Sacred Song in the Late Antique and Byzantine East: Comparative Explorations 3-6 May, 2015 Brown University

Spyridon Antonopoulos City University, London

“ 'We shall clearly hear him say 'Rejoice!' as we sing': Hearing, Intelligibility, and Performance in Byzantine Chant"

The complex strophic poems known as the Kanons were first composed during a flourishing of literary creativity that took place in and around the Palestinian monastery of St Sabas in the seventh and eighth centuries. Kanons typically consisted of eight or nine textually and melodically unique heirmoi, to which multiple thematically linked troparia (contrafacta) were adapted. The heirmoi formed the basis for the notated musical collection of the Heirmologion, which can be found in its most archaic form as early as the tenth century. The heirmoi found in medieval Heirmologia were unascribed, brief, and mostly syllabic. By the fourteenth century, while traditional styles of psalmody continued to be sung and written, a new style of singing and composition – kalophonia – had begun to touch nearly every genre of liturgical poetry, including the Kanon’s heirmoi. Thus, elaborate kalophonic heirmoi, composed by named musicians, appear at least by the fourteenth century, characterized by long, melismatic phrases, text troping, insertion of non-textual elements, modal variety, and an expanded melodic range. This paper shall provide an analysis of select kalophonic heirmoi in contrast to their syllabic forebears in order to confront questions of aural reception, intelligibility, and performance.

Thomas Arentzen University of Oslo

“Voices Interwoven: Refrains and Vocal Participation in Late Ancient Kontakia”

The refrain constitutes an indispensable element of the kontakion. It ties the stanzas together, but it also contributes to a sort of repetitive concentration in these songs; whichever spirals and ellipses the narratives move in, the refrain remains a gravity center. Scholars have generally been fascinated by the narrative disposition of kontakia or their ability to expand on Biblical stories in almost homiletic ways. If we take the performance context into consideration, however, the role of the refrain cannot be neglected. This repeated line was most probably sung by the congregation or, alternatively, by the congregation represented by the choir. For a short moment, every so often, the whole assembly would participate. After some twenty stanzas of narration and exhortation individual churchgoers may have paid attention to different aspects of the songs – if they had paid attention at all – but what none of them can have missed is the last line of every stanza. Some kontakia feature simple refrains like “hallelujah,” while others – especially those of Romanos – weave the refrain into a complex web of voices and polysemous turns. The congregation, which provides the voice of the refrain, thus gets interwoven into these bent warps. This paper explores how the more advanced refrain constructions involve the congregation and how they serve or not serve a positioning of the faithful among the characters of the kontakion narratives.

Susan Ashbrook Harvey Brown University

“Poetry, Prayer, Presence: Invocations in the Mimre of Jacob of Sarug”

This text session will present several examples of introductory invocational prayers from the mimre of Jacob of Sarug. These prayers show pronounced patterns in style and content that serve to demarcate distinctive identities and roles for both preacher and congregation in the event of the mimro’s performance. They further construct particular expectations for divine presence in the event.

Mary B. Cunningham Nottingham University

“Is There Room for Doubt in Christian Faith? Romanos and John the Monk on the Apostle Thomas”

This presentation will deal with the hymnographic treatment of a doubting presence in Byzantine liturgical celebration: the apostle Thomas and his commemoration on the first Sunday after Easter. I will examine and contrast two hymns that were sung on this feast, including the sixth-century kontakion by Romanos the Melodist and the eighth- or ninth- century kanon that is attributed to John the Monk. Although the two hymns differ in structure and style, they both feature dialogues between Christ and the doubting apostle. I will explore a shared preoccupation of the two hymnographers as they demonstrate that faith develops out of doubt with the help of physical contact; however, it is noticeable that the two liturgical poets teach this lesson in different ways, which are influenced by the particular hymnographic genres that they employ. The emphasis of this presentation will be on performative issues, that is, poetic performance in the context of religious ritual. The hymnographers’ desire to induce a deeper sense of faith and liturgical involvement in their audiences is visible in both compositions on doubting Thomas. In addition to this, they seek to create a dynamic encounter between the biblical characters within their sacred songs. The presentation could take the form either of a short paper or of a workshop, depending on the wishes of the conference organizers.

Uffe Holmsgaard Eriksen Aarhus University

” ‘We have all come now to listen to what the Gospels say’ Romanos the Melodist as preacher and the question of genre”

The kontakia of Romanos the Melodist have often been defined as ”sermon[s] in verse” (Trypanis), ”sung sermons” (Schork) or metrische Predigt-Hymnen (Koder). This definition puts emphasis on the sermonic dimension in favor of the more lyrical or dramatic. It also raises the question of genre, as many kontakia do not easily fit the prototypical sermon or homily; rather the kontakion is a hybrid-genre or perhaps even a genre-mosaic, consisting of several micro-genres such as prayer, exhortation, drama, dialogue and ekphrasis. This paper will focus on Romanos as preacher and on the sermonic dimension of the kontakia. How does Romanos expound the scriptures and how does he instruct his audience? The role of exegesis and typology will be re-adressed, as well as the use of (theo)logical argumentation. The research presented will be work in progress and will draw on a number of kontakia, including ”On the Epiphany” (SC 17), ”On the Ten Virgins I” (SC 31) and ”On the Second Coming (SC 50). The group of kontakia numbered 51-56 in the SC edition will also be included. In all these kontakia, retelling stories with vivid dialogue, so prominent a feature in many kontakia, is either absent or playing a minor role. In stead, Romanos devotes in these kontakia his poetic and rhetorical skills to catechesis and moral instruction of the audience.

Georgia Frank Colgate University

“The Problem of Pity in Romanos, ‘On Elijah’ “

This text session examines a metrical homily by the Christian hymnographer Romanos the Melodist. Comprising 33 stanzas, the sixth-century kontakion on Elijah focuses on the devastating drought the prophet brought upon Israel as a punishment for sin (1 Kings 17). Romanos recasts the subsequent episodes (being fed by ravens in the wilderness and the raising of the widow’s son at Sarepta) as a duty-bound God’s desperate ruses to persuade the prophet to withdraw the oath and end the drought. The subthemes of a stiff-necked prophet, God’s ruses, and the raven’s reputation for pitilessness all have precedents in Syriac poetry and Greek homilies (e.g., Basil of Seleucia PG 85.147-97). How Romanos adapted this familiar story is the focus of my remarks. Among other things, this session will focus on the hymnographer’s use of voices—divine, human, and animal—to resolve the divine dilemma and to achieve the prophet’s conversion from justified vengeance to pity.

Sarah Gador-Whyte St. George’s College

“Performing Repentance in the Kontakia of Romanos the Melodist”

In a genre dominated by dialogue, speech becomes a key way in which Romanos explores theology, creates models of behaviour and engages listeners in enacting that behaviour. Through speech, and often through internal monologues or imagined dialogues, Romanos’ characters analyze their own actions and thoughts, explaining the nature of their sin and demonstrating their path to repentance. Thus biblical characters become practical models for Romanos’ congregation to imitate as they seek to live Christian lives; textual performances help to construct the actions of believers. Given the centrality of speech and dialogue to Romanos’ theological outreach, silence is usually marked. The haemorrhaging woman’s silence and secrecy are symbols of her fear and lack of understanding (Oxf. 12). Speech is not always positive – Peter’s silence would have been preferable to his denial of Jesus (Oxf. 18) – but, whether external or internal and often involving shouting or weeping, it always forms an important part of repentance. Grief, expressed by tears and shouting, is the response to sin God most desires, but this grief must be appropriate and expressed in a Christian community: Peter howls and weeps at his sin, and calls for others to lament with him (Oxf. 18). By contrast, the character of Judas (Oxf. 17) is completely mute, his repentance too late and his actions self-excluding. And yet Romanos manages to use even the story of Judas to encourage repentance and teach about mercy. This paper explores Romanos’ concept of repentance and its performance in the kontakia through the lenses of speech and silence, grief and tears, participation and exclusion, and song.

Sidney H. Griffith The Catholic University of America

“The Poetics of Scriptural Reasoning: Syriac Mêmrê at Work”

Syriac-speaking Christians of Late Antiquity had a marked penchant for religious discourse in verse. St. Ephraem’s long admired madrōshê are the stellar examples of Syriac poetry at its best. But he and other writers of note in Patristic times, such as Jacob of Serūg and Narsai of Nisibis, also composed hundreds of lines of verse in the literary form of the mêmrô, a sort of metrical homily that typically explored the inner dimensions of scriptural texts set for proclamation in liturgical events. The close analysis of the prosody and other recurring features of this well-liked and interactive genre reveals its role as the principal vehicle of popular biblical exegesis in Syriac.

Sarah Insley Brown University

“Matrona of Perge in Literature and Liturgy: An assessment of an early hymn fragment ascribed to Romanos”

It is striking that while Late Antiquity was a tremendously creative and productive period in the development of hagiographical writing across the Mediterranean, the earliest Greek hymnographers seem to have displayed comparatively little interest in the saints as appropriate subjects for liturgical poetry over and against the much more popular treatment of Biblical characters. Of the 59 genuine kontakia of Romanos the Melode, for example, only three deal with saints, and none of the early Greek hymns collected, e.g., in Trypanis’ Fourteen Early Byzantine Cantica (1968) take holy men or women as their subjects. Notably, however, the 29 spurious kontakia of Romanos, edited by Maas and Trypanis as a supplement to their edition of the genuine corpus1, are entirely devoted to martyrs and saints. Included amongst them is an isolated fragment dedicated to a local female saint in Constantinople, the abbess and monastic founder Matrona of Perge (ca. 430- 510), who was also the subject of a lengthy 6th-century prose vita later epitomized in liturgical handbooks. This fragment is fascinating as a lone example of the liturgical commemoration of a local Constantinopolitan holy woman in poetic form, especially given the limited hymnographic material on female saints surviving from Late Antiquity. I therefore propose to examine the fragmentary hymn on Matrona of Perge in light of of early Greek and Syriac hymnography dedicated to women saints, and also in the context of Matrona’s hagiographic dossier, in order to establish it as a significant witness to the unique place accorded to this influential holy woman in Constantinopolitan liturgy and religious history.

1 P. Maas and C.A. Trypanis, Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica Dubia (Berlin, 1970), pp. 184- 185. Kevin Kalish Bridgewater State University

“The Sinful Woman (Luke 7:36-50) in Preaching and Song: A Comparative Study of Ephrem Graecus’ Homily The Sinful Woman and Romanos’ Kontakion 21”

While much can be gained by asking how one writer is indebted to another writer for thematic material, figures of speech, or even phraseology, this strictly philological method also has its drawbacks, as it assumes that texts are abstract objects without any sense of how these texts were performed. By taking a different approach and asking how the performative context shapes different expectations from a prose homily and a poetic hymn, we can approach this question in a way that moves beyond looking for parallels. In this paper, I will look at two Greek texts on the Sinful Woman: a homily attributed to St. Ephrem 1 but surviving in Greek (part of the corpus of “Ephrem Graecus”) and a hymn of St. 2 Romanos the Melodist on the same theme. Numerous late antique texts in both Syriac and Greek develop a complex backstory for the Sinful Woman, but so far this homily of Ephrem Graecus has not entered into the discussion. While considering this larger tradition, my paper will focus primarily on these two texts since Ephrem Graecus and Romanos employ similar language and imagery, though in different ways depending on the performative context. What we gain from this approach is an understanding of how these two inter- related forms (prose homilies and poetic hymns) employ common literary devices but within different performative contexts and for different rhetorical effects. Derek Krueger University of North Carolina – Greensboro

“Divine Triumph and Liturgical Joy in the Hymns of Romanos the Melodist”

While the hymns of Romanos perform and cultivate penitential self-regard, they also encourage ebullience in response to God's acts of salvation, especially the incarnation and resurrection of Christ. Christ's greeting to the myrrhbearing women in On the Resurrection VI (Oxford 29) commands a change of mood from grief at the crucifixion to "gladness and happiness" in response to Christ's triumph over death. Indeed Easter marks a shift from first person singular lament at the sins of the self to a collective shout at God's deeds on behalf of humanity. This paper charts Romanos's rhetoric of joy to assess how the hymnographer transmits and elicits emotions appropriate to the liturgical moment and the lectionary's presentation of the biblical narrative of redemption. The Psalms in particular provide the liturgical vocabulary and precedent.

Laura S. Lieber Duke University

“Suffering Not Yet Sufficient? An Exploration of Maternal-Filial Discourse Performance”

In this essay, I explore a particular interpersonal dynamic as it appears in a small corpus of Late Ancient liturgical poems: specifically, filial expectations of and responses to immanent maternal grief, and the use of grief to “manipulative” ends by both parties. Poetry from late antiquity and the early Byzantine period offers several “set pieces” when lend themselves to creative exploration of a very specific and intriguing set of circumstances: a grown son, in the presence (real or imagined) of his mother as he accepts or rejects his immanent death. The specific scenes include the binding of Isaac in Genesis, the death of Moses in Deuteronomy, and the crucifixion in the Gospels. This essay examines two Hebrew “laments” by Moses alongside an Aramaic poem in Yocheved’s voice; Romanos’ kontakion “Mary at the Cross;” and two Syriac memre (Pseudo-Ephrem) on the Binding of Isaac. My purpose here is not to draw large conclusions but to illustrate, in almost pointillist fashion, performative possibilities generated by this potent literary-exegetical context. This small but lively body of poems brings to light a particular set of interpersonal dynamics, colored by gender but also family role. The mothers are, to an extent, foregrounded as “women” who are quick to weep, groan, cry out, and mourn—performing lamentation in a distinctly feminine way. And yet, as mothers, Yocheved, Mary, and Sarah deviate in various ways from this broadly drawn sketch—responding to crisis in a way that seems to depart even from their sons’ and husbands’ expectations—thus making this particular relationship (along with others even less well-attested in the corpus, such as sister-brother) important to examine from the perspective of family life in antiquity and the role that liturgical poetry could have played in reinforcing, changing, or shaping the subtle gender dynamics, power hierarchies, and cultural norms in this basic unit of society.

Ophir Münz-Manor The Open University, Israel

“The Literary Origins Of Late Antique Liturgical Poetry”

This text session concerns the origins of the poetics of the late antique "liturgical poetry school”. I will bring examples from the Hodayot, the Hymns of Solomon and New Testament hymns and the respective earliest examples of Hebrew, Syriac and Greek liturgical poems.

Gerard Rouwhorst Tilburg University

“Christian Sacred Songs East of Antioch”

In the Syriac-speaking and bilingual regions east of Antioch (North Syria; Mesopotamia) one finds a variety of sacred songs. The Acts of Thomas that were probably composed in Edessa, contain a number of prayers which, though probably originally written in Syriac, follow the basic pattern of Greek cult hymns. A basically different type of sacred song is constituted by the madrasha, the 'the teaching song' which proves to be a typically Aramaic genre of which also Jewish and Samaritan exist and which, moreover, has a lot of elements in common with the Jewish piyyutim. Within the Christian madrashe - as written by Ephrem the Syrian - one may distinguish different subcategories, some being primarily doxological, some rather biblical-didactic and some explicitly dogmatic or even anti- heretical (this category of madrashe appears to be unique to Chrsitianity).

I will compare three samples of these major categories of sacred songs: a) prayer drawn from the Acts of Thomas which shows the characteristic that are typical of Greek cult songs and prayers; b) one of Ephrem's madrashe that has a doxological and didactic character and c) one of Ephrem's anti-heretical 'Hymns' Contra Haereses.

Attention will be paid to the literary structures of the different categories and to the question which role each of these texts may have played in which liturgical meetings (if they actually did).

Michael Swartz Ohio State University

“Monologues with Death”

This text session will present two funeral and lamentation poems in Aramaic and Hebrew that incorporate mythic and folkloric motifs to drive home the inevitability of death. The session will also present comparative evidence from other genres of ancient Jewish hymnography and from other literatures of lamentation.

Niki Tsironis Institute of Historical Research National Hellenic Research Foundation, Athens

“The Death of God from Hymnography and Homiletics To the Encomia of Holy Saturday”

In this paper I shall explore the way in which the imagery associated with the death of God in the Gospels, in the Apocryphal literature and the hymnographical tradition of the Syriac East became part of a stock of set phrases and images employed amply in the homiletic tradition of the middle Byzantine period. I use the expression ‘death of God’ intentionally, alluding to Cyril of Alexandria and his theology of the communication of idioms but also to the dramatic context against which the narrative of the Crucifixion is set in order to reach emotional height and intensity.

In particular, my paper shall focus on the crucial role of the performance through which the most striking and emotionally appealing images were selected and eventually included in the Lenten Triodion and especially in the encomia of the Holy Saturday. The process shall be analyzed with methodological tools deriving from the theory of orality as expressed by Lord and Parry in the 1930’s and developed by Gregory Nagy in recent decades in his second edition of the Singer of Tales, his Poetry as Performance, but also important articles such as “The Performing and Reperforming of Masterpieces of Verbal Art at a Festival in Ancient Athens”. An analysis of the elements that were eventually selected and included in the Encomia of Holy Saturday may lead us to suggestions regarding anthropological notions prevailing during the middle Byzantine era but may also reveal the role of performance and reperformance of texts in a liturgical context at the core of which lies the narrative of the sacrifice of God.

Jeffrey Wickes Saint Louis University

“In Search of Ephrem’s Audience”

Ephrem’s audience, in and of itself, has not been the subject of extensive scholarly study. Scholars have addressed the question tangentially, and developed some basic theories about the audience and performative context of the madrāšê. But, within the literature, there is no clear consensus on precisely who constituted Ephrem’s audience, what we mean when we speak of audience, and how we can uncover his audience through a study of his madrašê. In this paper, I aim to add methodological clarity to the question of the audience of Ephrem’s madrāšê. In the first part of the paper, I try to ascertain how scholars currently understand the question of Ephrem’s audience. In the second part, I turn to Ephrem’s madrāšê themselves. Ephrem’s Hymns on Unleavened Bread, Hymns on Faith, and Hymns against Heresies are generally thought to have arisen in three different polemical contexts (against “Jews,” against “Arians” and against “Gnostics”). The hymns thus rhetorically construct three sorts of “others,” and, by extension, three different audiences. My goal is to analyze the audience cues embedded within these three distinct hymn cycles to discern how (or if) these cues shift according to different polemical contexts, and within distinct literary works. Such an analysis can help us begin to think in a more nuanced way about the audiences of Ephrem’s madrāšê, and the variety of literary techniques he used to communicate with them.

Joseph Yahalom Hebrew University Jerusalem

“Debate Poems for Pentecost: The Torah and her Bridegrooms”

I will present different approaches to the problem of the postponed delivery of the Torah to humanity. The Early Christian approach, the opposite Midrashic approach, and the later liturgical approach which is deeply connected to the mystical realm of the Hekhaloth literature. The poetic debate between God and his daughter, the Torah, concerning her marriage, is embedded in the structure of one of the most prestigious forms of Late Antique Liturgical poetry, The Qedushta. The structure of the Qedushta and its different components will be presented within the frame work of the ongoing debate between God and the Torah concerning her chosen bridegroom.