Syntax Rules in Neo-Byzantine Music: Sticheraric 1st Mode

The present approach is limited to Romanian chants: 26 chants taken from hieromonk Macarie's Anastasimatarion (Doamne, strigat-am..., the Resurrection stichera, the Anatolian stichera, the dogmatics from Doamne, strigat-am..., the Laude and the Voscreasna I), and to a lesser extent from the work of other psalts, such as Dimitrie Suceveanu and Victor Ojog.

To arrive at the constituent elements and their interrelationships by ways of decomposing a chant into its structural parts the author divided in succession the chants into periods, and then the periods into phrases. In turn certain phrases can be divided into two units, whereby the second one is known under the name of cadence formula.

Since the syntactic rules of the first unit are less restrictive than those of the cadence formula the author named the former a free zone (fig. 2). There are indivisible phrases, which consist only in cadence formulae, and do not contain a free zone. The cadence formulae (fig. 3) were described for the first time by Ion Popescu-Pasarea in his work Principles of the Oriental Church (Psaltic) Music, published in 1897.

Two kinds of cadence formulae can be distinguished: perfect ones (the cadences at the end of periods) and imperfect ones (the other cadence formulae).

In hieromonk Macarie's Anastasimatarion 85% of the cadence formulae, both perfect and imperfect, were found to be reducible to those described by Ion Popescu-Pasarea. Two new formulae, presented in fig. 5, were also identified, whose weight within hieromonk Macarie's musical economy is 10% of the perfect cadence formulae (for formula P5), and 17% of the imperfect cadence formulae (for formula ga3).

Popescu-Pasarea also describes 4 special cadence formulae (fig. 6) of which one has its cadence in the high register - to mark words and ideas pertaining to the heavenly world - and the other three have their cadences in the low register - for the terrestrial world.

A special type of cadence formulae, the modulatory formulae, are also used for rhetorical reasons. For the first echos the most frequently used modulatory formulae are those of the 6th echos, if the text expresses human suffering, and of the 7th, if the text expresses joy. Depending on author the frequency of the special cadence formulae used varies. In hieromonk Macarie's Anastasimatarion the proportion taken by special cadences is less than 3%, whereas in Dimitrie Suceveanu's Anastasimatarion it reaches 16%.

Figs. 8 and 9 illustrate the relationship between literary and melodic accents. Fig. 8 marks the neumes under which a word can begin with a tonic syllable for the perfect cadence formula P1. Fig. 9 marks for the perfect cadence formulae P2 one of the only 5 neumes under which a syllable can begin, irrespective of whether it is accentuated or not. Fig. 10 illustrates the division of the perfect cadence formulae. The view of the author is that the syntax units illustrated in the figure could be considered to be the appropriate elements of vocabulary.

The paper concludes that dividing a chant into constituent elements should be viewed as an analysis tool whose further development may be possible but is at the present state of his research unclear. Also, the usefulness of analysis methods like this one to provide an objective basis on which to build value judgements as to stylistic characteristics of byzantine music needs to be tested in further research.

Costin Moisil