IRT to the 1672 Council, its seen as a semi-Ecumenical council but personally, I'm a bit leery of the Scholastic leanings it has. From my history classes this timeframe was odd for the Greek church. They were getting a lot of their printed materials from Venice printers and clergy educated in Italy. So at least from modern eyes, some of this is now a little suspect due to these influences.
I do agree concerning the semi-scholastic influence; we should also consider that at the time of the council, the Jesuits and Theatines were actively meddling in the affairs of the Eastern churches; the Theatines in particular, who later became very nearly extinct as a religious order, were allegedly responsible for orchestrating several incidents where portions of Orthodox churches broke away in what is strictly speaking a schism, so they could enter into communion with the Pope of Rome.
That said, the relationship with the Venetian Republic did one incredibly awesome thing for Orthodox Christianity, and that is, the Italian Baroque composers who travelled to Ukraine, facilitating the development of several glorious new forms of Slavonic chant. Slavonic Orthodox church music went from having three or four beautiful systems of chant (Znamenny, Byzantine, Russian and Ukrainian hybrid monastic derivatives of Byzantine and Znamenny chant, such as ancient Ukrainian monody, and Valaam chant, and finally, the Prostopinije congregational hymns and chant of the Carpatho-Rusyn and Lemko ethnic groups who had been incorporated without any say in the matter into the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church by the Union of Brest, under pressure from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
However, when the Italian composers arrived, all modern forms of Russian and Slavic music originated from that encounter as well as the cultural encounter between the Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Croatians and Slovenians with the Austrians and Germans, who were oppressive to the slavs, but had good music. The distinct character of the early church music of the Kievan Rus and the existence of Znamenny Chant furthermore I believe was the result of the Swedish Varangians (Vikings) who married into Slavic tribes, creating the Rus people from whom Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, and to a lesser extent, the Rusyns (Ruthenians or “Red Russians”) are descended from, and resulting in a synthesis between ancient Swedish music, ancient East Slavic music, and Byzantine ecclesiastical music. So Slavonic music has in a sense always been a melting pot, and the Italians who introduced Baroque tonality and four part harmony enabled a great deal more melting, of the good kind (synthesis) as opposed to the bad kind, or the good but destructive kind of the Wicked Witch of the West (“Help me, I’m melting!”).*
So as a result of that, there are a vast array of beautiful systems of Russian, Ukrainian, Belarussian and Bulgarian chant. You have high concept classical church music by Dmitry Bortniansky, Pavel Chesnokov, Alexander Nikolsky, Alexander Archangelsky, Artemy Vedel, Even Stankovych and numerous other fine ecclesiastical composers such as Degterev, Popsavov, Sheremetev, Sorokin, and of course, the extremely successful setting of the Divine Liturgy and All Night Vigils by Rachmaninoff, and a reasonably good setting by Tchaikovsky.
So in addition to the aforementioned composers, Slavonic music also wound up with a ton of beautiful new chants, including Greek Chant, which as I am sure you are aware, is not Byzantine chant, but some of the melodies, especially the famous setting of the Trisagion, do have a Hellenic sound to them, albeit a modern one, being tonal, like Agni Parthene, and then Kievan Chant, Imperial Court Chant, Bulgarian Chant, and the distinctive chant of numerous monasteries which are too numerous to iterate. And these systems, and indeed even to a large extent the music by the great ecclesiastical composers mentioned above, follow an 8 mode system derived from Byzantine Chant, and this is related to the eight modes** of Gregorian Chant and of course, the Gallican Chant Family (Ambrosian, Mozarabic, Gallican, Beneventan, and other more obscure varieties). And the evidence does show that St. Ambrose did import the first antiphonal hymns per se into the Western Church; the extremely conservative Roman chant up until that point was, for purposes of Latin worship at least, monotonic chant, and indeed the low mass was chanted using monotony until the tenth century, when the custom of whispering it began, along with the unique French practice of organ accompaniment; one will still hear monotonous chant in some Anglican liturgies from the 20th century, when Anglo Catholic priests used it to intone certain parts of Evensong and other services that are more commonly read.
The organist at York Minster in the 1970s, Francis Jackson, a contemporary of Herbert Howells and other Anglican composers I love, was particularly good at chanting the entire service of choral evensong and was one of the last to follow that practice, which sadly disappeared almost completely in the 1990s, and that combined with the virtual disappearance of upper RP pronunciation by the clergy has had the effect of degrading the sound of Choral Evensong, but only in Scotland will one likely hear a beautiful regional accent that is an acceptable replacement for “BBC English” as it was once known, although it should be noted that Church of England clergy took received pronunciation to an extreme, creating beautiful sounds even when they spoke, by holding their jaw stationary as much as possible. You can hear this exquisite vocalization in older recordings of Church of England worship, and it persisted into the 1970s, like so many other awesome British traditions which have since vanished.
And there is also evidence to support the idea that St. Gregory Dialogos (Pope St. Gregory the Great) was largely responsible for the system of Gregorian chant, although many of the most famous Gregorian compositions, like the Missa Angelis (composed, I think, in the 1300s or early 1400s by a Franciscan friar), and the Litany of Loretto, were composed a long time after his papacy
Indeed the Litany of Loretto postdates St. Gregory by a thousand years, and was the prayer associated with the international Naval victory that kept the Ottomans on their side of the pond (there were four great victories that kept Europe Christian; that of St. Guillame of Gellone which kept the Islamic armies of Al-Andalus, an ongoing strategic war between the Rus and the Ottomans which lasted for a millenium, the Naval victory at Loretto, and the Relief of Vienna.
And of course, West Syriac chant as used by the Syriac Orthodox Church also has eight modes in the Beth Gazo (“House of Treasure”, their system of hymnody), while other Oriental churches have different chant systems; Tasbeha, for example, has named modes, and I don’t know how many there are, and I believe Ethiopian church music has more than eight modes. Ancient Greek Music had I think as many as nineteen modes in the “perfect tone system,” but I believe it had eight modes in common with the church, and one of the modes, either the seventh or the eighth, I recall a philosopher attacking because it was in his opinion depressing, in that it built up happy emotions and then smashed them.
As a Psalti
@GreekOrthodox do you do much chanting?
One final argument you might be horrified by, and I am certain it would horrify my friends at the Greek Orthodox monastery of Elder Ephrem (memory eternal) in Florence, AZ, called St. Anthony’s, which is not far from a Coptic St. Anthony’s, and then in Egypt is the original Coptic St. Anthony’s, where if I ever do become a monk, that would be one monastery I might like - those excellent singers of Byzantine Chant, Capella Romana, have also massively piqued my curiosity about modern Greek Orthodox music through their recordings of Peter Michaelides (memory eternal) and Tikey Zes (who I believe reposed in the 90s), and I really want to hear more contemporary Greek Orthodox music. I have found recently a treasure trove of contemporary Romanian music, which being derived from Byzantine chant but embracing four part harmony, has a similar sound.
There is also the exquisite three part harmony of Georgia. When I first heard it, I was turned off, but that was because the all male choir had a forceful sound, similiar I would say to the monks at Simonpetra on Mount Athos, except without the refinement, so the result was...shouty. Fortunately, I soon found really good recordings by the Bassiani Ensemble, and various Georgian churches, and I fell in love. Recently I found on Apple Music a recording of Greek Orthodox chant in three part harmony, which baffles me; I had no idea there was any history of that system in use outside of Georgia and the Slavonic churches (specifically, the Russian Orthodox, Bulgarian Orthodox and the various autonomous churches in the former USSR under the MP, as well as the Ukrainian Greek Catholics and the new OCU, tend to share church music, and Georgian church music did become popular in these countries; I have many recordings, both albums and services on YouTube where Georgian chant makes an appearance, particularly the compositions of Zakhari Paliashvili, and there is an album of Ludmilla Arshavskaya leading the Cantus Musical Ensemble in singing his setting of the Divine Liturgy, albeit in Church Slavonic rather than Georgian).
* The lady who played the Wicked Witch of the West, as is so often the case with actors who play villains, was extremely nice; she appeared in one of my favorite episodes of Mr. Rogers, one which was intended to make sure young children were not frightened by, but were instead able to enjoy, make-believe, such as The Wizard of Oz. Fred Rogers, as most of you know, was an ordained minister in
@hedrick ’s denomination, the PCUSA, specially ordained with a focus on children's television, and I regard him as the most important televangelist of the 20th century, because he was able to impart basic Christian values to an audience of young children that in many cases would not have heard the teachings of Jesus Christ from any other source.
Mr. Rogers was careful to make his program accessible to non-Christians, but the Christian values in it are abundantly apparent. He also prohibited one actor on his show, the singer who played the part of the African American policeman, who in real life is inclined towards homosexuality from attending homosexual nightclubs in the late 1970s, and I believe this action might be the reason why that talented singer is still with us - Mr. Rogers, by being, in the actors own words, a surrogate father, probably saved the man’s life, when we look at the tragedy of the initial spread of AIDS. Christians have a moral duty to save people from those passions which risk their lives, and if we have homosexual friends who look up to us, the best thing we can do is provide moral guidance. Unfortunately, the people at Westboro, who I think really hate people who are inclined towards that sin, have created a situation where it has become increasingly difficult for Christians to confront the sin of homosexual behavior without appearing to hate homosexuals, when in fact encouraging people to fast and pray rather than give in to carnal impulses, whether those impulses involve perversion, gluttony, avarice, the abuse of alcohol and other substances, theft, gambling, or violence, is one of the most loving things we can do, as human beings created in the image of Christ our God.
** I have read that due to a quirk in Gregorian chant not present in Byzantine or Syriac chant, there is also a ninth mode that is available, but I lack the musical training to verify or explain it. When it comes to ecclesiastical music, I am a consumer, one blessed with diverse taste for all forms of traditional music and an intense loathing of praise and worship and Christian rock music; I believe that no Christian minister should ever preach within half a klik (500 meters or about 1/4 of a mile), of an electric guitar and drum kit, and I also agree with James Bond in Goldfinger that listening to the Beatles without ear protection is on a par with drinking warm champagne).
By the way, that guy who in another thread got on my case for challenging his view that all entertainment is inherently sinful and that music is inherently idolatrous (?) will really get upset if he sees this thread I reckon...
