Words and Music in Byzantine Liturgy

Author(s): Egon Wellesz

Source: The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Jul., 1947), pp. 297-310
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/739285
Accessed: 09/01/2009 07:35

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=oup.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the
scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that
promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Musical
Quarterly.

http://www.jstor.org
VOL. XXXIII, No. 3 JULY, 1947

THE MUSICAL
QUARTER

WORDS AND MUSIC IN BYZANTINE

LITURGY1
By EGON WELLESZ

ALL who have ventured to explore the vast domains of Byzantine

hymnography from one aspect or another know that we are
only at the beginning of the work that must be done.
We can divide the preparatory period into two sections: the first,
dating from 1850 to the beginning of this century, comprises in
the main the work on the texts by Mone, Neale, Pitra, Christ,
Wilhelm Meyer, Bouvy, Stevenson, and Krumbacher. The second,
dating from the last decade of the 19th century to 1930, comprises the
successive attempts of Thibaut, Gaisser, Gastoue, Fleischer, Rie-
mann, Tillyard, and myself to decipher the musical notation. The
foundation of the Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae marks the be-
ginning of a systematic approach to the problem of Byzantine
music and hymnography as a whole; the first step taken by a group
of scholars who could not have been more different in outlook and
training, to coordinate their plans and aims into a common effort.
1 This paper was read before the Bicentennial Conference on Scholarship and
Research in the Arts, Princeton University, on April 23, 1947.

297
Copyright, 1947, by G. Schirmer, Inc.
298 The Musical Quarterly
They also sought cooperation with other scholars, such as Dom
Tardo and the regretted Kirsopp Lake, and they are now anxious
to cooperate with their American friends and European colleagues,
of whose work we have known too little during the isolation of the
war years, and with whom we want to renew and open personal
contacts.
Hitherto most of our time was taken up by the difficulty of
deciphering Byzantine notation in its various phases, but I hope
that the main obstacles that stood in the way of the transcription of
the innumerable surviving melodies have been removed. We can
read the music of the 13th-century hymns at least as well as we can
read that of Western hymns of the same century. And just as in
Gregorian research we work back from later manuscripts to earlier
ones, using the linear notation to help decipher codices that have
the neumes in campo aperto, so we can use the Middle Byzantine
notation of the 13th century to help us to read manuscripts of the
12th and 11th centuries written in the Early Byzantine notation.
Continuous occupation with manuscript versions, wearisome as
it was, proved to be an excellent means of studying the alterations
in the melodies that are found in later manuscripts, though they
are usually only slight, and of investigating the influence the indi-
vidual words and the structure of the line have on the expression
marks and rhythmical signs of the notation.
It is the close connection of words and music to which I should
ultimately like to draw attention, because I see in it one of the
most remarkable features of Byzantine hymnography. But before
we come to this point I should like to deal with the texts and the
music in general.
By an unfortunate aberration our immediate predecessorstreated
the texts and melodies of the hymns in isolation without reference to
their place in the liturgy. Neale, Mone, and Pitra, all of them
excellent liturgiologists, had begun the study of the texts in
the right way. Cardinal Pitra above all, who was able to approach
the study of hymnology, Eastern and Western, as a whole, had
rediscovered the metrical character of the various forms of Byzantine
liturgical poetry from the simple monostrophic Troparion to
the metrically complex Kanon. Here he stopped, and did not
attempt to apply the rules of Greek classical poetry to a genre which,
as he rightly saw, was derived from Semitic prototypes. The same
sound view was held by Bouvy and by Thomas Wehofer, whose
 Words and Music in Byzantine Liturgy 299
premature death in 1902 deprived Byzantine research of one of
its most promising scholars. At this point, however, the metrical
theories that Wilhelm von Christ had put forward in his Anthologia
Graeca Carminum Christianorum began to spread. Christ's treat-
ment of Byzantine verse in accordance with Greek metrics must
be regarded as a serious setback, because it influenced not only
the investigations of Karl Krumbacher into the structure of the
Kontakia of Romanus, but also those of Gaisser and of Hugo
Riemann into the music of the hymns, and made them introduce
into their transcriptions of Byzantine melodies a rhythmical scheme
alien to the music of that period.
All these attempts to treat Byzantine poetry and prose-poetry
as an efflorescence of Greek classical poetry belong to the past,
but for us, who had to get rid of this sham tree of knowledge, it
cost much time to destroy its roots, and to replace it by a modest
but straight plant. Here, I wish to express my gratitude for the in-
spiration I received from the work of Dom Mocquereau and the
School of Solesmes, and particularly from my reverend friend the
late Dom Sufiol, with whom I discussed these questions. Dom Suniol
provided me with many examples of Ambrosian melodies for my
study entitled Eastern Elements in Western Chant, in which I
was able to prove the close relationship between Byzantine and
Ambrosian melodic formulas. The discovery of this affinity sup-
ported my view of the origin of Byzantine and pre-Gregorian Chant
from a common source, namely the music of the Syro-Palestinian
Church and, further back, of the Synagogue. This theory is, I
should like to add, in accordance with the conclusions reached by
Dom Cagin in the fifth volume of the Paleographie Musicale, in
which he dealt with the texts of the Ambrosian Antiphonary. I want
to quote one example only. The text of the Ambrosian Responsory
Vadis Propitiator is, as Dom Cagin has shown, a free version
of parts of the second and fourth Troparia of the Kontakion
Tov bL' lt;sg oTavQcivtcf of Romanus. It is difficult to assume that
the Latin antiphon is derived from the Greek Kontakion; they
must both go back to an earlier prototype. Since we know that the
hymns of Romanus have their roots in Syriac poetical homilies,
the obvious explanation is that both the Kontakion and the antiphon
are derived from a Syrian prototype.
We must now turn to the main subject of this paper.
Byzantine hymns, both the words and the music, are an integral
300 The Musical Quarterly

part of Byzantine liturgy. Their artistic qualities can only be prop-

erly appreciated if we consider them in relation to their function
in the service of the Eastern Church. This may seem a platitude
to those who are acquainted with the history and development
of Byzantine liturgy, but it can easily be shown that this factor
has not been taken into account by prominent scholars who have
dealt with Byzantine religious poetry. When, for example, we
examine the books and articles that have dealt with the two main
forms of Byzantine devotional poetry-Kontakion and Kanon-
we find the view expressed, without a single exception, that the
Kontakion, which flourished in the 6th and 7th centuries, was
poetically superior to the Kanon, which replaced it in the 7th
century, and unfavorable comments are made about the dry,
didactic, and verbose character of the Kanon. Such a conclusion
may, indeed, be reached if the Kanon is studied merely as poetry,
without the music, and without any consideration of the function
of both these elements in the liturgy. But the result will be a dif-
ferent one if we approach the problem from another angle and
ask why it was that the Orthodox Church replaced a traditional
and flourishing poetical genre, the Kontakion, by another, the
Kanon, so completely that only a few stanzas of the earlier genre
remained as part of the Office.
The Church had, I think, two reasons for making this important
change. The first one, relating to the content, is connected with
the igth decree of the Second Trullan Council of 692, ordering
the heads of the churches to preach every day. The second, relating
to the form, is connected with the extension of the service. Let us
explain this statement, briefly. The Kontakion is, in content, a
poetical homily. Like its predecessor the sermon of the early Church
and the Synagogue, it had its place in the Office after the Lesson
from the Gospel. When Romanus (fl. c. 500) begins his Kontakion
on the Ten Virgins with the words: "I was stupefied when I heard
in the Gospel the holy parable of the Ten Virgins," we are instantly
reminded of the scene in the synagogue of Nazareth described by
St. Luke in 4:16-22, when Jesus, after having read the pericope
from Isaiah, 61, begins his sermon with the words: "This day is this
scripture fulfilled in your ears."
The gap between the sermon of Our Lord and the Kontakion of
Romanus is filled by many examples to be found in the homilies
of Romanus' predecessors.The most important comes from Melito's
 Words and Music in Byzantine Liturgy 301
homily on the Passion, recently discovered by Campbell Bonner,
in which he chants from the pulpit: "The scripture of the Hebrew
Exodus has been read, and the words of the mystery have been ex-
plained; how the sheep is sacrificed and the people is saved. There-
fore, hear ye, beloved: thus the mystery of the Passover is new and
old, eternal and transient, corruptible and incorruptible, mortal
and immortal."
We can see a clear development from the sermon in the Syna-
gogue to the early Christian homily of Melito, from this to the
homily in poetical prose of Basil of Seleucia and his contemporaries,
and finally to the poetical homily of Romanus.
But it is clear that the decree of the Trullan Council made it
liturgically impossible to retain in the Office the singing of the
Kontakia as well as the now obligatory preaching of a sermon.
This would have meant the duplication of a liturgical act. The
Kontakia, therefore, had to be dropped.
The second point, the substitution of the Kanon for the Kon-
takia, was also a consequence of this measure. The extension and
the increasing splendor of the liturgy led, as a matter of course,
to an increasing embellishment of the service by songs. Instrumental
music was strictly excluded from the inside of the church, and
portable organs which accompanied the processions had to be left
outside the door. The institution, therefore, of a new genre of
hymns, in which music played an essential part, was an obvious
development. In the days of Romanus the same melody, certainly
of a syllabic character, was repeated to each of the isosyllabic stanzas
of the poem, that is eighteen to thirty-two times.
The new genre, the Kanon, consisted of nine odes, each one
made up of a number of stanzas. This meant that nine different
melodies, composed in different meters and differing in expression,
were sung. But this was not all. The refrain of each stanza was
repeated by the congregation, and Troparia, that is monostrophic
hymns, were inserted after each ode. Thus a rich pattern of Troparia
of different kinds arose, among which the groups of isosyllabic
stanzas of the odes were predominant.
It still remains to be shown in detail how the nine odes of
the Kanon gradually developed from refrains inserted between the
verses of the Canticles up to the moment when the poetical power
of the Kanons became so strong that the Canticles were replaced
by the odes of the Kanon. It must also be shown how far the odes
302 The Musical Quarterly
were treated as "images" of the Canticles, as earthly, audible echoes
of the hymns which, according to the Dionysian theology, are
incessantly sung in heaven by the ranks of angels, inaudible to
human ears but perceptible to the inspired hymnographer. It must
also be explained why, at a certain time, the singing of all the
stanzas of an ode was abandoned and only three or four odes
were sung in the truncated version, so that at the final stage the
hymnographers only wrote down three stanzas of each of the re-
maining odes.
The liturgiological explanation of the replacement of the Kon-
takion by the Kanon makes it clear that the new stage of hymnog-
raphy, in which the center of gravity had shifted from the poetry
to the music, needs a different treatment of the words from that
of earlier Byzantine hymnwriting. In the Kontakion the melodies
were certainly of a simple type, making it possible for the congrega-
tion to understand every word of the text, which often had a didactic,
even polemic, character, as was fitting for a hymn of the homilectic
type. In the Kanon the music was more elaborate and the melodic
line more extended. The narrative character of the homily dis-
appears and makes way for a more emotional treatment. The poetical
vision of the hymnwriter is extended over the whole ode, which
is treated as a unit. This leads to repetitions which may sometimes
seem dull if one merely reads the poetry, but this feeling disappears
if one hears it sung. We may go a step further. As in the case of
Latin hymnography, highly inspired poems are mingled with unin-
spired. The printed anthologies contain many exquisite examples
of Byzantine devotion. There are also hymns in which the Eastern
mind expresses itself with more passion than can be found in any
Latin hymn, and it is these hymns that provide the best approach
to Byzantine hymnography.
This applies not only to the two main genres of Byzantine
minor
hymnography which we have mentioned, but also to the
forms, the Stichera, which are found clustering so thickly over all
the
parts of the Office that we can well understand how one of
best scholars in Eastern Liturgy came to refer to them as "the
ivy of hymnography".
We are at present better prepared to understand the nature of
the
Byzantine devotion than were the scholars who approached
and
problem looking back to the great masters of Greek poetry
thought with whom they compared the Byzantine hymnographers.
 Words and Music in Byzantine Liturgy 303
This was an unjust estimate of poets who were gloriously defending
the realm of their ideas against iconoclasm, which threatened to
destroy monastic life in the entire Eastern Empire, and who, faced
with torture and death, professed their faith.
We can go even further back, to the days of Romanus, in order
to show the formation of the new spirit, which is the spirit of the
Orthodox Church. so different from that of Clement of Alexandria,
who represents the Catechetical school of the 3rd century, and
who draws inexhaustibly on classical writers - Homer, Pindar,
Aeschylus, Euripides, Pythagoras, Plato.
Romanus is the poet of Orthodoxy; he expresses in his poems
the dogmas of the Church. He makes an uncompromising stand
against the spirit of ancient Greek poetry and philosophy. In the
18th stanza of his hymn on Pentecost we find the following outburst:

Ti (pvoGot xal Povt6ewoiotv

ot "EMqVg;;
L qpavTilovtral "AeaTov
tJog
TOvtrQtaxataQatrov;
Tt XAavctval
rrO HXoaTova;
Tl ArOEVnOvqv OTeQyovat
ay
trov vEv;
Tl Lil VOOVOiV
"OpQov
iVEtov aQyov;
TI HlUcayo6av 'iQVoUoVt5
TOv bltalcog )Lto(poivTa;

Why are the Greeks puffed up, and why do they chatter? Why do they let
their imaginations wander after Aratos, the thrice accursed? Why do they
err in pursuit of Plato? Why do they adore Demosthenes the degenerate?
Why do they not see that Homer is a hollow sham? Why do they prattle about
Pythagoras, who should by rights be put to silence?

Here we have laid bare the style of the poetical homily. Some
may feel that such hostility to the great minds of the past should
have no place in a poem. But we may come to understand Romanus
better if we look for parallels in poetry that lies nearer to us.
We shall find them in 17th-century England, in Milton, and in
contemporary France, in Paul Claudel. There is a passage in a
poem of Claudel in which the poet raises his voice as defensor fidei
304 The Musical Quarterly
in an age filled with the spirit of religious indifference. I quote a
passage from his Magnificat, written in 1907:
Restez avec moi Seigneur, parceque le soir approche et ne m'abondonnez pas!
Ne me perdez point avec les Voltaire et les Renan, et les Michelet, et les Hugo,
et tous les autres infamesl
Vous montrez at l'obscure generation qui arrive,
La lumiere pour la revelation des nations et le salut de votre peuple Israel.

In Paradise Regained Milton sums up the Christian's attitude to

the pagan philosophers and ends:
Who therefore seeks in these
True wisdom finds her not, or by delusion
Far worse, her false resemblance only meets,
An empty cloud.

Neither Romanus nor Milton nor Claudel can be charged with

ignorance of the greatness of the men whom they attack, indeed
it is because of this greatness in the eyes of the world that the
attack has to be made and the attention of the audience turned
to values beyond those of the world, to active Christianity.
Should poetry of this kind be called sophisticated and sterile
because the hymnwriters dwelt so constantly on dogmatic problems,
and were influenced by theological questions which the present-day
reader must be familiar with if he is to understand their work?
I think that the answer to this question depends on the creative
power of the hymnwriter to assimilate these elements and to com-
pose a hymn that fulfills the purpose for which it was written,
namely to produce in the congregation the state of devotion that
the feast of the day requires. There have been many great poems
in the West, from the Middle Ages up to modern times, which need
an exegesis to be fully appreciated. It is enough to mention Dante's
Divine Comedy, Langland's Piers the Plowman, Johann von Saaz's
Ackersmann aus Bihmen and Milton's Paradise Lost.
The great hymns of the Orthodox Church have not yet found
an adequate literary exegesis, or a translator of high literary qualities.
Yet even the early Victorian adaptations of some of the hymns made
by Neale revealed so much of their beauty that they now form an
integral part of the English Hymnal. There is also a German prose
translation of the Lenten and Easter hymns by P. Kilian Kirchhoff,
who, like a Christian martyr of the days of Nero, died for his
faith before he was able to finish his work.
 Words and Music in Byzantine Liturgy 305
But we need a poet who is at the same time an accomplished
Greek scholar, a man like Milton or Dryden, to give us a translation
of Romanus, Andrew of Crete, John Damascene, Theodore and
Joseph of the Studion, in order to make Byzantine hymnography
accessible to the modern mind, or else a great scholar capable of
evoking the spirit of the hymns. We must hope for such good for-
tune; without it the work we Western scholars are now undertaking
will be restricted to the understanding of a small group of the highly
educated.
We shall now turn to the music of the hymns.
On various occasions I have drawn attention to the fact that
Byzantine melody construction reflects the same attitude towards
art that we find in Byzantine poetry and also in the icons. The Byzan-
tine conception of art is based upon Platonic and Neoplatonic
thought, adapted to orthodox theology by Denys the Areopagite.
According to this conception the work of art belongs to the world
of appearances. It is comparable, to quote a passage from Plotinus,
to the reflection in a mirror of that which has its substantial
existence outside the mirror. It is a projection of the Reality which
is audible and visible only to the higher ranks of the celestial hier-
archy. But through them the reflection of Divine Beauty is trans-
mitted to the lower ranks, and from them to the prophets, the
saints, and the inspired artists, who, in a state of vision, paint an
icon or compose a hymn. Thus the artist could never attempt to
follow his own imagination-such a thought could never have oc-
curred to him. He had to follow a given pattern. If he was a painter
he had to imitate an already existing icon, which represented to
him the visible manifestation of the immutable features of the
saint who dwells among the angels. If he was a hymnographer he
had to imitate an already existing hymn which was the echo, made
perceptible to human ears, of the hymns of praise sung in heaven
by the ranks of the celestial hierarchy.
The rigidity of Byzantine sacred and ceremonial art is not,
therefore, a sign of lack of imagination or of creative sterility, as
was thought by many writers who approached the problems of
Byzantine art from the Western point of view and were dominated
by igth-century esthetics. What seemed to these writers lack of
imagination appears to us as the uncompromising realization of
Orthodox thought, the complete integration of art into the concep-
306 The Musical Quarterly
tion of Orthodox theology, which found its supreme expression in
Eastern liturgy.
The wealth of melodies possessed by the Byzantine Church
is overwhelming. As the student turns the pages of the two facsimile
volumes of the Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae, which contain
the hymns of the Hirmologium and the Sticherarium, he will have
difficulty in finding his way. The Hirmologium contains more than
1700 melodies and the Sticherarium more than 700. But, after having
transcribed the greater part of these main sources for the study of
Byzantine hymnography from various codices, we can see that the
problem of ordering and classifying the melodies is not as difficult
as it seemed at first. Nearly all the codices we examined show,
in principle, the same versions of the melodies. An exception is the
Hirmologium Codex Saba 599. It remains to be seen whether there
was a divergence between the usage of the Palestinian monastery
of St. Saba and that of the monasteries on Mount Athos and the
Studium in Constantinople.
But our investigations have simplified the problem. They have
shown, first, that there is a uniform tradition in most of the relevant
hymnbooks which we can trace back through all the stages of nota-
tion from the i5th century to the manuscripts of the 9th century,
the earliest with musical notation that are known to us. Secondly
the examination of the structure of the melodies has made it clear
that they are all built up of a limited number of formulas, short
groups of notes that are significant of the mode, the echos of the
melody.
Let me be more precise. I have found that Byzantine melodies
are not composed in a mode as the Greek melodies are supposed to
have been, but that the use of a certain group of formulas gives
each melody its character, which is called its echos or mode. The
principle of the formulas was first discovered fifty years ago by Idel-
sohn in his study of the maqams in Arabic music, and for some
time such groups were simply called maqams. My own investigations
have shown that as a principle of melody construction the formulas
are characteristic of the music of the Eastern Church. They are also
characteristic of the pre-Gregorian melodies in the West and of
those groups of Gregorian melodies whose Oriental origin is obvious.
It therefore seemed better to replace the term maqam by the less
striking but clearer one of "formula".
I venture to say that the principle of the formulas is the basic
 Words and Music in Byzantine Liturgy 307
principle of musical composition in, the Syro-Palestinian countries,
and it spread from there with the expansion of early Christian music
to the countries of the Byzantine Empire and to those of the Medi-
terranean basin. The kernel of the melodies of both the Eastern
and Western Churches derived from the melodies of the Jewish
Synagogue. But their character was considerably modified by the
genius of the language to which they were sung; the original form
remained unaltered only in a few bilingual chants in which the
original language survived as a venerable relic. An example of
such incrustation is the monostrophic bilingual hymn "'OTrT(
oGavQ6 - 0 quando in cruce, which I have analyzed in my Eastern
Elements in Western Chant.
The fact that the vast number of Byzantine melodies can be
reduced to a limited number of archetypes may lead to a wrong
judgment of the creative qualities of Byzantine composers, as has
often been the case with the icons. But we have already made it
clear that the Byzantine composer had to submit to the exigencies
of the Orthodox liturgy; his task was prescribed for him by the
work of his predecessors. The melodic archetypes he had to use
and combine were to his mind the apechema, the echo of the
divine hymns. The work of the composer consisted in giving the
melodies a new frame by linking them together. These short pas-
sages, consisting of a few notes leading up or down by steps, or
remaining on the same pitch, were the work of the hymnode.
The formulas were, as a matter of fact, so well known to the
hymnwriter that he had them all by heart. This becomes evident
from the study of the manuscripts using the earliest stage of Byzan-
tine notation. Like the Latin neumes the Byzantine musical signs
indicate the rise and fall of the voice. Both are interval notations and
both, in their early stages, are intended to guide the singer who
is supposed to have learned the melody before he sings it in the
service. There is, however, a difference between the systems. Plain-
chant notation gives the interval signs from beginning to end.
Early Byzantine notation consists of interval signs and rhythmic signs.
In gth-century manuscripts the formulas have, as a rule, no interval
signs, but mainly signs relating to expression and rhythmic nuances;
the transitional passages, however, have interval signs set to every
syllable of the text. This indicates that Byzantine notation aimed
at helping the singer to combine the words and the music, so
308 The Musical Quarterly
that the words should be given the right musical expression, and
at giving him a clear indication of how to sing the transitional
passages.
Let us take an initial formula of the first mode and see how
the accents of the words correspond to the rhythmic signs of the
music:

Ex.lr

t n- ste-e
E-Rct-vae- v - r-dCV
:"E-Laoyv Et- K >-vXO,-:E.-ev
X9.- ,s Y-..w- Tat
,T_- .te- C.X-6v A^

te mt i f
C) }
Trov I?O-(p-lV QS eV iE-4o-Y-c T? Plou)
a0o- Tev*vgpXo-1.
nEKvo-KTbs
'EK VU-KT-
b

(a) shows the lin of ethe Hirmos beginning with an accented syl-
lable, (b), (c), (d) the accented syllable preceded by one, two, or
three unaccented syllables (the article is always treated as an unac-
cented syllable). In all cases the accent of the words coincides with
the mark of expression in the musical notation. It may be noted that
no distinction is made between acute and grave, or between short
vowels and long. These differences did not exist in Byzantine pro-
nunciation and the same dynamic sign is used for all of them.
The second table gives further evidence for the treatment of
the accents: The hymns of this group begin with a recitation on a.
The recitation is interrupted by the lower fifth on d which either
coincides with the first accented syllable or is used as a preparation
for it. Whether the first or the second method is used depends on
the rhythm of the lines to which the formulas are set, or on the
words that are to be emphasized by the interval of the fifth.

Ex2 >,
VJ n^ I>n -
J-. -
rTT- -cb - v -6 eu-6n o-
TTe-no6-KxA- /A -vr f
a
Ne- VL- <lv-TraL t u-[665]
'v-0a- 6x6-,a 4S _ ^L&-pa
'09 - FL-4ov-t?5 6'. Irv- v-Yov-o?iv
 Words and Music in Byzantine Liturgy 309
If we take a whole line and compare the accents of the music with
the accents of the words we shall find other words treated as unac-
cented besides the article. In a verse of twelve syllables there are
as a rule four syllables that bear the musical accent, either by an
accentuated or prolonged note or a group of notes equivalent to a
prolonged note. In shorter verses there are two or three main ac-
cents, as can be seen from the following examples:

Ex3 r
>-'
lo6-i-Xw-dcAvr.x-ea-vo-
ooc
t-Aov o/ T'O w-_-TOV
rb 'xK-tco6oi ee-ov
'&A-Aov
55i-60v IC%v
TaU ir6x-To$
I'KE-Ka-yu-vou yu-64- jc%-vo5
Tta-6eL. el- Au- va.- ?v
'o ngo-p-- TrS K-- L- ,
ix- P9-&x"5sX_a
c-t(- cv (- [v-6cS]

"0- e Txy 6tcwu-

'O0-.-t,o-yv 61
x,
'e-jpa-Auv-v41 tV Ut-
6TL v
TTa-ALv'I- T- 605
/A o,-t--
'os
T yo -"-
TO - Kv
Ka_-ac-vo-_iv -L-

This discovery confirms the metrical theories of Paul Maas, who,

in his editions of Byzantine hymns, disregards the classical system
of accentuation and puts accents only on words that have a special
significance in the meter of the line. The correspondence of the
metrical scheme with the rhythmical is another proof of the integral
connection between words and music, and shows that neither can be
studied independently.
Moreover, close examination of the words in connection with
the music, and vice versa, will show how subtle the work of the
hymnographers was in creating new hymns on the patterns of older
ones. Indeed, the more we occupy ourselves with the problem the
more we are bound to admire the achievements of Byzantine hym-
nographers, whom we may call without exaggeration supreme masters
of musical and poetical variation.
In a period of musicological research in which the scholar's
attitude towards any kind of homophonic music was biased by the
prevailing interest in polyphony and highly developed harmonic
310 The Musical Quarterly
writing, neither plainchant nor the music of the Eastern Church
was fully appreciated. In that period, as we know, there could be
no spontaneous approach to medieval melodies. Plainchant was
revived by setting the melodies to a harmonic accompaniment on
the organ, and these harmonies were treated in accordance with
i9th-century theory. Byzantine melodies, fortunately, escaped this
distortion because they could not be deciphered from the manu-
scripts in which they were preserved. The music of the Greek
Orthodox Church was known from everyday usage, and we can
now see that the musicians of the 16th and 17th centuries had added
so much of their own that the original shape can hardly be discovered
under the extensive ornamentation and coloratura.
A minute investigation into the dynamic and rhythmic signs of
the notation and their groupings was therefore needed in order to
find out how they corresponded to the meter of the words. These
investigations, exacting as they were, proved most valuable. It can
now be seen that the Byzantine hymnographers were extremely
careful in setting words to music, and that by slight changes of the
melodic line, or even by introducing a rhythmical nuance, they
blended words and music perfectly.
Nothing was left to chance, nothing to improvisation. Byzantine
musical notation is an instrument far superior to Western neumatic
notation, and instantly reveals a mistake of a scribe, or the defects
of a minor composer who sets the words of a new hymn to an existing
melody without making the necessary changes.
We have just succeeded in finding out the main principles of
hymn-composition. It will be the task of our successors to work
them out in detail and to make the treasury of Byzantine melodies
a living part of our musical experience.