love Christian Metal, which is Christian art
Well I suppose there’s no accounting for individual stylistic preferences in music, after all, I have a vast collection of Soviet military music, including the entire body of work of the great Ukrainian composer Symeon Tchernetsky, as well as other classics by Agapkin, Alexandrov, et al, and what is more I have it committed to memory. For obvious reasons this could cause an offense to many of my Orthodox co-religionists who actually had to endure living under the Sovietsky Soyuza; a recurring nightmare of mine involves me walking around one of the ROCOR or the more ethnically Russian OCA parishes, including my own local cathedral of the Holy Virgin Mary, or one of our monasteries such as that of St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco or the Vashon Island monastery, and to find myself accidentally humming
The March of Stalin’s Air Force or
The Red Army’s Entry Into Budapest.
I even love Orthodox Christian Metal.
Which you will never hear in an Orthodox church, I am pleased to say. Even the use of organs is extremely controversial (I myself support their use in Greek Orthodox cathedrals and parish churches where their use is traditional, for example, in Western Europe, North America, and in the Ionian Islands, but only for the performance of settings of the liturgy by composers such as Tikey Zes who wrote for the organ, and not with Byzantine Chant (and also the restoration of the organ that once stood in the narthex of the Hagia Sophia when we retake Constantinople from the Turks) but oppose their use in musical rites where they are not traditional, and also oppose their use by the Syriac Orthodox, where the encyclical allowing organs is frequently abused to allow encyclicals, and where the traditional Syriac chant really sounds much better without it). I am happy to report that the average age of our hymns is in my estimation roughly 900 years, and that’s with the average being weighted in favor of more recent years by
troparia, kontakia and
akathist hymns composed for newer saints.
By the way, to be clear, this entire reply is intended as good-natured ribbing and as edutainment, since obviously there are many Orthodox who enjoy metal music, excluding obviously, myself, although I know of people who would regard my enjoyment of Soviet, Belgian, Swedish and British military music, among other nationaltiies I am aware of, as itself being “metal” although I myself don’t really understand this adjective, or why it is applied to certain genres of music, or certain behaviors, because I prefer to surround myself with art and music from the late Classical (Byzantine), Baroque, Rococco, Romantic/Victorian, and Art Nouveaux / Beaux Arts / Arts and Crafts and Art Deco / Streamline Moderne / early Modernist styles. Indeed the only popular form of music I have any real interest in, which I would deny constitutes at present anything like popular music, is jazz (including the swing music of the 1930s-50s).
This is of course because I am, simply put, an eccentric and a man who enjoys cultural pursuits.
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