RichardRBarrett
Μέλος
If I may --
As somebody directly involved in a couple of things mentioned in this discussion, I'd like to say some things. This is a bit long; apologies in advance.
1) The Saint John of Damascus Society is not, and has never claimed to be, an ecclesiastical body. We are an arts organization that seeks to find ways of using the wide variety of traditions of Orthodox music, as well as music education, for purposes of outreach to the general public. No more, no less. Long story short, we started out as a "music boosters"-type organization for the parish in Bloomington, Indiana; when it became clear that the Bloomington parish was not interested in involving itself in such efforts, we rethought things, and here we are. We have participated in events sponsored by groups and parishes within GOA, ROCOR, and AOCNA; we have sponsored events bringing together people from those jurisdictions as well. We do not claim to have any authority within any particular church body, nor do we wish to have any. That's not what we do. I should also note that, despite efforts that cross jurisdictional lines, we rather studiously avoid the term "pan-Orthodox" in describing ourselves, likewise "ecumenical"; both of those terms carry baggage we don't want. For more on what we're doing, I recently did a phone interview for the radio show Come Receive the Light with Fr. Chris Metropoulos about the St. John of Damascus Society, and you can find it here: http://www.myocn.net/index.php/2013...tional-society-for-orthodox-church-music.html
2) This last weekend was the annual convention for the Mideastern Federation of Greek Orthodox Church Musicians, the choir federation for the Metropoles of Detroit and Pittsburgh. I was there, and I was asked to give a an hour and a half talk on Mode III as part of a "Church Music Institute". I hesitate to even bring this up, because I suspect that somebody like me doing such a thing only proves K. Giannoukaki's point about the choir federations/National Forum and psaltiki (possibly because of, not in ignorance of, who my teacher is), but by the same token, I'm pretty sure I don't qualify as anybody's "darling" or "favorite".
Regardless of such concerns, I was given two tasks: demystify the concept of modes for an audience used to the polyphonic musical idiom, and use the polyphonic setting of the third mode resurrectional apolytikion being sung that Sunday (Chris Zervos' adaptation of Sakellarides' melody, set to his own English translation) as a jumping off point for discussing the third mode.
In a nutshell, I spent 45 minutes going over some really basic theory; types of scales, νη πα βου, kommata (albeit without dwelling on it too much), the idea of melodic formulae that go with modes, syllabic vs. melismatic, irmologic vs. sticheraric vs. papadic, that kind of thing. What I was shooting for was to explain what these things *mean*, and why, apart from the technical terminology, and then to put the terminology back in to explain why it's necessary to know it.
(My point of reference here, I should note, is a priest who once asked me, "Isn't talking about νη πα βου kind of silly when people already know 'do re mi'?" I said, no, learning and using the proper terminology is part of any craft. "But it makes it less accessible," he said. No, I insisted; it makes it less idiosyncratic. "Well, find a way to make teaching the terminology more accessible, then," he said.)
Where we got to was that the third mode resurrectional apolytikion is third mode, it's authentic, it's irmologic, and it's enharmonic, and there seemed to be *something* of an understanding of what all those things mean.
So, then I showed them scores, starting with the apolytikion from the Anastasimatarion of Petros Lampadarios; I showed them the score in Byzantine notation and said, I'm not showing you Byz notation to freak you out, i'm just showing it to you so that my process is transparent -- I won't show you any byz notation I don't also transcribe, and if we have time, I can talk more about it if you want later. I then showed them a very dry transcription in staff notation, had them sing it parallagi a couple of times, and asked, okay, what are some general observations we can make about how this behaves? How the melody works? The relationship of text to music?
Then I showed them Mr. Zervos' adaptation of Sakellarides' melody; again, I asked everybody how it was the same, and how it was different. (I should stress that at no point was I trying to convey the idea that "Zervos is doing it wrong"; not at all. He's not claiming that he writes Byzantine music; he's adapting an adaptation in his own musical idiom, and I am not interested in evaluating his music based on criteria not applicable to the end product he's seeking to create.)
Then what I did is showed them another version that used Zervos' translation, but recomposed the melody with the right formulae to properly fit the text, and asked, so, how is THIS different from Zervos' adaptation? People said, oh, it's a lot more like the version from the Anastasimatarion, the relationship between text and melody is clearer, and it's easier to sing. By that point we were basically out of time, but what I said seemed to be received well.
That's one part of the story; the other part is that I heard a number of comments about chanters over the course of the weekend that were antagonistic at best. The perception was clearly communicated; chanters are cowboys and lone wolves, they want to do everything themselves, and they want to tell everybody else they're wrong. They're not team players, they're not welcoming, they're not inclusive, they're not democratic.
To further add to the mix -- I helped chant Orthros on Sunday, and the psalti there is a gentleman who clearly lives to serve the Church, but he is perhaps well past the point where he should have been given relief from his duties as a reward gratefully given for his decades of service. His voice no longer produces pitch with any accuracy, his ear fails him, and while he was perfectly welcoming, he was neither overly communicative nor terribly concerned to make sure that other cantors could see the book on the psaltiri.
Now, God bless the man who at 97 still has the energy and determination to get up on Sunday morning to chant Orthros (at 36 it's a fight for me), but if the picture people in the choir loft have in their heads of what "Byzantine chant" means is that it's what the old man with no voice left does solely on his own, then I can understand where some of the problem comes from.
To be blunt -- we've got a PR problem, and it's not going to go away by insisting that we don't actually have a PR problem, everybody else is just doing it wrong.
In a way, I get it -- nobody wants to be marginalized, nobody wants to be told that what they do or what they like is wrong, AND nobody wants to give up any ground. It's treated as a zero-sum game by all players. The solution that seems to be embraced in most parishes is that the psalti gets all of the services that, let's be honest, nobody comes to, the choir members get the Sunday Liturgy, and since the choir members probably are warming up before Liturgy, they don't get to participate in Orthros (furthering the problem of it being a service nobody goes to). The fact remains, that's a really awful solution in every way; it keeps everybody apart and, in truth, solves nothing. Since most parishes don't seem to do Vespers (that I've seen, anyway), that can't serve as any kind of a mediating ground. It's all or nothing on Sunday morning.
I will say, not to dislocate my shoulder patting myself on the back but simply to say how I handled this disconnect over the course of the weekend, that I spent my time at the convention trying to be useful however I could. I participated in choir rehearsals and sang in the choir for Liturgy, and did my best in the choir loft as much as I did my best at the psaltiri. I talked to, and thanked, the choir director and the composer (as I also thanked the psalti for his hospitality). Things like that.
All of this is to say, with respect to the National Forum and the choir federations, my advice, for whatever it's worth, is -- we don't need a National Forum of Psaltai. There's the Archdiocesan School, there's HCHC -- there is no need whatsoever for yet another body of unclear authority doing its own thing. Rather, I would argue that chanters need to FLOOD the choir federation council meetings and conventions, as well as the National Forum meetings. I went to the MEFGOX council meeting in Ohio in May -- with around 100 parishes in the federation, I was stunned to see less than ten people in attendance. That is a terrible ratio, and those are meetings where people might actually be able to do some good in the long run. Same for the conventions -- our attendance was evidently quite low this year. Imagine a federation convention that has so many chanters registering to go that they have to rethink the offerings and the repertoire! Imagine the National Forum of Greek Orthodox Church Musicians seeing a rush of chanters at their gathering, such that it is necessary to take very seriously the notion that psaltai count as "Greek Orthodox Church Musicians"!
The thing that everybody is terrified of is attrition. That was a huge topic this last weekend, with "Go home and grow your choirs!" being a rallying cry, and there being a lot of noise about getting youth in our *choirs*. Not at the psaltiri, but in the choir loft. That's telling. What's even more telling is that of people older than college age, I think I was the youngest participant (again, at 36). What's still even more telling is that I had a lot of the college age (and younger) participants at my presentation, and some of them expressed a lot of interest in learning about chant, but not having any idea how to go about learning it. Without easily accessible educational opportunities, of course those kids are going to wind up in the choir loft instead of learning to chant, and they will be acculturated accordingly.
As to the issue of GOA's chant practices needing to be subject to the Tradition of the Great Church -- if our (as in GOA's) hierarchs don't care about pews, organs, and pastel colored choir robes, why in the world would you think they'd care whether or not an oxeia is used in a score? A visiting luminary of some notable rank at MEFGOX last weekend made fun of me (and chanters generally) for even using the words "chromatic", "enharmonic", and "diatonic"; if somebody told him it was his job to monitor how Byzantine chant was taught in all of its particulars, I expect he'd laugh you out of the room. The Antiochians at least have a new Patriarch who once wrote a Byzantine music textbook.
All right, that's long enough for now. My $0.02 worth, if it's even worth that.
Richard
As somebody directly involved in a couple of things mentioned in this discussion, I'd like to say some things. This is a bit long; apologies in advance.
1) The Saint John of Damascus Society is not, and has never claimed to be, an ecclesiastical body. We are an arts organization that seeks to find ways of using the wide variety of traditions of Orthodox music, as well as music education, for purposes of outreach to the general public. No more, no less. Long story short, we started out as a "music boosters"-type organization for the parish in Bloomington, Indiana; when it became clear that the Bloomington parish was not interested in involving itself in such efforts, we rethought things, and here we are. We have participated in events sponsored by groups and parishes within GOA, ROCOR, and AOCNA; we have sponsored events bringing together people from those jurisdictions as well. We do not claim to have any authority within any particular church body, nor do we wish to have any. That's not what we do. I should also note that, despite efforts that cross jurisdictional lines, we rather studiously avoid the term "pan-Orthodox" in describing ourselves, likewise "ecumenical"; both of those terms carry baggage we don't want. For more on what we're doing, I recently did a phone interview for the radio show Come Receive the Light with Fr. Chris Metropoulos about the St. John of Damascus Society, and you can find it here: http://www.myocn.net/index.php/2013...tional-society-for-orthodox-church-music.html
2) This last weekend was the annual convention for the Mideastern Federation of Greek Orthodox Church Musicians, the choir federation for the Metropoles of Detroit and Pittsburgh. I was there, and I was asked to give a an hour and a half talk on Mode III as part of a "Church Music Institute". I hesitate to even bring this up, because I suspect that somebody like me doing such a thing only proves K. Giannoukaki's point about the choir federations/National Forum and psaltiki (possibly because of, not in ignorance of, who my teacher is), but by the same token, I'm pretty sure I don't qualify as anybody's "darling" or "favorite".
Regardless of such concerns, I was given two tasks: demystify the concept of modes for an audience used to the polyphonic musical idiom, and use the polyphonic setting of the third mode resurrectional apolytikion being sung that Sunday (Chris Zervos' adaptation of Sakellarides' melody, set to his own English translation) as a jumping off point for discussing the third mode.
In a nutshell, I spent 45 minutes going over some really basic theory; types of scales, νη πα βου, kommata (albeit without dwelling on it too much), the idea of melodic formulae that go with modes, syllabic vs. melismatic, irmologic vs. sticheraric vs. papadic, that kind of thing. What I was shooting for was to explain what these things *mean*, and why, apart from the technical terminology, and then to put the terminology back in to explain why it's necessary to know it.
(My point of reference here, I should note, is a priest who once asked me, "Isn't talking about νη πα βου kind of silly when people already know 'do re mi'?" I said, no, learning and using the proper terminology is part of any craft. "But it makes it less accessible," he said. No, I insisted; it makes it less idiosyncratic. "Well, find a way to make teaching the terminology more accessible, then," he said.)
Where we got to was that the third mode resurrectional apolytikion is third mode, it's authentic, it's irmologic, and it's enharmonic, and there seemed to be *something* of an understanding of what all those things mean.
So, then I showed them scores, starting with the apolytikion from the Anastasimatarion of Petros Lampadarios; I showed them the score in Byzantine notation and said, I'm not showing you Byz notation to freak you out, i'm just showing it to you so that my process is transparent -- I won't show you any byz notation I don't also transcribe, and if we have time, I can talk more about it if you want later. I then showed them a very dry transcription in staff notation, had them sing it parallagi a couple of times, and asked, okay, what are some general observations we can make about how this behaves? How the melody works? The relationship of text to music?
Then I showed them Mr. Zervos' adaptation of Sakellarides' melody; again, I asked everybody how it was the same, and how it was different. (I should stress that at no point was I trying to convey the idea that "Zervos is doing it wrong"; not at all. He's not claiming that he writes Byzantine music; he's adapting an adaptation in his own musical idiom, and I am not interested in evaluating his music based on criteria not applicable to the end product he's seeking to create.)
Then what I did is showed them another version that used Zervos' translation, but recomposed the melody with the right formulae to properly fit the text, and asked, so, how is THIS different from Zervos' adaptation? People said, oh, it's a lot more like the version from the Anastasimatarion, the relationship between text and melody is clearer, and it's easier to sing. By that point we were basically out of time, but what I said seemed to be received well.
That's one part of the story; the other part is that I heard a number of comments about chanters over the course of the weekend that were antagonistic at best. The perception was clearly communicated; chanters are cowboys and lone wolves, they want to do everything themselves, and they want to tell everybody else they're wrong. They're not team players, they're not welcoming, they're not inclusive, they're not democratic.
To further add to the mix -- I helped chant Orthros on Sunday, and the psalti there is a gentleman who clearly lives to serve the Church, but he is perhaps well past the point where he should have been given relief from his duties as a reward gratefully given for his decades of service. His voice no longer produces pitch with any accuracy, his ear fails him, and while he was perfectly welcoming, he was neither overly communicative nor terribly concerned to make sure that other cantors could see the book on the psaltiri.
Now, God bless the man who at 97 still has the energy and determination to get up on Sunday morning to chant Orthros (at 36 it's a fight for me), but if the picture people in the choir loft have in their heads of what "Byzantine chant" means is that it's what the old man with no voice left does solely on his own, then I can understand where some of the problem comes from.
To be blunt -- we've got a PR problem, and it's not going to go away by insisting that we don't actually have a PR problem, everybody else is just doing it wrong.
In a way, I get it -- nobody wants to be marginalized, nobody wants to be told that what they do or what they like is wrong, AND nobody wants to give up any ground. It's treated as a zero-sum game by all players. The solution that seems to be embraced in most parishes is that the psalti gets all of the services that, let's be honest, nobody comes to, the choir members get the Sunday Liturgy, and since the choir members probably are warming up before Liturgy, they don't get to participate in Orthros (furthering the problem of it being a service nobody goes to). The fact remains, that's a really awful solution in every way; it keeps everybody apart and, in truth, solves nothing. Since most parishes don't seem to do Vespers (that I've seen, anyway), that can't serve as any kind of a mediating ground. It's all or nothing on Sunday morning.
I will say, not to dislocate my shoulder patting myself on the back but simply to say how I handled this disconnect over the course of the weekend, that I spent my time at the convention trying to be useful however I could. I participated in choir rehearsals and sang in the choir for Liturgy, and did my best in the choir loft as much as I did my best at the psaltiri. I talked to, and thanked, the choir director and the composer (as I also thanked the psalti for his hospitality). Things like that.
All of this is to say, with respect to the National Forum and the choir federations, my advice, for whatever it's worth, is -- we don't need a National Forum of Psaltai. There's the Archdiocesan School, there's HCHC -- there is no need whatsoever for yet another body of unclear authority doing its own thing. Rather, I would argue that chanters need to FLOOD the choir federation council meetings and conventions, as well as the National Forum meetings. I went to the MEFGOX council meeting in Ohio in May -- with around 100 parishes in the federation, I was stunned to see less than ten people in attendance. That is a terrible ratio, and those are meetings where people might actually be able to do some good in the long run. Same for the conventions -- our attendance was evidently quite low this year. Imagine a federation convention that has so many chanters registering to go that they have to rethink the offerings and the repertoire! Imagine the National Forum of Greek Orthodox Church Musicians seeing a rush of chanters at their gathering, such that it is necessary to take very seriously the notion that psaltai count as "Greek Orthodox Church Musicians"!
The thing that everybody is terrified of is attrition. That was a huge topic this last weekend, with "Go home and grow your choirs!" being a rallying cry, and there being a lot of noise about getting youth in our *choirs*. Not at the psaltiri, but in the choir loft. That's telling. What's even more telling is that of people older than college age, I think I was the youngest participant (again, at 36). What's still even more telling is that I had a lot of the college age (and younger) participants at my presentation, and some of them expressed a lot of interest in learning about chant, but not having any idea how to go about learning it. Without easily accessible educational opportunities, of course those kids are going to wind up in the choir loft instead of learning to chant, and they will be acculturated accordingly.
As to the issue of GOA's chant practices needing to be subject to the Tradition of the Great Church -- if our (as in GOA's) hierarchs don't care about pews, organs, and pastel colored choir robes, why in the world would you think they'd care whether or not an oxeia is used in a score? A visiting luminary of some notable rank at MEFGOX last weekend made fun of me (and chanters generally) for even using the words "chromatic", "enharmonic", and "diatonic"; if somebody told him it was his job to monitor how Byzantine chant was taught in all of its particulars, I expect he'd laugh you out of the room. The Antiochians at least have a new Patriarch who once wrote a Byzantine music textbook.
All right, that's long enough for now. My $0.02 worth, if it's even worth that.
Richard