Byzantine Albania and the vocal ison “question”: the preservation of an ancient tradition in the arbëresh ecclesiastical and secular musical practice
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Summary/Abstract: The oral tradition of the Arbëresh chants it can be said that are based on the classical Byzantine, medieval style of chant, without ―heterogeneous influxes‖, as Father Lorenzo Tardo of the Abbey of Grottaferrata puts it, or other Ottoman expressive devices and musical effects such as ―lamenting trills, guttural pulsations, nasal paraphoniae and nostalgic dirges‖ (Tardo 1938, 100). The Arbëresh possess a considerable patrimony of this repertoire, which even today is still transmitted orally. At the present time the liturgy is sung in Albanian and Italian as well as the traditional Greek. In order to make the understanding of the text of the liturgy easier, in 1968 it was decreed that the use of the Albanian language should be substituted (although not totally) for the Greek language. Scaldaferri‘s view is that ―this obviously will provoke the abandoning of even the most recent forms of the modern Byzantine chant in Greek. The most problematic situation encountered today‖, according to him, ―is in the Eparchy of Lungro where the very old liturgy has been completely substituted with that in Albanian and with music adapted from the modern Byzantine chant‖ (Scaldaferri 2000, 294). On the same language issue, Garofalo writes that ―until few decades ago songs were sung only in Greek. Different translations into Italian and Albanian were used only recently. Believers (who generally do not know Greek) usually read editions in Greek transliterated into Roman type with parallel translation into Italian‖ (Garofalo 2004, 276).

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