The Best Known Psaltic Chants during Lent

The collection entitled The Triod includes chants and readings from the period whose name it bears, which spans the time from Sunday of the Customer and the Pharisee to Holy Saturday, on the eve of Christ's Resurrection. This period was named to distinguish between the number of the odes included in the morning service canons (three) and that of the odes in The Octoechos and the The Mineion canons (nine).

During Lent, specific chants are sung to correspond to the spiritual events characteristic to this period, which are meant to reveal the supreme religiousness of Jesus Christ. The chants of The Triod are basically directed towards the spiritual and moral preparation of the faithful for understanding in humbleness, fasting and prayers the suffering and the death of our Saviour.

The literary and musical genres of this period, and those already presented (the Octoechos, the Triod, the Penticostarion) usually make use of and greatly favour the troparion, the kondakion and the canon. The liturgical function is particulary important for outlining certain specific characteristics within the genre itself. The genre which is most used during this period is the canon, usually made up of three odes, which contributed to the actual name of the period, The Triod. There is only one work, namely hieromonk Macarie's The Mourning of our Lord, that was allowed to enter the list of the chants sung during this period and that was put to verse.

In an especially valuable book, that is not rivalled in Romania, published in 1999 at the Trinitas Publising House of the Metropolitan Church of Moldavia and Bucovina, entitled The Evening Services of Lent and including not only the troparia, the stichera, the kondakia and the canons, but also around 20 psaltic scores of the most important and beautiful chants of this period, the order is presented of the evening services during Lent, The Chants of the Holy Trinity in 8 voices and stichera of humbleness. This book is the result of particularly minute research done by father Mihail Ungureanu, archimandrite Partenie Apetrei, and archimandrite Clement Haralam, the abbot of Three Hierarchs Monastery.

Raluca Fronea