The Evolution of the Church Chant of the Byzantine Tradition - Orality and Uniformness

Orthodox church chanting is in its innermost dephts of Byzantine origin. It is equally true that the Byzantine and post-Byzantine musical cultures cannot be fully understood if their religious dimension is not also taken into consideration. The orality and the orientation towards uniformness, two aspects that are complementary to the evolution and tradition of the orthodox chant of Byzantine origin, greatly rely on this religious dimension.

The delay in the use of the musical notation (in both manuscripts and printed texts) contributed to a great extent to the important role orality played in the overall development of Christian chanting, and in particular to the Byzantine one. The orality of Byzantine culture reiterates the basic characteristic of the human race, i.e. its capacity to speak, which is also visible in its biblical, theological, and other manifestations.

The initiatives as well as the orientation towards uniformness have aimed, throughout the history of the Church, at correcting the "centrifugal" effects of oral variations and variants, thus using at times written signs or notations, whereby equal proportions of uniformness and notation (which is rather opposed to orality) were never achieved. Just like orality, the orientation towards the uniformness of church chanting was obvious from the early times of the Christian church, both in biblical and canonical manifestations.

For the last three or four centuries, the initiatives and the orientations towards uniformness have meant complex manifestations, whose importance was incresed by various factors such as culture, politics, religion. The development of church singing of the Byzantine tradition has brought a certain balance between the dyanamic character of orality (the expression of the inner life) and the orientations towards uniformness (the expression of an exclusive belief, the spiritual permanence of tradition), a different expression of the same spirituality that characterizes orality.

Vasile Grăjdian