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What music did Ukrainians create and perform five, six, or seven centuries ago? Ukrainian folk music comes to mind first since it was richly represented in our culture and cultivated as one of its pillars. However, Ukrainian music of that time wasn’t limited to the folk tradition; professional music was also historically important in Ukraine.
Ukrainian professional music has long been associated with sacred music, which was performed during religious ceremonies and become nearly everyday part of people’s lives.
We know quite a lot about Ukrainian religious music of the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods (seventeenth -nineteenth centuries). Although many Ukrainian composers of the seventeenth-nineteenth centuries remain unknown, there is an even greater knowledge gap (even for professionals) when it comes to early Ukrainian monodic music, which preceded polyphonic music.
This is eloquently illustrated by the amount of time allotted for studying the thousand-year-old tradition of monodic singing at Kyiv’s leading music schools, e.g. approximately four to five academic hours at the National Music Academy of Ukraine in the History of Ukrainian Music course, and two to three hours at the Glier Kyiv Municipal Academy of Music. Thus, professional musicians are perhaps a little less helpless than average music lovers when it comes to a knowledge of early Ukrainian monodies. However, there are almost no performances or audio recordings of early Ukrainian monodic music to widen our knowledge of it.
Some steps have been taken to overcome this situation. For example, there have been recent festivals of Ukrainian Orthodox sacred music with amateur and professional choirs performing some Ukrainian monodies. Also, chants from old Ukrainian prints and manuscripts were sung and recorded by singer Natalia Polovynka and director Serhiy Kovalevych within the framework of the IRMOS project (Early Sacred Chants of Ukraine).
Today’s, performances of Ukrainian monodies are at an improved level, through the method of historically informed performance, based on a thorough study of manuscripts.
This was also the main idea of the Byzantine Slavonic project, which presented liturgical singing based on Ukrainian manuscripts of the late sixteenth and eighteenth centuries in Kyiv.
What was the focus of this project? The answer reveals a real detective story, which not only allows us to glimpse at pages of early Ukrainian manuscripts, but also discloses a tradition of liturgical singing in another distant country. So, let’s start from the very beginning.
Ukrainian manuscripts: a mystery
Archives in Ukraine (the Institute of Manuscripts of the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine) and abroad (the National Library of Romania) hold a priceless Ukrainian musical heritage, especially collections of liturgical chants for entire liturgical years. These collections are called hirmologions [irmoligions, heirmologions or irmoloys – L.B.] (from the Greek “irmos” [“heirmos”] – a line of a hymn). Kyivan square notation, the first form of European five-line musical notation in the East Slavic lands, was used in those collections starting at the end of the sixteenth century.
Hence, such manuscripts could be relatively understandable today and even for people who are minimally familiar with music notation. However, this apparent accessibility does not deprive the manuscripts of mysteries. Among them are anonymous chants with Greek-language texts written in Cyrillic and words such as “Greek”, and “in Greek” in the names of the chants.
Researchers, since the second half of the nineteenth century, questioned whether these hirmologions derived from Greco-Byzantine models. On one hand, Kyivan Rus’ adopted Christianity from the Byzantium and continued to have close ties with the Patriarchate of Constantinople (the Kyiv Metropolis was subordinate to it until 1686), so the presence of Greco-Byzantine melodies in Ukraine made sense. On the other hand, in similar cases, when such music was used in sacred practice by different peoples (including Serbs, Wallachians, and Moldovans), it was recorded in completely different ways. Texts were written using the Greek alphabet and the music was notated using Byzantine neumes and the names of Greek composers. Hence, until recently it was unknown what kind of chants named “Greek,” were recorded in Ukrainian manuscripts, and whether their “originals” existed at all.
Byzantine music: mission impossible
The inhabitants of the Eastern Roman Empire during the fourth-fifteenth centuries called their state the “Empire of the Romans”. The designation “Byzantium” was applied to it after its fall to preserve the memory of the original name of the empire’s capital, Constantinople (Byzantium). This state was the center of Eastern Christianity throughout most of its existence. It is not surprising that Byzantium developed an influential tradition of sacred music, which is now called Byzantine music.
However, one should not be tempted to correlate Byzantine music with the time of Byzantium’s existence since its origins date back to Ancient Greece and Rome times. There is no end date for this tradition, as Byzantine music has survived the Byzantium Empire for centuries, and still dominates the church tradition of Greece.
Byzantine music is fundamentally monophonic, with the melody as its central part, and richly decorated with melismas. However, in practice, the melody is supplemented by a lower part (“isokratema”), which supports the melody by carrying the tonic of the scale. The isokratema was never written down in early recorded sources; it was improvised by the singers. The oriental flavor of the chants is largely due to the structure of the Greek modes (“ichos”), which include not only the tones and semitones familiar to Europeans, but also various microtones.
A neumatic notation system that is unusual today was used to record Byzantine music. While the modern five-line notation records the exact pitch of each sound, the Greek notation recorded the pitch direction (the musical interval from the previous tone). Each sign in a music manuscript carried its own expressive load, “energy,” so they all had their own names (“petasti,” “iporoi,” etc.). In addition, separate symbols were added to represent rhythmic and melodic ornamentations.
As discussed above, Byzantine music represented a different musical system. Therefore, solving the problem of the origin of “Greek” chants in Ukrainian hirmologions was until recently an “impossible mission” since it required special knowledge.
The solution
Yevheniia Ihnatenko, a musicologist with a PhD in Art History, has studied Ukrainian and Byzantine monodies for many years. She studied Byzantine music in Greece with the outstanding singer and teacher, Lykourgos Angelopoulos. Yevheniia Ihnatenko’s research helped lift the veil of mystery off early Ukrainian monodies since she found the Greco-Byzantine prototypes in a significant number of hymns.
This enriched the history of Ukrainian music with new names, facts, and contexts. For example, it became known that works of prominent Byzantine composers of the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries such as Ioannis Glykis and Manuel Chrysaphes were performed in Ukraine. While researching the Greek-language repertoire, she unexpectedly attributed a work to the sixteenth-century Moldovan composer Eustatius, the protopsalt of the Putna Monastery. This further expanded the list of our ancestors’ cultural contacts. This new knowledge finally made it possible to present “Greek” monodies from Ukrainian manuscripts to the public. This music was the focus of the Byzantine Slavic project, initiated and directed by Yevheniia Ihnatenko.
Singers Pavlo Bielsky, Pavlo Moskalenko, Mykola Dzhufer, and Ruslan Kirsh (also the project’s producer) made these scientific discoveries “sound”. All team members attended Yevhenia Ihnatenko’s course Byzantine Music: Theory and Practice at the National Music Academy of Ukraine, which sparked their personal interest in this music and laid the foundation for their professional approach to it.
The project involved archival and research work and, most importantly, live performances and audio recordings of the restored monody repertoire. The hymns were performed in one of Ukraine’s greatest shrines, St. Sophia of Kyiv, where they were probably performed 400-500 years ago.
Pavlo Moskalenko described his impressions of working on the project:
“It’s like learning about your family: who your ancestors were, where they lived, and what they did. It makes you realize who we are today.”
However, researching a “musical pedigree” was a real challenge, even for professionals.
“Vocalists at the conservatory spend many years developing a complex system of correct sound production, but it is not at all suitable for monodies. The way monodies were performed was completely different, comingfrom a different and more ancient vocal culture, perhaps simpler in terms of vocal technique (but it’s also surprising how difficult it could be to sound simple). Like the evangelist Matthew said, unless you become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven,” added singer Pavlo Bielsky.
The audience at the project presentation concert was immersed in the grandeur of the simplicity of early chants. In accordance with the principles of historically informed performance, the monodies were performed by a homogeneous male cast of singers. To formulate their own interpretation, the performers went through a thorough study and comparison of Ukrainian and Byzantine music notation.
“Our manuscripts often do not contain certain important markings, such as tones [hlasy], which were transmitted orally. It is the comparison with the Byzantine prototype that helps “put the puzzle together” and perform this music today,” noted project manager Yevhenia Ihnatenko.
In addition, the performance considered the principles of the oral tradition of Byzantine singing, such as improvisation with isokratemas, melodic ornamentation, and so on.
At the concert presentation, the audience heard early chants in Greek and Church Slavonic that were sung in churches and monasteries on historic Ukrainian lands like:
– “It is Truly Right” (“Άξιον εστίν”) from Ukrainian manuscripts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one of the most famous prayers to the Virgin Mary that believers offered and continue to offer to this day;
– “The Virgin Today” (“Ή Παρθένος σήμερον”) from Ukrainian manuscripts of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is a Christmas kontakion performed in Greek and Church Slavonic with an author believed to be St. Roman the Solodkospivets’ (sixth century);
– “Let Us Who Mystically Represent the Cherubim” (“Οἱ τὰΧερουβεὶμ”) from Ukrainian manuscripts of the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries. This is a hymn that could be called the musical culmination of the liturgy, performed in version by Eustatius, the protopsalt of the Moldovan monastery of Putna(sixteenth century);
– Prypila chants from Ukrainian manuscripts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These glorify saints on the feasts of the Lord and the Virgin Mary, in particular Volodymyr the Great, John the Theologian, the Holy Trinity, the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, etc.
The project participants sang these chants and talked about them, what they were performing and how they were performing. This allowed the audience to fully immerse themselves in the fluidity of the mystical ritual of our ancestors and, by having experiences like our ancestors, to deeper understand the foundations of our identity.
The Byzantine Slavic project is supported by the organization Ignea Korda and won a Per Forma grant from the Kyiv Contemporary Music Days organization with support (to develop the performing arts sector in Ukraine) from the Netherlands Performing Arts Fund and the Netherlands Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.
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