Brief Historical Overview of Armenian Sacred Music and Neumes
Brief Historical Overview of Armenian Sacred Music and Neumes

Summary/Abstract: The sacred music of the Armenian Apostolic Church, like other Christian music traditions, is the result of the fruitful relationship between the oral and the written traditions. Dialogues with other liturgical cultures and musical exchanges with both Latin and Byzantine Churches gave birth to an ecclesiastical musical tradition, born in proximity to Christian Antiquity, which has survived, despite significant obstacles, to the present day. The study presents in a diachronic manner the central moments of the evolution of the Armenian liturgical chant, its great reformers and poets/hymn writers, the system of musical notation that managed to bear the entire hymnographic corpus specific to this millennia old tradition, and the theoreticians that decisively contributed to the development of Armenian ecclesiastical music.

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