SACRED MUSIC FROM AN ORTHODOX PERSPECTIVE
SACRED MUSIC FROM AN ORTHODOX PERSPECTIVE

Summary/Abstract: In recent years, a considerable number of books and articles in English dealing with art and the sacred from a Christian perspective. These publications have proposed many useful and stimulating perspectives to the discussion of the ways in which the sacred can be represented and have contributed to achieving a crucial goal in raising the level of this discussion in both artistic and theological terms. Thus, the work of plastic artists over the centuries on the icon was discussed and a complex analysis of the philosophical context of approaching the sacred in art was carried out, which required hard work in the direction of establishing an artistic mystagogical creation. There is, however, no real attempt to discover how, for example, Byzantine and Gregorian chant, Christian polyphony, Palestinian Masses, Georgian polyphonic music, or the countless compositions of the Divine Liturgy in Russia, to name just a few examples, could embody or transmit the sacred in their respective liturgical contexts. Despite some remarkable contributions and the fact that many of the recent studies in Western European languages concerning the relationship between art and the sacred have been quite prolific, they have generally avoided discussions of liturgical music, a special dimension when discussing the sacred music of the Orthodox Church. The present work aims to establish some themes for the continuation of this discussion, drawing not only on recent commentators, but especially on the comments of the Fathers of the Church on liturgical hymns.

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