Performance Practice and the Politics of Transcribing Byzantine Chant1

Alexander Lingas2

Transcriptions of Byzantine chants into staff notation, despite their proven utility,3 have been generating controversy ever since the first Western European attempts to apprehend the intervallic and rhythmic information conveyed by medieval Byzantine neumes.4 These early efforts not only sparked debates among Western academics as to whose interpretation was more correct, but also provoked a strongly negative reaction from certain Greek scholars and cantors who saw all of the transcriptions as musically alien to the received tradition of Byzantine chanting. By the mid-1920s, Western musicologists and Greek traditionalists had each achieved a modicum of internal consensus, leaving the two sides arrayed against each other over issues of tuning, rhythm, chromaticism, and ornamentation. These positions hardened in the next decade as the debates became focused on the transcriptions issued by the Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae (MMB) of Copenhagen, the organisation founded in 1931 by Carsten Høeg, H.J.W. Tillyard and Egon Wellesz to co-ordinate Western musicological study of Byzantine chant. Although the MMB suspended its Transcripta series in 1958, transcriptions into staff-notation have continued until the present day to serve as the moment of truth for illustrating divergent theories about the interpretation of Byzantine neumes. The ability of staff notation to function in such a decisive manner is, of course, partially predicated on the assumption that it is what Greek scholars would call a “hyper-analytical” and Westerners would call a “super-prescriptive” form of musical notation.5 In other words, a Byzantine melody written in Western score, in contrast to a transmission in Byzantine neumes of any period, is assumed to be a relatively complete representation of its realisation in sound. Yet, as the recent revival of Early Music has forcefully reminded Western musicians, such assumptions are a relatively recent development, for staff notation, like its Byzantine counterpart, has only gradually progressed toward greater precision. In general, the earlier the repertory, the more its realisation was dependent on a body of unwritten conventions known collectively as “performance (or performing) practice.”6 If the ratios of written to unwritten knowledge required at the opposite ends of this musical spectrum have long been obvious – the earliest staffless neumes of West and East require singers already familiar with

1 The author would like to thank Lycourgos Angelopoulos and Ioannis Arvanitis for sharing pre-publication copies of forthcoming articles. Research for this paper was supported by a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and grants from the Philoptochos and Church Music Federation of the Greek Orthodox Diocese of San Francisco. 2 Assistant Professor, Arizona State University School of Music Fellow, European Humanities Research Centre, University of Oxford 3 In addition to facilitating the dissemination of information to non-specialists, transcriptions have been a particularly useful tool for the comparative study of Byzantine melodies because a “graphic” notation plotting a melody on a staff is arguably better suited visually to the task of comparison than a “digital” notation listing the succession of intervals with a single line of neumes. This distinction between the two types of notation comes from Kenneth Levy, “, Music of the” in ed. Stanley Sadie, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 3, p. 554. 4 For a survey of studies by Western scholars, see Egon Wellesz, A History of and Hymnography, 2nd ed., Oxford 1961, p. 2-3, 11-18. Markos Dragoumis discusses the little-known but arguably more successful efforts by a Constantinopolitan