and to discuss past (shared) experiences, but part of the purpose is to present the fieldwork results in their textual form. Do the monks recognize themselves in my writing? How do they perceive my representation and interpretation of their culture and everyday life? The present book started life as a PhD dissertation (Lind 2003). I have taken advantage of many opportunities during the period between the completion of the PhD and, many years later, the writing of this book, to give a copy of my dissertation to the monks, to receive their opinions and reactions, and to think about what to do with them. A particularly intense period of such “dialogic editing” took place on a visit in 2007, and in subsequent e-mail correspondence. Some monks openly expressed their surprise (and approval) that in a PhD dissertation Byzantine music might be defined first and foremost in terms of “lived life of monks” and “prayer” (see the introduction). Their reaction points to the fact that most research on Byzantine chant is often highly technical, theoretical, and paleographical, and not concerned with contemporary discourses, with performance practices, and with the everyday processes of negotiating the meanings of Byzantine music and spirituality. Thus I believe that this book supplements mainstream Byzantine musicology and suggests new directions for future research. Some monks were puzzled by “the presence of cranes and other modern stuff ” in places where I have tried to discuss the beauty of Byzantine music. The comment suggests that construction work is somewhat disturbing to a life devoted to spiritual absorption, and that it has no place in monks’ musical imagination. Yet the comment is also encouraging. It supports the importance of this study’s focus on Byzantine music as a

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modern spiritual expression vital to the Athonite monastic community, while also exemplifying the ways in which monks, from time to time, ideologically reject notions of modernity. This book omits some technical discussions in the PhD dissertation that, on subsequent reflection, seemed to me better pursued in specialist journals for the relatively small group of Byzantinologists. And it also omits some sections that the monks felt ill at ease with. For example, the monks were not comfortable with a number of passages in my PhD dissertation that addressed playfulness and humor during rehearsals and in music lessons. The Vatopaidians were concerned that readers would get the false impression that monks are not serious men working hard to achieve a high musical standard while maintaining a solemn monastic and spiritual attitude. I can understand the viewpoint, and have revised my book accordingly. But my experience of monks telling jokes and having fun with music theory in fact changed my preconceptions of monkhood in highly positive ways. I came to perceive the monks as men adept at balancing spiritual solemnity with relaxed moments of warmhearted laughter. This point seemed worth retaining, so I have made a few exceptions, for example at the end of chapter 3. These are some of the moments that I cherish the most, as they made me feel more human myself and confirm the cohesive power of a good sense of humor for the sense of belonging and group identity formation. A Vatopaidian monk who read my dissertation wondered why I insist on using Greek terms throughout a study that is otherwise written in English. For example, I use the word hegoúmenos instead of abbot, and protopsáltis instead of cantor. “Why do you use Greek words where there are English equivalents?” On the one hand, these are the terms I have been using in conversations with Greek monks and laymen, so I stick (or perhaps am stuck) with them. On the other hand, I realize the implications of the otherness that the use of these Greek native terms creates—an imposed otherness that the monk (as a representative of the Vatopaidian brotherhood) rejects. I respect the point, but maintain the value of using both sets of terms, though, since changing them completely would distort the context of my own understanding, which I also aim to communicate in the book. FORGIVENESS AND FATHER MAKSIMOS In his article “Relating the Present to the Past,” addressing musical cultures of the Mediterranean, Bruno Nettl concludes that the world’s societies survive by tying the present to their own past, and in this, music plays a significant and sometimes indispensable role. In devoting

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ourselves to the anthropological study of “past and present” in the musical cultures of the Mediterranean, we participate in discussing what has perhaps been the most fundamental question in music research. (Nettl 1996: 12)

In the Athonite monastic society, the present is tied to a variety of pasts: the Orthodox epic past, the various moments of the Athonite spiritual and musical tradition past, and the monks’ own immediate autobiographical past. In constituting tradition and pastness for the Orthodox community, to rephrase Nettl, Byzantine music plays a significant and indispensable role. In Orthodox belief, it has been a condition of humanity since the time of the Fall to pray for forgiveness. Byzantine music, then, is a means of overcoming the distance to the past beyond the Fall, a means of realigning the future with paradise lost. Every melodic line of Byzantine music, like every breath of the Athonite monk and pious pilgrim, holds within it the words of the Jesus Prayer (see Gothóni 1993: 115–17): “Lord, Jesus Christ, have mercy upon me, a sinner.” This prayer, absolutely central to Athonite monasticism and Orthodox spirituality, part of every monk’s every utterance, breath, and heartbeat, seems even stronger when understood as prayer for forgiveness for everything that has happened between these pasts and an indefinite number of subsequent presents, between any then and any now. In that sense, the past is, in a very compelling sense, always present in Byzantine chant and in the imagination and experience of its sacred sound and its spiritual silence. Byzantine music provides, along with other practices, a spiritual path, which, for Orthodox monks, provides the only possible answer to the inescapability of death. My last conversation with my first teacher, Father Maksimos, took place a few weeks before the end of my fieldwork; we were never to speak again. We were having a conversation about musical-notational signs and musical interpretation, and I had the feeling that he had something important to say to me, like a last word from a master to his student. So he had. I wanted to know the meaning of Byzantine music, but, in his view, the answers were not to be found where I was looking. “Listen,” he said, “it might be so that God resides in the little details, but the important issues in life do not concern whether the small musical signs should be performed this way or the other. The essential question is what will happen to your soul when you die.” I think Father Maksimos was trying to tell me that while I was on the right path in my ethnomusicological studies, I was still having difficulties understanding that there was a highly unsettled relation between the power of this music to lead us to God and its ultimate irrelevance in the face of God and all he ordains. I would need to keep coming back, and keep talking to the monks. There was much more our dialogue might yet produce. I have a growing feeling that this was his way of not saying goodbye.

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NOTES 1. The quotation is from Bakhtin’s (1986) last essay, entitled “Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences” [1975]. 2. The monks speak of sostí ermineía or orthí ermineía (correct interpretation) of musical signs—most likely influenced by Simonos Karas’s national-historical purism, which he did not infrequently express (see for example Karas 1990 [1955])—and orthí thriskeía, which refers to right belief or right way of believing, if not indeed the only true way of living in God.

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Glossary of Greek Terms

agiasmó. Holy water. Agion Oros. The Holy Mountain (of Athos), Mount Athos. agrypnía. (All night) vigil. apíchima. (pl. apichímata, also íchima or epíchima.) Intonation formula; melodic indication of a given mode on its intonation syllables (ananes, or nechéanes, or légetos, etc.). apódeipno. (or apódeipnon.) Compline. (At Vatopaidi it takes place at the lití, or the esonarthex.) apolytíkion. Dismissal chant. apóstrofos. Musical sign for one descending voice or step. Athonite. “From Mount Athos.” autómela. (sing. autómelon.) Model stanzas for other tropária (prosómoia). cheironomía. Hand gesture, cheironomy. coenobium. See koinós víos. diavastáris. (or diavastís.) Lector, lectionarius, reader; used synonymously with anagnóstis. echos. (mode.) Byzantine music has four authentic modes and four plagal modes, and several other subgroups or submodes. élksi. (pl. élkseis.) Melodical attraction, related to the function of the “leading note” in Western terms. eortés. See giortí. epitropís/Epitropis. Musical commission; used here to designate (1) the Patriarchal Musical Commission of 1883, and (2) the publication of Epitropis (1888; with capital E and without accent). esonarthikón. Esonarthex, “inner room”; also known in Greek as the lití. esperinós. Vespers, evening service; marks the beginning of the liturgical day.

211

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foní. (pl. fonés.) Voice, tone step, or melodic step (for example an ascending second). génos. (pl. genera.) There are three genera in Byzantine music: the diatonic (1st, 4th, 1st plagal, and 4th plagal), the chromatic (2nd and 2nd plagal), and the enharmonic (3rd and 3rd plagal; however, these two modes are often considered to be hard diatonic, and not enharmonic). See also echos. gérontas. (or géron.) Elder, older monk; also, spiritual father; also, abbot (see hegoúmenos). giortí. (pl. giortés.) Feast (eccl.); also often transliterated eortés. hegoúmenos. Abbot of a (ruling) monastery; also transliterated as igoúmenos. hesychía. Quietude, spiritual concept of inner piece; also, spiritual silence. Hesychastírion refers to the eremitic huts and caves suited for the ascetic way of life in quietude. These are usually placed in the érimos, “the desert” (the southern part of the peninsula). idiorrhythmic. “With one’s own rhythm”; as opposed to coenobitic monasteries (koinóvion), where the monks follow a shared, common way of life. ieró. Sanctuary, containing the altar. ieromonachós. Priest-monk. ierótita. Holiness. ikonofylákio. Icon storage (found on the 2nd floor at Vatopaidi). isáki. Musical sign. isokrátema. (pl. isokratémata.) Drone; related to íson-practice (holding the drone) and the musical sign íson, for a repeated note. See also íson and isokrátis. isokrátis. (pl. isokrátes.) Member of the choir who holds the íson (drone); also bathyfonos (deep voice). íson. (pl. ísa.) Musical sign for a repeating note; also, drone. See also isokrátema. Karyaí. (or Karyes.) The capital of the Holy Mountain. katholikón. The main church at a monastery. kelí. A monk’s cell or room, also referring to the rooms in the pilgrims’ dormitory. Kellíon refers also to a smaller monastic building with a chapel and a piece of land, usually habituated by a small number of monks. koinós víos. Coenobitic, “common life,” a monastic lifestyle where the monks share all duties. Today, all monasteries at Mount Athos are coenobitic (since the beginning of the 1990s). Iviron and Vatopaidi were the last idiorrhythmic monasteries to turn coenobitic. kosmikós. (pl. kosmikoí.) Layman, a man from “the world” (a visitor or pilgrim). loukoúmi. Turkish delight: stiff jam covered with icing sugar. lýgisma. Musical phrasal sign, indicates a melodic “bending.”

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mesonyktikó. Midnight service. (Today it is run just before the morning service.) monachós. Monk. mória. (pl.) Byzantine musical scales (Gr. pl. klímakes) are divided into a varying number of mória (other Greek terms used with more or less the same meaning include kómmata, tmímata, and leímmata). In contemporary theory, an octave is divided into seventy-two mória (i.e., seventy-one mória; cf. Karas 1982). naós. The nave of the church; refers also to the church as a whole building. náos. An old mode produced on the basis of the first mode. okseía. Musical sign for one ascending step, indicates a “high” melodic leap or turning. olígon. Musical sign for one ascending step. omalón. Musical sign, probably an early conjunction of the two signs okseía and vareía. órthros. Matutin, morning service. ouzo. See rakí. Panagía. The All-Holy Mother of Christ. paraklitikí. Musical phrasal sign, often used together with okseía. petastí. Musical sign for one ascending step. píesma. (or diplí bareía.) Musical sign. proskomidí. Offertory. proskynitís. Pilgrim. protopsáltis. Cantor. psalmodía. Psalmody, chant. psaltikí téchni. The art of Byzantine chanting; Byzantine music. psáltis. Chanter (singer), choir member; often used synonymously with protopsáltis (cantor). psifistón. Musical phrasal sign. rakí. Often served as welcoming refreshment at the monasteries (together with coffee and loukoúmi), rakí is the Greek equivalent to schnapps (distilled from grapes and flavored with anise). Other schnapps-type beverages are tsípouro (similar to rakí) and oúzo (distilled rakí—sweeter than the other two). Many monasteries at Athos produce rakí, or tsipouro, and wine (krasí). One of the best tsípoura (pl.) and some of the best Athonite wines are produced at Mylopotamos (“Apple River”), close to the monastery of Iviron. skevofylákio. Sacristy. skíti. (pl. skítes.) Skete, lesser monastic village or an assemblage of a few houses and a small chapel where smaller groups of monks live. These are typically placed at some distance from the ruling monasteries to which they adhere.

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Glossary

streptó. Musical phrasal sign, here used together with okseía. tálanton. A wooden plank beaten rhythmically to call to service. tromikón. Musical phrasal sign. tropária. (sing. tropárion.) Liturgical song texts or poems that are not from the Bible, as opposed to psalm verses. Tropária are characterized by rich use of metaphors and other poetical expression, and often conclude as invocation or prayer to the character addressed in the poem (typically Christ or a saint linked with the festival of the day). As an umbrella term it covers various hymn genres, mostly consisting of poetic settings that are used as refrains in the recitation of psalms, though some might also be performed as independent hymns. tzákisma. Musical sign, indicating a melodic “shattering.” voithós. Assistant, helper; assists in the choir, holds candles and books, etc. ýfos. (or ífos.) Here used to mean musical “style,” or style of chanting.

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Bibliography

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Wright, Owen. 1992. Words without Songs: A Musicological Study of an Early Ottoman Anthology and Its Precursors, vol. 3. London: School of Oriental and African Studies. ———. 1996. “Middle Eastern Song-Text Collections.” Early Music 24 (3): 455–69. Zannos, Ioannis. 1994. Ichos und Makam: Vergleichende Untersuchungen zum Tonsystem der griechischen-orthodoxen Kirchenmusik und der türkischen Kunstmusik. Bonn: OrpheusVerlag.

UNPUBLISHED FIELD MATERIAL AND MUSICAL SOURCES Field Material Field notes: 1997 (March–May), 1999 (March), 2000 ( June and November), 2001 (October–December). Field recordings: 2000 ( June and November) and 2001 (October–December), on minidiscs (BASF MD Maxima 80; Sony MD-74) and cassettes (Sony CD-it II). Recording equipment: Sony Professional Tape Recorder, Sony Minidisc Digital Recorder MZ-R70, both with stereo microphone Sony ECM-MS907.

Musical Manuscripts Note: Manuscript codes refer to codex numbers of the manuscripts. PAN 906. Musical MS, Panteleimonos 906 (dated 1816). Scribe: Gregorios Protopsaltis. (Analyses of the old notation written in the New Method. See Stathis 1975–1993, 2:188–96.) PAN 946. Musical MS, Panteleimonos 946 (dated 1830). Anonymous. (Analyses of the old notation written in the New Method. See Stathis 1975–1993, 2:257–58.) PAN 957. Musical MS, Panteleimonos 957 (dated 1815–1830). Scribe: Theofánis Monachós. (Analyses of the old notation written in the New Method. See Stathis 1975–1993, 2:283–86.) VAT 1254. Musical MS [IMMB αρθ. 1254] (18th cent.). VAT 1374. Musical MS [IMMB αρθ. 1374] (dated 1714). Heirmologion. Scribe: Nomofylakos Balasiou. VAT 1397. Musical MS [IMMB αρθ. 1397] (dated 1795). Heirmologion. VAT 1400. Musical MS [IMMB αρθ. 1400]. Mattheos Vatopaidinos. (Analyses of the old notation written in the New Method.)

Music in Print Note: The codes used here were invented for the purpose of convenient reference uses in the present work. Each code is an easily recognizable abbreviation for either the writer or the place of origin and year of publication. ANA1858. Anastasimantarion argon kai syntomon. Athens: Z H, 1933. (Anastasimantarion of Petros Lampadarios Peloponnesios, edited by Ioannis Protopsaltis; 1998 reprint.)

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229

ANTH1837. Anthologia, vol. 1. Edited by Grigorios Protopsaltis and Chourmouzios Chartofylax. Constantinople: Kastrou, 1837. (Anthology of Byzantine hymns in the kalophonic style for esperinos, orthros, liturgy, Lent, and Easter.) ANTHOS1896. En anthos tis kath imas ekklisiastikis mousikis. Edited by Agathangelos Kyriazidos. Constantinople: Nomismatidos, 1896. (Anthology of kalophonic hymns for esperinos, orthros, liturgy.) AO1931. Mousikios thisavros tis leitourgias [Musical treasure of the liturgy], vol. 2. Edited by Nektarios Monachos Ieropsaltis. Karyes, Greece: 1931. (Printed book of chants from the liturgy of Chrysostomos and the Akolouthia of Easter; 1978 reprint.) AO1983. Taksis kan akolouthia tou megalou kai angelikou monachikou schimatos. (Unpublished 1983 source from the Holy Mountain.) BER1817. Apanta Petrou tou Bereketou, 4 vols. Edited with commentary by Charalambis Karakatsanis. Athens: 1998. (Collected works of Petros Bereketis.) EFE1820. Petros Efesios, Neon anastasimantarion. Bucharest: 1820. (New Anastasemantarion translated into the New System; reprint: Athens, Koultoura, 1999.) RIG1958. Georgios Rigas, Melodimata Skiathou [Chants from Skiathos]. Athens: 1958. SYK1985. Mousikis anthon: i mikri athonias theias leitourgias tou gerontos Meletiou Sykiotou [Musical blossom: The little Athonite Divine Liturgy of Geronta Meletios Sykiotos]. Karyes, Greece: 1985. VAT2000. Mousikon apanthisma tou katholikou [Musical anthology of the main church]. 4th printing. Great and Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi, 2000.

Discography (Commercial Recordings) ARV/2002. Under the Shadow of Mount Athos: Orthodox Hymns from Skiathos Monasteries. CD, AEM 019. ELBYX/1992. The Greek Byzantine Choir and the choir of Vatopaidian monks. Agrypnia at the Great and Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi: In Honour of the Feast of Saint Evdokimos of Vatopaidi, cassette 1. Great and Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi, 1992. MC, ELBUX-29. IMSP/1999. The Monks of Simonopetra Are Chanting. (Series of recordings from 1999: Vespers, IMSP 106; Matins, IMSP 107; Divine Liturgy, IMSP 108.) MN1-2/1999. Monument of Ecclesiastical Music, CDs 1 and 2: Melodies from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Athens: Centre for Research and Publishing, 1999. MN4-5/1999. Monument of Ecclesiastical Music, CDs 4 and 5: Calophonic Hymns. Athens: Centre for Research and Publishing, 1999. PSA/118. Live recording 3, “Hymns of the Holy Ceremony.” Psáltes of the Holy Mountain (series of recordings). Chanting: Father Gabriel Makamvos. CD, Papadas, Musical Editions PME 118 (no date; estimated early 1990s). PSA/120. Live recording 5, “Hymns of the Holy Ceremony.” Psáltes of the Holy Mountain (series of recordings). Chanting: Father Ignatios Vatopedinos. MC, Papadas, Musical Editions PME 120 (no date; early 1990s). VAT-CD1/96. The Vatopaidian Musical Bible, vol. 1: Christmas Hymns. CD, 1996 (ISBN 960-7735-00-5). VAT-CD2/96. The Vatopaidian Musical Bible, vol. 2: Epiphany Hymns. CD, 1996 (ISBN 960-85391-7-X).

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Bibliography

VAT-CD3/97. The Vatopaidian Musical Bible, vol. 3: Holy Week. CD, 1997 (ISBN 960-7735-06-4). VAT-CD4/98. Holy Monday. CD, Crete University Press, 1998 (C.U.P. 21; ISBN 960-524-051-3). VAT-CD5/00. Holy Saturday: Service of the Epitaphios. CD, Crete University Press, 2000 (C.U.P. 26; ISBN 960-524-106-4). VAT-CD6/00. Easter Sunday. CD, Crete University Press, 2000 (C.U.P. 27; ISBN 960-524-107-2). VAT/archive. Musical archives, Great and Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi.

Audiovisual/Digital Material VAT-Video1. 1997. The Never-Failing Light: Mysterious Harmony of Athonite Psalmody. Bank of Cyprus. VAT-Video2. 1999. Bank of Cyprus. CD-ROM/VAT 2001. 2CD-ROM, Great and Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi.

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Index

65-Ferie (Danish travel agency), 145, 146 academic: field research, 3; literature, 126; monks, 137; position, 5, 179; scholarship, 93, 128, 132; study, 40, 162; tradition, 26, 75, 162; writing, 53 Adaiewsky, Ella, 79, 161–62 afterlife, 189 Agias Annis (skete), 154 agrypnía, 181 Alexandru, Maria, 33n3, 78 anamnesis. See remembrance angelic imitativeness, 183 Angelidis, Kostas, 57, 68, 73n29, 84, 107, 111, 112, 136, 154, 155, 163 Angelopoulos, Lykourgos, 48, 57, 69, 111, 163 Antonellis, Panagiotis S., 53, 57, 68, 108 apichímata. See intonation formulas “ars nova” (Byzantine), 181 article 105 (of the Greek constitution), 11 Arvanitis, Ioannis, 49, 57, 73n24, 169, 171n34 ascesis: chanting as, 158, 181; monastic, 144 ascetic: life, 9; vocal ideal, 158

Athens, 2, 48, 61, 64, 65, 68, 84, 86, 97, 104, 116, 138, 154, 155, 161, 163 Athonite, 7, 153, 170n4, 206; style of chanting, 5, 7, 123, 148n17, 151ff, 170n2, 181, 206 Athoniteness, 5, 191 Athos. See Mount Athos “Athos City,” 126, 127, 128, 133 authenticity, 2, 25, 28, 32, 62, 154, 165, 205; desire for, 124; as discursive trope, 19; historical, 2, 32, 201; and inauthenticity, 2, 26; and moral judgment, 136 authority, 9, 77, 190, 194: ascribed to oral tradition, 71; and authenticity, 167; of the author, 207; extraaesthetic, 31; historiographical, 153; interpretive, 134, 167; musical construction of, 31; and past, 25, 61, 167; of the reform, 58, 72; and sacred music, 97, 167; and virtuosity, 190–91 Baud-Bovy, Samuel, 119n27 Bereketis, 42, 46, 57, 185, 186, 187, 190 birds and birdsong, 140, 173, 174, 180 bodily habits, 195 Bourgault-Ducoudray, L.-A., 79, 104, 106, 107, 162

231

Book 1.indb 231

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232

Index

breath, 108, 180; divine, 178; as prayer, 109, 164, 209 buteo buteo (common buzzard), 180 Byzantine chant, 13–15, 69; approaching, 178; definitions of, 13–15, 157; diversity in, 152; ethnography of, 202; as prayer, 5, 13 Byzantine: empire, 11, 34n15, 40, 41, 141, 203; music history, 29; past, 19, 20, 39, 40, 201, 204. See also Byzantium; Byzantine chant; music; tradition, genealogy of byzantineness, 161 Byzantium, 24, 32, 40–41, 61, 66, 78, 141–43, 147n10. See also Byzantine empire Catholic 39, 70 Carvanos, Constantine, 107, 108 CD. See recording(s) CD-ROM (from Vatopaidi), 4, 27, 52, 52, 53, 59, 61, 73n19, 132, 134, 140 cell of the géronta, 42, 97, 116, 119n18 cell phone(s), 32, 121, 122, 139 Chalatzoglou, 46, 53, 57 change(s), 17; of life at Mount Athos, 32; musical, 23, 25, 29, 31, 49, 59, 69, 74n42, 91, 137, 203–5; nonchange and, 3, 71, 93; in Ouranoupolis, 127–28; period of, 49, 93; political, 144; and tradition, 17–18, 21, 22, 26, 31, 32, 38, 71, 72n14, 93, 200; unchanged and, 4, 74n42, 203 chant: Athonite (see Athonite style of chanting); Byzantine (see Byzantine chant); Gregorian, 22, 39, 77, 110, 145, 149n28, 158; Estonian, 6, 13, 158, 160, 161; Ethiopian, 4, 13; medieval, 30; melismatic, 182; sound of, 6 cheironomía. See cheironomy cheironomy, 74n41, 75, 86, 94, 110–13, 112, 119n45, 198n19. See also gestures

Book 1.indb 232

cheroubic hymn, 185–891, 186–87, 188, 191, 192 cheroubikón. See cheroubic hymn choir, 39, 42–44, 46, 48–49, 91, 98–100, 105, 110–11, 136, 139, 144, 148n15, 148n16, 151, 153–55, 157, 161, 166, 167, 169, 177, 181, 186–89, 188, 192 choral: performance, 116, 136, 153, 169; performance of intonation formula, 98, 104; practice, 59, 153, 166; responses, 165; style, 113, 166 Chourmouzios, 14, 60, 61, 64, 118n8 chronotope of religious time, 189–91, 196 Chrysanthos, 14, 15, 45, 60, 63, 64, 66, 67, 70, 90, 97, 118n6, 118n8 coenobitic, 9, 33n8, 46–49, 72n8, 154 coenobium, 49, 180 communion, 179, 183, 185, 195 community 9, 28, 38, 59, 129, 181, 191; Athonite, 9, 147n7, 153; the EC (EU), 20; the EEC, 11; monastic, 3, 5, 7, 9, 13, 26, 42, 51, 59, 84, 124, 130, 151, 154, 165, 169, 171n35, 190, 208; oral tradition and, 61–62; orthodox, 6, 132, 138, 151, 209; spiritual, 143, 174, 190, 194; territory and, 123 Conomos, Dimitri, 35n22, 64, 181, 198n10 Constantinople (Istanbul), 9, 11, 33n7, 40, 41, 53, 57, 59, 60, 66, 68, 70, 85, 90, 104, 111, 118n6, 153, 165, 170n4, 197n5 crane(s), 12, 17, 18, 207 cultural: continuity, 21–22; encounter, 30, 206; fundamentalism, 20; hegemony, 153; negotiation, 18; practice, 2; sincerity, 26 culture(s): as analytical implication, 202; traditional and modern, 28; writing, 194 Dafni, 121, 122 Damianos Vatopaidinos, 48, 51, 53, 57, 61, 187

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Index death, the inescapability of, 209 decadence, 20, 26 decay, pleasing, 24 diachronic idiosyncrasies, 21 dialogic editing, 206–8 dialogical: encounter(s), 7, 202; imagination, 206; relation, 206 dialogue, 5, 7, 194, 199, 209; with the dead, 53; with God, 196; musical, 59, 203; as silence, 194 (see also silence); and text, 206–7; transcription as, 82 (see also transcription) diamonitírion, 122, 126 difonía, 118n11. See also polyphony Dionysiou (the monastery), 154 discourse, 2, 26, 195, 200; epic, 3, 191; prior, 167; revivalist, 28, 50–51; scholarly, 5 dissemination 49, 93, 134, 199 Docheiariou (the monastery), 44 drone: creating meaning of, 107–10; double, 106–7, 113, 114–15; ísonpractice, 13–14, 70, 104–9, 185, 204; keeper(s), 100, 105, 108, 113, 177, 189, 192; the vedic om and, 107–10 Early Music Movement, 30. See also music Efesios, Petros, 90, 90, 91, 91, 165 electricity, 16, 32, 38, 154, 180 élkseis. See melodic attraction e-mail correspondence, 32, 207 emotions, 195 enlightenment: European, 24, 66, 67; Greek, 41, 66, 67, 168 epeísakton mélos (imported melody), 96 érimos (the desert), 180 ethnographic: encounter, 1, 2, 6; present, 6, 33n5; voice, 6, 7; writing, 206 ethnomusicological: fieldwork, 29 (see also fieldwork); methodology, 6; position, 13 ethnomusicology: historical, 30–31; poststructuralist, 1

Book 1.indb 233

233

EU (the European Union), 7, 11–13, 12, 20, 32, 131, 133; Christianity in the, 20 the Holy Eucharist, 192–93, 195 Eurohellenism, 20 Europeanization, 64, 68 Evangelistria (monastery), 168–69 everyday: congregational practice, 191; labor (sounds of), 174–75; life, 6, 24, 40, 42, 133, 144, 154, 166, 174, 207; performance, 153, 179; services, 113 the Fall, 3–4, 189, 190, 209 fieldwork, 1, 4, 6, 7, 9, 16, 18, 26, 29, 30, 32, 41–47, 45, 60, 62, 76, 93, 100, 105, 117, 122, 123, 131, 132, 136, 144, 151, 152, 153, 161, 166, 174, 181, 184, 185, 194, 196, 197, 201, 202, 203, 207, 209; chronotope of, 6; as dialogical process, 6 (see also dialogue); material (polymorphous), 4; recollection and, 7, 16, 62, 122 Firfiris, 162–64, 165, 171n31 flag(s), 23, 24, 34n15 forgiveness, 3, 13, 47, 189, 208–9 Fourth Patriarchal School of Music, 15, 90, 118n6 Friends of Mount Athos, 49 Garden of the Mother of God. See Mount Athos genealogy, musical, 46, 49, 52–63, 54–56, 204 gestures, 62, 75, 178, 190: hand, 74, 110–13, 119n45, 189 (see also cheironomy); iconic, 75, 157, 160, 190; metaphoric, 157–58, 190; musical, 195; and oral tradition, 93–94; ritual, 175, 200; vocal, 85 Gianellos, Dimitri, 33n3, 78, 80 globalization, 19, 38, 131–33 the Great Church (Agia Sophia), 53, 57, 59, 60, 61, 85, 111, 165, 170n4 Great Lavra (the monastery), 11, 17, 18, 73n25, 170n4, 196, 197, 197n5

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234

Index

Greekness, 20, 23, 66, 68, 140 Gregorios Palamas, 181, 198n6 Grigorios Protopsaltis, 14, 64, 118n8 Grigoriou (monastery), 178 Hagiorite. See Athonite Halkidiki, 7, 112, 201 harmonization, 64, 65, 107 Hatherly, S.G., 79, 162 heartbeat, 109, 109, 209 hegoúmenos, 175–77, 192 heritage, 20, 26, 28, 30, 131, 136, 204; Athonite, 2, 126, 128, 130–34, 143– 44, 201–2, 206; Byzantine, 134, 145; Byzantine musical, 63, 79, 134, 145; Greek national, 37, 67, 129, 131; Orthodox, 51, 131; and tourism, 123, 141; Vatopaidian musical, 60, 136; world, 13, 130–31 hesychasm, 109, 181–82, 184, 198n6, 198n12 hesychía. See silence, spiritual heterogeneity, 152, 191, 203 heteroglossia, musical, 152 hierarchy: Byzantine musical, 199; cultural, 29; heavenly, 3, 177; monastic, 13, 191; orthodox, 179 hierotopy, 179. See also space, sacred historical: continuity, 29, 191, 200; continuum, 17, 78, 79; discontinuity, 24, 41, 79, 93; faithfulness, 30; imagination, 33, 205; narrative, 32; periodization (suspended), 3; tyranny, 71, 93 historiography, 32, 153, 199 history; invented, 25 Holy Mountain. See Mount Athos homogeneity; the ideal of, 203 humility, 42, 156, 168, 192–95, 206 humor, 117, 208 Høeg, Carsten 14, 29, 73n25, 78, 79, 92 icon(s), 16, 39, 75, 85, 126, 127, 129, 130, 134, 140, 142, 160, 169, 175, 178, 179, 190

Book 1.indb 234

identity: and ancient Greece, 66; Athonite, 132, 151, 166; of Byzantine chanting, 167; construction, 53, 77, 97, 134, 145; cultural, 18, 26, 131; discourse and, 200, 206–7; with God, 160; group, 48, 208; historical, 29, 31, 53, 58; local/regional, 29; monastic, 144; musical, 97; national, 23, 29; new, 38; orthodox, 53, 191, 200; of tourist/pilgrim, 127 idiorrhythmic, 33n8, 46, 48, 72n8, 154, 166 imaginary, 24, 27, 32, 77, 128, 138; Athonite, 2, 5, 132, 140, 143, 147, 148n16, 169, 202; past as, 33, 53; tourist, 5, 145; of traveling back in time, 139; of a united Greece, 23 impenetrable barrier, 71, 74n47, 93 interpretation: ethnomusicological (anthropological), 6, 7, 51, 78, 130, 183, 202–3, 207; exegesis, 69; historical, 23. See also notational sign(s) interval(s), musical: measuring, 69–71, 86; structure of, 14, 34n12, 68, 79, 80, 83, 86, 104, 106, 107, 108, 111, 185 intonation formula(s), 43, 49, 63, 75, 86, 94, 98–104, 101, 102, 103, 113, 204 Ioasaf vatopaidinos, 61, 74n30 isokrátema. See drone singing isokrátes. See drone keepers íson. See drone; notational signs íson-practice. See drone Iviron (the monastery), 1, 4, 12, 16, 34n8, 71, 139, 154, 155, 156, 173, 174, 180, 183, 189 kalophonic, 42, 72n2, 113, 120n47, 181, 188 Karamanis, Athanasios, 57, 58, 105, 106 Karas, Simonos, 44, 45, 57, 65, 68, 69, 84, 85, 95, 97, 98, 110, 111, 167, 210n2

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Index Karyes (or Karyai), 8, 9, 10, 11, 16, 24, 162, 163, 164, 171n31 katholikón, 17, 37, 42, 100, 166, 175, 176, 179, 191, 192, 193 kollyvádes, 168–69 kollyvádika, 168–69 Konstantinou, Georgios, 44, 45, 45, 48, 57, 60, 68, 83, 84, 85, 96, 97, 106, 107, 111, 118n12, 136, 163 Koukouzelis, 42, 61, 154, 181, 182 Ksenofontos (the monastery), 153 ksenophonía (foreign-voicedness), 67–68. See also westernization Lampadarios, Ioannis, 90, 90, 91, 91, 111 Lesvios, Georgios, 65 Levy, Kenneth, 118n6, 14, 15, 35n22 Lingas, Alexander, 15, 33n3, 34n11, 118n6, 182, 184, 198n6, 198n12 listening, 2, 58, 73n24, 98, 107, 112, 116, 117, 140, 151, 165, 180, 181, 184, 193, 199, 200, 202; analytical, 58, 112, 113; to birds, 180; to God, 180; spiritual, 49, 184; and transcription, 82, 116, 188 liturgy, 34n13, 43, 139, 142, 164, 165, 167, 185, 194; Divine, 15, 164, 173, 185, 188, 189, 192–95 longing, 137, 138, 140, 145, 178, 183, 196 love (of God), 13, 47, 59, 168, 184 manuscript(s), 4, 27, 29, 30, 32, 37, 41, 42, 48, 49,50, 52, 60, 73n19, 73n25, 75, 76, 77, 93, 105, 116, 143, 147, 151, 153, 164, 204, 205, 206; specific mss, 61, 74n30, 74n31, 74n35, 75, 117, 118n1, 120n49, 168, 170n4, 171n33, 228 Margaziotis, Ioannis, 118n7 marginalization, 200 market: music, 124, 126, 130, 134, 142, 144, 200; tourist, 129–30 Matthaios Vatopaidinos, 48, 51, 60, 61

Book 1.indb 235

235

Mavroeidis, Marios, 118n5, 118n12 meaning: negotiating, 190, 207; production of, 30, 203 media, the untranslability of, 81, 81–82 mediation, 134, 145, 146, 158, 184, 189, 201, 202, 204 Megistis Lavra. See Great Lavra melodic: attraction (élkseis), 80, 83, 156; embellishment, 86, 91; formula, 189, 198n19 memory, 28, 152; creating, 27, 190 Meteora, 33n2, 129, 130 meter (musical), 83–84 missionary activism, 200 modal indications (phthoraí), 91 mode: Byzantine 14, 42, 68, 75, 83, 86, 91, 92, 94, 98–100, 102, 104, 116, 118n11, 156, 159, 168, 185, 204; makam, 95, 164, 185; náos, 94ff, 95; old, 49, 86, 94ff; scale and, 14, 80, 113, 156. See also scale modernity, 16, 17–21, 22, 199–200; as discursive trope, 19; many-voicedness of, 203; multiple, 17–21; narrative of, 19; sacred, 204; and secularization, 19, 20 136, 138, 139; signs of, 32; as technical development, 19, 32. See also tradition modernization, 19, 20, 25, 32; of the authentic, 26 monasticism, 2, 11, 33, 124, 130, 131, 137, 138, 141, 143, 167, 169, 181, 191, 197n5, 203, 204, 209 monophonic, 13, 48, 64, 65 monophony, 69 Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae, 14, 29, 75, 78 Moran, Neil, 111 Morgan, Maureen M., 67, 70, 74n43 mória, 83 Mount Athos, 7, 8, 9ff, 10, 32, 121, 144, 174, 180, 201; foundation of, 11; as living museum, 131, 141–43; population of, 9, 24, 124, 126; producing, 121ff; as world

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236

Index

heritage site (UNESCO), 13. See also Athonite music: classical (Western), 18, 28, 106; early, 19, 28, 30, 32, 34n19, 38, 40, 77, 137; ecclesiastical, 65, 68, 69, 71, 105, 106, 161, 169; folk, 18, 28, 68, 105, 124, 137, 140, 145; as imaginary object, 205, 207; Jewish, 22; lessons (fieldwork), 4, 41–46, 45, 87, 208; religious, 191, 205; ritual, 173; sacred, 5, 13, 26, 28, 30, 179, 189, 202 music revival(s), 4, 15, 19, 21, 27–29, 38, 40, 50, 62, 112, 136, 161, 199–200, 205; Byzantine, 22, 28, 84, 112; at Vatopaidi, 4, 21, 28, 44, 49ff, 85, 94, 99, 166 music theory: Byzantine 1, 14, 23, 27, 34n12, 38, 39, 42, 63, 66, 67, 71, 154, 167, 184, 208; Western 64, 67 musical: blossom, 37ff, 49, 50, 51, 53, 73n15; “energy” (energía), 84–89, 91–92, 111, 116 the Musical Commission (Epitropís), 67–72, 97, 99 musiciking, 203 Nafpliotis, 57, 58 naós (nave), 177, 179 narrative, 7, 199; categories, 19; historicity and, 32 nasal sound, 158–59. See also palatal sound nation-state: formation of, 23, 25; Greek, 11ff, 23, 32; and imagined communities, 147 nationalism, 123; (ethno)religious, 20, 23 Nea Skiti, 47–50 neo-Orthodox Movement, 21 New Method (Nea Methodos), 14, 15, 41, 57, 61, 63, 64, 69, 80, 83, 85, 90, 92, 93, 105, 118n6 neumes (notational signs), 97, 204 noise; humanly produced, 180, 196

Book 1.indb 236

nonsense syllables, 173, 181, 198n14; meaning free, 173, 183–84, 189; meaning of, 173, 182–87; as performative, 184; religious sentiment and, 173 nostalgia, 80, 123, 143 notation(s) (musical), 27; as aide-mémoire, 57, 79, 98; arbitrariness of, 80–81; Byzantine, 4, 14–15, 30, 101, 188, 189; descriptive and prescriptive, 82; drone (íson-practice) in, 105, 107; ekphonetic, 14, 92; and orality, 77–78, 113, 185, 188, 189; power of, 76; Western staff, 15, 65, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 87 notational signs (Byzantine), 6, 204, 209 (see also revival); apóstrofos, 88; compound, 86, 92; interpretation of, 39, 48, 59, 60, 69, 77, 88, 93, 96, 113, 120n46, 136, 164, 209, 210n2; isáki, 84, 88; íson, 88, 105; lýgisma, 112, 113; okseía, 44, 75, 81, 81, 84–93, 89, 90, 97, 111, 112, 164; olígon, 86, 86, 90–91; omalón, 89, 112; paraklitikí, 84, 89, 89; petastí, 84, 86–88, 87, 112, 113, 164; phrasal (qualitative), 84, 86, 88, 89, 110 (see also phrasal freedom); píesma, 84; psifistón, 84, 90, 91, 112; quantitative, 86, 88; streptó, 84, 89, 89; tromikón, 89, 89, 111, 112, 112; tsákisma, 88, 113 obedience, 5, 13, 47, 158, 168, 194, 195 oktoechos, 95 om, 107–10 ordination, 62 orthography, musical, 6, 85, 92. See also transorthography orthopraxis, 6, 85; musical, 6, 75, 85, 160; notational, 6, 75, 85, 93, 99; and performance practice, 2, 3, 6 other: Athonite spirituality as, 200; monks as, 132, 133, 139, 145; monks as temporal, 133, 138

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Index othering, 132, 201 otherize 123 otherness, 30, 40, 138, 141; experience of, 44, 179; of native terms, 208; of the past, 77; repression of, 152 otherworldly 3, 165 Ottoman: empire, 63; poetry, 182, 198n10; rule, 32, 66 Ouranoupolis, 4, 10, 122–30, 125, 127, 128, 133, 144 palatal sound, 159, 159 paleographical: encounter, 78; musical past, 93; studies, 153, 204, 207 paleography, 14, 29, 30, 33n3, 49, 53, 86, 97 Pantokrátor, 177 Papadimitriou, Konstantinos 118n7 Papadopoulos, Georgios 64 paradigm: academic, 204; evolutionary, 106; modernization, 19; structuralist, 200 parallagí (solfège), 63, 105 participation, 6, 76, 130, 160, 173; in God, 75, 160; as mimesis, 159; in sound, 160; in the spiritual rite, 173, 178–79, 189, 192, 193, 195 past: as a construction site, 40–41, 77; dominant versions of, 204; embodied, 189, 191; experienced, 203; as a foreign country, 40; philological, 40; and present, 3, 19; sense of the, 31ff; unwanted, 31, 32, 67; wanted, 31, 139 “the past is always present” (proverb), 3, 117 pastness, 3, 24, 25, 31–32, 190, 204, 209; aesthetic quality and, 27, 32; imaginary of, 203; of musical objects, 27, 94; remoteness and, 27–28, 94 Peloponnesios, Petros, 64, 90 performance: choral, 154 (see also choir; choral); musical, 2, 28, 191; practice, 14, 30, 152, 182, 188, 199; ritual, 190

Book 1.indb 237

237

Perivoli tis Panaghias. See Mount Athos; Athonite phrasal freedom, 87, 113, 116 pianoforte, 65, 71 pilgrimage: Athonite (at Mount Athos), 4, 124, 126, 129–31, 139; ethnomusicological, 122; and fieldwork, 151; as gendered, 149n32; late-modern rediscovery of, 126; and tourism, 4, 5, 121ff, 126, 128, 129; virtual, 144–45 place, construction of, 123, 147n2 Plutarch’s dilemma, 62 Polyphony, 64, 68, 105, 106, 107 polytheism, pre-Christian, 182 prayer, 1, 5, 13, 59, 108, 109, 139, 147, 151ff, 173, 179, 183, 192, 200, 202, 207, 209; the anatomy of, 109; and heart, 3, 108, 109, 109, 157, 180, 183, 184, 189, 197, 209; the Jesus Prayer, 109, 119n40, 209 premodern, 25, 137, 141, 154 presencing (God), 160, 175 Pringos, Konstantinos, 57, 58, 165 Protestantism, 178, 179 protopsáltis, 2, 3, 31, 46, 48, 49, 53, 57, 60, 70, 98, 100, 104, 110–13, 138, 154, 166, 181, 186, 188, 188, 189, 190, 208 Psachos, Konstantinos, 57, 65, 98 psalmodía. See Byzantine chant psaltikí téchni. See Byzantine chant psaltírion (instrument), 70–71 psáltis/psáltes, 5, 153, 192 quietude. See silence spiritual Raasted, Jørgen, 14, 33n3, 86, 170n4 radio, 68, 165 recitation, 199 reconstruction. See music revival recording(s): early, 4, 27, 48, 58, 163, 204, 205; equipment, 122, 228; ethnographic (Karas), 68; field (the author’s), 4, 42, 73n25, 89, 163, 177,

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238

Index

185, 192, 193, 203, 205, 228; other commercial, 144–45, 169; sound, 163; technology, 48, 58; Vatopaidian (CDs), 4, 26–27, 37, 49, 51, 53, 59, 60, 73n27, 94, 96, 98, 99, 107, 113, 124, 130, 132, 134, 135, 136, 140, 145, 151, 155, 163, 166, 169, 199–200, 201, 202, 204, 205 the reform of the Byzantine musical system, 2, 4, 20, 22, 23, 27, 41, 57, 58, 60, 61, 63, 64, 66, 67, 69, 71, 72, 74n39, 78, 84–86, 90–93, 97, 99, 111, 118n6, 201, 204 reinventing the past, 18, 30, 31 religion, 5, 30 remembering, 28 remembrance, 191–92, 195 Romanou, Katy, 32, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67 remote: area, 132, 133, 180; monks as, 132; others, 133; past, 3 remoteness, 11, 28, 94, 131–33, 144 148n13, 167 renovation, monumental, 18 representation: cultural, 27, 78, 80, 82, 131, 132, 139, 142, 143, 203, 207; graphical, 75–76, 81, 82 (see also transcription); and the icon, 75, 160 restoration: age of, 21–24; monumental, 4, 12, 32, 37, 38, 39, 42, 47, 50; musical, 39, 137 revival: of Bach, 22; of Byzantine chant, 2, 4, 6, 18–19, 20, 22, 84–94, 112, 199, 204; musical (see music revival); of notational signs, 76–77, 84–94 revoicing history, 202 revolution, age of 22 “right” chanting. See orthopraxis rite 32, 181, 187, 198n9 ritual, 183, 195, 200 sacred musicology, 53, 68, 71, 77, 204 sacredness, 178–79 scale (musical), 14, 80, 83, 95, 113, 156. See also mode

Book 1.indb 238

Schartau, Bjarne, 33n3, 34n9, 41, 93, 162 self-consciousness, historical, 26–27 self-identification, 28 self-representation, 27, 132, 140 sensibility in Orthodox Christianity, 179 sensitivity, spiritual, 193–94 sensorium, sacred, 200 silence, 109, 174, 183, 192, 194, 196; and Byzantine music, 192; as dialogue, 194; experience of, 192–94, 196; as object of desire, 196; ritual, 173, 192; spiritual, 1, 5, 109, 173ff, 180–82, 184, 189, 193–96, 209 Simonos Petras (the monastery), 17, 62, 98, 107, 144, 154 simplicity (as ideal), 154 sin: and communion, 192, 195; in the Jesus Prayer, 119n40, 209; as precondition of humanity, 3, 5, 137, 168, 168, 189; in word painting 91, 91 sincerity, spiritual, 92, 137, 161, 200– 201 Skiathos, 33n2, 168–70, 171n34 skíti, 9, 20, 154 solemnity, 107, 157, 170n15, 190, 192, 206, 208 Solesmes (the monastery), 39, 77, 110 song (tragoúdi), 13 sonority, 174 soteriology, musical, 5 sound, 6; anthropogenic, 180; sacred, 5, 108, 160, 173ff, 203, 209 soundscape, 5, 83, 107, 174–75, 203 Souroti (the monastery), 112, 113 souvenirs, 16, 134 space: the church, 175; construction of, 147n2; religious, 20; sacred, 175, 178, 199; sonic, 173, 175; topological and topographical, 132 spirituality, 2, 3, 178, 209 Stanitsas, Thrasylouvos, 57, 58, 165 Stathis, Grigorios, 33n3, 73n19, 74n42, 86, 143, 153, 170n5

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Index Stefanidis, Vasileios, 66, 74n39 Strunk, Oliver, 71, 74n47, 118n1 Sykiotis, 164–65, 171n31 task (diakónima), 6, 9, 41, 42, 43, 98, 158, 176, 190 teleology, 53, 77, 204 teretísmata. See nonsense syllables territory: Athonite, 2, 85, 123–24, 131, 165, 167, 170; of fieldwork, 6 thanksgiving prayer. See Eucharist Theoretikon mega, 45, 46, 60, 63, 64, 66, 70, 90, 118n6 Thessaloniki (Thessalonica), 68, 73n25, 84, 116, 122, 129, 143 Thibaut, Joannès, 70 “third culture” (temporary establishment of a), 6 Three Teachers, 14, 57, 58, 60, 63, 64, 69, 70, 71, 84, 88, 92, 118n6, 118n8 Tillyard, H. J. W., 14, 33n3, 78, 158 time, 190, 191; otherworldly meaning of, 3; suspended, 189 timelessness, 29, 167, 191 Touliatos, Diane, 33n3, 182, 183, 198n10, 198n11 tourism, 30, 201–2; Athonite, 4, 124, 125, 127, 128, 133; industry, 123, 132, 139, 145; inner, 127; religious, 129, 130; spiritual, 128, 145 tradition, 15, 17–19, 21, 24, 28, 41, 51, 58, 59, 71, 96, 99, 123, 138, 140, 161, 170n4, 175, 178, 201; Athonite, 113, 123–24, 153, 155, 167, 204, 209; authenticating, 26, 167; authenticity and, 2, 24, 27, 30, 62, 111, 142, 145; break in, 46, 50, 71; Byzantine musical, 1–4, 13, 17, 18–19, 21, 22, 23, 27, 30, 33, 38, 41, 79, 92, 124, 136, 145, 152, 156, 161, 191, 199, 205; change and, 31, 93, 200; continuation of, 17, 37, 46, 48, 57, 60, 83, 134, 164, 200; genealogy of, 52–63; Gregorian, 22, 39, 77, 149n28; identity and, 29, 53, 58;

Book 1.indb 239

239

invention of, 22, 23, 25, 26; learning, 27; living, 30, 161; mass production of, 23; meaning of, 16, 61, 62, 160; modernity and, 2, 16, 17, 19, 21, 25, 28, 93, 122, 166; monastic, 84, 132, 139, 143, 144, 162; naturalization of, 25; notational, 92–93; oral, 41, 44, 51, 57, 58, 61–63, 69–71, 74n47, 76, 78, 85, 91, 93, 95, 113, 137, 158, 161, 204; oral and written, 2, 83, 137; orthodox (Christian), 4, 19, 21, 27, 29, 41, 50, 51, 97, 110, 124, 152, 162, 167, 168, 177, 180, 183, 190, 203, 209; Ottoman lyric, 198n14; photography and, 48, 138–39, 142, 143, 145, 147, 166; reinvented, 22–23; religious, 2, 3, 18, 179; renewal of, 53; restoration metaphor and, 38; revival of, 15, 21, 84, 95, 195, 200, 204; revived, 17, 20, 26, 48, 50, 84, 201; sacred, 4, 5, 17, 28, 29, 40, 75, 160, 199, 201; saturated, 133; secrets of, 116–17; sincerity and, 26, 92; the study of, 27, 29; unbroken musical, 24, 63; Vatopaidian, 27, 38, 51, 53, 57, 61, 63, 67, 95, 116, 153, 204 traditional, 15, 17, 21, 22, 26, 28, 65, 106, 140, 169; attitudes, 193; image, 132; as label, 200; life, 131, 139, 141; past, 167, 203, 204; self, 201; societies, 25, 26, 139; space, 123 traditionalism, 16, 65, 161 traditionality, 104, 136, 144 traditionalization, 28 tranquility, 184, 196. See also silence, spiritual transcription: as an act of exotization, 80; conceptual, 82; as graphic representation (see representation); as interpretation, 82; of Byzantine music, 78–84, 81, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91, 95, 102–3, 112, 114–15, 186–87; on the problem of, 4, 15, 78–82 transmission. See tradition

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240

Index

transorthography, 75ff, 85, 92. See also orthography traveler, 9, 126, 130, 131, 132 Troelsgård, Christian, 14, 15, 33, 33n3, 41, 75, 76, 86, 93, 118n6 Typikón, 11, 32, 35n22, 197n5 UNESCO, 13, 130–31 Vatopaidi (the monastery), 4, 15, 22, 24, 39, 187, 203 the Vatopaidi Musical Bible, 60, 135, 199 Vatopaidian music school (mousikodidaskaleíon), 42, 51, 63; style of chanting 27, 50, 136, 200 Vatopaidiness, 191 Velimirovic, Milos, 33n3, 79, 98, 182, 198n10 Violakis, Georgios, 70, 74n39 virtue(s): of Athonite chanting, 206; the authentic as, 26; of choral precision, 136; Christian, 5, 21, 158, 164, 168,

Book 1.indb 240

194–95; of inner wakefulness, 108; monastic, 158, 184 voice, 2, 3, 6, 72n2, 109, 113, 154, 156–58, 160, 163, 164, 169; of the Byzantine past, 20; cheironomy and, 110–11; foní (melodic step), 86, 107; of God, 5, 175, 184; orthodox, 21, 133, 139; sacred, 5, 11; unified (as ideal), 152–53. See also ethnographic voice War of Independence, Greek, 11, 15, 23, 24, 32, 66 Wellesz, Egon, 14, 33n3, 40, 41, 78 westernization, 20, 63, 66, 67 Williams, Edward, 181, 182, 198n8, 198n10, 198n12 women, Mount Athos and, 121, 140, 162 wordless jubilation, 173, 183, 194 xenofonía (foreign-voicedness), 67–69, 71. See also westernization

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About the Author

Tore Tvarnø Lind has studied at the universities of Copenhagen, Athens, and Chicago, and currently holds an associate-professor position at the University of Copenhagen (Department of Arts and Cultural Studies) in ethnomusicology. His fieldwork studies include Byzantine chant at Mount Athos, Greece, and music and healing/medicine in contemporary medical, spiritual, and new-age practices in Denmark. His current work focuses on various aspects of Byzantine chant, notably the concepts of tradition and historical authenticity. Other research interests include music as torture in the 21stcentury’s so-called war on terror, and masculinities and the sound of classic motorcycles.

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Book 1.indb 241

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