Theory and Practice in the Music of the Islamic World: Essays in Honour of Owen Wright (SOAS Musicology Series) by Неизвестный

Author:Неизвестный [Неизвестный]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138218314
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-11-19T22:00:00+00:00

Between the Church and the theatre

In the early 1920s, the chanting practices of cantors (psaltes) in Greek Orthodox churches of Athens and the periphery formed the subject of heated discussion in music newspapers and occasionally the general press. What was particularly at stake was the question of conformity to the received tradition with all that this entailed.

The debate about ecclesiastical music, also known as the “musical question”, had already been going on for some time. A practice that seemed to encapsulate in an unswerving way the key issues at stake was “tetraphonia” or the harmonization of Greek ecclesiastical music, which was strictly monophonic, according to the polyphonic system of European art music. The application of Western-style harmony in the form of three or – more usually – two additional voices to Byzantine music had been introduced as early as the 1840s in certain Greek Orthodox churches in Vienna, Trieste and London.9 Its adoption in the palace chapel of Agios Georgios in Athens in 1870 set the precedent for the proliferation of polyphonic choirs in Orthodox churches of Greece especially from the 1880s onward.10 Despite a series of encyclicals issued both by the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Greek Church that consistently proscribed it,11 Western-style harmony had endured.

In the prolonged dispute over polyphony, both its detractors and supporters had followed a line of argumentation that was largely technical; it involved a comparative assessment of the intervallic, scalar and melodic features of Byzantine and European music, in order to argue for or against the relative merits and compatibility of the two musical traditions. Yet, at heart, this was an ideological war of words, related with the broader issue of Greek cultural identity. For advocates of monophony, the adoption of Western-style harmony, which they associated with the Latin and Protestant West, amounted to a “betrayal of Hellenism and Orthodoxy”;12 whereas for their adversaries, contemporary Byzantine music had turned into a barbarian medley of Jewish, Turkish and Arabic sounds,13 of which polyphony might purge it. The former deplored what they saw as uncritical mimicry of an irreconcilably foreign and/or morally dubious tradition; the latter denounced the current state of Byzantine music as impure and unrefined. In many ways, the controversy over ecclesiastical music eloquently condensed broader discussions about the present state of Greek musical culture at large14 and about Greek national identity and the production of modern Greece through definitive readings of its historical past.15 This may partly explain the resonance of the debate beyond the world of music and Church specialists.

Another set of issues that were recognized as alarming involved the inroads that the secular world seemed to be making into the religious sphere. In the early 1920s, numerous articles reported on polyphonic choirs that threatened to replace monophonic Byzantine choirs in a number of churches. Those calling for their abolition pointed out that multi-part singing, by obstructing the clarity of delivery, rendered the text incomprehensible. But it was especially the social associations of polyphony with the public culture of entertainment and worldly pleasure that seem to have provoked these reactions.

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