The Neume Notation Project

Louis W. G. Barton

µ Influences of Byzantium and Syria

CONTENTS:

§ Byzantium

§ Influence of Byzantium on Western Chant

§ Byzantine Chant Notation

§ Syrian Chant

§ Modes



§ Byzantium

he city of Byzantium was founded as a center of trade by Greeks in 667 b.c. The city was subsumed politically by the Romans in a.d. 196, but its population and culture remained predominantly Greek. In 330, the Roman Emperor Constantine ("The Great") moved the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to Byzantium, and renamed the city 'Constantinople' in his own honor. By 395 the Roman Empire had split into Eastern and Western Empires, and, in 476, the Western capital at Rome succumed to the invasion of barbarians.

After the fall of Rome, western Europe entered into a period of cultural darkness, uncertainty, and deprivation, while the Eastern Empire flourished. Constantinople became unquestionably the center of learning and culture in the Mediterranean basin. Emperor Justinian I, "The Great" (reigned 527-65), recaptured the city of Rome, yet it would never again regain its preeminence. (Nevertheless, Rome was the seat of St. Peter and, with Charlemagne, it acquired renewed importance as the locus of the Papacy and center of Catholicism.)

By 1054, the Eastern and Western Churches, too, were definitely divided. In that year Pope Leo IX issued a condemnation of the patriarch of Constantinople.

In 1453, the fortified stone walls of Constantinople crumbled in a long bombardment by the Turks using newly-invented, powerful siege cannon that they bought from Europe. During the sack of the city, large numbers of ancient books, considered as by the Moslem Turks as 'infidel' works, were burned. The magnificent Hagia Sophia church (Greek, "Holy Wisdom"), completed by Justinian in 538, was spared for its great beauty and still stands today (albeit as a Moslem mosque). The city has remained part of Turkey and is now called Istanbul.

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§ Influence of Byzantium on Western Chant

ride in the autonomy of the Western Church may have contributed to acceptance of the notion that Western music descended directly from ancient Greek music (viz., classical Greece), via Rome. It is more likely the case, in my opinion, that Eastern Christian influence, specifically Byzantine, played a major part in the formation of Western liturgy, piety, and music. The Western system of church modes, for example, may have derived from an older modal system in the East (an argument advanced by Jacques Chailley), or at least, this was a synthesis of Byzantine and the ancient Greek modal systems. Melodies from the East, perhaps originally from Syria, found their way into the corpus of Gregorian chant in the West. Specifically, the Kyrie, the Sanctus, and possibly the Gloria were direct imports to the Western liturgy from the East; to this day the Kyrie is usually sung in Greek at Catholic Mass.

The Frankish court under Charlemagne (reigned 768-814) had extensive contacts with the royal court at Constantinople, including intermarriage, diplomatic envoys, the gift of an organ to Charlemagne, and even a visit there by Charlemagne himself. As the earliest-known Western neumed documents are Frankish and most likely date from Charlemagne's era, and considering the great efforts of Charlemagne to increase literacy and regularize the liturgy, it seems quite possible that Charlemagne's cultural initiatives played a key role in the development of Western neume notation. The cultural exchange between an East still pre-emenint as the cultural center of Christianity, and a West only beginning to emerge from the Dark Ages, strongly suggests that Western notation was (at a minimum) influenced by Eastern practice.

Obviously, the earliest church was not Greek, but Hebrew. Yet, after Constantine the Great moved the center of political power from Rome to Constantinople, and following his own conversion to Christianity (and mandating it as the State religion), Greek-Byzantine influence came to dominate the Church. According to historical liturgists, it was during this time that Western Catholic liturgy developed. The Greek musical idiom was institutionalized in Eastern Christianity due to the social and political power of Byzantium. For a time, the Popes were even selected by Byzantine civil appointment. This general state of affairs remained in effect until Justinian I recaptured Rome, and (more importantly) until Pepin and Charlemagne strengthened the Papacy and codified the Roman liturgy. Thus, one can well imagine a strong Byzantine influence upon Western chant. We hope that digital transcription of both Eastern and Western chant sources will help future scholars shed light on the exact nature of this influence.

Many of the above remarks are reinforced by the following passages from Richard H. Hoppin, Medieval Music, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), pp. 48-49.

Actually, the earliest manuscripts with musical notation are from the ninth and tenth centuries, and none comes from Rome or even Italy. All of them originated in the North.
The most striking departures from traditional Gregorian Chant melodies occur in a series of manuscripts originating in Rome between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Considerable controversy has raged over the significance of these manu-scripts, but it is now generally agreed that they represent a much older Roman tradition [viz., older melodies, not older notation]. Their contents correspond to the oldest liturgical sources and lack the feasts added after the eighth century. It is logical to assume, therefore, that their music approximated the chant in Rome as it was before being transplanted to the Carolingian empire. These manuscripts have received neither the liturgical nor musical study they deserve. Preliminary investigations of the music, however, confirm the supposition that it is an archaic form of the chant as we know it today. … One of the interesting aspects of the Old-Roman Chant is that a number of its Alleluias have verses in Greek. This suggests another influence at work in forming the musical repertory of the Church during its first thousand years. The transition from Greek to Latin as the liturgical language of the West was by no means instantaneous or complete. At first, some parts of the service were preformed in both languages, and even today the readings of a solemn papal Mass are done in Greek and Latin. Moreover, later additions to the liturgy came from the East, either with or without translation to Latin. Examples are the Kyrie eleison (Lord, have mercy) in Greek, introduced at an early period, and the Agnus Dei (Lamb of God), introduced in the seventh century with the text translated into Latin. Numerous chants were created after Greek models, and some were even sung in Greek or in both Greek and Latin.
Greek—or, more properly, Byzantine—influence was inevitable, given the power and importance of the Byzantine emperors after the collapse of the Western Roman empire. That influence was exerted primarily through the constant flow of Eastern clerics to positions of importance in the West and even to the papacy itself. … Notker Balbulus tells us in his Gesta Caroli Magni (Deeds of Charlemagne) that Charlemagne heard Eastern singers (presumably sent by Byzantine Empress Irene in 802) perform a set of antiphons for Epiphany. Pleased by these chants, Charlemagne ordered them translated into Latin and adapted to the original melody. The truth of Notker's story has recently been verified through the discovery of the Greek originals.

There has to-date been relatively little overlap of Western and Eastern chant scholarship. Perhaps this situation is reinforced by a language barrier, since most scholars of Western chant seem not to have facility in Greek (or any other languages of the Orthodox Church), and facility with Latin seems not to be common among Eastern chant scholars. (In earlier eras, a 'well-educated' person was expected to be able to read in both Latin and Greek: both languages were taught to young people in preparatory school, and reading of classical Latin and Greek literature was required in college. Unfortunately, this criterion for sound education seems to have elapsed.) Perhaps of more significance, the specialization by liturgists in just the Latin or the Orthodox "Discipline" is consistent with the historical schism between Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Whatever the underlying causes may be, scholarly study of medieval neume notations has proceeded mostly along separate vectors of Western and Eastern scholarship.

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§ Byzantine Chant Notation

he origins of Western chant notation are uncertain. One camp holds that it derived from Latin accent marks for text. Another school holds that it evolved from Hebrew cantillation marks on sacred texts (which served as reminders for correct intonation of the texts). Yet another theory is that Western notation was invented ex nihilo in the West during the Carolingian period. The most reasonable theory, in my opinion, is that a system of script neumes already existed in the East, which was adapted to the requirements of the Latin language by the Carolingians in their efforts to catalog and systematize Western chant.1

Egon Wellesz identifies two distinct systems of musical notation in the East. The first was devised for regulating the cantillation of the readings from the Prophets, the Epistles, and the Gospels. The second was to fix the method of chanting certain parts of the ordinary of the Mass, particularly the Kanons, the Stichera, Kontakia, and other poetical texts.2 He contends that notation of the Psalms, Alleluias, and Doxologies does not appear in manuscripts in the East until the thirteenth century. Grout says that typical Byzantine hymns evolved from short responses, or troparia, between the verses of psalms, "being furnished with music on the basis of melodies or melody-types perhaps taken over from Syria." 3 Grout divides Byzantine hymns into kontakia and later kanones; the latter probably adapted the melodies of the earlier form. They differ from the metric hymns of the Western Church for their elaborate structure. The kanon consisted of eight divisions, or odes, each having several strophes. Each ode had its own melody. "Each ode corresponded to a specific Biblical canticle .... The canticles of the Byzantine Church, with one exception, still remain today in the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church. The most important of these for the history of music is the Canticle of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Magnificat." 4

The system of notation for the first type of cantillation was the 'ecphonetic signs'; the system for the second type was the 'musical signs proper', or neumes. Both systems are believed to have derived from ancient Greek prosodic signs, which were used to mark texts for proper declamation. Old Greek writing ran together without spaces between words, and so it was difficult to render a fluid recital without the help of these prosodic marks. Invention of the prosodic signs () is generally attributed to the grammarian Aristophanes of Byzantium (c. 180 B.C.). From his examinination of manuscripts, Wellesz concludes that ecphonetic signs were introduced in the fourth century C.E., but by the fifteenth century their meaning and proper interpretation had been forgotten.5 The ecphonetic symbols would fall under Treitler's classification as 'iconic symbols',6 that is, symbols that represent the shape of a melody, its inflection, and contour without reference to actual pitch or durations of notes.

Wellesz provides the following table of ecphonetic signs for Byzantine manuscripts.


Fig. 1. Table of ecphonic signs

Each sign had a specific meaning for the cantillation of text. The Oxeia, for instance, indicated that the voice should "rise and remain on a higher pitch until the end of the phrase," 7 while the Syrmatike indicated an undulating action of the voice. The compound signs appear either in pairs to enclose a segment of text, or in multiples with some special meaning.

The second major system for Byzantine musical notation was neumes. Eastern neumes would fall under Treitler's classification as 'symbolic characters'. Each character is a literal (not pictorial) representation of a note or group of notes, in an analogous way to letters of the alphabet standing for sounds of speech. There is nothing inherent in the shape of the letter 'A' that would lead one to think that it stands for the sound 'ah', and so 'A' is symbolic, not iconic.

An example of a notated Greek text follows.


Fig. 2. Greek text notated with chant signs

Wellesz gives credit to Jean-Baptiste Thibaut as being the first scholar to make a systematic investigation of Byzantine musical notation and to propose that Western neumes originated in the notational culture of Constantinople.8 Thibaut identified three periods of Byzantine neumatic notation, as follows:
  1. the early period, when the signs have no distinct intervallic value;
  2. the middle period, when intervals between notes are clearly indicated; and
  3. the late period in which subsidiary symbols are added in red ink to the normal musical notation, which is in black ink.
Dating of Byzantine manuscripts can be very problematical. By contrast, Western manuscripts can be dated (albeit with limited dependability) by the type of script the scribe used. Minuscule script, for instance, was developed by the Carolingians, and manuscripts employing it cannot date from before that period and are unlikely to date later. Gutenberg’s printing machine largely ended the copying of books by hand in the West. In the Orthodox world, however, the copying of manuscripts continued almost till modern times. (Even now in some monasteries prayers are transcribed by hand and kondakars are compiled.) In Byzantine manuscripts copyists frequently employed a self-consciously archaic script that dated from the fifth and sixth centuries for its great beauty, so-called 'Old Parchment Uncial'.

The lectionaries were the most precious books, particularly the Evangeliaria [which contained the Gospels], with their richly jewelled covers, and therefore had to be written calligraphically with an archaizing tendency. A script composed of capital letters was more legible in the darkness of the church before dawn or after dusk than the complex forms of minuscule script which developed later. These two causes contributed to make the scribes intensely conservative. 9

The shape of ecphonetic signs remained essentially unchanged for almost five centuries.10 Telltale signs help sometimes in dating and determining provenance. Wellesz mentions a manuscript from around the year 1000; although most of it is written in Old Parchment Uncial, in places where the scribe started to run out of room on the page he resorted to the more compact 'Liturgical Uncial' that was common in his day. The presence of Liturgical Uncial in a document implies that the manuscript was not written before the ninth century. Other telltale signs help scholars, such as the method of construction and binding of books. Wellesz mentions manuscripts in minuscule script, whose covers consist of two thin wooden plates, glued together, and covered in red leather. Because of the small grooves on the cross-sides and protruding front-sides of the covers, Wellesz says that these manuscripts must have come from Constantinople; only in that area did craftsmen make book bindings of this sort. Ink color can be another telltale indicator. Wellesz mentions a manuscript with the letters of the text written in dark brown ink and ecphonetic signs written in light brown ink, which causes him to believe that the text and music symbols were written by two different scribes at different times. (We know, however, that it was often the case in the West that one scribe copied the text, following which an expert in chant notation wrote the neumes; a more scientific investigation into ink types may be in order.)

A system of musical notation existed in Constantinople well before the Carolingian era in the West and at a time when Byzantine was the cultural and religious center of Christendom. It is reasonable to assume that the development of musical notation in the West was influenced by Byzantium. This conjecture might be strengthened circumstantially by the idea that the ecclesiastical modal system was adapted from the Byzantine modes. Clearly, Gregorian chant has some melodic ancestry in Byzantine chant. The influence of Syrian music upon Byzantium, and indirectly on the West, seems probable, though speculative at this point. No early form of Syrian chant notation is known, which makes this speculation almost impossible to validate.

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§ Syrian Chant

believe a strong argument might eventually be made for substantial Syrian influence upon early Church music. This idea is based on cultural proximity, the great antiquity of Christianity in Syria, and striking similaritities between modern Syrian melismatic contours of those of Gregorian chant.

Gregorian chant melodies were in some cases composed during the Middle Ages; the great bulk of chants, however, were likely inherited from the early church. Many of these may, in turn, have derived from Hebrew Temple chants or from melismatic songs of Syria. Unfortunately, no record survives that would give us positive identification. (If such records once existed, they may have been burned in the sack of Constantinople.) Due to the collapse of the Western empire after A.D. 410, culture was preserved only in Byzantium and the East for a considerable length of time. As discussed above, it is possible that chant repertoiries from the Byzantine Church were imported to the West. Such a line of transmission would give credence to the idea that the peculiar nature of Gregorian chant derives indirectly from Syria.

Syrian ecclesiastical chant may have been more rhythmical than Gregorian Chant as it is interpreted today (which is based on a reconstructive interpretation by of the monks of Solesmes).

Syria, being one of the first countries to be Christianized, has a long and interesting history of church music. Christian poetry reached an early peak in the hymns, still in use today, of St. Ephrem (d. 373) which represent the beginning of Christian hymn writing and which were imitated by St. Hilarius, bishop of Poitiers (d. 366), and by St. Ambrose, bishop of Milan (d. 397). Ambrose also imported from Syria the practice of antiphonal singing.

Since no early MSS of Syrian chant (if it was ever written down) have been preserved, the present practice of Syrian chant is the only material available for investigation .... It is a good deal more rhythmic and syllabic–thus, in a way, less "Oriental"–than Gregorian chant. To what degree the Syrian chant of today is representative of the early chant is a matter of conjecture and dispute. 11

Alternative renditions of Western chant are given by Dominique Vallard (available on CD), which strike me as making better sense aurally and which are more compatible with the rhythmic nature of contemporary Syrian mellismas.

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§ Modes

ome scholars (notably Jacques Chailley) argue that the ecclesiastical modes for classifying the music of the Western Church evolved directly from the modal system of the Byzantine Church. The Western ecclesiastical modes, in any case, are a classification system that is distinct from the ancient Greek modes of octave species, as presented in the Greek musical treatises. Late in the Middle Ages, Church melodies were written to conform to theoretical notions about the ecclesiastical modes, but I believe the modal system was initially used descriptively to impose order upon a disorganized corpus of melodies.

Because [the Carolingians] felt a need for some system of organizing all the melodies and rules of singing, and because of their interest in going back to the authorities of antiquity, they developed the system of the church modes, and together with the church modes they developed the system of eight psalm tones, with its implications for the recitation of the Office.

... the Roman version of Gregorian chant originally did not involve the system of the eight church modes, and ... the system of church modes was adopted only late and gradually into the Roman version from its Frankish counterpart. ... [T]he system of the church modes was developed in the Frankish Empire, and we do not have any evidence of use in Rome before the thirteenth century. 12

By the late Middle Ages, the intellectual ethic of deferring to authority and precedent extended its source materials to the classical Greek authors. Though debate persisted concerning the appropriateness of Greek precedent regarding Christian liturgy, Greek writings were held in increasing esteem as the medieval intellect moved toward the Renaissance. At first it was mainly the elegant style of classical Latin that was admired, but eventually content, too, was taken to be paradigmatic. The ancient Greek modes and Western ecclesiastical modes at first shared only the word 'mode' (an oft-used concept in medieval thinking); as the content of ancient Greek documents became more widely available, confusion was inevitable in trying to reconcile the Church modes with the poorly-understood Greek system (a system that remains poorly understood to this day).

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Footnotes
[1] Eric Werner in particular advocates this position. See Eric Werner, The Sacred Bridge, (New York, 1959), chaps. 3, 4. He traces the evolution of ecphonesis from Hebrew, to Byzantine, and ultimately to Western music. Hucke is critical of Werner's scholarship; see Hucke, "View of Gregorian Chant," fn. 7.
[2] Egon Wellesz, A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography, (Oxford: Clarendon Press; Oxford University, 1949), p. 246.
[3] Donald Jay Grout, A History of Western Music, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), p. 14.
[4] Ibid., p. 14.
[5] Wellesz, op. cit., p. 247. 'Ecphonetic' is from the Greek ekphonein, meaning to cry out or pronounce. Interestingly, Wellesz finds a close parallel between the system of ecphonetic signs and the system of Syriac accents.
[6] See Leo Treitler, "The Early History of Music Writing in the West," (Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 35, no. 2), pp. 239-41 ff. In technical terms (following the theory of semiotics by the logician Charles Sanders Peirce), with iconic representation there is isomorphism between the sign and the referent.
[7] Ibid., p. 252.
[8] Ibid., p. 261. He cites as the most comprehensive study H. Riemann's Die byzantinische Notenschrift (Leipzig, 1909). Treitler cites J.-B. Thibaut, Monuments de la notation ekphonétique et neumatique de l'église latine (1912).
[9] Ibid., p. 247.
[10] Ibid., p. 247.
[11] Harvard Dictionary of Music, Don Michael Randel, ed., (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1986), s.v., "Syrian Chant."
[12] Helmut Hucke, "New View of Gregorian Chant," (Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. XXXIII, no. 3, Fall 1980), p. 465 and 442-43. Treitler concurs, "the melodic families of the repertory had formed before the eight-mode system was imposed over them" (Leo Treitler, "Homer and Gregory: The Transmission of Epic Poetry and Plainchant," [The Musical Quarterly, vol. LX, no. 3, July 1974], p. 347).
Credits
Masthead image from ms. Lincoln College D. 35, Fol. 6. Reproduced from Wellesz, A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography, frontispiece.
Fig. 1 reproduced from Wellesz, A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography, p. 252. Wellesz cites as his source a small table on a leaf of Codex Leimon (Lesbos) 38, fol. 318.
Fig. 2 reproduced from Wellesz, A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography, p. 256.




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Revision: 25 July 2001
Copyright © 1976, 1992, 2001, Louis W. G. Barton