Orthodox Liturgical Music

Step into an Orthodox service at any point and someone is singing. Nothing in Orthodox worship is merely spoken: petitions are intoned and answered with a sung "Lord, have mercy," the Scriptures are chanted rather than read flat, and the great bulk of every service is hymnody — troparia, kontakia, stichera — cycling through the eight melodic modes of the Octoechos. St. Basil, writing in the fourth century, describes his congregations dividing in two to sing the psalms antiphonally before dawn: the Church has prayed to melody from her earliest days.

The reason is more than beauty. Orthodox hymns are dense with doctrine — whole entries of this encyclopedia are compressed into single stanzas sung on Sunday mornings — and what a congregation sings year after year becomes what it believes. Music in Orthodoxy is not the atmosphere around the theology; it is one of the places the theology lives.

The Orthodox norm is a cappella: no organ, no piano, no band. The conviction beneath the custom is that worship is offered by persons, and the human voice — the instrument God made — both carries the words and belongs to a praying body in a way no machine does. The early Church sang unaccompanied, partly in continuity with the synagogue and partly because instruments in the ancient world carried the associations of the theater and pagan festival; by the time those associations faded, the Church had discovered that the unaccompanied voice was not a limitation but her sound. Even the Psalms' harps and cymbals the Fathers read as pointing to the harmony of soul and body praising God together.

Honesty requires the exceptions. From the early twentieth century onward, a number of Greek Orthodox parishes in America adopted the organ — often to support congregational singing in buildings and circumstances far from home — and some parishes use it still, though many have returned to unaccompanied chant. And Orthodoxy does have one gloriously loud instrument: bells — rung before and after services to call and to proclaim, but silent during the singing itself. Within the services, the norm across the Orthodox world remains the human voice.

On that common foundation the Orthodox peoples have raised strikingly different musical houses. Byzantine chant, the living tradition of the Greek-speaking churches and beyond, sets a single ornamented melodic line over a held drone called the ison. Znamenny chant is the austere unison chant of old Russia, written in hook-shaped signs rather than notes on a staff. Kievan chant and its relatives are the simpler later Slavic chants that became the everyday workhorses of parish service-singing. The Georgian Church sings an ancient polyphony of three interweaving voices, a tradition of striking beauty. And Russian choral polyphony — the harmonized repertoire that grew from the eighteenth century onward, from Bortniansky to Rachmaninoff — turned the choir itself into one of Orthodoxy's best-known sounds. Other traditions — Romanian, Serbian, Arabic-language Byzantine chant, Carpatho-Rusyn congregational singing — fill out the family.

No council ranks these traditions, and this encyclopedia will not either. A visitor who hears Byzantine chant in one parish and a Russian choir in the next is hearing the same services, the same Cherubic Hymn, the same words — proof that the Church's unity was never meant to be uniformity of sound. Whatever the melody, the aim is the one St. Paul set: singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.