Russian church singing began with the Baptism of the Rus’. Prince Vladimir the Great of Kiev was the ruler of the Rus’. He was baptized by the Greeks from Byzantium. There is a general pattern in the history of the Russian people. It tends to repeat; inspiration comes from the Greeks and a downfall in ethical and spiritual life from the West, particularly the Renaissance heritage that many Europeans have clung onto even today in its many morphing secular forms. This chapter divides itself into three parts: znamenny chant, partesny chant, and contemporary church singing. Today Russian liturgical singing is a mixture of znamenny and partesny chant. The first type grew organically when the Slavs of the Rus’ lands learned chant and the use of neume notation from the Greek Orthodox Christians in Constantinople. The second type came from Roman Catholic singing informed by the Renaissance; that time also coincided with a powerful combination of the Papal States and the new secular humanism of the rulers, nobles, and learned men. Partesny came to Russia through the Latinized influence of Poland and Ukraine. Partesny singing isn’t really chanting, but harmonization of parts from different voices, unlike the unison singing mentioned in previous chapters from Hellenism, Judaism, and early Christianity. Now Russian church singing is mixture of the eastern and western ways of practicing and conceptualizing church singing. Like genealogy, znamenny chant is the ancestral and authentic heritage of the Rus’ lands and peoples. The western influence, like architecture and iconography, brought an end to Orthodox practices and tradition. It seems to be reviving slower than iconography and theology in Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union; znamenny chant is still practiced in some monasteries there. Metropolitan Hilarion identifies a “genetic” link between Gregorian chant in Latin Christianity and Byzantine and znamenny chant; they both have the unique rhymical quality of “unmeasured beats.” But he doesn’t pursue that connection further in the chapter. Before the Schism, liturgical singing called Ambrosian, Gallican, and the “melismatic” Mozarbic in Western Europe existed and they do have direct links to Byzantine chant. The Gallican chant sometimes even uses Greek texts. The best contrast to today’s theatrical church singing in Orthodoxy is the choral singing of the Carpatho-Russians in Eastern Europe. Metropolitan Hilarion hasn’t commented on the survival of this tradition of participatory singing of the whole congregation in areas that once encompassed the old Slavic lands of the Rus’ like the Carpathians, eastern Slovakia, Ukraine, and Belarus.
Melody is our feeling guided and embodied by the unison of voices and divine words toward the Holy Trinity, the ultimate transcendent one. Znamenny chant can be understood as a collection of “melodic formulae,” each with their own characteristic name. Unlike the more emotional singing of the Greeks, maybe even the Syrians too, the Russians used some of their own folk melodies to make a calmer sounding chant. The neume notation wasn’t exact in nature like modern western letter notation on a staff; it had to be literally taught from person to person by practice. Like the alphabet, Byzantine neume notation was borrowed into Russian chant; they created the kriuk notation and znamenny signs to guide the voices. It’s a kind of chanting that depends on the divine services and oral tradition, not on precision of notes, pitch, or exact training. The liturgy, people, choir, and clergy were the main educators of znamenny chant. People who wrote these melodic formulae were like the rhapsodists of ancient Greece. It wasn’t purely an academic or scientific study or training that made this system of chant complex and beautiful; the Russians attained this chant by living within the mysteries of the Orthodox Church and maintaining tradition. The introduction of “cinnabar markings” made the liturgical chant more like the technology of texts rather than the simpler way of guiding and guarding the living traditions of znamenny. It was this kind of approach that began the slow decline of chanting toward the ultimate consequence of the contemporary “church concerts,” which are now a common, exhilarating, and diverse feature of Roman Catholic and Protestant Christian music.
The American writer from the South, Richard M. Weaver, comments on this same cultural decline through technology and the dogma of precision; he calls these symptoms of fragmentation a loss of metaphysical center. An insidious insistence on precision, absolute pitch, cinnabar markings, staff notation were all signs of a disintegrated mind and chant had to flee from church services. Church singing lost its “submissiveness” to the core of the spiritual wording of the divine texts of the liturgy; they speak of Christ as the center of all creation. The spirit of humanistic analysis and a strict demand for exactitude scattered the focus of znamenny and Byzantine chant on Christ, the Son of God. Rebirth, called renaissance in French, now changed meaning from a spiritual renewal of the heart in Orthodoxy through chanting to a rebirth that denotes a turning over of tradition to discovery and the value of constant change in the service of progress toward the peripherality of experience to the point of losing all attention to spiritual sensitivity and growth. Gavriil Lomakin in the 19th c. spoke against this “Italianism” when he said, “a rebirth implies a death of something that went before … “For Russia, the death of cross-in-church architecture, wooden churches, iconography, znamenny chant and theology informed by asceticism had to die to make room for the new ideas coming from Rome, the capital of Renaissance humanism and the Papacy.
Renaissance Europe developed and merged secular and church music into the “performative” arts. From this, enthusiastic Italian composers of church concerts came to Russia and changed Orthodox divine liturgy into an experience like opera or orchestral theatre. Instead of centering our feelings and desires toward the good and beautiful, we are now harnessed by “pain or pleasure” and our emotions are not used to struggle and to transcend this captivity to the world but to revel in it. Our feeling is to be oriented toward its natural end: to pray and praise the Holy Trinity in unison, many of our holy fathers teach this. But many well-known Russian composers were engulfed by the Renaissance music of Roman Catholic Europe. Some Russians tried to mix the world and the church; others genuinely sought to recover the past of znamenny chant through western methods of composition. The consequences of changing the purpose of music became evident in their way of thinking. For example, Pyotr Tchaikovsky lamented that the old Russian chants and melodies couldn’t be revived because they are lost to the past. But according to Holy Orthodoxy, we neither are bound by the past nor are slaves of the unknown future because the Church’s wisdom stands in the center, not limited to time as understood as the passing of moments. If Renaissance humanism were the correct path, then Tchaikovsky and other academicians would be correct. Now, the Choir of the Moscow Patriarchate seeks to revive the ancient melodies of znamenny. The next chapter discusses the church singing in the other patriarchates and local churches of Orthodoxy such as Georgia, Serbia, Romania, and Greece. Russia is an example to other Orthodox countries in its formation under its spiritual ancestry from Byzantium to its acceptance of the false philosophies of secularism.