Petrović, Danica

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Aspects of the Continuity of Serbian Chant

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-- - - ---- - _- ---- ---- -5) Im Kreise von Dufay und Ciconia erschien die humanistische Konzeption in Anknüpfung an die Grundsätze der Rhetorik und der Auswertung des antiken Begriffes der Harmonie und ihrer Bedeutung (Elders op. cit.). 6) Jerzy Liban. Pisma o muzyce (Schriften über Musik). Bearbeitet und übersetzt von El1bieta Witkowska-Zaremba, Krakow 1984. 7) Klaus Wolfgang Niemöller, Untersuchungen zu Musikpflege und Musikunterricht an den deutschen Lateinschulen vom ausgehenden Mittelalter bis um 1600, Regensburg 1969. 8) Wie irreführend wäre z.B. die Bewertung heutiger Musikkultur der polnischen Gesell-schaft, wenn sie sich ausschließlich auf das Schaffen der hervorragendsten Kompo-nisten (Lutos~awski, G6recki, Penderecki) stützen würde. 9) "Quisquis igitur honestum diligis et utile, qui fas atque pium religionis nostrae, colis, qui tuae patriae tuisque amicis et civibus consultum velis, iucundum quoque te exhibere, alumnum, Musicam ama, Musicam disce, Musicam in suis penetralibus quaere qua non mimus quam aliis liberalibus disciplinis honorem divitiasque tibi comparabis" (Liban op. cit.). 10) Eine Übersicht üb~r diese Meinungen präsentiert Miroslaw Perz in der Arbeit "Pogl~dy" na muzyky w Polsee XVI stulecia" (Ansichten über Musik im Polen des 16. Jhs.), Renesans. Sztuka i ideologia, Warszawa 1976. 11) Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance, New York 2/1959. 12) In gleicher Weise faßt auch Fellerer dieses Problem auf (op. cit. S. 301): "Bei aller Selbständigkeit nationaler Entwicklung der Musik ist eine gesamteuropäische Integration der Musik in der Zeit der Renaissance gegeben. Die einzelnen Völker lieferten dazu ihren Beitrag". Danica Petrovic: ASPECTS OF THE CONTINUITY OF SERBIAN CHANT The art of medieval Serbia was cut off in full flower by the Turkish invasions and the fall of the medieval Serbian state in the 15th century. Fine threads of cultural tradition survived intact in the monasteries, the only places in that troubled time to keep alive the Orthodox spiritual and artistic heritage of former ages. Architecture has survived ( churches, fortresses), painting ( frescoes and icons), manuscripts of poetic and theological works, a few music manuscripts with neumatic notation, church vessels and embroidered vestments of great artistic value and, above all, the spoken ward in everyday liturgical practice. Such was the historical and cultural fate of the Balkan peoples. lt does not bear comparison with events in Western Europe, where at precisely this time the composers whose anniversaries are being celebrated world-wide this year (1985) were producing their greatest works. Serbian Church Chant is a type of monodic music which has remained in use as part of the Church's liturgy from the time of Cyril and Methodius (the 9th century) to our day. lt is the only kind of musical tradition among the Serbs which can be traced back continuously through written historical sources to the early Middle Ages. The survival 186 of this music over the centuries has been the object of scholarly research only over the last thirty years. The most urgent task is to study the scanty and obscure sources which are scattered around the world; but the number of scholars engaged in this research is correspondingly small. The material which to date has been discovered, transcribed into modern notation, published and performed consists of isolated marginal notes, fragments of manuscripts and, exceptionally, of whole manuscripts with Greek and Church Slavonic texts and Byzantine neumatic notation1• And yet, in contrast to the latin tradition of Gregorian chant, Orthodox liturgical chant (Greek, Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian) still survives in oral tradition. Herein lies the great advantage enjoyed by our musicologists, who can look for, and find, answers in this living tradition to questions about the problems of performance and style in this type of singing which are posed by written sources from the past2• We must stress that the term 'oral tradition' in church singing implies the oral transmis-sion of melodies. The words are part of the Church's liturgy, strictly regulated by the Typicon ( the corpus of rules ordering ecclesiastical practice), and textual changes fall within the domain of theological and textological research. An attempt to establish a periodization of Serbian Chant an the basis of research to date leads us to recognize three fundamental stages: I. The oral musical tradition, which, albeit accompanied by extensive and significant changes, has continued from the times of the first translations of liturgical texts from Greek into Old Church Slavonic. Orthodox hymnodic texts are always written in one of the eight modes of the Octoechos, which are indicated in all surviving Glagolitic and Cyrillic liturgical manuscripts (from the 10th century an). The melodies, an the other hand, survived in musical practice and experienced singers would adapt them to the texts as they occured in the order prescribed by the calendar and the Typicon. II. Part of the existing musical tradition was written down in Byzantine neumatic notation in Slav and bilingual Graeco-Slav manuscripts, as sources extant today show, from the early 15th to the early 19th centuries. The names of three Serbian composers have been found in neumatic manuscripts of the 15th century: Stefan, Isaija and Nikola3• Apparently the melodies composed by kir Stefan the Serb enjoyed particular popular i t y, for they are also found in Greek music anthologies from , 16th century Moldavia4 • The Slavonic music manuscripts from Mount Athos ( two from the Great lavra and a rather !arger collection of Slavonic neumatic manuscripts from Chilandar) constitute the largest and most significant group. These are music anthologies containing a variety of hymns from the standard liturgical repertoire5• A special place among them is occupied by songs in honour of Serbian Saints6• The full significance of these remarkable works of medieval Serbian literature cannot be understood in isolation from the melodies to which they were sung over the ages. Literacy in general, and musical literacy in particular, was in the past the prerogative of a small 11umber of educated individuals, usually monks. We know from marginalia that in the 18th century few people were in a position to read "sweet chant" (as it was called) from neumes7• Although the chants were noted down in a fixed form in manuscripts, they continued to exist in oral tradition and were used every day in the lang services of monasteries. III. The third stage in the development of Serbian Chant is connected with the insti-tution and historical existence of the Metropolitanate of Sremski Karlovci. At the end of the 17th century, after Austria's defeat in the Balkans, under the pressure of Turkish atrocities the great mass of the Serbian population, organized and led by their Patriarch Arsenije Carnojevic, left their ancient homeland. These emigres took with 187 them the holy relics of the medieval Serbian princes and martyrs, icons, manuscripts and early printed liturgical books, all of which helped them to preserve their national integrity, religious faith and distinctive culture. They adopted elements of Western European culture slowly and cautiously, First via Kiev and Russia and then from Budapest and Vienna. These were the circumstances under which within the territory of the Austrian Empire in the course of the 18th century Serbian Baroque art developed as we now know and appreciate it in numerous surv1v1ng or ruinous monuments of architecture, in painting, graphics, literature8• The 18th century was a turning point in the history of Serbian chant. The old musical usage underwent a transplantation with the move to new geographical and cultural areas. There it came into contact with the music of Western Europe and with Russian church music which was already Europeanized. The influences on it were many and various (Greek teachers and singers, Russian teachers, Russian printed books, the multifarious musical life of Budapest and Vienna) 9• All these influences together led to the creation, through oral tradition among the monks of the Fruska Gora monasteries, of a new kind of church chant, known as Karlovci chant. This type of chant, like that of the Middle Ages, was based on the modes of the Octoechos, which are characterized by distinctive melodic formulae. As they were heard and sung over the years, these formulae became part of the idiom, the way of thinking and the stock of knowledge among monks and lay singers. During the 18th and 19th centuries this chant was the corner-stone of Serbian music and an important element in the whole Ser~ian culture which flourished in the monasteries of Fruska Gora and the extensive territory of the Karlovci Metropolitanate. In the middle of the 19th century the chant was taken down in notation for the First time by Kornelije Stankovic, and subsequently by his numerous followers10• Up to the Second World War Serbian chant was part of the common spiritual heritage and people learnt it at home, in church and at school from their earliest youth. Thus it could become the basic ingredient of choral compositions by the Serbian composers Kornelije Stankuvic, Stevan Mokranjac, Petar Konjovic, Stevan Hristic. At the same time as it was taken down in musical notation and incorporated into these composers' works, the chant continued its peaceful existence through oral tradition in the monasteries and among lay singers, today few in number. The last few decades have seen a gulf appear between trained musicians and Church chant, for all its musical richness, its profound conceptual significance and the beauties which it has acquired over the ages. The old singers are dying out; few people understand the content and meaning of the lang monastic services in which poetry and music open the way to an understanding of the cosmos. But occasionally a poet or composer is moved by his own personal search for eternal truths to rise above contemporary culture and spirituality. They discover in monastic singing, and in books which are not so much old as forgotten, the beauty and the universal meaning of the poetic texts and the endless melodies sung through the ages in the lang monastic vigils. One such is our contemporary, the composer Ljubica Marie (born 1909) who in her search for fundamental truths and for roots in her own soil turned her attention to the eight-mode system of church chant and devoted a whole cycle of compositions, "The Music of the Octoechos" to it. She had an intuition, as she puts it, of "ancestral memories" in these melodies, and approached them as a composer freely, probing deep into their essential content, their contemplative character and their quality of internal spiritual concentrationll. 188 Among our contemporaries special mention must also be made of the composer Vasilije Mokranjac ( 1923-1984), who died in tragic circumstances and whose symphonic music undoubtedly earns him an outstanding place among Yugoslav composers. Both in his personal relationships and in his music Mokranjac was alert to the timeless forces of good and evil in man andin his surroundings. In his compositions we can trace an exciting process of creative development in a spiritually rich personality conscious of eterna-1 values. In the course of his spiritual quest Mokranjac came to know the powerful effect of monodic singing and was deeply impressed by the beauty of recently deciphered Serbian melodies. He sought in them not a link with the past, and ancestral tradition, but direct, timeless contact between man, God his creator and the universe. By introducing certain characteristic motifs of the old chant into his symphonic music he conveys certain spiritual insights which gradually came tobe an integral part of his personality. Although he chose to use traditional melodies, Mokranjac is not in a narrow sense anational composer. Especially in his last works he deals with universal cravings and depicts man's emotional and intellectual crucifixion at the hands of the world in which he lives. In his last composition, for solo clarinet, Mokranjac seems tobe saying farewell, already resolved to take his own short cut to eternity. The work of Vasilije Mokranjac, which now awaits appraisal, is a new and unparallelled phenomenon in Serbian music. On the basis of what has here been said it is clear that the past has made two kinds of contribution to the aesthetics of Serbian music: a) The first is the still living oral tradition of Church chant, which is part of everyday liturgical practice in monasteries and churches. This chant lies at the heart of Serbian musical compositions in the national-romantic style of the period from the mid 19th to the mid 20th century. b) The second is the approach adopted by certain of our contemporaries, who look for ancestral tradition in sacred melodies or - in the single instance so far of Vasilije Mokranjac - through the search for universal values discover the highly expressive qualities and profound significance of medieval monodic chant. Footnotes 1) Cf. Dimitrije Stefanovic, Old Serbian Music, examples of 15th century chant, Institute of Musicology, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, vol. 15/I, Belgrade 1975; Danica Petrovic, Octoechos in the Musical Tradition of Southern Slavs, Institute of Musicology, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, vol. 16/I, II, Belgrade 1982. 2) Cf. Danica Petrovic, Srpsko pojanje u pisanom i usmenom predanju ( The Oral and Written Tradition of Serbian Chant), Nau~ni sastanak slavista u Vukove dane, 14, Beograd 1985, pp. 257-265. 3) Dimitrije Stefanovic, ibidem. 4) Cf. Anne E. Pennington, Stefan the Serb in Moldavian Manuscripts, in: Music in Medieval Moldavia, Bucharest 1985, pp. 186-199; Dimitrije Stefanovic, The Works of Stefan the Serbin Byzantine Music Manuscripts, Muzikoloski zbornik, XIV, Ljubljana 1978, pp. 13-18. 5) Cf. Danica Petrovic, The Importance of the Chilandari Music Manuscripts for the 189 ----- - - --- - ------- -- - -History of Serbian Church Music, Musica Antiqua Europae 0rientalis, VI, Bydgoszcz 1982, pp. 223-263. 6) Cf. Dimitrije Stefanovic, Stihire srbima svetiteljima (Stichera in Honour of the Serbian Saints, transcriptions from Chilandari MSS), 0 Srbljaku, Beograd 1970, PP• 459-472; Danica Petrovic, Music for some Serbian Saints in Manuscripts Preserved in Roumania, XIV International Congress of Byzantine Studies - Bucharest 1971, vol. III, Bucharest 1976, pp. 557-564; Eadem, Hymns in Honour of Serbian Saints in Music Manuscripts of the Monastery of Chilandar and in Printed Editions, Studies in Eastern Chant, vol. IV, London 1978 1 pp. 134-139. 7) Cf. Dimitrije Stefanovic, Izgoreli rukopis br. 93 Beogradske narodne biblioteke, Bibliotekar, XIII, 5, Beograd 1961, pp. 381-382. 8) Cf. Dejan Medakovic, Srpska umetnost u XVIII veku, Beograd 1980; Dinko Davidov, Srpska grafika XVIII veka, Novi Sad 1978; Milorad Pavic, Istorija srpske knjizevnosti baroknog doba, Beograd 1970; Vojislav Matic, Arhitektura fruskogorskih manastrira, Novi Sad 1984. 9) Cf. Danica Petrovic, Le Chant Populaire Sacre et ses Investigateurs, La Musique Serbe a Travers les Siecles, Belgrade 1973, pp. 275-292; Rudolf Flotzinger, Der Musikunterricht des Kornelije Stankovic in Wien um 1850, in: Kornelije Stankovic and His Time, Scientific Assemblies, book XXIV, Department of Fine Artsand Music, book 1, Belgrade 1985, pp. 41-52. 10) Cf. Danica Petrovic, The Church Chant of Sremski Karlovci and the Work of Kornelije Stankovic, in: Kornelije Stankovic and His Time, Scientific Assemblies of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, book XXIV, Department of Fine Artsand Music, book 1, Belgrade 1985, pp. 137-146. 11) Melita Blagojevic, Pitanje muzickog nacionalizma i delo Ljubice Marie, Zvuk, 1, Sarajevo 1979, pp. 25-30. 190 

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Aspects of the Continuity of Serbian Chant

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