Music is a part of human nature. The spirit is stirred by the sounds of music toward an action or end. All cultures have music, whether it’s whistling, humming, throat singing, singsong and tonal languages, or the long retelling of epic stories. A lament, a memorial, an account of heroic deeds, and tragedies are types of music that begin to approach the essence of prayer.
Early Christian music and Byzantine church music are two main sections in this chapter. Icons and manuscripts often only survive in fragments and some melodies from Jewish worship have survived in Christianity and in some Yemenite Jewish communities. Holy tradition and scripture witness to singing hymns or hymnizing (Gk. humnesantes), psalms, and spiritual odes (Mt. 26:30, Col.3:16, Eph.5). These form the three broad groups of Christian music. In ancient Greece, hymns were songs in honor of ancestors, heroes, and gods; traditionally, the generational songs of older cultures are usually in connection with tribe, family, and the forming of peoples. For Christians, these three types of singing connect us to the saints who came before us, and it joins us with the Holy Trinity as sons and daughters of God. There are boundary stones to guide Christian worship from Apostolic origin, but how systematic that music became depended on where Orthodoxy took root. From Carthage, the Roman province of northern Africa, Tertullian (Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus, 2nd – 3rd c. AD) who wrote in Latin teaches us that there was a tradition of reading the psalms and “improvised praises from the heart.” The Greeks preferred to intone the liturgical texts and Gospels in a style that was reminiscent of Hellenic antiquity. The Papyrus Oxyrhynchus found in 1786, for instance, uses the Dorian mode and letter notation for voices, and it may have been used in the liturgy.
Many types of Eastern instruments are mentioned in the Psalms. Some interpret them allegorically and others literally, and that justifies the use of the organ, guitars, tambourins, and drums at some Christian assemblies. The human voice literally can encompass the major categories of man-made instruments: wind, percussion, and string. At the same time, words can be sung with the breath, the beat and the vibrating chords of voices that sing in unison during the Orthodox divine liturgy. In this way, instruments can be understood as both literal and allegorical. There are many other reasons. For many Greeks, instruments were viewed suspiciously as pagan, emotional, and meant to support voices that are already weak, according to St. Gregory of Nyssa. St. Clement of Alexandria viewed playing instruments generally as “delusion” and “irrational” that “corrupt man’s morals” and disturb our thinking. St. Basil the Great called the stringed lyre “obscene.” The harsh criticism about instruments stems partly from the immoral Greek culture of paganism and mostly from principles of form and function of these instruments and sounds that interrelate with human nature and prayer. Often the lyre was an instrument that the wealthy used to train female slaves to play seductively at parties. In the 4th c., Arnobius also criticizes secular instruments because they produce many passions. For this reason, even outside of the Church, many of our holy fathers cautioned against instruments as Plato warned of its effects on the morality of youth. The spoken word also conveys the real spiritual seeds of truth that enter our heart. What the liturgical texts say and seek to implant into us take precedence over instrumental sounds, which usually blunt the mind from capturing the speech of the liturgy. So, instruments were not rejected so much based on principle, but on the style and forms that affect the feelings of people during prayer every day. Like the Books of the Bible, the Church’s wisdom makes “conscious choices” and gives us rules about what to listen to as well as what to read, not based on fragments of philosophy or fashionable fads, but on the spiritual principles of life. Canon 75 of the Sixth Ecumenical Council set down that music is morally energized and that a code of ethics and behavior should be followed. Care and godly sorrow are awakened in our heart best by choral singing or voices in unison, the traditional music of Judaism and early Christians.
St. Clement of Alexandria taught the allegorical understanding of instruments in the holy scriptures. The zither symbolizes the mouth, the shofar symbolizes the call to resurrection, the strings the sinews and nerves of the body, the psaltery symbolizes the tongue. Essentially, our bodies are the instruments of God’s song. Just as the Jews worshipped with all twenty-nine different instruments and King David wrote the psalms with instruments to accompany the voice, Orthodox Christians worship with all the heart, mind, and soul to produce a sacrifice of praise to the Holy Trinity from the heart, not from the bass, guitar riffs, or drumming of the hands. There is the assumption that the mind, the heart, and the body all have specific purposes. Instruments, because of their form and ends, are tools that have ethical consequences. The chanting of voices works to enliven the
“cold” and “stiff” parts of our human nature because of passions. King David was a shepherd, and he understood that songs can be calls to the sheep to return on the path as well as slings for the giants in life. The stringed psaltery or harp is unique because it’s the only musical instrument whose sound comes from the top part of it and descends from there. The spiritual principle reflects how the Holy Spirit comes with grace on Christian sons and daughters of the Holy Trinity. The form guides the function of the psalter toward higher awareness of God and humility; it’s the way to heaven for the soul that requires discipline and harmony. Because of this, our holy fathers don’t disapprove of the psaltery. When these ethical and musical principles aren’t followed by Christians, a spirit of secularism enters and fragmentation on all levels slowly breaks apart the universal voice. The opposite of fragmentation is connection. In the East, they perceived the whole in one voice singing or choral singing through neume notation and a kind of deduction, while the West in general followed letter notation from the bottom up so that the primacy of exactness and “disconnected points and moments” dominated church music. Orthodox music has an ethos, ‘’a salutary power,” and a moral effect because sound is a part of human nature. The next chapter discusses Russian Church music and its treasure of znamenny chant and its conflicts with this fragmented approach to music that still dominates much of the secular and Christian world.