Part Three has two major sections. The first section focuses on the many spiritual and historical aspects of liturgical singing and the second on the unique tradition of bell ringing. That covers a range of five chapters.
In chapter 10, Metroplitan Hilarion highlights the parallels and differences between the musical traditions of ancient Israel and Greece from a religious and theoretical perspective. He mentions the belief among the Hebrews in “the salutary power of music.” The Hellenes also had an enduring cultural connection to this strong effect of music and poetry. For example, Homer’s epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were didactic and transformative for the audience, and Greek tragedies too were performed like the epics in communal and religious ways that spilled over into the poetical traditions of ancient Rome. Similarly, the Psalmist David composed hymns and poems that were accompanied by various kinds of instruments that were meant to enhance the singing voice, as Metropolitan Hilarion explains. Just as the Hellenes incorporated musicians into their honor of the deities, like Dionysius, Apollo and Artemis, so too the Hebrews recruited a certain number of priests from the Levites to worship God in the temple through music. The psalms often contain the phrase “call upon his name” and so there is a connection to the divine names of the Old Testament and its later development among the holy fathers of the Church and relationship between the name, the image and the first image in the principles of iconography.
The Psalms were the distinguishing structure of ancient worship in Israel as it does in the Orthodox Church today. There were different forms of song and instruments used by King David. Instruments included the categories of wind, string, and percussion; there were twenty-nine names of different instruments mentioned in Hebrew so that these words are only a rough translation into the English, Russian, or Greek. The purpose of instrumental music was to accompany choral singing in Jewish tradition to strengthen the human voice. Israelite worship is founded on how different human voices sing as one voice. The Orthodox Church still uses this kind of “intoned reading” or “psalmodic cantillation” during the divine liturgy and choral singing. Improvisation and ornamentation were a few of the characteristics of Jewish psalmodic worship. According to Metropolitan Hilarion, secular music didn’t exist. The melody for the Hebrews in a “single voice” structure of singing in unison did not have large stock of sounds to use.
The ensemble of chanting into “one voice” is also shared by the ancient Hellenes. They also used a similar stringed kitharaand lyre like the ancient Israelites, which originally were plucked with four strings that would become the basis of the tetrachord (four-string). The alternation between voices, antiphonal singing, was also accompanied by dancing. Rhapsode means a song is stitched together or woven by a reciter. It is seen in the Odes of Pindar, which contain lyrical poems to be recited. The rhapsodist made sonic icons for the ears. The Panhellenic games gathered all the different Hellenic peoples into one place, at Olympia, Corinth, Delphi, or Nemea. There they recited rhapsodes, celebrated deities and victories, and both men and women competed in many games and musical processions. It encapsulated Hellenic communal identity that stretches as far back as the Neolithic times of Old Europe to the philosophy of Plato’s classical idea of the common good, and it is argued to be at the root of the communal Greek spirit. The Greeks developed musical theory that influenced St. Augustine and Boethius much later in history. From the verb teino, to pluck, stretch, pull, we get the word tone. The tonos or tone became the basic unit of Greek music, which referred to the tension of string on an instrument. Plato taught that “all harmonies [symphonia] are formed from four sounds.” His philosophy was interested in music in so far as it produced a good soul and a morally strong person. Plato was not bogged down by the details but he was interested in how music affected the emotions and actions of people. From this the principle of the tetrachord emerged as a symphony or harmony of sounds in consonance. The tetrachord is made up of four different sounds around each other in a similar way that different voices form one voice in a choir. Tetrachords can be grouped together to form other systems such as the octave. Two tetrachords equal an octave. The grouping based on octaves instead of tetrachords forms the basis of western European musical tradition. Evgeny Gertsman argues that modern European cannot sense the difference between the tetrachord symphony and the octave system, and this split in music had contributed to their separation from the cultures of antiquity and Russian civilization. Europeans and Russians do not share the same basis in musical theory. Gertsman also explains that there is a functional relationship between sounds and how “the content of the work” moves forward. The closest western counterpart to that relationship of sound and the work itself is the Latin epic of the Aeneid by Virgil that divides lines of poetry into dactylic hexameter like the Homeric epics.
The modern system of music in the West relies on the range of two tetrachords. The widest range for the Greeks was five tetrachords from the highest to lowest sound because of the aesthetic descent. Metropolitan Hilarion also explains that unlike the European system today, there is no “absolute pitch” in Greek musical tradition because each instrument and human voice is different; the lowest sound is unique to the individual. But to create a “smoothness” a group of instruments or voices shared the lowest sound in harmony. Not all tetrachords joined together are created equal, according to Plato and other Greek philosophers. Plato ascribed certain ethical characteristics or an ethos around each grouping of tetrachords. The Dorian mode, or kind, was considered noble-spirited, but others were called effeminate, ecstatic, festive, brave, peaceful or licentious. The pagan Greeks understood the moral results of using certain instruments and arrangement of voices and tones. The principle of music in ancient Israel and Greece is the same: the human voice is strengthened by other human voices by singing in unison. The holy fathers of the Church and the canons were aware of these ethical implications of music and the powerful way it could draw us into worshipping the Holy Trinity in spirit and in truth. The next chapter discusses early Christian and Byzantine singing in the Church.