About our Choir and Byzantine Chant
Meet the Choir
St. Mark of Ephesus Byzantine Choir was founded in 1989 in Boston, MA, and since then has chanted the sacred services of St. Mark of Ephesus Cathedral in Roslindale, MA. The St. Mark's Choir chants in the traditional Byzantine style, that is, the ecclesiastical music tradition inherited from Hellenistic Jerusalem, Byzantine Constantinople, and post-Byzantine Greece.
The St. Mark’s Cathedral Choir chants in the traditional Byzantine style that has characterized the music of Orthodox Christian worship for well over a millennium. This sacred music developed in the Orthodox Christian East from the early days of the Eastern Roman Empire (c. 330 AD) until the fall of Constantinople in 1453, at which point Byzantine chant had crystallized as a distinct musical genre that employed tens of thousands of poetic hymns in a system of eight musical modes. This musical tradition continued to develop and flourish despite the 400 year Ottoman occupation of much of the Christian East. Transmission of Byzantine chant continued through these centuries, through both oral and written means, culminating in the so-called Three Teachers' reformation of the musical notation system in the early 19th century. These reformers, Chourmouzios the Archivist, Gregory Protopsaltis, and Chrysanthos, Bishop of Madyta, transcribed the medieval symbols of parasemantike into a more analytical notation system in which the written neumes reflected specific metrical values. Today's tradition is most closely linked to the music which immediately followed this reformation, as well as the compositions of the great revival of Byzantine chant which directly preceded it. While owing a great deal to this period of development, today's Byzantine music tradition is nevertheless the heir of a medieval and ancient past, to which it is inextricably linked.
Under the direction of Spyridon Antonopoulos, since 1999, St. Mark's Byzantine Choir has expanded its repertory, chanting the Chrysanthine transcriptions from a majority of the Classical Byzantine composers, from Petros Lambadarios and Petros Bereketis to St. Ioannis Koukouzelis. In addition to chanting the more familiar masterpieces of the genre, the choir is committed to rendering the sacred hymns of the Church in English as well as in Greek. To this end, the choir chants a substantial portion of the Cathedral's sacred services in English, primarily using transcriptions of Classical Byzantine hymns adapted for English by Fr. Christos and Mr. Antonopoulos.
Recently, members of the choir have performed in concerts of Byzantine chant and Greek folk music at Yale University (2005), Brown University (2006), and the University of Michigan (2006), as well as appearing on Steve Demos' "Grecian Melodies". Director Spyridon Antonopoulos has led master-classes in Byzantine chant at The New England Conservatory and Boston University and has taught Byzantine chant at The Greek Institute in Cambridge, MA, and at St. Mark's Cathedral in Roslindale. The choir endeavors to produce its inaugural recording to celebrate its twentieth anniversary, in the Summer of 2009.
About Byzantine Chant
The term Byzantine Chant refers to the music of the Christian churches following the Eastern Orthodox rite that has developed over the centuries from the time of Constantine the Great to today. Chant is very important to the liturgical life of the Eastern Orthodox Church, where a majority of church services are primarily sung. Byzantine Music is a living musical system that continues to evolve within the framework of an accepted tradition that has been handed down orally by highly-trained psaltic masters, called psaltai, and through written transcriptions of Byzantine Music which are expressed in a notation system unique to Byzantine Chant. The Fathers of the Orthodox Church recognized that Byzantine Music, when combined with the text of the divine services, not only helped the listener better understand the text, but also had a great spiritual benefit. For this reason, other forms of music are not to be sung during the sacred services.
Byzantine Music has many features which distinguish it from Western Music, with which most Americans are accustomed. Byzantine Music is monophonic and always chanted a capella (without instruments). Whereas the scales of Western Music are even tempered, or divided equally, the scales of Byzantine Music are not, making the intervals between notes different than in Western Music. These Byzantine scales are divided into three categories: diatonic, enharmonic and chromatic. In addition to these three classes of scales, Byzantine Music is divided into eight tones, or musical modes, which tell a psaltis which scale to use and which phrases to employ in that particular scale while chanting.
Modern Byzantine Music owes much to the developers of its musical notation, the so-called "Three Teachers," Chysanthos, Gregory, and Chourmousios. Replacing the older medieval notation which had become highly complex and readable by only a handful of experts, the Three Teachers developed a simplified method in the early 19th century that is still used today. In the old notation, one symbol correlated to approximately one musical phrase, whereas the new notation gave each symbol a value of one or two notes. Unlike the staff notation of Western Music, where the staff identifies each note's position in the scale, Byzantine Music employs "neumes" which are relative to each other and indicate the change in interval from the previous note.
The wealth of the Byzantine Chant tradition cannot be summarized in a few paragraphs, so we invite you to look at the resources offered on our Links page. We also recommend this article from St. Anthony's Greek Orthodox Monastery in Arizona.
