I. Why Do the Greek and Russian Churches Sound So Different?
As an Orthodox Christian in the English-speaking world, you have likely encountered, at some point in your life, two very different kinds of Orthodox church.
The first is the Greek parish — perhaps under the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, the Ecumenical Patriarchate, an Antiochian or Cypriot parish following a similar tradition, or any of the many parishes around London, Sydney, Toronto, or smaller English-speaking communities that follow the Byzantine musical heritage. When you walk in, the chanting is unaccompanied — sung by one or two cantors standing alone at the chant-stand. There is a single melody. There is no harmony in the Western sense, no choir on four voices. Underneath the melody, a deep continuous note sounds without interruption — a kind of sonic foundation upon which the chant rises and falls. The cantor reads from a book filled with strange signs you have never seen in any musical textbook, perhaps lifting his hand in a particular way above the page as he chants. The sound is ancient, austere, and possesses a quality that the Western ear at first cannot place.
The second is the Russian parish — perhaps under ROCOR (the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia), the OCA (Orthodox Church in America), a Moscow Patriarchate parish abroad, or a Serbian or Bulgarian community that has adopted similar musical traditions. The experience here is entirely different. A choir sings — often on four voices: soprano, alto, tenor, and bass — with rich harmonies that any classically-trained ear recognizes immediately as belonging to the broader European musical tradition. The music is written on a standard musical staff with treble and bass clefs, the same staff one would find in a Mozart piano concerto. The choir’s sound fills the church, often gloriously, recalling the great choral traditions of nineteenth-century Russia — Bortniansky, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, the Synodal School of Moscow, the great Petersburg Court Chapel.
Two parishes, both Orthodox, both legitimate, both ancient in their roots — sounding utterly unlike each other.
If you have moved between these two worlds — perhaps as a convert exploring which Orthodox jurisdiction to call home, perhaps as a traveler visiting parishes of different traditions, perhaps simply as someone whose family connections include both Greek and Russian Orthodox kin — you have probably asked yourself the questions this article exists to answer:
Which one is “right”? Which is the original sound of Orthodox prayer? And why do they differ so dramatically from each other?
The short answer, which you will see unfolded at length in this article, is this. The chanting you hear in the Greek parish is called psaltic music — or, by its older traditional name, psaltiki (in Greek: ψαλτική; in Romanian: psaltichie). The two terms are synonymous; both come from the Greek verb psallō — “to sing in praise of God.” This is the original chant of the Orthodox Church — the chant in which the Church prayed from the time of the Holy Fathers onward, composed by Saint Romanos the Melodist, Saint John of Damascus, Saint John Koukouzelis. Its roots reach back to the apostolic age, and its Byzantine form crystallized progressively over the first Christian millennium. It is monodic (a single melody for all, not multi-voice harmony), it is vocal (only the human voice, no instruments), and it is modal — organized around eight weekly modes called the Oktoechos.
The Russian chant you hear in the ROCOR or OCA parish — beautiful, harmonized on multiple voices, written on Western staff notation — is a more recent form. It developed gradually in Russia from the late seventeenth century onward, especially under and after Tsar Peter the Great (1672–1725), as Western European choral aesthetics were progressively absorbed into Russian church music. This Russian choral tradition is not wrong, not lacking in spiritual depth, not foreign to Orthodoxy. It has its own venerable composers, its own deep piety, its own genuine flowering of Orthodox prayer in choral form. But it is a synthesis composed over time — preserving certain elements from the older Russian chant tradition (called znamenny chant) while absorbing Western harmonic and notational forms. And that older Russian tradition, znamenny chant, was itself a direct Slavic descendant of Byzantine psaltic music as it existed in the tenth through twelfth centuries.
In other words: both traditions are Orthodox, but psaltic music is the elder. Byzantine psaltic music is the wellspring from which all the Orthodox musical traditions historically flow. The Russian choral tradition is one venerable branch, shaped by Russia’s particular historical encounter with the West. The Greek psaltic tradition continues the trunk.
This article is for the Orthodox Christian in this situation — who loves the services of the Church, who has encountered both traditions and wondered about the difference, and who would like to understand what each is, how each came to be, and why the Byzantine psaltic tradition occupies the place it does in the life of the Orthodox Church. We will trace the history of psaltic music from its ancient Christian roots, through the great Fathers who composed the hymns we still sing today, through the great monasteries where it reached its fullness, down to our own time. And we will understand, by the end, why this music remains the foundational chant of Orthodoxy — even though, in many of our parishes today, the music sounds quite different.
II. What, Properly Speaking, Is Psaltic Music
The word “psaltiki” comes from the Greek verb psallō — “to sing in praise of God” — a verb distinct from traghoudaō, which means “to sing worldly songs.” Ancient Greek made a clear distinction between two kinds of singing: the singing of glory to God, and the singing of revelry or theater. Psaltic music is, by its very name, song offered to God. Not religious music alongside other musics; not sacralized folklore; not art on spiritual themes. It is song addressed directly, in the Church, to God — the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
The most concise definition I know belongs to a contemporary Romanian psaltis, Ion Minoiu — a musician trained at the conservatories of Bucharest and London, who gave up a Western musical career to serve as cantor at the Romanian skete on Mount Athos: psaltic music is “the voice of the Church expressed in song.” And he adds an observation that follows this definition down to its deepest root: church singing is not a human invention that Christians lent to God, but has its ultimate source in the eternal communion of the Holy Trinity — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — in which love, glory, and mutual self-giving are beyond all created words. The Church, founded at Pentecost as the Body of Christ, receives chant as a gift of the Holy Spirit; and this gift has its origin in the divine life itself, beyond all creation. This is why true chant expresses, as Minoiu also says, “a state of going out of oneself toward God, a state of wonder” — because it participates, in created and limited fashion, in the very movement of divine love.
Three fundamental traits define psaltic music. These are three very simple traits that any Christian can grasp without being a musician.
First: it is vocal. Only the human voice. No organ, no piano, no instruments of any kind. Why? Because the human voice is the only “instrument” that bears the word. An organ sings, but does not speak. A violin sings, but cannot say the Creed. The voice, by contrast, bears within itself the text of prayer. And for the Church, the text is holy — the Psalms of David, the troparion of the Resurrection, the kontakion of the Akathist, the megalynarion of the Theotokos. Everything sung in psaltic music is, first and foremost, a text of prayer or of the confession of faith. The music is the garment that clothes the text so that it may be sung — but the text is the kernel. This is why psaltic music does not use instruments: because the instrument would obscure the text, would shift the focus from prayer to beautiful sound.
Second: it is monodic. This is the trait that strikes the modern ear most forcefully. Monody means “one song.” All the cantors sing the same melody, at the same time, on the same line. There is no principal voice with accompaniment. There are no sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses interweaving as in a Western choir. There is one single melody for all. And beneath this melody, to prevent it from being pure monotony, one or two cantors hold a deep, prolonged, continuous note — the fundamental note of the mode in which the chant is sung. This held note, which we will discuss at length below, is called the ison. But the ison is not a “second voice” in the polyphonic sense; it is a foundation, a sonic ground, an environment in which the melody floats — and it does not move harmonically, but stands still.
Why monody? Because the Church is one. Saint Ignatius the God-bearer, bishop of Antioch († 107), in his Epistle to the Ephesians, writes to the faithful: “Your presbytery is so attuned to the bishop as the strings to a lyre; and each of you forms a chorus, so that, taking your tone from God, you may sing with one voice through Jesus Christ to the Father.” This is the most ancient icon of Christian psaltic singing, given by a saint who lived one generation after the Apostles: one voice, one chorus, one tone received from God. Monody is the sonic expression of this unity of faith.
Third: it is modal. Here we enter the more technical, but also the most spiritually rich, dimension of psaltic music. It is organized in a system of eight modes — eight different ways of ascending and descending the musical scale, each with its own “atmosphere,” its own character, its own melodic formulas. These eight modes are called, in Greek, octō ēchoi — “the eight tones” — and the liturgical book that contains them is the Oktoechos (Greek: ὀκτώηχος, “eight-toned”). We will see below how these eight modes came to be formed, how they work, and why there are exactly eight — not seven, not twelve, but eight. This choice of number itself carries deep theological weight.
Three traits — and a fourth essential observation: the musical scale itself is different. The Western music we all know — whether of opera, choir, piano, or modern popular song — is built, in its modern form, on a tempered system: the octave (the distance from one C to the next C) is divided into twelve equal semitones. The piano illustrates this system best: seven white keys (the seven notes from C to B) and five black keys (the semitones between them) within one octave. This division of the octave into twelve equal semitones is a very precise mathematical convention, but an artificial one — it is not identical to the natural tunings of sound, but is a practical convention gradually established in the West, especially between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so that the same melody could be played in any key without large differences in tuning. All modern Western music, with its four-voice harmony, rests on this system.
Psaltic music functions differently. It does not rest on the equality of the twelve semitones, but on unequal modal intervals: large tones, small tones, and finer distances that the ear trained only on the piano does not immediately recognize. In Chrysanthine theory, these differences are described through the division of the octave into smaller units called moria — a system far finer than the ordinary Western staff, allowing the description of intervals that Western notation cannot render with precision. This is why certain psaltic tones, on first hearing, sound “between the notes” or even “wrong” to the Western ear. They are not wrong; they belong to a different musical logic. Psaltic music does not climb and descend on the scale of the piano, but on the living scale of the mode. Each of the eight modes has its own scale with its own specific intervals; and the ascent may use a different interval than the descent, within the same mode. Psaltic music is therefore not merely a fixed scale, but a living movement within the mode.
And the writing is different. Western music is written on the staff — the five horizontal parallel lines familiar to anyone who has ever opened a piano score. At the beginning of the staff, a clef is placed (the treble clef for high voices, the bass clef for low voices), which fixes where the note C lies. Then each note is painted as a round dot on one of the lines or between them — vertical position indicates pitch (how high or low), and the shape of the note indicates duration (whole note, half, quarter, eighth). The reader sees at a single glance both the pitch and the duration of every sound. This is an absolute, objective system: the note C is C regardless of the previous melody.
Psaltic music is written with neumes. The word comes from the Greek neuma — “movement,” “sign of the hand.” Neumes are not placed on a staff. They are small graphic signs — dots, hooks, curves, arrows, curved lines — placed above the written text, each sign above a syllable or a group of syllables. And they do not indicate absolute pitches, but movements — relative to the note you currently are on. One sign means “rise by one step”; another, “descend by two steps”; another, “stay on the same note”; another, “rise on a melisma of several notes together.” To read a page of psaltic music correctly, the cantor must know the mode in which he is singing (because the signs take on different intervals in different modes), must know the starting note (called the martyria — the initial witness), and then must follow the movements indicated. The system is therefore relative and modal, not absolute: the same neume signs are not read mechanically as fixed notes, but receive their meaning within the mode, the starting witness, and the melodic formulas proper to that mode. To put it in a pedagogical formula: the Western staff tells you the absolute pitch of the note; the neumes tell you the movement of the melody.
This is why a page of psaltic music looks completely different from a page of Western music: there is no staff, no treble clef, no round notes placed vertically on lines. There is only a written text — the words of the troparion or the Cherubic Hymn — and above the text, small neumatic signs telling the cantor how to chant each syllable. And these signs, with all their complexity (since the Chrysanthine reform of 1814 there are approximately fifty basic signs plus combinations), can only be learned through apprenticeship to a master — just as, in fact, psaltic music has always been transmitted: from mouth to mouth, from teacher to student, through a trained ear and an open heart.
These three traits — vocal, monodic, modal — are the elementary characteristics of psaltic music. All the rest, however complicated it may seem when you open a chant-book full of neumes, flows from these three.
III. How It Arose: The Early Christian Centuries
The apostolic Church inherited from the Jewish world the psalmody, the chanting of the Psalms, and the sung prayer of the Old Covenant. The Lord Jesus Christ Himself, at the Mystical Supper, “after they had sung a hymn, went out to the Mount of Olives” (Matthew 26:30). In the Jewish tradition, “to sing a hymn” at Passover meant the singing of the Hallel (Psalms 113–118). So the first musical model of the Church was formed on the foundation of the Psalter of David and the hymnography of the Old Covenant.
But the Church grew quickly beyond Judea — to Antioch, Ephesus, Rome, Corinth, Alexandria — in predominantly Greek-speaking environments. There, Christian chant gradually took on the traits it would preserve throughout its history: the Greek language, the Greek musical system in Christianized form, the Greek poetic structures sanctified for liturgical use. Christian chant was born, then, from the encounter of Jewish inheritance with Greek culture, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
We have four fundamental historical witnesses to how Christians sang in the earliest centuries.
Pliny the Younger. The earliest external witness to Christian chant comes not from a Christian source but from an official Roman letter. Pliny the Younger, imperial governor of Bithynia, writes to Emperor Trajan around the year 112 about the Christians he was investigating. He reports that they “were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and to sing in alternation a hymn to Christ as to a God” — carmen Christo quasi deo dicere secum invicem. This Latin sentence is precious. It tells us three important things. First, that the Christian gathering was nocturnal, held in the early hours of a fixed day (probably Sunday). Second, that the type of chant was antiphonal — sung in turns, alternately, “among themselves” (secum invicem). Third, that the object of the chant was Christ venerated as God — external testimony, from a hostile pagan source, of the high Christology of the Church already at the start of the second century.
Tertullian. The Christian apologist from North Africa at the end of the second century and beginning of the third, Tertullian writes in his Apologeticum (chapter 39) that at the Christian agapē meals (the fraternal meals that followed the Divine Liturgy) each believer was invited to sing something before the assembly — either a Psalm of David or a song he himself had composed by personal inspiration. The witness is significant: chanting in the second-century Church was not limited to the chant-stand, but belonged to the whole assembly. Everyone sang.
Clement of Alexandria. The great Christian teacher of Alexandria (late second century), in his work Paedagogus (II.4), discusses how Christians should conduct themselves at meals, including with regard to music. And he states clearly: musical instruments — the cithara, the flute, the harp — belong to the pagan world, to prodigal banquets, to theaters of debauchery. Christians sing “simply, with measure, with quietness,” using their voice as the only “word-bearing instrument.” This is one of the earliest explicit formulations of the principle that Christian chant is purely vocal.
The antiphony of Saint Ignatius. The historian Socrates Scholasticus (fifth century), in his Church History (VI.8), relates that Church tradition attributed to Saint Ignatius the God-bearer — the third bishop of Antioch after the Holy Apostle Peter — the introduction of antiphonal chant, that is, singing by two choirs answering each other alternately. Saint Ignatius, says Socrates, had a vision in which he heard the angelic ranks chanting glory to the Holy Trinity in alternating hymns; and returning from the vision, he established this manner of chant in the Church of Antioch, from where it spread to all the other Churches. This tradition tells us something essential: the musical form of the Church is not a human invention, but an ordering received through divine revelation. The way the Church chants is the way the angels chant.
The Hymn of Oxyrhynchus. There is one spectacular exception to the documentary silence of the first three centuries. In 1918, in Egypt, at the archaeological site of Oxyrhynchus, a fragment of papyrus was discovered, catalogued P.Oxy. XV 1786. Dated to the end of the third century (probably between 270–300 A.D., that is, at least a quarter of a century before the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea), the papyrus contains the text of a Greek Trinitarian hymn and, above each syllable, the musical notation of the melody. It is the oldest surviving piece of Christian music in the world, written in ancient Greek musical notation.
What does this hymn show? Beyond its extraordinary antiquity, it shows something of immense theological importance: before the peace of Constantine in 313, before the Council of Nicaea in 325, an ordinary Christian in a provincial Egyptian town held in his hands the text and melody of a fully Trinitarian hymn. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are invoked together in a complete doxology. This means that, before the ecumenical councils dogmatically formulated the teaching of the Holy Trinity, the Trinitarian faith of the Church was already being chanted liturgically. The Hymn of Oxyrhynchus shows that the Trinitarian doxology was already part of sung Christian prayer before Nicaea — that is, the ecumenical councils did not “invent” the Trinitarian faith, but formulated it dogmatically, in the face of Arian and Pneumatomachian challenges, what the Church had received apostolically and was chanting liturgically already in the previous centuries.
So, according to these four witnesses: by the end of the second century and the beginning of the third, Christian chant was already established as a distinct phenomenon, proper to the Church, with clear traits: vocal (without instruments), antiphonal (in alternating choirs) or responsorial (soloist and popular response), Trinitarian in its doxology, performed at night or before dawn, communal in execution. All these traits would then be preserved by Byzantine psaltic music throughout its history.
IV. The Great Melodists and the Eight Modes
With the peace of Constantine in 313 and especially with the transfer of the imperial capital to Constantinople in 330, the Church emerges from the catacombs and from private homes; it enters magnificent churches built for the Liturgy. Now Christian chant gains the leisure and the resources to unfold in its full splendor. And — as was fitting — the melodists appear: the poet-cantors who compose, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the great liturgical hymns of the Church.
The great Christian melodists of the early centuries were, in most cases, saints known also for other gifts: holy bishops, holy monks, holy Fathers of the Church. This is no coincidence. For the Orthodox tradition, church chant is not the product of individual artistic talent, but the gift of the Holy Spirit working through the saints.
Saint Romanos the Melodist (sixth century). Born in Emesa, in Syria, formed as a deacon at Berytus (modern Beirut), Saint Romanos came to Constantinople in the time of Emperor Anastasius I. Tradition preserves the story of the miracle the Theotokos worked for him: on the night of the Nativity of the Lord, having been assigned to chant at the service though he had no beautiful voice, Romanos prayed weeping to the Mother of God. She appeared to him in a vision, handed him a papyrus, and commanded him to swallow it. When he awoke, Romanos ascended to the imperial chant-stand and chanted the kontakion that has made him immortal — the Kontakion of the Nativity of the Lord, the first kontakion in the history of Christian hymnography:
“Today the Virgin gives birth to the Transcendent One, and the earth offers a cave to the Unapproachable One! Angels with shepherds glorify Him. The wise men journey with a star, since for our sake the Eternal God was born as a young Child.”
These twelve verses are chanted today, in the third mode, throughout the Orthodox Church on the night of the Lord’s Nativity. They are, properly speaking, only the prelude (in Greek prooimion) of the original kontakion — which, in its complete sixth-century form, included some twenty-four additional stanzas (called oikoi) developing the full theology of the Nativity in hymnographic form: the paradox of the Uncontainable One born in a cave, the worship of the angels and shepherds, the journey of the Magi, the Virgin Mother, God made an infant. In current Church use only the prelude has been preserved; the rest of the kontakion, still preserved in manuscripts, is now read less frequently. Saint Romanos composed, according to tradition, over a thousand such kontakia, of which approximately eighty have been preserved — a mountain of liturgical poetry from which the Orthodox Church has shaped, over the centuries, the hymns we still sing today.
Saint Andrew of Crete (c. 660 – 740). The Archbishop of Crete, author of one of the greatest hymnographic works of the Church — the Great Canon of Repentance, chanted during the first week of Great Lent and in its entirety in the fifth week. Two hundred and fifty deeply penitential troparia, climbing through the whole of the Old and New Testaments as on a ladder of repentance. Anyone who has heard the Great Canon chanted at the all-night vigil of Saint Mary of Egypt has heard the very heart of Great Lent.
Saint Cosmas of Maiouma (late seventh – mid-eighth century). The foster brother of Saint John of Damascus (see below), bishop of the city of Maiouma near Gaza. Author of the canons for the greatest of the Lord’s feasts: the Nativity of Christ (“Christ is born; glorify Him!”), Theophany, the Transfiguration, Pentecost. These canons are chanted, in their finished forms, throughout the Orthodox Church to this day.
But the great synthesizer of the whole era is one man alone. About him we must speak more extensively.
Saint John of Damascus and the Eight Modes
Saint John of Damascus (c. 675 – 749), monk of the Lavra of Saint Sabbas near Jerusalem, is without doubt one of the greatest figures of the Orthodox Church. Born into a Christian Arab family in Damascus, son of a high official at the Umayyad caliphal court, Saint John received the finest education of his time and served, for a time, in the caliphal administration. Then, leaving all things, he entered the Lavra of Saint Sabbas, where he lived until his repose. There he wrote the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith (the first systematic dogmatic treatise of the Church), defended the holy icons against the imperial iconoclasts with his pen, composed hymns, and systematized the liturgical music of the Church.
His work in the field of church chant has two dimensions.
First, he composed himself a great number of hymns — between eight and fourteen canons considered certainly authentic, of which the best-known and highest is the Canon of Pascha: “It is the day of Resurrection; let us be radiant, O peoples! Pascha, the Pascha of the Lord…” This canon, chanted on the night of Holy Pascha in the entire Orthodox Church, is a hymnographic masterpiece in which the whole paschal theology of the Fathers is concentrated into a few hundred verses. Whoever truly listens to the Paschal Matins listens to Saint John of Damascus.
The second thing, however, is even more important. Saint John of Damascus systematized the eight modes of church chant. The melodic traditions had existed for several centuries — but they were various, local, not yet unified. Saint John gathered this material into a coherent system: eight melodic modes, each with its own scale, its own opening and closing formulas, its own spiritual “atmosphere.” And he created the liturgical book that contains them: the Oktoechos (Greek: ὀκτώηχος).
Why eight modes? The number eight is not arbitrary. In Church tradition, eight is the number of the day that follows the seventh, that is, of the age to come. The week has seven days; the eighth day is the Resurrection, is eternity, is the Kingdom. Saint Basil the Great, in his treatise On the Holy Spirit (chapters 27 and 29), explains at length the liturgical symbolism of the number eight — why Sunday is “the eighth day” and why the Church prays standing in the days between Pascha and Pentecost. The eight modes of the Oktoechos transpose this meaning into music: each week of the liturgical year is chanted in a different mode, and after eight weeks the cycle begins again. The Orthodox liturgical year is, structurally, an unfolding of the eight modes.
The eight modes are not eight arbitrary musical scales. Each has its own character, its own sensibility, its own way of ascending and descending. The psaltic tradition has associated with them, without rigidly closing them in formulas, certain atmospheres: bright joy, doxological (Mode 1); deep, sorrowful repentance (Mode 2); heroic, martial hymnography (Mode 3); humility, tears (Mode 4); gentle penitence (Mode 5); vigil, nocturnal doxology (Mode 6); few pieces, but weighty (Mode 7); peaceful, almost ecstatic glory (Mode 8). These are orientations, not strict rules. But the spirit of each mode is recognized by any experienced cantor and by any Christian who has long listened to the services of the Church.
The system of eight modes systematized by Saint John of Damascus has remained, from the eighth century to the present day, the musical skeleton of all Orthodox chant. All the services — Vespers, Matins, the Divine Liturgy, the Vigil — unfold on this system. The hymns you hear today in any Orthodox church, whether Greek, Romanian, Serbian, Arab, or Russian, are set in one of the eight modes. The Oktoechos of Saint John of Damascus is the source.
V. The Ison, the Melos, and the Sonic Icon
Before continuing further in history, we must understand one element of psaltic music that we have not yet explained, but which is fundamental to its spiritual meaning: the ison.
When you listen to psaltic chant, you observe that beneath the principal melody chanted by the protopsaltis or the chant-stand, a deep, prolonged note is sounded continuously by one or more cantors. This note does not change; it does not rise, does not descend, does not move melodically. It stays. It is the fundamental note of the mode in which the chant is sung. It is called the ison (or, in Greek, isokratema — “the one who holds a single note”).
The ison is not Western harmony. It is not a “second voice” accompanying the melody. It is something else — it is foundation, sonic environment, deep presence over which the melody floats. Hierodeacon Sabin Preda, conductor of the Nektarios the Protopsaltis Psaltic Ensemble in Bucharest, offers the most beautiful spiritual interpretation of the ison I have encountered: the ison, which contains within itself all sounds and which always appears as a foundation over which the melody is set, expresses the uncontainable, incomprehensible, and inexpressible Godhead — yet ever-present, and which fills with wonder by the very mystery of its being.
And the parallel which Father Sabin Preda then draws is extraordinary: the same role is fulfilled by the gold background of the icon. Gold is the metal that contains within itself all colors. Just as the gold of the icon is not a “color” alongside the other colors, but the luminous substrate that receives and sustains them all, the ison is not a “note” alongside the other notes, but the sonic silence of God over which human prayer is chanted. The icon and the ison express the same truth: divinity as the foundation of all existence, as a mysterious and all-encompassing presence in which each word of prayer and each face of the saint find their place.
Whoever has stood in an Orthodox church and heard the Cherubic Hymn chanted beneath the golden background of the iconostasis understands what this parallel means. The visible world and the audible world, through icon and through ison, become converging images of the same Inconceivable.
There is yet another theological depth here, also emphasized by Father Sabin Preda. The coexistence of the two elements — ison and melos, foundation and melody — is itself an image of the hypostatic union. Just as in Christ the two natures (divine and human) are united “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation” (the Council of Chalcedon, 451), so in psaltic music the melody (a human work, articulated in words) and the ison (an image of the uncontainable Godhead) are united without being confused and without being separated. Church chant is therefore not a mere musical contrivance; it is the sonic iconography of Orthodox Christology.
Father Michel Quenot, the French Orthodox priest who serves in Fribourg (Switzerland) and who has written one of the most beautiful recent books on Byzantine hymnography — Sacred Vocal Art and Theology: Saints, Hymnographers, and Melodists of Byzantium (Editura Basilica, Bucharest, 2023) — raises this observation to the rank of a structural principle of all church chant. In his book, Quenot formulates the thesis thus: Byzantine hymnography is, in his own words, “an icon in music and words” of the mystery proclaimed in the Liturgy. There is a bond of interdependence which unites the icon — the visible liturgical image of the Orthodox Church — with hymnography as the audible liturgical image of the same mystery. The painted icon is constructed in resonance with the spoken, chanted, and sung liturgical text; and psaltic hymnography paints in sounds and words what the icon expresses through colors and lines. The Orthodox temple as a whole is the synthesis of these two iconographies — the visible and the audible — which support and perfect one another reciprocally.
This is, fundamentally, what the Christian feels who enters an Orthodox church where the service is chanted in authentic psaltic music, against the painted iconostasis: he feels that he has entered Heaven. The visible iconography and the audible iconography work together upon his heart.
VI. Saint John Koukouzelis and the Golden Age of Kalophonia
We arrive at the heart of psaltic music’s beauty. The fourteenth Byzantine century is, in the history of the Church, the century of hesychasm — the century of Saint Gregory Palamas, of the disputes with Barlaam of Calabria, of the Constantinopolitan councils (1341, 1347, 1351) which confirmed the dogma of the uncreated light and of the divine energies. It is the century of Saint Gregory of Sinai, of Saint Philotheos Kokkinos, of Saint Nicholas Cabasilas. It is the century of Mount Athos in its spiritual plenitude — of the Great Lavra, of Vatopedi, of Hilandar, of Iviron, of Dionysiou, of Saint Paul’s.
And it is — not by chance — the century of Saint John Koukouzelis and the kalophonic school.
Kalophonia, in Greek, means “beauty of voice.” It is the name borne by the highest musical unfolding of the Byzantine psaltic tradition — a very rich, florid melodic style in which each syllable of the text may be chanted on a long melisma of many notes. If Saint John of Damascus in the eighth century gave psaltic music its bones (the eight modes), Saint John Koukouzelis in the fourteenth century gave it its most living flesh.
Who Saint John Koukouzelis Was
Saint John Koukouzelis (c. 1270 – c. 1360) was born, according to tradition, at Dyrrachium (Durrës, in modern Albania), into a family with southern roots — Bulgarian-Greek. Orphaned of his father, the child John was sent by his mother to Constantinople, where he was received into the Imperial School of the court. There he was noticed for his extraordinary voice; legend says that on the first day of school, when the teacher asked him what he had eaten for lunch, the child answered in his naïveté: “koukia kai zelia” (“beans and pulse”), from which he received the name Koukouzelis.
He became, while very young, a singer at the court of the Byzantine emperor. His voice attracted the attention of Emperor Andronicus II Palaeologus. He was being prepared for a brilliant court career. But Saint John chose otherwise. He fled to Mount Athos to become a hesychast monk. He entered the Great Lavra (the oldest and largest Athonite monastery, founded by Saint Athanasius the Athonite in 963). There, to hide his qualities, he received the obedience of shepherd — he pastured the goats and sheep of the monastery in the wilderness of the mountains around Athos. Tradition says that, while pasturing the flocks, he sang alone in the silence of the wilderness, raising unceasing prayers to Heaven. And the goats, listening to him, would rise and stand upright on their hind legs, as if in worship. Thus he was discovered; and from then on he was recognized and honored as the greatest psaltis of his time — Maistōr, “the Master.”
What Saint John Koukouzelis Accomplished
He accomplished several capital things.
First, he contributed decisively to the development and refinement of late Byzantine musical notation — tradition attributes to him an essential role in perfecting the neumatic system, raising the old Byzantine notation to a precision and complexity without precedent. The notation that cantors today use in their chant-books has direct roots in the work of Saint John Koukouzelis and the school he founded.
Second, he himself composed an immense body of hymns — kalophonic pieces, stichera, anagrammatismoi (chants with syllables reversed for meditation). The best known of his compositions is Anōthen oi prophētai — “From on high the prophets” — a long hymn dedicated to the Theotokos, in which all the Old Testament prophecies about the Mother of God are chanted on long, florid melodies.
Third, he founded a musical school at the Great Lavra. Generations of disciples learned from Saint John Koukouzelis. Byzantine manuscripts preserve dozens of psaltai who were “disciples of Koukouzelis” — cantors who, for two or three centuries after the saint’s repose, continued to chant and compose in the kalophonic style. The kalophonic school of the Lavra became the nucleus from which all late Byzantine music spread.
The Miracle of the Koukouzelissa
There is a tradition preserved to this day on Mount Athos. At the vigil of the Akathist to the Theotokos (the Saturday of the Akathist during Great Lent), Saint John Koukouzelis was chanting in the Katholikon of the Great Lavra before the icon of the Mother of God. Under the weight of his ascetic struggle and prolonged vigil, he grew tired and lightly dozed, leaning against the wooden chant-stall. In his sleep the Theotokos appeared to him and said: “Rejoice, John! Chant for me always, and I will never abandon you!” And she placed in his right hand a gold coin. When he awoke, the coin was still in the saint’s palm. This coin is preserved to this day as a holy relic at the Great Lavra. And the icon of the Theotokos before which this happened received, from that time to this day, the name the Mother of God “Koukouzelissa” — that is, “of Koukouzelis,” in memory of the saint. The icon is today housed in the Chapel of the Entry of the Theotokos into the Temple at the Great Lavra and is commemorated in the Orthodox Church on two days: October 1 (the feast of Saint John Koukouzelis) and the tenth Friday after Holy Pascha.
This tradition tells us something essential for all psaltic music: kalophonia was not rewarded as art, but blessed as prayer. The Theotokos does not pay Saint John Koukouzelis as an artist; she blesses him as a monk who places his entire life, including his voice, in the service of the Name of her Son. This is, fundamentally, the key to understanding all psaltic music: music is service, not performance. Chant is prayer, not art.
Why Hesychasm and Kalophonia Belong Together
Here lies the theological heart of the matter. How does it happen that precisely in the century of hesychasm, when the great Fathers (Saint Gregory Palamas, Saint Gregory of Sinai) were teaching the Jesus Prayer and the inner struggle for the purification of the mind, there appeared in parallel the highest and richest musical compositions of the Orthodox Church?
The answer is this. Hesychasm is not a sterile silence, but a deepening into the Word of God. The heart purified through stillness and the Jesus Prayer becomes capable of a higher prayer — a prayer that can no longer be spoken simply, but must be chanted in long, florid melodies, because simple speech is too poor. Byzantine kalophonia is the musical expression of the purified heart, of the heart filled with the Holy Spirit, which can no longer contain in short and dry words what it tastes of the glory of God.
In other words: we may say, without reducing the one to the other, that kalophonia is hesychasm chanted, and hesychasm is kalophonia made silent.
This is, without doubt, the highest era of Byzantine psaltic music. All that comes after Saint John Koukouzelis will rest upon what he perfected.
VII. The Road to Our Own Day: 1453, 1814, Bucharest 1820
The Byzantine Empire fell. On May 29, 1453, Constantinople was conquered by the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II. The Great Church of Hagia Sophia, the place where Byzantine chant had reached its perfection over eleven centuries, was converted into a mosque. The Ecumenical Patriarchate moved to the church of the Holy Apostles, then to Pammakaristos, then to Saint George of the Phanar. Under Ottoman rule, the Greek Orthodox world entered an era of five centuries of political bondage.
And yet psaltic music did not die. Indeed, in these very five centuries of political bondage, it was preserved, transmitted, and developed — under the shadow of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople, through the great monasteries of Mount Athos, through the schools of psaltic music in Jerusalem, Sinai, Bucharest, and Iași. This is one of the strongest witnesses of the Church: when the state falls, when the empire perishes, when all around collapses, the chant of the Church remains.
Successive generations of great psaltai continued the work of Saint John Koukouzelis. Briefly, the principal among them: Chrysaphes the New (mid-seventeenth century), protopsaltis of the Great Church, author of communion hymns of absolute musical perfection; Petros Bereketes (c. 1665 – c. 1725), one of the greatest composers of Cherubic Hymns; Daniel the Protopsaltis (c. 1740 – 1789); and then the great and last great psaltis of the pre-reform period, Petros Peloponnesios (c. 1730 – 1778), Lampadarios of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Petros Peloponnesios composed the musical repertoire which, even today, forms the backbone of the weekly Orthodox services: the Anastasimatarion (the Chants of the Resurrection in the eight modes) and the Doxastarion.
The Chrysanthine Reform of 1814
In the second decade of the nineteenth century, three great masters from Constantinople judged that the old Byzantine musical notation — the complex stenographic system inherited from Saint John Koukouzelis — had become too difficult, too hard to learn, accessible only to an elite. They therefore devised a new, simpler, more analytical notation, which could be more easily learned.
These three masters were: Chrysanthos of Madytos (c. 1770 – c. 1840), archbishop and then metropolitan, author of the fundamental theoretical treatise of the new notation; Gregorios the Protopsaltis (c. 1778 – 1821); and Hourmouzios the Chartophylax (c. 1770 – 1840), archivist of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. The three worked together between 1810 and 1814. In 1814, the reform was officially approved by the Ecumenical Patriarchate and entered general use.
The reform accomplished two essential things. First, it simplified the notation — the complex “stenographic” signs of Koukouzelis were replaced by more analytical signs. Second, it fixed a systematic theory of the modes and intervals.
It was a didactic reform, not a reform of the melodies. The chants remained, in their essence, the same. Only the manner of writing them on the page was changed. Those who know both notations recognize that there is no break of content between them, only of writing. The new, Chrysanthine notation is what you see today in the chant-books of psaltai throughout the Orthodox world.
Bucharest 1820
Now something happened that English-speaking Orthodox Christians may not have heard. The first chant-books of psaltic music ever printed anywhere in the Orthodox world were printed in Bucharest, in 1820.
The direct disciple of Petros Peloponnesios, Petros Ephesios (Peter of Ephesus), Greek by origin, came to Bucharest with the blessing of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. There, under the protection of Metropolitan Dionysios Lupu of Ungrovlachia (1819–1821), he founded the first printing press for psaltic music in the entire Orthodox world. And in 1820 he printed the first two books: the New Anastasimatarion and the Short Doxastarion, both works of Petros Peloponnesios transcribed in the new Chrysanthine notation.
Printing meant for psaltic music what Gutenberg’s press meant for European civilization as a whole: massive diffusion, accessibility, definitive preservation. And this founding moment took place on Romanian soil.
Saint Macarius the Hieromonk and the Romanization of Chant
But the books printed by Petros Ephesios in Bucharest were in Greek. Romanians had long desired to have psaltic music in their own language. And the man came who accomplished this.
Saint Macarius the Hieromonk (1750–1836), Romanian psaltis and hieromonk, received in 1820 the obedience of Metropolitan Dionysios Lupu to translate into the Romanian language the entire psaltic tradition of Byzantine origin. Macarius had been from 1817 a direct disciple of Petros Ephesios, learning from him the new Chrysanthine notation. He knew well both the old Byzantine system and the Chrysanthine system. He was prepared as no one else for this work.
Owing to the Greek revolution of 1821, the Bucharest printing press was interrupted. Saint Macarius took refuge in Transylvania and then in Vienna, where — between 1822 and 1823 — he printed the first three Romanian books of psaltic music: the Theoretikon (Grammar of Psaltic Music), the Anastasimatarion (Chants of the Resurrection), and the Heirmologion (Katavasia Book). In the preface to the Heirmologion printed in Vienna in 1823, Macarius explains clearly why he did this. I quote exactly from his preface:
“Those who know only a little Greek, and those who know nothing at all, are compelled to chant the Cherubic Hymn, the Holy, holy, holy, and the most mysterious of the holy chants of our holy faith in the Greek language, without understanding what they chant — neither they themselves, nor those who listen to them.”
Saint Macarius’s argument is profound. It is not nationalist — Macarius does not say that Romanian is better than Greek. He says that prayer must be understood by those who chant it and by those who listen. Otherwise the Cherubic Hymn, the Holy Holy Holy, the great mystical chants of the Divine Liturgy — all remain covered by a foreign language, and those present cannot penetrate their meaning. This is pure pastoral theology: psaltic music, as prayer, needs to be understood in order to be truly prayer.
Returning to his homeland after 1823, Saint Macarius gradually printed the entire psaltic music in Romanian and founded schools of psaltic music in every town of Wallachia. By the time of his repose in 1836, every important Romanian town had a school of psaltic music after the Chrysanthine method, in the Romanian language.
After Saint Macarius, his disciple — Anton Pann (1797–1854), teacher, printer, and composer — continued the work and composed the most important treatise on the theory of Romanian psaltic music of the nineteenth century. The contemporary musicologist Constantin Răileanu, founder of the Anton Pann Ensemble, rightly observes that, in the Romanian world, all subsequent psaltic treatises are tributary to Pann.
Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century, Romania had a fully formed Romanian psaltic tradition — in the language of the people, with treatises of theory, with printed chant-books, with schools, with trained psaltai. Mount Athos, the great Romanian monasteries (Neamţ, Cernica, Căldăruşani), the metropolitan cathedrals, and many large parishes chanted in this traditional Romanian psaltic music.
VIII. Why, Then, Does the Russian Church Sound So Different?
Here we come back to the question with which the article began. If psaltic music is so ancient, so deep, so beautiful — why does the Russian Orthodox parish, where many English-speaking Orthodox worship, sound so utterly different?
The answer has several layers, and it requires care, because the Russian choral tradition is a venerable Orthodox heritage which deserves to be approached with respect, not with the dismissive tone of an outsider. Many readers of this article are themselves devout members of ROCOR, OCA, or Moscow Patriarchate parishes, drawn to Orthodoxy perhaps through the very beauty of Russian liturgical music. Some have wept at the Vsenoshchnoye Bdeniye of Rachmaninoff, or at the Cherubic Hymn of Bortniansky, or at the rich and reverent choral textures of a slavonic Vigil in a parish steeped in the Synodal tradition. None of what follows is intended to diminish that experience. But truth must be spoken with love, and the historical truth about Russian Orthodox music is more layered than is commonly understood.
First Layer: Russian Chant Was Once Byzantine
When the Slavs received Christianity from Byzantium in the ninth and tenth centuries (the mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius, the baptism of Saint Vladimir of Kiev in 988), they received with the Faith the chant of the Church. The Russian Orthodox Church’s original liturgical music — called znamenny chant (from the Slavic znamia, “sign,” because it was written with neumatic signs called kriuki) — was a direct Slavic adaptation of Byzantine psaltic music as it existed in the tenth through twelfth centuries. The contemporary Russian musicologist Irina Lozovaya (1950–2017, Professor at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow), in her capital monograph The Old Russian Notated Paraklite of the Twelfth Century: Byzantine Sources and Typology of Old Russian Copies (Moscow, 2009), established on rigorous paleographic evidence the direct dependence of the oldest Russian chant-books on the Byzantine Heirmologia of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
In other words: from the tenth to the seventeenth century, Russian Orthodox chant was, in its essential character, the same as the chant of Constantinople and Mount Athos. Monodic. Vocal. Modal. Without harmony in the Western sense. Adapted to the Slavic language and to the particular character of the Slavic ear, but structurally a Byzantine inheritance. This is the chant of Saint Sergius of Radonezh, of Saint Andrei Rublev, of the great monasteries of Solovki and Valaam in their earliest centuries.
This chant has not died. It is preserved to this day in certain Russian monasteries (especially among the Old Believers who broke with the official Russian Orthodox Church after the Nikonian reforms of the seventeenth century), it is being studied and revived by ensembles such as Lozovaya’s own Asmatikon (founded in 2004–2005 at the Moscow Conservatory) and by similar groups in Russia and abroad, and in recent decades it has begun to appear again in certain ROCOR and OCA parishes that have rediscovered it as part of their authentic patrimony.
Second Layer: The Westernization of Russian Church Music
From the late seventeenth century onward, however, something else happened. Tsar Peter the Great (1672–1725), fascinated by everything he had seen during his Western travels, set about systematically reshaping the Russian Empire on Western European lines. This great transformation reached, inevitably, into the music of the Church. Western European choral styles — first Italian, then German-Protestant — began to be imported into the Russian Orthodox liturgy, especially in the court and capital cities.
Through the eighteenth century, foreign composers of Italian origin (Galuppi, Sarti, and others) worked at the imperial court, composing for the Russian Liturgy in their native operatic-choral style. The native Russian composers who followed — Dmitry Bortniansky (1751–1825), Maxim Berezovsky (1745–1777), Stepan Davydov (1777–1825) — were themselves formed in Italian musical institutions: Bortniansky studied in Venice and Bologna for ten years under Galuppi, and his great liturgical concertos, beautiful as they are, bear unmistakably the imprint of late-eighteenth-century Italian choral writing. By the nineteenth century, the Russian Orthodox musical scene was dominated by the Petersburg Court Chapel under composers and conductors trained on European models.
A counter-movement arose in the late nineteenth century — the Moscow Synodal School, with composers such as Stepan Smolensky, Alexander Kastalsky, Pavel Chesnokov, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Pyotr Tchaikovsky in his liturgical works — which sought to return Russian church music to its native znamenny roots while still working within a choral, harmonized idiom. The greatest works of this school, Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil (1915) and Tchaikovsky’s Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom (1878), are masterpieces of Christian art and are deeply loved by Orthodox Christians worldwide. But it must be said honestly: even these works are not a return to the actual sound of the chant Saint Sergius of Radonezh heard. They are nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Russian sacred art, magnificent in their own right, but built within the framework of European harmonic and choral conventions adopted in Russia after Peter the Great.
This is the Russian musical inheritance that came, through emigration after 1917, to ROCOR parishes in North America, Western Europe, and Australia; that became the standard repertoire of the Orthodox Church in America; that fills the choir lofts of Russian Orthodox parishes in San Francisco, New York, London, Sydney, and a hundred smaller communities. It is beautiful. It is Orthodox. It is venerable. It has formed many generations of believers in deep faith and prayer. It is not, however, the original chant of the Church — which is psaltic music, the Byzantine chant we have traced above.
Third Layer: A Pastoral Reality, Not a Polemic
This is not a polemic against Russian Orthodox music. It is, rather, a clarification for the Orthodox Christian who has wondered about the difference. The Russian choral tradition is, properly understood, a Russian synthesis — preserving Russian Orthodox piety and Russian Orthodox texts within a musical idiom shaped by Russia’s particular historical encounter with the West from the eighteenth century onward. It has produced saints (Saint John of Kronstadt, Saint Tikhon of Moscow, the New Martyrs of Russia all worshipped in it). It has formed Orthodox piety in unforgettable ways. Hierarchical blessing rests upon it. It is woven into the lived faith of millions of Orthodox Christians today.
But it is not, and does not claim to be, the chant of the early Church. Psaltic music — Byzantine chant — is. This is why, when an Orthodox Christian who has only ever known Russian choral worship encounters Byzantine chant in a Greek or Antiochian or traditional Romanian parish, he or she often perceives an immediate sense of antiquity — of touching something older than what they have known. This perception is correct. They are touching the very chant of the Holy Fathers.
What About the Romanian Tradition, and Others?
For completeness: the Romanian Orthodox tradition (and the Serbian, the Bulgarian, the Antiochian, the Georgian) preserved the Byzantine psaltic line through the centuries, adapting it to the local language but never adopting the wholesale Western-choral transformation that occurred in Russia. In Romania, as we saw in Section VII, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century work of Petros Ephesios, Saint Macarius the Hieromonk, and Anton Pann firmly grounded psaltic music in the Romanian language within the framework of Byzantine tradition. To this day, the great Romanian monasteries (Neamţ, Sihăstria, Putna, Cernica), the metropolitan cathedrals, and many large parishes chant in this Byzantine-rooted Romanian psaltic music.
There is, however, also a more recent layer in Romania: a Romanian choral tradition for parishes, developed from the late nineteenth century, harmonizing the traditional psaltic melodies on two or four voices in the Western manner. The principal composers — Gavriil Musicescu (formed at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory), D. G. Kiriac (formed at the Schola Cantorum in Paris under Vincent d’Indy), Gheorghe Cucu, Ioan D. Chirescu, Nicolae Lungu — were devout Orthodox Christians, knowledgeable of the psaltic tradition, but musically formed in Western European conservatories. Their work has hierarchical blessing, has been in use for over a century, and has formed many generations of Romanian believers; but it is, as in the Russian case, a more recent synthesis between the inherited psaltic skeleton and an adopted Western choral aesthetic, not the original psaltic music of the Byzantine tradition.
So When You Visit a Greek Parish
When you, as an English-speaking Orthodox Christian, visit a Greek or Antiochian or Cypriot parish and hear the chant of the Byzantine tradition — when you visit a traditional Romanian monastery and hear the same chant in the Romanian language — you are hearing the sound of the original prayer of the Orthodox Church. The voice in which Saint John of Damascus, Saint John Koukouzelis, and the great Fathers chanted. The chant of the Liturgy of Hagia Sophia. The chant of the Holy Mountain.
When you visit your Russian parish and hear Bortniansky’s Cherubic Hymn, Kastalsky’s Magnificat, or a Tchaikovsky setting of the Liturgy — you are hearing the sound of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian Orthodox piety, which is also a sacred and venerable witness, but historically a more recent one, shaped by Russia’s particular encounter with European choral tradition.
Both are Orthodox. Both bear sanctifying grace. Both are loved by the Church. But only one is the original.
IX. Why Psaltic Music Is, Nevertheless, Different — Four Meanings
Having traced the history, we may now gather the four fundamental theological meanings that make psaltic music different from all other religious musics in the world — even from its more recent synthesized derivatives in modern parish use.
First: Monody as Expression of the Unity of the Church
Psaltic music is monodic — a single melody, chanted by all who chant. This is not an aesthetic limitation; it is a theological choice. The Church is one, after the image of the Holy Trinity in which “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). The chant of the Church expresses this unity through one voice.
When in the West, beginning in the ninth century, polyphony developed (multiple voices interweaving harmonically), this was not simple aesthetic innovation, but the expression of a different theological sensibility. The Churches of the East preserved monody precisely because it expresses more exactly, in sonic form, the assembly “with one mouth and one heart” of which the Liturgy speaks. When the left choir responds to the right choir in alternating psalmody, when the protopsaltis chants the verse and the assembly answers with the refrain, when two choirs chant alternately the stichera of Great Vespers — always, all chant the same song, in the same tone, on the same melody. There is no voice counter-pointing another voice. There is a single melodic line, but enriched through the organic participation of the community.
Second: The Modality of the Eight Modes as Liturgical Time
Psaltic music is modal — organized in the eight modes of the Oktoechos, which are not mere musical scales, but forms of liturgical time. The first week after Holy Pascha is chanted in Mode 1; the second week in Mode 2; and so on, until Mode 8, when the cycle begins again. The Orthodox liturgical year is, structurally, an unfolding of the eight modes.
Why eight? Because eight is, in Church tradition, the number of the Resurrection and of the age to come. The week of creation has seven days. The eighth day is the day of the Resurrection — Sunday, the eschatological day, the day of eternity. The eight modes of the Oktoechos transpose this meaning into music. Each week, chanting in a different mode, you traverse a sonic image of the eight days of the Resurrection. And at the end, when the cycle closes, you begin again — because the Resurrection does not close, but unfolds eternally.
This is a teaching which the medieval West did not preserve. The Western modes gradually reduced themselves to two (major and minor), and modern Western music has chanted in these two modes for seven hundred years. Psaltic music, by contrast, preserves the eight modes, each with its own atmosphere, each with its own place in liturgical time.
Third: Listening as the Primacy of Transmission
Psaltic music is received through Tradition, not composed out of originality. There is no “original” psaltic music in the modern sense of the word. The greatest melodists — Saint Romanos, Saint John of Damascus, Saint John Koukouzelis — did not express their “creative personalities,” but received the gift of the Holy Spirit and gave musical form to the prayer of the Church.
The logic of psaltic music is the logic of listening. As the monk listens to his elder, as the believer listens to his spiritual father, as the Church listens to Tradition — so the psaltis listens to those who came before. He learns from them. He receives from them. He preserves what he has received. He transmits what he has preserved. Whoever listens to authentic psaltic music listens, in fact, to the voice of living Tradition — the voice of the Church which has received and transmits, without rupture, what she herself received from God.
This living chain of transmission is not a historical abstraction, but a verifiable reality down to our own day. The Romanian musicologist Constantin Răileanu testifies that in 1980s Bucharest — under the militantly atheist communist regime — he was formed under three great Romanian psaltai: Gică Costache (the best disciple of the great Ion Popescu-Pasărea, who formed generations of Romanian psaltai in the early twentieth century); Archimandrite Symeon Tatu, abbot of Plumbuita Monastery (formed at Neamţ Monastery on the originals of Dimitrie Suceveanu); and the chanter Grigore Tănase of Cernica (a monastic colleague of the late Patriarch Teoctist). Through these three teachers, the young apprentice in the 1980s received a tradition which, through three or four direct links, climbed back to the mid-nineteenth century, to the age of Saint Macarius the Hieromonk, Anton Pann, and Dimitrie Suceveanu. And from there, through Petros Ephesios, Petros Peloponnesios, and Daniel the Protopsaltis, the chain rises further into the pre-reform Byzantine world, back to Saint John Koukouzelis and beyond. This is Tradition in the concrete sense: not an ideology, but a line of living men who have each in turn received and transmitted what they did not invent.
Fourth: Prayer as an “I–Thou” Relation
Finally — and this is the highest axis — psaltic music is prayer addressed directly to God, not speech about God. It is the expression of the personal relationship of the Church with the Person of God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Father Michel Quenot, in the book mentioned above, formulates this reality with a precision that cannot be evaded. The liturgical music of Orthodoxy, he writes, is “in the service of the word, and not the reverse.” And if the relation is reversed — if music exits the service of the word and becomes an end in itself — then the word becomes an alibi of the music, and prayer becomes a pretext for art. The Divine Liturgy ceases to be a mystery and becomes a concert; the psaltis ceases to be a servant and becomes an artist.
This is the fundamental distinction which psaltic music makes, and which is not always made by the church music of other traditions. The word of prayer is sovereign. Music is the garment that allows the word to become song, but it must never cover the word, hide it, make it an “alibi.” In authentic psaltic music, whoever listens hears the text — the Cherubic Hymn, the Psalm, the Troparion, the Megalynarion, the Doxology — in the depth of its meaning. Music does not mask it; it brings it to the surface.
X. The Living Tradition Today
The reader who has followed the article this far may ask: but does this authentic psaltic music still exist today? Or is it a historical tradition on the verge of disappearing, known only to the old?
The answer is clear: Byzantine psaltic music is today a living tradition, fully active, recognized at the highest cultural and spiritual levels of the world.
In 2019, Byzantine chant was inscribed by UNESCO on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, through the dossier jointly submitted by Greece and Cyprus — described officially as a living tradition and a complex musical system, transmitted without interruption from the Byzantine period to the present.
In the Greek Orthodox world, it is the official chant of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, of the Church of Greece, of the Church of Cyprus, of the Patriarchate of Alexandria, and of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem. On Mount Athos it is preserved in full form, with its florid kalophonia, in all twenty monasteries and in the dependent sketes and cells throughout the mountain.
In the Romanian Orthodox world, it is the chant of the Patriarchal Cathedral in Bucharest, of the Metropolitan Cathedral in Iași, and of many other cathedrals and great monasteries. The great monastic communities preserve it (Neamţ, Putna, Sihăstria, Tismana, Cernica, Frăsinei, Bistriţa, and many others). There are academic schools of psaltic music at the National University of Music in Bucharest (the Melodos program, currently coordinated by Dr. Cătălin Cernătescu) and at the Gheorghe Dima Conservatory in Cluj. There are festivals, master classes, and specialized ensembles (Psalmodia, Anton Pann, Nectarios the Protopsaltis, Stavropoleos, and many others).
In the English-speaking world, the tradition has been steadily growing. Dr. Alexander Lingas, founder of the ensemble Cappella Romana in Portland, Oregon, and Professor Emeritus at City, University of London, has been a leading force in introducing Byzantine chant to Western audiences. Honored by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I in 2018, Lingas conducted in 2023 the Byzantine Chant Ensemble at the coronation of King Charles III at Westminster Abbey, performing verses from Psalm 71/72 — a rare and symbolic moment when Byzantine psaltic music resounded within a British royal ceremony, as a tribute to the Greek Orthodox heritage of the King’s father, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.
In academic scholarship, two Romanian researchers deserve mention: Archdeacon Prof. Dr. Sebastian Barbu-Bucur (1930–2015, Cheia Monastery) discovered on Mount Athos approximately 250 Romanian psaltic manuscripts and critically edited, in four volumes, Psaltichia rumănească of Filothei sin Agăi Jipei — the earliest known Romanian psaltic chant-book, written in 1713. Prof. Vasile Vasile (b. 1941) was honored by the Romanian Academy in 2008 with the Ciprian Porumbescu Prize for his three volumes Romanian Musical Treasure from Mount Athos. Prof. Dr. Nicolae Gheorghiţă (b. 1972, National University of Music in Bucharest) is today the principal academic authority on the post-Byzantine period (1453–1821).
In the international Orthodox world, Associate Professor Dr. Maria Alexandru (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), a Romanian born in Bucharest, teaches Byzantine musical paleography to young Greeks at the most prestigious Greek university. Father Michel Quenot (Fribourg, Switzerland), the French Orthodox priest, reveals to the Western world the treasures of Byzantine hymnography through his book Sacred Vocal Art and Theology (Bucharest, 2023). Academician Dimitrije Stefanović (Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade), trained at Oxford and Princeton under Egon Wellesz, Henry Tillyard, and Oliver Strunk, has documented the Byzantine musical heritage preserved in Serbian monasteries (Studenica, Hilandar). The late Professor Miloš Velimirović (1922–2008, University of Virginia), Serbian-American, contributed foundational work to the Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae series.
The fact that a Romanian scholar teaches Byzantine chant to Greeks in Thessaloniki, that a Greek-American conductor chanted it at the coronation of the King of England, that a French Orthodox priest writes books about it which Romanian Orthodox read, that in our Romanian monasteries the same psaltic music is chanted that Saint Macarius the Hieromonk chanted, and before him Saint John Koukouzelis at the Great Lavra — all of this says one simple thing: Byzantine psaltic music knows no ethnic boundaries. It is the universal heritage of Orthodoxy.
In Conclusion, with the Mercy of God
So, dear reader, if you are an English-speaking Orthodox Christian standing between the Greek and the Russian parish in your city — both filled with believers, both echoing with prayer, both unlike each other in sound — do not think of this any longer as a matter of preference between two styles. Think of it instead as a matter of inheritance.
In the Greek parish, in the traditional Romanian or Antiochian or Cypriot parish, you hear the inheritance of the early Church — the chant that grew, through the great Fathers, from the apostolic age to its full Byzantine form, and which has been preserved, transmitted, and lovingly safeguarded from generation to generation down to our own day.
In the Russian parish, in many ROCOR and OCA communities, you hear a beautiful Russian flowering of Orthodox prayer — venerable, deeply pious, sanctified by saints and martyrs, but shaped, in its musical form, by the historical encounter of Russia with the West from the eighteenth century onward. It is Orthodox, but it is one Orthodox tradition among others — and historically not the oldest.
Both are home to grace. Both can lead you to the Kingdom. But if you wish to know the original sound of the prayer of the Orthodox Church — the sound in which the Holy Fathers prayed, the sound of Saint John of Damascus and Saint John Koukouzelis, the sound of Hagia Sophia and Mount Athos — that sound is Byzantine psaltic music, alive today in Greek, Romanian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Antiochian, and increasingly in English-speaking parishes that have begun to recover their full inheritance.
And if you choose, one day, to learn the chant yourself — at a school, with a teacher, in a master class — you will discover that this apprenticeship binds you, through three or four living links of teachers and students, back to the great Romanian or Greek psaltai of the nineteenth century, to the pre-reform Byzantine world, to Saint John Koukouzelis and beyond. As psaltis Ion Minoiu has so well formulated: chant is the theios eros, the divine longing — and not only a longing for Paradise, but a small foretaste of it. Byzantine psaltic music is not a music about Paradise; it is, in itself, a touch of Paradise reaching down to earth. Whoever truly chants, whoever truly listens — tastes already, in the present age, in the Sunday Liturgy, a drop of the age to come.
This is the living Tradition of the Church. And it is near you — in the chant-stand of the nearest Greek or Antiochian or traditional Romanian parish, in recordings of monastic chant from the Holy Mountain, in contemporary Byzantine choral ensembles in your own language, in good books that can guide you. You need only reach out your hand.
The end, with the mercy of God.
Principal Sources Consulted
Primary patristic and melurgic sources:
- Saint John of Damascus, Oktoechos; Paschal Canon
- Saint Romanos the Melodist, Kontakion of the Nativity; Akathist to the Theotokos (attributed)
- Saint Andrew of Crete, Great Canon of Repentance
- Saint Cosmas of Maiouma, Canons of the Lord’s Great Feasts
- Saint John Koukouzelis, Anōthen oi prophētai and kalophonic works; manuscripts of the Great Lavra
- Manuel Chrysaphes, On the Theory of the Art of Psaltic Music, 1458
- Chrysanthos of Madytos, Theoretical Treatise on the New Musical Notation, 1814
- Saint Macarius the Hieromonk, Theoretikon, Anastasimatarion, Heirmologion (Vienna, 1822–1823)
- Anton Pann, The Theoretical and Practical Foundation of Church Music, 1845
Fundamental academic sources:
- Egon Wellesz, A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography, Oxford, 1961
- Dimitri Conomos, A Brief Survey of the History of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Chant
- Edward Williams, A Byzantine Ars Nova, 1972
- Christian Troelsgård, Byzantine Neumes: A New Introduction to the Middle Byzantine Musical Notation, Copenhagen, 2011
Contemporary Romanian sources:
- Hierodeacon Sabin Preda (Nektarios the Protopsaltis Ensemble, Bucharest)
- Ion Minoiu (psaltis at the Romanian sketes of Saint George-Colciu and Saint Hypatios on Mount Athos)
- Dr. Constantin Răileanu (Anton Pann Chamber Ensemble, Bucharest)
- Archdeacon Prof. Dr. Sebastian Barbu-Bucur, Filothei sin Agăi Jipei. Psaltichie rumănească, vols. I–IV; The Culture of Byzantine Musical Tradition on the Territory of Romania
- Prof. Dr. Vasile Vasile, Romanian Musical Treasure from Mount Athos, vols. I–III
- Prof. Dr. Nicolae Gheorghiţă, The Sunday Communion Hymn in the Post-Byzantine Period (1453–1821), Sophia, 2009; Byzantine Music between Constantinople and the Danubian Principalities, 2010
Contemporary international sources:
- Father Michel Quenot, Sacred Vocal Art and Theology: Saints, Hymnographers, and Melodists of Byzantium, Editura Basilica, Bucharest, 2023
- Associate Prof. Dr. Maria Alexandru, Paleography of Byzantine Music, Aristotle University Press, Thessaloniki, 2017
- Dr. Alexander Lingas, founder of Cappella Romana; the Lost Voices of Hagia Sophia project (with Stanford University)
- Miloš Velimirović, Byzantine Elements in Early Slavic Chant: The Hirmologion, Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae, Copenhagen, 1960
- Acad. Dimitrije Stefanović (Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts), studies on the music of Kir Stefan the Serb
- Prof. Dr. Irina Lozovaya, The Old Russian Notated Paraklite of the Twelfth Century: Byzantine Sources and Typology of Old Russian Copies, Moscow, 2009