I would like to announce another important publication which, unfortunately, follows a symposium with 5 years delay!
It is already the second conference dedicated to the topic (see the proceedings of 2005 at the publisher Peeters and at Google Books), and Christian Troelsgård wrote in the foreword about these two symposia:
The question of the relationship between the actual musical traditions of the Greek Church of today and the melodies contained in the medieval manuscripts with Byzantine neumatic notation, has very often been raised, and a qualified answer can only be given through a precise study of the transmission and transformations of the melodies and the whole musical heritage during the intermediate centuries. At the 2005 symposium, more general studies of the development of Byzantine chant repertoires and a number of case studies spanning the 14th through the 19th centuries were presented. In this volume, the study of the development of Byzantine-Greek Church music is supplemented with a handful of papers on the development of yet other genres, and with a focus on the education of cantors (psaltai). It is precisely the role of the master cantors, the so-called maïstores, their teachings, treatises, innovations and their relations with the pupils, that is treated in a number of papers in the present volume. As has been learned from these symposia, the evolution of the didactic tradition appears to be one of the key points for understanding phenomena of transmission and development in Byzantine chant in general.
Summary:
What is the relation between the Greek ecclesiastical chant traditions of today and Byzantine chant? That question can only be answered through a meticulous study of the transmission and transformation of both the melodies, the genres, and the whole musical culture of Late Byzantium and the subsequent centuries.
This book presents a handful of studies focussing on both the development of new musical styles, such as the ornamented Kalofonia ('Beautiful sound'), and on the education of the cantors, the psaltai. The role of the master cantors, the maïstores, their teachings, treatises, traditions, innovations, compositions, and the various modes of interpretation (exegesis) are among the topics covered by this collection of papers, written by specialist scholars of Byzantine chant history.
Table of Contents
See pdf at the publishers page: http://www.peeters-leuven.be/toc/9789042927483.pdf
Achilleas Chaldaiakis' contribution about the Eunuch Protopsaltis Philanthropinos
Here with facsimiles in colour: http://www.academia.edu/3308858/
Emmanouil Giannopoulos' contribution about chant treatises in 17th- and 18th-century manuscripts
Please visit his homepage: http://users.auth.gr/mangian/Emm.%20Giannopoulos,%20Hernen%202008.pdf
Review
Here a quotation:
These are the second proceedings on the same topic, which includes the bridge between Byzantine chant and the living traditions of Orthodox chant, a bone of contention between “Occidental” and “Greek” scholars. And unlike the first time, its focus is on the education of the cantor (1–122) and on more specific studies of chant (123-316), indeed with two exceptions mainly of the sticheraric genre (the sticherarion was the first notated chant book created since the end of the 10th century by the reformers of the Studiu Monastery). [...]
The latter (“the new embellishment of the sticherarion”, gr. καινοφανής καλλωπισμός) is the topic of Flora Kritikou’s philological study of 4 layers (215–251): 14th-century sticheraria, 15th- and 16th-century sticheraria ascribed to Manuel Chrysaphes (GR-AOi 950, 954), 17th-century sticheraria ascribed to Georgios Raidestinos I (GR-AOka 220), and those ascribed to his pupil Panagiotes the New Chrysaphes (ET-MSsc gr. 1238–1239). Unlike Wolfram and Wanek her study is less focussed on a comparison of individual compositions than a study of how the great signs had been transcribed. The intention to keep the old method to do the thesis of the sticheraric melos created a new combination of hypostaseis which cannot be found in the earlier manuscripts. During the process of 200 years, these very signs became “innovative composers”. One might miss a comparison with the transcription of the old sticherarion by Chourmouzios whose exegeseis were so long, that abridgements had to be invented between Petros Peloponnesios and Konstantinos Pringos (another 200 years). [...]
The proceedings of the symposium in 2008 are a striking document, how experts of Byzantine chant have finally proceeded with scruples and with an increasing questioning of historiographical constructions referred to those periods, which connect Byzantine traditions with the living ones of Orthodox chant. [...] The vivid exchanges between various traditions of religious chant and across the borders of different religions, as they do still exist within the traditional communities around Galata and other districts of Istanbul are definitely one source of inspiration. A more profound understanding of the Byzantine heritage presumes, that both sides put away cut and dried opinions which had far too often been an obstacle within the study of “post-Byzantine chant”, insofar as they did not simply prevent to study it at all.
