Tradition, Innovation, Renewal, and the Orthodoxy of the Psaltic Art

In this paper I will examine ways in which change (or the lack thereof) has been understood by practitioners of the psaltic art of Byzantine ecclesiastical psalmody and their relationships to broader discourses of religious and ethnic identity. I will begin with a brief historical survey of these matters in the East Roman cultural sphere during late antiquity and the Middle Ages. For most of this long period there is relatively little interest in the musical aspects of liturgical singing as markers of fidelity to (or deviation from) Orthodox tradition. Whereas patristic writers censured sung texts such as the interpolated Trisagion for perceived doctrinal deviations, their comparably few admonitions regarding styles of musical composition and performance tend to speak only in general terms about inherited norms of liturgical propriety. In the second part of the paper, I turn to consider the emergence of controversies over matters of continuity and change in Orthodox liturgical singing. These begin gradually with the slow emergence of disputes over the propriety of polyphonic singing in Western styles. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Greek Orthodox traditionalists in were complementing musical anti-Westernism with strong defences of what they perceived to be the historical authenticity of their received repertories and practices of chanting. Asserting that these musical traditions were simultaneously ancient Greek, apostolic and patristic in origin, they viewed their preservation from heretical adulteration or unwarranted innovation as a matter of fidelity to Holy Orthodoxy. Such positions were problematic not only because of the lack of ancient precedents for making musical style a criterion of Orthodoxy, but also because of the challenges they posed for understanding how the Psaltic Art had changed over time and space. Even traditionalists could not deny that their received repertories of chant were the product of centuries of creative development led by successive generations of composers, poets, and theorists. Modern musicological research further complicated the picture by offering showing graphic change in the notation of their melodies, raising the possibility that received versions chants might differ in substantial ways from their forbears.