Byzantine chant, or the psaltic art, is the monophonic liturgical music of the Greek-speaking Orthodox East: a living practice with a documented history of more than a thousand years, its own theoretical literature, a notation that passed through several systems, and a repertory of tens of thousands of pieces. In the Holy Land it carries a particular inheritance, because several of the Eastern church's most consequential hymnographers worked in the monasteries of the Judean desert.
What a mode actually is
The organising principle is the Octoechos, a system of eight modes: four authentic and four plagal, the plagal standing a fourth below their counterparts. An echos, however, is not simply a scale. It is a compound of a base note, a characteristic arrangement of intervals, a stock of melodic formulae known as theseis, standard cadences and a recognised expressive character; to sing in the second mode is to draw on that whole complex, not on a succession of pitches.
The intervals themselves surprise listeners trained on Western music, since several steps used in the psaltic modes correspond to nothing available in equal temperament. Modern theory describes them by dividing the octave into seventy-two equal parts, from which each mode builds tones and semitones of differing sizes. The modes rotate weekly from the Sunday after Pascha, completing the cycle every eight weeks, as set out on our page on the liturgical calendar.
From reciting signs to round notation
The written transmission begins with ekphonetic notation, in use from roughly the ninth to the twelfth century, whose small set of signs marked recitation and cadence in the lections rather than melody. Palaeo-Byzantine neumes follow in the tenth century in two families, conventionally named Chartres and Coislin after the manuscripts that defined them; these give the direction of melodic movement but not the size of the intervals, and served singers who already carried the melodies in memory.
Around 1177 the Middle Byzantine or round notation reaches a fully diastematic form in which every sign carries a precise interval value, and from this point the repertory can be transcribed with confidence; comparable volumes survive in Western collections such as those in the British Library's catalogue of illuminated manuscripts. The kalophonic style of the fourteenth century, associated above all with John Koukouzeles, then elaborated existing melodies with long melismatic passages and wordless vocalisations.
The last great change came around 1814, when three teachers named Chrysanthos of Madytos, Gregorios and Chourmouzios devised the New Method: a reduced inventory of signs, a solmisation on seven syllables, and a systematic account of interval sizes. Almost every printed chant book since follows this Chrysanthine notation, into which the older repertory was transcribed.
The genres of hymn
The texts sung to these melodies fall into a small number of well-defined genres, each with its own history and place in the services.
- Troparion — the oldest and simplest form, a single short stanza attached to a day or a feast.
- Kontakion — an extended verse sermon bound by an acrostic and a refrain, brought to its height by Romanos the Melodist in the sixth century; in later use only its opening stanza and first strophe survive.
- Kanon — a cycle of odes modelled on the biblical canticles, each opening with a heirmos that sets metre and melody for the stanzas following; from the eighth century it dominates the morning office.
- Sticheron — a stanza interpolated between verses of a psalm; an idiomelon carries its own melody, a prosomoion a borrowed model.
These are gathered into books of their own — the Heirmologion, the Sticherarion and the anthologies used by cantors for elaborate settings — a manuscript tradition described on our page on manuscripts, libraries and treasury.
The ison and the texture of the sound
Byzantine chant is monophonic: one melodic line, sung by one voice or by many in unison. Against it a portion of the choir may hold the ison, a sustained tone on the base note of the mode, shifting only when the melodic centre shifts. The ison is not harmony in the Western sense: it moves in no counterpoint and generates no chords, existing only to fix the centre against which the melody is heard.
Its antiquity is debated: the practice is securely attested from the sixteenth century and may be older, but the notated sources do not record it, since a drone requires no notation. Monophony matters for a reason theological as much as musical, since the tradition treats chant as a vehicle for a text, so the words govern the melody. General accounts of Byzantine chant and the resources gathered by Dumbarton Oaks take this as the defining characteristic of the repertory.
The Holy Land inheritance
The Judean desert houses were among the great hymnographic workshops of the Christian East. John of Damascus and Kosmas of Maiouma both worked at the monastery founded by Sabas, and between them are credited with much of the kanon repertory still in use; Sophronius, writing in Jerusalem in the early seventh century, is associated with a body of anacreontic verse, and the Great Kanon of Andrew of Crete remains the longest hymn in the tradition. That setting is described on our page on the monasteries of the Judean desert.
The influence ran outward. The oldest surviving hymnal of the Jerusalem rite, the Iadgari, survives in Georgian translation and shows how thoroughly the usage of the city was exported before Constantinopolitan practice became dominant. In the Holy Land the repertory is sung in Greek and in Arabic, and Arabic-language composition remains a living craft; its visual counterpart is treated on our page on Byzantine iconography.