Meaning and Essence of Sacred Chant in the Orthodox Church

Christian Orthodoxy is the culture of the appropriate human attitude before God, of the harmonious and right relationship to God and veneration of God.

God is unimaginable and ineffable; He reveals Himself in His Eternal Word, in Jesus Christ, in whom we also see the countenance of the Father. According to Orthodox understanding, worship is the sensory and spiritual expression of perfect veneration of God, a living encounter with God and spiritual exercise, a wondrous “play of love between man and God."

In Orthodox worship everything is sung. Instruments are not used, because in holy cult it is not an instrument made by human hands that should sound, but the noblest sounding body created by God Himself: the human voice.

The original chant of the ancient Church is a path of exercise and a symbol, insofar as eternal spiritual reality and temporal earthly form become one. Like worship as a whole, sacred chant has both an ascetic-mystagogical and a revealing, proclaiming meaning. The term “theurgy,” roughly “God’s working,” embraces both aspects.

The theurgic character of sacred chant appears clearly where it is lifted above all worldly, earthly functionality and is therefore pure, original music, so to speak “primordial music.” This is not about an abstract idea of music, but about a synergistic event between God and man. True choral chant is worked by the Holy Spirit and born from the Eternal Word which was in the beginning, through which all things were created, which is with God and is God Himself. It is not a matter of “pleasing” people, of “awakening feelings,” and certainly not of being “modern.” The original, mostly monophonic sacred chant of the Church, which always develops from the fundamental tone and plays around it and other central tones from the holy word, is the manner of most intimate prayer unfolded into a sacred cultural form. The soul listens and moves in the breathing of the Spirit and, in holy vision, nestles close to the eternal song of the angels, to the thoughts, powers, and primordial words of God. The task is to reproduce the eternal archetypes as purely and clearly as possible. This purity corresponds to their holy and sanctifying power, lifted above everything worldly. Only as a consequence of this immediacy to the Spirit and this purity do qualities of feeling again appear as an effect of sacred chant, but here as purified and purifying qualities.

Thus sacred chant crosses the boundary between time and eternity. Coming from holy silence and listening before the face of God, it passes into the purest and clearest expressive form of spirit-moved “glossolalia” (“speaking in tongues”). Filled with divine grace and power, it becomes the earthly image and echo of the eternal song of the angels. It is not “made by human beings,” but born in spiritual vision of the archetypes into energetic and acoustic form. It speaks directly to the spiritual soul. We call this early Christian manner of singing choral chant.

Orpheus and Christ in Holy Tradition

The high art of music has always contained knowledge of its mantic dimensions. The Church Fathers and educated monks were well acquainted with those spiritual traditions of antiquity that were only later called “hermetic.” It is therefore no surprise that in early Christian wall paintings the mythical singer Orpheus was often shown as a prefiguration of Christ. In the myths of Orpheus, essential archetypal motifs of the story of Jesus Christ are prefigured. For this reason the early Church Fathers, such as Clement of Alexandria, regarded Orpheus as a prefiguration of Christ. According to the ancient Greek myth, Orpheus could move animals, plants, and even stones by the power of his song. Clement of Alexandria sees here the decisive analogy to Christ, who raises the dead to life and makes human beings out of stones “as soon as they had become hearers of the song.” By drawing deepest emotion from animate and inanimate matter through his song, Orpheus raises it to the level of human perception. The Gospel describes an analogous process on a higher plane. Through His Word, which He Himself is, Jesus calls earthly man from death to life. The raising of the dead is proof of the divine creative power that dwells in Jesus as true man and true God, but it is also a parable. According to the spiritual reading of the Bible, the “normal,” unenlightened, spiritually ignorant human being is like one asleep, blind, or lame. From the standpoint of the archetype placed within him, he is still on the developmental level of a dead stone. Only humanity awakened to the spirit, to which we are nevertheless called and created from the beginning, has eternal quality of being. The raising of the dead in the biblical accounts is therefore always at the same time image and parable of the spiritual rebirth from water and Spirit of which Jesus speaks to Nicodemus. Saint Athanasius of Alexandria says: “God became man so that man might become God."

Deification remains to this day the central theme of Orthodox Christian asceticism and spirituality. This essential drawing near to God, realized in being and becoming even to likeness with Him, is the great fruit of the Orthodox mystical path. It is the path of the high love of God.

Song of the Angels

Against the background of the mystical theology of the early Church Fathers, the sacred chant of the Church is a central bearer of the cultic mystery. Therefore the fathers of the Church and of monasticism, such as Ambrose of Milan, Ephraim the Syrian, Dionysius, Sabbas of Jerusalem, John of Damascus, later Symeon the New Theologian, Romanos the Melodist, John Koukouzelis in the Lavra on Athos, and countless others down to the present day, were always at the same time holy poets and singers. In their chant the Eternal Word, Christ Himself, is alive; it works from the redeeming and creative power and presence of the Holy Spirit. The hymns and the manner of singing must correspond and be adequate to the ascetic-spiritual presuppositions of theurgy and of Orthodox mystical tradition. It is therefore not enough for the hymnographer and singer to be “only” musically trained; he must in the same way and to the same degree be purified through the practice of spiritual prayer and have developed a sense for the archetypal working powers.

By archetypes we mean the eternal counsels and creative thoughts of God through which all that exists has become and becomes, and in which the measure of every perfection rests. These archetypes are spiritual, that is, transcendent, higher than all earthly reason and accessible only to the spirit, the spiritual reason. They cannot be grasped by earthly reason, rationally or conceptually; but they open themselves immediately to spiritual vision. As soon as they gain earthly form, in the context of our theme here in the hymn or psalm sung in prayer, they unfold their effective power outwardly as sound in space and time. In this sense liturgical chant is also, in a certain way, an icon, perhaps in its symbolic power even going beyond the painted image. Be that as it may, in every case the image should come as close as possible to the archetype and shape spiritual reality and power into the sensory world. The image is first of all hieroglyph, rune, powerful holy sign. Where the spiritual dimension is added, where both the receiving human being is opened through spiritual purity and the acting divine grace-power of the Holy Spirit is present, there the image is filled with the grace and power of God Himself. In this connection the teaching on the divine energies is of great importance, as it was always given in Orthodox Christian tradition and as Saint Gregory Palamas later formulated it. Saint Gregory Palamas understands this reality pneumatologically, that is, as the action and indwelling of the Holy Spirit. In the cult of the Church, the action of the Spirit aims at the knowledge and reception of the Eternal Word of God. The depiction of the eternal song of the angels in the sacred chant of the Church is an ancient topos of Christian liturgics. This is by no means to be understood merely metaphorically, as has become customary in the West. The song of the angels, who offer eternal praise at the throne of God, is the archetype of choral chant in a spiritual and ontological sense. Hence that purity and transcending power which we involuntarily sense when we encounter true choral chant, and which the modern, secularized person at first perceives as fascinating “strangeness” or “distance from the world.” As the melos of choral chant always circles around the ison, unfolds from it, and returns to it, so this chant centers the powers of our soul in the heart, our spiritual center, and opens there our spiritual faculty of perception. Sacred chant has an almost initiatory character for spiritual vision, at least to the degree that the human being is spiritually open at all.

Word, Logos, and Spirit in Choral Chant

The musical form of choral chant develops from the prayed word. This is to be understood on several levels: 1. the linguistic, 2. the spiritual, which we call the “archetypal,” and 3. the level of the Logos, the Eternal Word of God Himself.

The concrete formation of the melos first follows the natural accents and rhythms, the syntactic and architectural structure of the language. Beyond this, it follows the meaningful movements of the holy word and their echo in the consciousness of spirit-knowing beings.

The hymns and psalms that form the textual basis of choral chant are often already high mystical poetry. Their spiritual meaning opens itself to the spiritual vision from which they are born and which they in turn seek to generate in the hearer. By spiritual meaning we mean the prelinguistic, or better, supralinguistic content of these texts: that immediate action of the divine thoughts in the human spirit which then, in a second stage, expresses itself indirectly, as if refracted in the prism of human apprehension and human expression, and gains form. Thus language itself wrestles at the boundary of aporia for the truest possible expression of the unsayable mystery, and mystical poetry arises.

In the same way and from the same sources of the archetypal levels, or in another expression, from the heavenly spheres, choral chant draws. Since, as a prelinguistic or supralinguistic medium, it is able to nestle immediately against the spiritual energies, or is itself image and making-present of their circling movements, liturgical poetry, which is itself language, word-form of the unsayable primordial Word, gains in the melos of choral chant its sensory spiritual form and archetypal elevation.

In the Cherubic Hymn of the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom it says, programmatically:

or elsewhere it says of God:

The aspect of mystical knowledge is always in view. Thus, for example, in the very ancient Trinity hymns at the beginning of Orthros it says:

The ecclesial hymnographer in the traditional understanding is not a composer in the usual sense, but rather comparable to a midwife of spiritual powers. He has a share in the mystery of the all-holy Theotokos Mary, who received the Eternal Word of God from the Holy Spirit and then bore Him in the flesh. Analogously, the hymnographer brings the Eternal Word of God to form in his own way. As spirit-born liturgical poetry draws from the unsayable Eternal Word of God, as icon painting, besides the testimonies of historical tradition, always also lives from the vision of the heavenly forms, so the holy hymnographer listens to the song of the angels, the sound of the heavenly spheres.

This “listening” is not an acoustic process, but again spiritual vision: here as a tender mutual nestling of the movements and powers of the soul and the divine Logos, the play of love of divine wisdom in the human being with God who again and again presses near, withdraws, and returns.

A hymn is the more perfect the more it is an echo of the eternal song of the angels. Therefore choral chant is, according to the laws of spiritual knowledge, a true and genuine symbol.

Chant as Mystagogy

In the sung liturgy, the task is to activate, by means of the written melodies, the spiritual dimensions of the holy word, as well as the rational and emotional dimensions growing from them. A high degree of musicality, intuition, and spirituality is required of the singers, so that the original exalted mood of vision is transmitted to the hearers and, if they are open and ready for it, likewise leads them upward to a spiritual grasp of meaning and to a sensing and intimation of the archetypes. The entire cultus of the Orthodox Church is mystagogy, that is, a leading toward the eternal, unsayable Mystery; the Orthodox temple is a mystagogical space. Space and time are transcended, opened toward eternity in the holy event of theurgy. Sacred chant forms the sound-space in time in which theurgy and mystagogy unfold.

In this way liturgical singing becomes a unique, infinitely precious spiritual-ascetic exercise. In many monasteries of the Holy Mountain Athos, extraordinary importance is attached to having as many young monks as possible learn choral chant and master it actively. There one still knows from experience that the right manner of liturgical singing is at the same time an exercise in the right manner of spiritual prayer.

Formation of Melos in Choral Chant

The melos of choral chant is formed from smaller figures, the “gestures” or “neumes,” which themselves consist of several tones. Each of the eight church modes possesses a series of characteristic structural principles and turns. All this can be recognized again like the words, syllables, and grammatical structures of language. The “gestures” form the “vocabulary” of choral chant. They are also called “neumes,” like the graphic signs with which they are written down, and which in turn arise from the gestures with which the choir leader draws them in the air with his hand (cheironomy).

The neumes possess their own symbolism, so it is by no means insignificant where and when which neume appears in the melos. Furthermore, analogous to language, there are certain laws that constitute a kind of melos-forming syntax and grammar; knowledge and observance of these laws determine the quality of the chant.

Above all stands the law of all-harmony, of the well-ordered correspondence of archetype and image, and of the right cooperation of spiritual, psychic, and bodily powers. According to these principles, the melos is unfolded immediately by the Spirit from the word. Distinct from this are the indirect, more school-like procedures of traditional choral composition, which imitate already existing melodies more or less freely. In the West, the procedure of contrafactum is still known; Byzantine tradition knows much more far-reaching procedures that were and still are applied in a school-like manner.

In contrafactum (from Latin contrafacere, to imitate or reproduce), an existing melody is adapted to a new text with the smallest possible changes; completely different texts can also be placed under it, provided they are as similar as possible to the original text in length and in rhythmic and accentual structure. As a rule this already leads to difficulties when translating a text into another language, and to the unfruitful practice of adapting the form of the target language to that of the source language in order to change the given melody as little as possible. This does no small violence to the target language, and the result is correspondingly unsatisfactory.

In the so-called Irmologike and with the kontakia, the choral melody of the model is used only as pattern and basic structure. It is not only adapted to the other text; its elements are recombined according to the text and its meaning. Considerable expansions, shortenings, and changes of the melos are possible here. Thus free strophic chant arises. It is transmitted on the one hand as a metrically bound, relatively quick manner of singing (Irmologike) for the troparia of the canons after a model stanza, the irmos; on the other hand, for the slow manner of singing in the style of the early kontakia, where the stanzas are called prosomia, in German “similar ones.” In both cases it was originally an art of improvisation practiced in Orthodox monasteries as well as in cathedral and parish churches. From this comes the central importance of the choirmaster (choregos) and of hand gesture (cheironomy), with which he leads the choir, but also the frequent solo singing over ison in the liturgical practice of Orthodox monasteries.

A good singer is only one who can not only sing from notes, but who 1. knows many ways of interpreting the neumes and, from this knowledge, can sing out existing hymns appropriately, that is, ornamentally expand them; 2. can render texts into chant according to given models; and 3. can improvise freely.

Unlike Latin chant, which lives essentially from written witnesses, Byzantine choral practice remains to this day to a high degree a living tradition, passed on directly from teachers to pupils, so to speak “from mouth to ear.” This corresponds entirely to the conditions of the spiritual path of Orthodox monasticism as such, for there too it is not primarily the rules and norms that can be fixed in writing, but rather the living elders who pass on the spirit and life of holy tradition immediately “from mouth to ear,” and still more in common life, through their being and teaching, “from spirit to spirit” and “from heart to heart."

Byzantine neumatic notation, unlike today’s Western notation, does not indicate pitch steps, but intervallic progressions, which moreover can be executed in very different ways. It absolutely requires interpretation and includes a sometimes considerable range of possible executions. In the West, the closest comparison is perhaps the practice of ornamentation in instrumental music of the Renaissance and early Baroque. Even the concrete shaping of written hymns can vary greatly from region to region, monastery to monastery, singer to singer, and even with the same singer from service to service. Nevertheless, the same basic structural principles, the law of the harmony of the All, and the relationship of archetype and image are reflected in all variants.

Finally, Byzantine tradition knows the art of forming melos according to groups of neumes. In this case the musical material is not present as a completed melody at all, but forms only a loose treasure of musical gestures, each belonging to a particular expression and particular modes. This “procedure” too is originally an art of improvisation, but is increasingly used for the written fixing of hymns. It stands, as it were, in the middle between spirit-worked immediate creation of melos “from the word” and the somewhat schoolmasterly rendering of text into melos.

In addition, psalmody should be mentioned, whose spectrum ranges from slow melismatic forms, to be executed metrically or ametrically, to the small, flowing, always metrically bound manner of singing.

Historical Precursors of German Choral Chant

A German choral tradition could not develop in the Middle Ages, since the Latin Church did not permit the German language in worship, and especially since the church schism of 1054 AD, in the increasingly Roman-shaped West, Latin alone was regarded as liturgical language. When German-language services were introduced with the Reformation, the time of ancient church chant in the West was already over. Other, secular musical forms determined the development. Some early Protestant hymns are indeed comparable to the simple syllabic folk chants of Orthodox choral chant, the troparia. Luther and others also show occasional borrowings of older melodies in contrafactum, even structured in church modes. Overall, however, ancient church chant, which was most closely bound to monastic liturgy, had been abolished together with monasticism and the Latin language.

Yet this is already a late stage of a development that began much earlier. Through the hardening of tradition and its restriction to the written corpus of Gregorian chant, the actual laws of melos formation, as well as the spiritual-ascetic connections, gradually fell into oblivion. Through the overlaying and integration of individual chant pieces into polyphonic compositions from the High Gothic period onward, the original rhythmic structure of the chant was also lost. The “canonical” chant was increasingly “skeletonized” into a mere sequence of intervals, and then, as cantus firmus in long note values, adapted to the metric structure of compositions. This led, over the centuries, to the dominance of this leveled form even when one sang “only” chant. In this connection one speaks of “planed chant.” Gregorian chant was finally completely displaced by the forms of church composition that had developed in the West since the Renaissance and that, in the end, no longer differed in any way from the secular music of the respective time except in text and patrons. When, for example, E. T. A. Hoffmann writes about church music in the spirit of Romanticism, he no longer thinks of choral chant at all, but exclusively of contemporary works.

In the wake of Romanticism and the growing historical consciousness of the 19th century, Gregorian chant began to be rediscovered. Church Romanticism, for example in Novalis, idealized medieval church life, but had exclusively its Western, Roman form in view. In church music the movement of Cecilianism arose at that time, in which, among other things, a renewal of medieval Latin chant was sought. At first, in accordance with the understanding of the time, planed chant was regarded as the standard of chant as such, and the corresponding musical practice remained formative well into the 20th century. Starting from this misunderstanding, corresponding theories of the “spiritual abstraction” of chant were developed, which suited certain tendencies of Western theology and church of that period (19th century).

Early on there were attempts to underlay Latin Gregorian chant with German translations. Yet this “adaptation of Gregorian chant” to the German language remained only a side track. German texts were simply placed under the Gregorian melodies without further adaptation. Since the Latin melodies were regarded as “canonical” and therefore untouchable, and since the inner structural laws of chant had not yet been researched, while chant was understood quite in the spirit of Romanticism, this underlaying was carried out mechanically. This procedure, however, destroys the connection between word and melos that is so essential to original chant. For the historical reasons mentioned above, the problem was not perceived at all, not to mention the symbolism of the neumes and their spiritual references. The question of the agreement of musical with linguistic accents and of musical with linguistic syntax did, however, appear as a problem to not a few practicing church musicians by the middle of the 20th century at the latest. Finally, semasiological research in the area of the Latin Church took up these connections in Gregorian chant and placed their study on a scientific basis. It is now generally known that in Gregorian chant too the ductus and accentuation of the language formed the basis of melos formation, and that Latin chant possessed a highly differentiated rhythmic structure that cannot be captured in simple metric schemes.

For the adaptation of Gregorian chant into German this had frustrating consequences, for from the nature of the matter it had now become impossible and therefore obsolete. Nevertheless, in some monasteries a German-language choral practice took hold alongside Latin chant, though it did not go beyond the simplest syllabic forms. Overall, in practice, especially after the Roman council (Vatican II), worship in the Western Church was strongly shaped by Protestantism, and other, more modern musical forms are used.

An opposite situation and development can be observed in the Orthodox churches. In Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania, ancient church chant has always been cultivated. There were developments here too, such as the chant reform of the 19th century in the Greek sphere, or especially the development in Russia, which strongly resembles that in the West. Nevertheless one can speak of a relatively unbroken tradition. Since the 1980s, especially in Russia, there has been an overwhelming renewed turn toward the older choral traditions. In Georgia, Serbia, Lebanon, and the Near East there are analogous movements. Thus Orthodox Christianity possesses an enormously broad spectrum of different forms of church chant, from efforts at historically authentic reconstruction to new creations that consciously lean again on old and oldest traditions. This development is by no means restricted to monasteries, but is also carried by parishes, dioceses, and independent institutes.

The Choral Tradition in the Holy Trinity Monastery

Analogously, in the Holy Trinity Monastery a German Orthodox choral tradition has been developed which from the outset takes the German language as its basis and is therefore called German Choral Chant. Because of the ascetic and theurgic dimension of worship, the decision for a tradition adequate to ancient church choral practice was indispensable here as well.

Essential models for the development of this chant tradition are Byzantine and Old Bulgarian chant. That the cultic chant present in the West, Gregorian chant, also had a role to play, and that it made sense to use the experience of previous generations with the “adaptation of Gregorian chant,” followed from history and from the matter itself. The prerequisite for this work was the fortunate circumstance that, through the Orthodox view of the early Christian diversity of the choral dialects of the Christian peoples, the archetype common to all was much easier to grasp than it had been in the West even a generation earlier, where the term “choral chant” still meant exclusively “Gregorian chant.” Thus the approaches of “German Gregorian chant” and their relative failure could be evaluated in a completely new way, and a fundamental new beginning could take place by including, besides Latin, above all Byzantine and Old Slavonic choral traditions.

The development of German Choral Chant on the basis of the Orthodox liturgy began already in 1977 with the writing down of the “Truly It Is Meet” and a contrafactum of “Praise the Lord, O My Soul” according to the Old Russian znamenny rospev, then systematically from 1981 on the Holy Mountain Athos and since 1990 in the newly founded Holy Trinity Monastery at Buchhagen.

That simple adaptation is inadequate from the nature of the matter has already been shown in connection with attempts to adapt Gregorian chant for the German language. This naturally applies in the same way to Greek, Arabic, Slavic, and other choral melodies. By contrast, the traditional procedures of chant improvisation and hymnography described above, with free use of existing melodic material, as they have always been customary in Byzantine choral tradition, give the experienced musician excellent possibilities. Of course this work presupposes, in addition to musical ability, a finely developed feeling for language.

Simple contrafactum is quite suitable for syllabic chants, but its limits are narrow. As soon as the syntactic structure of the source language differs from that of German, it becomes unusable. A distortion of German in order to remedy this is forbidden for reasons of language culture.

Free imitation according to transmitted melodic material, up to improvisation, presupposes that the inner structural laws and melos-forming principles of choral chant are grasped and handled sovereignly. This applies equally to the formation and notation of new choral melodies. In the latter case, new melodies are formed in the “musical language” of choral chant directly from the German text. The effort is worthwhile in every case, for only in this way does one gain a genuine new choral dialect whose melos formation follows the syntax of the German language, whose musical accents sit correctly from the beginning on the meaning-bearing syllables of the German text, and which, beyond this, is able to employ melodic figures, neumes, intervals, the order of the tetrachords, and where appropriate changes of ison in a coherent, that is, symbolically, mystagogically, and musically meaningful way. As soon as one renews the “spiritual code” of ancient choral chant on the basis of a living language, the laws immanent in it again offer a certain security and guarantee, also spiritually, for the faithful translation of the archetypal working powers into acoustic event. Where the heavenly archetype is mirrored in the image, this chant breathes the same spirit as the ancient choral traditions and has the same mystagogical power. Like them, it too is an immediate “true image,” an authentic icon of the song of the angels. Thus German Choral Chant stands as a fresh green branch on the ancient tree of early Christian hymnody beside the classical ancient choral traditions. Through this, German too regains, in the sense of ancient church liturgics, the dignity of a “holy language."

The Notation of German Choral Chant

German Choral Chant is written down in the Trinity Monastery in a lined neumatic notation. The basis is the well-known Latin chant notation of Solesmes, which has, however, been considerably expanded. Besides the classical square neumes and lozenges for representing individual tones, multi-tone neumes are used predominantly and are represented by simple graphic figures. These neumes capture entire musical figures of several tones together with their rhythmic structure. They thus combine the function of the diastematic Western neumes with that of the so-called “great signs” of the older Byzantine manuscripts before the chant reform. In addition, there are a number of liquescent and ornamental neumes that allow the finest vocal differentiations to be notated, as are characteristic of German Choral Chant, in which it is comparable to Byzantine and Oriental chant and as they also played a major role in older Western European music.

The corpus of German Choral Chant now notated consists of the ordinarium of the Orthodox daily office, the Divine Liturgy, as well as the festal chants of the great feasts and further hymns.

Psalmody in German Choral Chant

Added to this are the models for singing the psalms. Here too, adapting the text to existing models was rejected as linguistically unsatisfactory. The other path, analogous to the new composition of the ordinarium and the festal hymns, of creating new psalm tones proved in practice to be a great challenge and ultimately took decades. The basic structure is at first simple and arises from the language itself: while Latin psalmody has fixed models whose melodic formulas enter at the beginning and end of the verses according to syllable count, German requires flexible models in which special “accent neumes” can be sung on the respective stressed syllables of the text. Thus shorter or longer recitative spaces arise between the accent neumes, but also at the end or beginning of the verse. For over 20 years the models were continuously elaborated in the daily liturgical practice of the monastery.

There are now three distinct genres of psalmody: 1. the metrically bound “small psalmody,” as with the light psalms of Vespers and the praise psalms at the end of Orthros; 2. the great metric-melismatic psalmody, used mainly in the night vigils on the great feasts; and 3. the so-called “great psalmody,” in which at least a third of the daily kathisma psalms are sung. The third manner of singing follows Gregorian models. The first two orient themselves on models of the Holy Mountain Athos and are partly direct adoptions.

Thus the singing of the psalms in German Choral Chant gains a wholly new, and yet actually ancient, joyfulness and coherence.