Some years ago, a singer who was primarily active in Russian Orthodox choral music pulled me aside at a church music event. “Can I be honest with you about something?” this person said to me. “I don’t understand Byzantine music. To me, it looks like it’s either a soloist or a group of mostly men; […]
At the Name of Jesus, every knee shall bow … and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. —Phil. 2:10, 11 I You might remember the old song in which a man and woman argue about pronunciation. “You like potayto and I like potahto; you like tomayto and I like […]
On Wednesday, October 2, 2019, a very special choral masterclass was given in the lower room of the Great Bell Tower at the Holy Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra. This monastery is considered the spiritual center of all of Russia and of its Orthodox Church. Several different factors contributed to the particular significance of this masterclass. The […]
The joke is at times heard that in the chapels of some of our seminaries, they “don’t worship but workshop.” The sense of this witticism is that what happens in their services is experimentation with rubrics, texts, service order, with an impulse towards “reform.” Over the course of this last summer, however, I was blessed […]
English-speaking Orthodox faithful in the United States who have wanted to learn the liturgical arts of the Orthodox Church — music, iconography, vestments, architecture and furnishings design, etc. — have historically had limited opportunities to study with knowledgeable teachers. Some have had the opportunity to go overseas to countries such as Greece and Russia to […]
In the past thirty years, I have attended almost 7000 liturgies in the United States, Canada, Russia, and Greece. Some of these have been in small candlelit chapels in the desert of Mount Athos; others have been in magnificent imperial monasteries with a thousand years of history. I have beheld liturgies celebrated by patriarchs and […]
The appearance of Kurt Sander’s Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, which was released simultaneously on April 26, 2019, in recorded form by Reference Recordings and in print form by Musica Russica, in many ways represents a unique and unprecedented event in the realm of Orthodox liturgical singing in North America. The work was created […]
Byzantine chant is an ever-evolving art form, responding to the advances put forth in both music and hymnography by the great personalities who have shaped it, such as Saint Romanos the Melodist, Saint John of Damascus, Saint John Koukouzelis, and Peter the Peloponnesian. However, all the men mentioned above were active within a wider movement […]
The state of affairs for English-language liturgical texts is fundamentally unstable. A core problem is that there is no existing body that has either the mission or the competence to review and approve English-language liturgical texts, so there is no settled path to a text being adopted once it is produced. In addition, differing jurisdictions […]
Theology wedded to music has a fragile integrity entrusted to singers who must skillfully labor to reveal heaven on earth.