Илия Граматиков: „Пасионът през втората половина на ХХ век: композиторски решения на литургичния жанр”
Iliya Gramatikoff: “The Passion in the Second Half of the 20th Century: Composers’ Approaches to the Liturgical Genre”

Summary/Abstract: Iliya Gramatikoff’s book, completed as a doctoral thesis in 2015, is a multilayered piece of research dedicated to a fairly complex topic. At its core it addresses the Passion and this instantly raises the question of how it is to be understood – as a music genre, as a liturgical narrative, or as both a music genre and a liturgical narrative. Is the conjunction of the two options possible? This needs to be answered at once and the author gives his answer: the Passion resists any attempts at its reduction to a music genre. This resistance, which he defines as a “genre characteristic insusceptible to any reduction”, implies that the meaning of the Passion as rendered in canonical texts cannot be confined to a musical composition, which in turn cannot be a Passion in the true sense of the word unless it keeps the horizon open onto the truth of which a Passion speaks, namely of the Passions of Christ. This is why, the solution which a composer offers to the liturgical genre involves his whole personality, i.e. his professional identity, his outlook on life, and his belief. However, the Passion puts to the test not only the composer, but also the musicologist. It requires the latter to adopt an adequate approach to the composer’s solutions considered within the liturgical genre. Such an approach does exist and has a long-standing tradition – it is the exegetic approach aiming to get at all layers of meaning (literal, allegorical, tropological and anagogical) which a text or a musical work holds. The two composers, whose Passions have been successively examined in the book – Krzysztof Penderecki (with his St. Luke Passion) and Arvo Pärt (with St. John Passion) – have lived up to this task. Iliya Gramatikoff has also lived up to it through his full-bodied findings about their music. In doing so, the author raises the bar for any music researcher who would opt to work on a theme, such as the Passion or another liturgical genre.

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