High Spiritual Messages from Mankind's Past: Byzantine Music

The approaching end of the second millennium is felt by many of us today as an important landmark in the history of mankind, and this has little to do with predictions of impending doom. Maybe it is because despite nominally useful, also unprecedented and continuously accumulating technological advances, we, human beings, seem to be farther away than ever from living the kind of full, accomplished lives many of us intuitively feel would only then be within our reach when our lives' substance could receive the touch of a higher and nobler power, than the one we normally manage to perceive in our very busy lives today.

With chances for direct human contact constantly diminishing due to the pressures exerted by an increasingly urban and technological, consequently materialistic society the realities we can perceive can hardly go beyond the overriding material world tightly surrounding us, and a longing is being experienced, particularly by the younger generation, for making place for something deeper and finer in our lives, that could give us more hope and joy, and sustain us with a more intense and permanent sense of peace with ourselves and with the world around us.

We do not know how Byzantine music appeared, just as we do not know how other religious types of music came into being, and this is due less to the absence of sufficient documentary evidence, as to the impossibility of recreating that state of the soul which enabled the early Christians to receive naturally the mystical power able to move them to fuse prayer and singing expression into one spontaneous and uplifting whole. The New Testament itself makes only sporadic mention of this state of the human soul, and it seems that this was so because in those days there was no need to evoke the obvious too often.

Like other genuine human cultures Byzantine religious culture has also passed on to the following generations an equally important inheritance in the visual arts, particularly in painting. Widespread theorizing on Byzantine painting has it that in order to acquire the "Byzantine mannerism" today one only has to mind carefully certain very strict canons and train one's skills to work outside generally accepted norms of "realistic" rendering. Such attitudes usually tend to oppose the assumed canons mentioned above to the "realism" of Western Renaissance which also found a vast area of expression in religious themes. But in doing so one is led to forget that Byzantine religious arts were not just manifestations of human endeavours but the results of attaining to a higher level of spiritual life, i.e. experiencing the sweetness of the honey.

Numerous monastic communities today seeking continuity with the original ideals and pursuits of the early Christian Church have the possibility of finding necessary explanations and moral support through reviewing the legacy reposing in the writings of the early fathers, through exercizing continually the prayer of the heart, and otherwise living the life of the like-minded community. So much so that meeting in the Carpathians living duplicates of the ascetic figures portrayed in traditional Byzantine paintings of former times is still very much a possible fact, just as it would be at Mount Athos or Mount Sinai. And maybe apart from beards touching the ground and spartan fasting canons even laymen living today the normal bread-earner's life would not be excluded from participating in such pursuits. The likelihood remains reserved for such laymen, perhaps even more so for laywomen, when surrounded by the peace and beauty of sincerely expressed Byzantine chanting during normal religious service today, to be able to taste of and share in what one assumes must have been in former times a much more widespread spiritual experience.

During the last 150 years or so Byzantine music has increasingly become a prime target of scientific research. Highly challenging areas have been discovered, such as musical notation systems, and their relationship to musical traditions. Cross-cultural subjects have been investigated, and possible common links have been established, centres of singing traditions have been identified, a huge amount of archiving and cataloguing work, to mention just the most obvious type of activity, still remains to be done. Finer touches are being constantly added to the picture of the old tree with its hard-to-see roots and its more and more visible branches, where of late both pre-Gregorian Western chant and Russian choral traditions receive a lot of attention.

In pursuing these highly commendable and predominantly intellectual research goals, we may wish to remind ourselves that Byzantine music in its presently accepted national variants is actually held to be part of the living message of the universal Christian Orthodox Church of all time, and that this message is not a hidden treasure in the process of being rediscovered but that it represents the natural outward form of expression of the various national Orthodox churches today.

Traian Ocneanu