NEWS AND VIEWS: Liturgical music: a venerable heritage at risk (12/25/05)

NEWS AND VIEWS: Liturgical music: a venerable heritage at risk

by Maria Kulczycky

CHICAGO - "We need to devote more attention in our churches in Ukraine and the diaspora to the performance of the rich liturgical works of Ukrainian composers who dedicated their God-given talents to liturgical music and the enrichment of the national heritage of Ukraine," concluded Archbishop Oleksander Bykovets of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church - Kyiv Patriarchate.

Speaking at the Kyivan Liturgy Symposium held in conjunction with the Festival of Kyivan Liturgical Music in Chicago in early October, Archbishop Oleksander emphasized that the biggest obstacle to the performance of these works, other than lack of familiarity, is the dearth of financial and publishing resources to increase familiarity.

Liturgical music was "destroyed in Ukraine by a godless government and has not been available in the free world." Changing this situation, "should be one of the chief resolutions of this symposium," he said.

The festival was held on the 120th anniversary of the birth of Prof. Ivan Truchly, a renowned Ukrainian choral conductor, a colleague of Alexander Koshetz, Mykola Leontovych, Kyrylo Stetsenko, and Mykola Lysenko, and an expert on the Kyivan liturgical tradition. A book of his notation and research, "Liturgy," was recently published by his son, Dr. Vasil Truchly.

Archbishop Oleksander was one of four presenters at the symposium that opened the festival and examined the development of liturgical music in Ukraine in the ancient, classical and modern eras. Augmenting the lectures, Laurence Ewashko, choral studies professor at the University of Ottawa, conducted a two-hour master class that guided participants in the practice and refinement of their vocal techniques.

Ancient liturgical forms

Archbishop Vsevolod Majdanski of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the U.S.A., launched the symposium with a discussion of the origins of liturgical music and its earliest manifestations in Ukraine. He reviewed the earlier forms of hymns, canticles and psalms created in melodic lines, simple for the congregation to follow.

They were followed by elaborations that included the kontakion, then the troparion and sticheron. "Over the years, the more expert cantors began to prolong the hymns with an almost worldess vocalization that eventually even used meaningless syllables; the teretismata were often found as independent compositions, and were the chief element of the increasingly used kalphonic or beautiful chant," Archbishop Vsevolod explained.

Modern recordings attempt to provide us with an idea of what this music sounded like. Contemporary Greek liturgical music includes a forced voice supported by a wordless drone, the ison. The early hymns would have sounded similar to contemporary medieval Western plainsong. Even in kalophonic music, the ison drone is not as prominent as in modern execution, according to the archbishop.

Byzantine chant came to the Slav nations with Christianity. The main point of diffusion was the Kyivan Caves Monastery. While the different structure and syntax of the languages has altered the music away from Byzantine chant melodies, what remains is "the fundamental principle that the chant was sung unaccompanied and in unison to a chant that simply served the words proclaimed," Archbishop Vsevelod noted.

Later development saw progressive elaboration of the chant, but music still only enhanced the words. "The care for the words is well illustrated by the fact that most Russian and Ukrainian choral settings follow strict rules of composition in order to avoid the counterpoint and overlap of words that we find, for example, in western Renaissance polyphony," said the Archbishop.

Classical Ukrainian liturgy

The dominant center for liturgical music in Ukraine has always been Kyiv, according to Dr. Truchly, another lecturer at the symposium and conductor of the Festival Choir.

A school of liturgical music was founded at the Kyiv Cave Monastery and its master - teachers disseminated the tradition, which was at first single-voice, but with a unique style differing from Western singing. Liturgical music was influenced by the genres and forms of the rich folk musical tradition of ancient Slavs. The earliest music evolved into "strokhny" (multi-voice) singing at the beginning of the 16th century, which was followed by "partesan" singing that characterizes the best of Ukrainian classical composition.

Composition had been hampered by an inadequate notation discipline. The old kriukov notation was replaced by linear-note notation, called kyivan znamen. Mykola Dyletsky, a renowned music theoretician and composer (1630-1690) published the "Music Grammar" in 1677, a text that influenced generations of Ukrainian composers, as well as composers such as Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Balakeriev. Among its practitioners were Maksym Berezovsky (1745-1777), Artem Vedel (1768-1808) and Dmytro Bortniansky (1775-1825), all of whom produced magnificent choral works, according to Dr. Truchly.

Bortniansky played a significant role in strengthening the national/ethnic roots of professional music and its release from feudal/scholastical leanings. Because Ukrainian folk musical traditions and its rich choral heritage imbued his compositions, Bortniansky had an unusually strong impact on Ukrainian composers, particularly in Western Ukraine, throughout the 19th century.

In the 1880s and 1890s, the model for Western Ukrainian composers became the works of the "father of Ukrainian music," Lysenko, according to Dr. Truchly. "Lysenko took an active role in the struggle of progressive western Ukrainian activists for the unification of all Ukrainian lands, for the expansion of Ukrainian musical life, musical education, and for a higher level of artistic compositional creativity."

Guided by the invocation "Praised be the name of God," these musicians and composers "raised liturgical music to the highest levels of musical and esthetic beauty," Dr. Truchly noted.

Modern liturgical music

The classical music composers were the teachers and models of liturgical music for the new composers of the pre- and post-revolutionary era in Ukraine, according to Archbishop Oleksander. The first liturgy in Ukrainian was held on May 22, 1919, in St. Michael's Cathedral in Kyiv, when Leontovych's liturgy was performed under the baton of the composer. It preceded the publication in Berlin in 1920 of a collection of liturgical compositions in Ukrainian by the prominent composer and conductor Alexander Koshetz.

An all-Ukrainian Orthodox Church Convocation was held in October 1921 in Kyiv with the participation of many of the day's leading composers (Stetsenko, Vasyl Stupnytsky, Petro Honcharov, Hryhorii Davydovsky, Leviysky, Pylyp Kozytsky, Yakiv Yatsynevych and Mykhailo Haidai). It signaled the rich epoch of modern Ukrainian liturgical music.

Composers began creating entire liturgies, rather than portions or individual hymns. Among them is Stetsenko's First Liturgy. The works of this group of composers are distinguished by octave endings, cadenzas without a thematic tone, frequent occurrences of the natural fifth and endings in major thirds in a narrow range to create long echoes in the cathedral rafters.

Not only complete liturgies, but cherubim hymns, chants, and smaller compositions continued to be created. After World War II, liturgical compositions were written by Ivan Zayets, I. Novokhatsky and Hryhory Kytasty.

In addition, composers were creating all-night services, spiritual concerts to accompany communion, nuptial services, ethnic-lyrical chants and other religious music.

A special place in the creativity of this era is held by Stetsenko's Requiem (Panakhyda), which is a Ukrainian requiem without equal in the depth of musical thought and religious mysticism, according to the Archbishop. The strongest section, "Peace grant unto us, Saviour" contains clear motifs of ancient folk tunes.

"Perhaps the only time this Requiem was optimally performed by a large professional choir was in August 1919, with the composer conducting, on St. Sophia Square in Kyiv. The requiem was performed for the eternal rest of the soul of Hetman Ivan Mazepa. It is worth noting that on this occasion, none of the participants mentioned the anathema placed on Mazepa by the Moscow Patriarchate. And the services were conducted by Ukrainian Orthodox and Greek-Catholic prelates celebrating together," Archbishop Oleskander said.

"Much as the better known Verdi Requiem, this is our Ukrainian requiem, which we should be performing in Ukraine and the diaspora to commemorate tragic events in our national and church history," Archbishop Oleksander suggested.

The popularity of Stetsenko's work was so prevalent in Ukraine immediately after his death of typhoid fever in 1922, that almost every region had a singing club named after him. These clubs were quashed by the NKVD in the 1930s as bourgeois-nationalist religious organizations.

Archbishop Oleksander distributed a chart of liturgical compositions (mainly unpublished) of Ukrainian composers and urged the organization of an effort to address the lack of published copies of these compositions.

The Festival of Kyivan Liturgical Music was organized to rectify the problem of neglect of liturgical music in the Soviet era and the lack of adequate support in the diaspora that are contributing to its decline. Held over two days, the festival, in addition to the symposium, included a concert of liturgical and folk music presented by four Chicago Ukrainian choirs and two ensembles.

At the conclusion, the Festival Choir, under the baton of Dr. Truchly, sang a hierarchical liturgy sung in the Kyivan tradition. Afterwards, guests and choristers who had worked with Prof. Ivan Truchly met at a reception to share reminiscences. Dr. Vasil Truchly signed copies of "Liturgy" after the reception.

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Full text documents of the lectures delivered at the Kyivan Liturgical Symposium, as well as the list of liturgical compositions by Ukrainian composers are available at [email protected]. CDs of the liturgy will also be available.

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