Αξιον Εστιν - typeset

[GabrielCremeens]

Hi everyone,

I recently purchased Papa Ephraim's 100 Byzantine Music Books DVD, and really liked several of the arrangements of Αξιον Εστιν that I encountered in the old Pandektis Liturgy book. I'm sure many of you have probably already seen them before, but, for my own personal use, I wanted to typeset them, for ease of reading (especially here at the school, where we have bunches of people trying to read off a single score, it helps if the print is big.)

Anyway, thought it might be helpful to some of you.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[basil]

I recently purchased Papa Ephraim's 100 Byzantine Music Books DVD, and really liked several of the arrangements of Αξιον Εστιν that I encountered in the old Pandektis Liturgy book. I'm sure many of you have probably already seen them before, but, for my own personal use, I wanted to typeset them, for ease of reading (especially here at the school, where we have bunches of people trying to read off a single score, it helps if the print is big.)

Anyway, thought it might be helpful to some of you.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Dear Gabriel,

Nice work! I'm glad you have been studying the classic books of Byzantine music. I only noticed two minor things that could be improved in your scores:

1. In the Plagal Fourth Mode version, a psephiston should be inserted beneath the second oligon in line 4 of page 1 in order to comply with orthographical rule #1. It is reasonable to assume that the lack of a psephiston in that phrase on page 454 of Μουσική Πανδέκτη is simply a typographical error, since the same formula appears dozens of times in the Anastasimatarion and Heirmologion with a psephiston in that position, as can be seen from page 815 of Papa Ephraim's collection of formulae.
2. Both pieces should be attributed to Gregory Levitis the Protopsaltis (1777–1822).

Basil

 

[frephraim]

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

They look nice, Gabriel. For the lyrics, you might like to try the font "Minion Pro" which won an award for the beauty of its Greek characters.
And even though you simply typeset the originals which don't have the ison written in, you might want to consider adding it anyway.

 

[GabrielCremeens]

They look nice, Gabriel. For the lyrics, you might like to try the font "Minion Pro" which won an award for the beauty of its Greek characters.
And even though you simply typeset the originals which don't have the ison written in, you might want to consider adding it anyway.

Evlogeite!

Thank you for the suggestions, Papa Ephraim. I looked into the Minion font and installed it; I'm taking a look at it right now.

Regarding the ison: is there possibly anything I could read on the subject? Personally, whenever I am holding ison for people, I follow what is written on the score - unless it is not written in, in which case I simply try to follow the martyrias and my own ear, based upon what I have heard on your own recordings, Papa Ephraim. I also tend to like the ison the way they do it at St. Nektarios Monastery in NY, under the direction of Fr. Ephraim. (Gerasimos Vassilopoulos). But, beyond listening to recordings, I don't have an solid idea of how it's supposed to be done. Could you possibly direct me to anything?

Kissing your right hand,
Gabriel

 

[Panagiotis G.]

Lots of good info on ison here:

http://analogion.com/Isokratema.html

Panagiotis

 

[GabrielCremeens]

Lots of good info on ison here:

http://analogion.com/Isokratema.html

Panagiotis

Thanks Panagioti. I've taken a look at the page before, and it is very helpful for general information and an overview of some different ideas. But some of it -correct me if I'm wrong- is not very common practice, in many places? E.g., G. Michalakis: "third mode always GA, even if the melody would go beyond Ke.. or below Ga"

A lot of what I'm wondering about would be places that have what we might consider to be "dissonant" intervals. It's not that I dislike dissonance per se; I don't mind hearing a clashing second, i.e. Ni-Pa of Plagal Fourth. It doesn't bother me. But, for instance, in plagal first: if you're on Ke, and move to Zo for two beats, is it really "wrong" (as I've heard a lot of people say) to move the ison to Di for those two beats? Or in plagal first, when you have the melody come to rest on Bou for two beats - again, is it really "wrong" to have the ison drop to Ni? Yes, it forms a third, but is that wrong?

Even more dissonant: Plagal second ison on pa. Melody cadences on Bou-flat for two beats. Is moving to natural Ni (kind of a minor third) wrong, so as to not get a half-step dissonance?

Again, I'm not really against the dissonances; they don't bother me at all. But is doing the opposite - moving the ison to avoid these dissonances - really incorrect?

Maybe I'm just a hopeless Westerner and I like something that sounds a little bit like harmony.

-G

P.S. Papa Ephraim, I looked into the Minion Pro font, and I tried using it. Basil, I also attributed the next piece I typed up. However, I experienced some problems with the font when converting to PDF. Perhaps it's just my computer - could someone else take a look and tell me if the font is somehow grainy when they open the pdf?

 

[frephraim]

...could someone else take a look and tell me if the font is somehow grainy when they open the pdf?

Yes, it is a tiny bit grainy. Perhaps tweaking some of the "printer options" of your PDF-maker would solve the problem. If you have the check in the box for "Rely on System Fonts," try removing that check.

 

[GabrielCremeens]

Yes, it is a tiny bit grainy. Perhaps tweaking some of the "printer options" of your PDF-maker would solve the problem. If you have the check in the box for "Rely on System Fonts," try removing that check.

Evlogeite!

Attached is another try. It still looks grainy to me, but much less so than before.

Την ευχή σας,
Gabriel

 

[Kavouras]

Hi guys, I just got a question on the correction Basil was talking about.

Even though it's written in that orthography rule book, the syllable accented is 'θέου' now with the correction because we now accent the oligon with the psefiston, when we want to accent the other syllable so it sounds like 'θεού' like when you would read it.

Now there is no rule for accenting an apostrophos, so should we leave it the way it is? Sure it looks wrong but that rule was made for accenting syllables, so cant we have instances like that where it 'looks wrong' to not accent a syllable that doesn't need it, otherwise we accent the oligon so it 'looks right' but would sound wrong with the proper use of the word?

Cheerio and spaghettio.

-Dimitri K.

Dear Gabriel,

Nice work! I'm glad you have been studying the classic books of Byzantine music. I only noticed two minor things that could be improved in your scores:

1. In the Plagal Fourth Mode version, a psephiston should be inserted beneath the second oligon in line 4 of page 1 in order to comply with orthographical rule #1. It is reasonable to assume that the lack of a psephiston in that phrase on page 454 of Μουσική Πανδέκτη is simply a typographical error, since the same formula appears dozens of times in the Anastasimatarion and Heirmologion with a psephiston in that position, as can be seen from page 815 of Papa Ephraim's collection of formulae.
2. Both pieces should be attributed to Gregory Levitis the Protopsaltis (1777–1822).

Basil