“Κατά τους κάτω χρόνους” (During the latest times): Some thoughts on the cultural context of Greek chanting during the 19th and the 20th centuries
“Κατά τους κάτω χρόνους” (During the latest times): Some thoughts on the cultural context of Greek chanting during the 19th and the 20th centuries

Summary/Abstract: Although musicologists tend to overpronounce the continuity of Greek Church music (the so-called ‘Byzantine’) from the medieval times till our days, the 19th century is a period of radical changes. In a geographical area earlier dominated by imperia, the development of nationalism creates new perspectives as well as new problems, and this becomes very clear in the birth of autocephalous national Churches that break up the tradition of ecumenism. The procedures that end up to the formation of nations and national states in the region (like the effort for standardization of national languages and the development of what Benedict Anderson calls “print capitalism”) obviously trigger changes in the chanting art, which gets more systematic, homogenous and clearly entrenched inside national borders. The development of civil structures (like societies, organizations and educational institutions) suggests new patterns of musical activity, which gradually depart form the religious devotional life and later become dominant carriers of the Church music. These carriers create new channels for dissemination of the music and introduce new elements into the music aesthetics, a procedure that continues till today. The modern, West-European scientific historical and musicological approaches give rise to various questions about the present state of the chanting art and about the aesthetic qualities of chanting, at times guiding to reconstructive projects while in other cases developing theoretical documentations of the practices in use. Round the change of the century, recordings and the musical industry introduce even more new approaches, not only in methods of writing down the music but also in ways of perceiving it. The development of formal musical education and research in the next years brings to the surface even more issues. Given all these changes, one comes to the question: To which extend the contemporary performances of the Greek Church music resemble their older counterparts?

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