Braille Byzantine Music Notation

By the way, the hyphens with two dots beneath them (used in between the code for the text and the code for the music) are not part of the Braille notation, so those hyphens should have been placed higher up. Those two dots are the code for a hyphen.

The president of the Association of Blind Chanters made a presentation about his association and about Braille Byzantine Music Notation at a conference in Athens in 1998. I translated it into English and have created a web page for it. I think many of you will enjoy reading it. I have also posted the original text of his presentation in Greek.

Here are some more details about Father Dositheos that the President of the Association of Blind Chanters sent me. The attached file is my English translation of what he wrote.

frephraim said:

Here are some more details about Father Dositheos that the President of the Association of Blind Chanters sent me. The attached file is my English translation of what he wrote.

Click to expand...

Thank you for translating and sharing that article with us. Fr Dositheos' story is truly inspirational.

Manolis Basias said:

He was always considerate and never wanted to trouble others with his own matters. To avoid burdening his fellow blind acquaintances with taking care of him in his old age, shortly before his death he made an agreement with the monks of the Old Calendar monastery of Saints Cyprian and Justina in Phili that they would take care of him in return for his permission for them to transcribe and publish his compositions for the sighted. Even though he spent the final year of his life there, he always remained in communion with the New Calendar Church of Greece.

Click to expand...

This account reminded me of the final years of Fr Michael G. H. Gelsinger, PhD (1890-1980), a priest and scholar who, starting in the 1930s, was the first to attempt the systematic translation of Greek liturgical texts into English following the meter of the original Greek. Fr Michael went on to produce a voluminous body of translations, only a small fraction of which were published in the 1970s in some musical editions by Fr John von Holzhausen. (Perhaps, due to his high standards for excellence in accuracy and rhythm, Fr Michael regarded his translations as a work in progress and hesitated to publish them.) After the death of his wife Mary, he joined the Old Calendar Holy Transfiguration Monastery in Brookline, MA, where he took the name Theodore in the monastic tonsure and eventually reposed. Fr Michael's legacy lives on through the metered translations published by Holy Transfiguration Monastery today, which are in no small part inspired by his pioneering work. In this sense, the translations published by Holy Transfiguration Monastery today are the fruits of decades of effort spanning multiple generations. (As an aside, the astute observer can still feel Gelsinger's presence in some of the unedited draft translations from Holy Transfiguration Monastery, e.g., in the use of the phrase "Good Lord" in the Holy Saturday Canon «Κύματι θαλάσσης».)