Casting Light on Medieval Performance Practice: Information Preserved in an Obscure Rubric
Casting Light on Medieval Performance Practice: Information Preserved in an Obscure Rubric

Summary/Abstract: This paper presents a small portion of ongoing research addressing the sacred celebrations and chanting practices in Slavia Orthodoxa from the 11th to 13th centuries. The focus is on the instructions for musical performance as prescribed by the rubrics in extant copies of service books. The investigation focuses specifically on a description of the singing at table during the August 15 Feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos, as recorded in a 12th-century copy of the Studite Typikon, the rule in use at the Kiev Monastery of the Caves, during the time of its founder, Theodosius. It is an early account describing in detail the musical performance of the festive hymnody outside the Divine services. An excision and abstraction of the chanted numbers from their liturgical context this early in Slavic ecclesiastical history hints at a primal developmental stage of such paraliturgical, and distinctly Slavic, musical-devotional forms as the Kolyadi and the later Spiritual Verses. The musical settings are then located in contemporaneous musical manuscripts, and are presented and examined within the context of the occasion. The paper concludes with a reconstruction of one of the chants for the Dormition feast.

• Details
• Contents