The Past is Always Present: The Revival of the Byzantime Musical Tradition at Mount Athos
by Tore Tvarno Lind (Music 782.3 Lin)
Before Gregorian chant came
Byzantine chant! The beginnings of what we now call “Western Civilization”
largely focused on an area of the Mediterranean where the boundaries between
West and East shifted and overlapped over millennia. On the West, we had
ancient Greece; on the East, we had Byzantium, the area now called Turkey, and
its capitol Constantinople. The two were mostly separated by the Aegean Sea,
though they share a border on land approximately 120 miles long. It is the area
of Byzantium from which Byzantine chant gets its name, a tradition that started
around the time of the establishment of Constantinople in 330, and continued to
evolve until roughly 1453. In between, this whole area enjoyed both periods of
relative peace, and times of great unrest during the Crusades. Roughly in the
middle of that period, Byzantine chant traditions made their way to Mount
Athos, on the Athos Peninsula in Greece. Starting in the late 900s, Eastern
Orthodox monks made their way to Mount Athos, and many followed. Today, there
are still 20 monasteries located there, and like other early music
organizations, they have started to focus on caring about the performance
practices associated with their musical traditions. Their stories of
reconnecting with these traditions, and finding places for them in modern-day
life, are detailed in the book The Past is Always Present by Tore Tvarno Lind,
which you can borrow from the Polley Music Library.
Author Lind is a Danish
ethnomusicologist who spent the better part of a decade researching the
material found in this book, mostly done on location at Mount Athos. He brings
with him both a deep interest in Orthodox chant, as well as interests in a
diverse range of musical practices, from musical healing to research of black
metal and hardcore music genres. As part of a series of books called “Europea:
Ethnomusicologies and Modernities,” this is an academic book in nature, but
Lind’s treatment of both his subject and the people who are reconnecting with
the music today make this one of the most readable and engaging books I’ve ever
read by an ethnomusicologist. Lind spent a decade of his life on and off
working on this book, visiting the monasteries at Athos, and his research was
very direct, including living at the monasteries, taking music lessons, and
participating in chant, as well as conversing with them about the related religious
issues that are fundamental to the purpose and function of the chants. His
presence doing this research coincided with the height of the “byzantine chant
revival,” a period during which the monks were focused on re-connecting with
the musical components of their traditions. These practices have led to lots of
new recordings of Byzantine chant traditions from many parts of the world in
the last 20 years, including the Mount Athos monasteries.
The introductory chapter of the
book features an historical overview of Mount Athos, and an overview of the
themes that Lind took away from his time there. Athos is a unique place in the
world that has mostly been self-governing over millennia. Even in modern
Greece, the peninsula enjoys a special status as a “self-ruled monastic state,”
which has remained an internationally important location for Orthodoxy. As for
the primary themes that emerged during Lind’s research, there are interweaving
strands of consideration about concepts like tradition, modernity, authenticity,
and restoration, all informing and indeed transforming one another.
Re-discovering or restoring the past in the present, even when it is being done
in locations that have been part of sustained traditions, is always a complex
endeavor.
In the “Musical Blossom” chapter,
Lind details a period of several months in which he stayed with the Vatopedian
monks to study Byzantine chant personally. He notes that his time there
coincided with extensive renovations happening to the monastery, and it also
was shortly after the monastery had implemented changes to both their singing
style and lifestyle, efforts they made in an attempt to connect more closely to
tradition. Lind is able to look at the liner notes of early CDs the monastery
has produced as the early fruits of this labor, and notes that they present
both the monastery and the music as having been in a period of “crisis and
decline” until recently, but now are flourishing again, revived and full of
energy that is affecting monks, pilgrims, and tourists. At roughly the 10-year
mark into this process, the monastery is highlighting their newfound grip on
tradition, while also connecting with the modern world through tourism and
producing artifacts like CDs and CD-ROMs able to take their work anywhere in the
world. And there is evidence that they remain connected with other centers of
Orthodoxy and Byzantine chant: “Contact with the chanting world outside the
monastic walls and the Athonite border is customary, desired, and frequent.”
While the Vatopedians work to revive and retain their own relatively rural
approach, they remain engaged with more “urban” styles of chant such as those
practiced in Istanbul. Both CDs and the ease of travel in the modern era have
made exchanges between Orthodox communities much easier, and it turns out that
they love to check one another out!
The ”Sacred Musical
Transorthography” chapter is where musicians interested in how this music is
written and performed will start to find some important details. Byzantine
chant has long used its own system of notation, which looks rather daunting at
first! Rather than using extensive staff lines,
the movement of the music has traditionally been documented in a series of
symbols. It’s also important to note that this music contains microtonal
elements: the octave is divided into 72 intervals, so a half-step in modern
Western music equals 6 “moria,” and a whole step is 12 moria. A similar system
is still in use in both the sacred and secular music of Turkey, and similar to
Turkish music, much of Byzantine chant may still sound relatively “tonal” to
our Western 12-tone ears, but there are regular microtonal adjustments featured
in the foundational scales used in all of this music. Like older chant
traditions, some of the older notational symbols themselves had fallen into
disuse, but were being revived again among the Vatopedians. Early 19th C.
reforms within the church had brought what was called the “New Method” into
practice, but during this new period of reform, musicians were finding that some
of the older symbols were simply clearer in use than using the smaller set of
compound symbols in the New Method. Of course, connecting with older
traditional symbols is another way of connecting the music of today to its more
distant history as well. There are also a set of related hand gestures used to
guide choral singing, which are briefly touched upon. Lind also discusses the
use of drones within Byzantine chant. While they have been a long-term
component of the tradition, they too have been utilized differently over time,
sometimes shifting more or less frequently under the unison melodies they
support, and sometimes appearing as a “double drone” of two intervals that are
a 4th, 5th, or octave apart. He makes some fascinating comparisons between the “isokratema”
drone in Byzantine chant, and the “Om” of Hindu Vedic chant.
The next section, “Producing Mount
Athos,” is a discussion that attempts to position the Mount Athos monasteries
within modern life. While these are still places where monks live and work,
they also accept visitors on pilgrimages, and they are largely open to tourism
as well. To the extent that the traditions that developed at Mount Athos have
their own unique local flavor, many tourists are attracted to the kind of
authenticity that one can only find by going to such sources. Of course, the
act of accepting tourists, and making the buildings and even the music as
presentable as possible, can’t help but alter that sense of “authenticity” on
some level, too. The whole area is recognized as a World Heritage Site, and its
location at the end of a somewhat isolated peninsula has helped to preserve the
location and its traditions for centuries, so tourists of many backgrounds find
their way to Mount Athos. Some are Greeks interested in the long-form
traditions of their own country (even though this area has at times been part
of Turkey, too). Some are religious tourists, interested in the history of
their own faiths. And pilgrims have been making the journey to Mount Athos
since the 1100s. While they all have their own unique contexts for comparing
the modern to the authentic, their collective presence has had at least some
effect on long-term residents.
The closing chapters focus more on
the religious aspects of Byzantine chant. After all, this music existed first
and foremost as a form of prayer. Lind finds that much like other aspects of
modern life in Mount Athos including music, lives of prayer also can be viewed
from several perspectives. While the monasteries collectively revive their own
traditions, they do so in ongoing presence of modern life and those
afore-mentioned tourists. The longer he was there, and the more often he
visited, Lind started to feel that the notion of an “Athonite style” that has
long been discussed by scholars, and has been one of the selling points for
tourism, might not be so pervasive in reality. While there may be a bit of a
regional style, in truth there are differences in performance even from
monastery to monastery in the same area, and chanting itself is practiced by a
wide range of monks, who do remain individuals despite living their lives
together. There will always be variety and multiplicity within these
traditions. In truth, there always was, too, back to the beginnings of what is
now thought of as the “traditional” or the “authentic.” Perhaps this is what’s
most beautiful about being up close and personal with long-standing traditions
like this: you learn to appreciate both the tradition, and see and know the
individuals that are keeping it alive.
(If you enjoy this, you may also
wish to try Western Plainchant: A Handbook by David Hiley, Gregorian Chant and the Carolingians by Kenneth Levy.)
Recommended
by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
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