_cizinec_ wrote:This is the interesting article I was discussing. It is by Vesna Peno and is published by Centrul de Studii Bizantine Iaşi.
You have to register to see the article. I didn't see a copyright, but I'd rather send the link and have you register than break any rules.
It is the second article down and is definitely worth the read.
http://www.csbi.ro/gb/revista03.html
The Tonal Foundations of Serbian Church Chant
Like the other peoples belonging to the family of the Eastern Orthodox Church the Serbians, too, showed during their religious musical practice an essential will to cling to inherited tradition coupled in later history to a growing desire not to miss certain modern changes that most other peoples around them, not excluding the Greeks, were seen eager to adopt. This paper is an attempt to show the similarity between the Serbian and the post-Byzantine chant traditions, especially those which, despite the various notations used, obviously relate to the area of the scale organization of modes.
The key event in later Serbian history, which also marked a turn towards the western world and its values, was the migration of the Serbian people from Kosovo to regions of Austro-Hungary at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries. After these two migratory waves settled influences came to the fore under which new varieties of Serbian chant arose. The influence which was then coming from Russian and Ukrainian teachers, experts in so-called "znameni rospjev" and other Russian chants, such as polyphonic-four part singing, directed the Serbian chant tradition towards the sound of European refined music, and away from its Byzantine roots.
The comparison made by the author between hymns from the Serbian and Greek Octoechos - Anastasimatarion, done by transposing the Serbian melodies into the final tones of the respective Greek hymns confirmed the original expectations that the scale progression of Serbian hymns corresponds completely to the natural scale progression of post-Byzantine melodies. They have the same tones (kataliksis) which appear at the end of melodic patterns, along with other main tones which represent the framework of the melody.
A clear conclusion concerning the scale structure of Serbian chant can be drawn only after new transcriptions of melodies into contemporary staff notation are made.
As it was pointed out, by accepting the staff notation system, Serbian church melodies were graphically fixed in the tempered major-minor system. The process of learning them from notes, especially using intonation from a piano or other tempered instrument, has meant that in time the various sizes of intervals of the second and third have led to only two sizes which exist in the tempered system. Only older Serbian chanters who did not learn the chants from notes but by ear can discern elements of the natural untempered sound.
It is thus a fact that modern Serb chant practice has preserved the key melodic elements from the neumatic chant tradition of the Orthodox people in the Balkans.
