Aural Architecture in Byzantium: Music, Acoustics, and Ritual

Bissera Pentcheva, Bissera Pentcheva

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351786881
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'art antique

Emerging from the challenge to reconstruct sonic and spatial experiences of the deep past, this multidisciplinary collection of ten essays explores the intersection of liturgy, acoustics, and art in the churches of Constantinople, Jerusalem, Rome and Armenia, and reflects on the role digital technology can play in re-creating aspects of the sensually rich performance of the divine word. Engaging the material fabric of the buildings in relationship to the liturgical ritual, the book studies the structure of the rite, revealing the important role chant plays in it, and confronts both the acoustics of the physical spaces and the hermeneutic system of reception of the religious services. By then drawing on audio software modelling tools in order to reproduce some of the visual and aural aspects of these multi-sensory public rituals, it inaugurates a synthetic approach to the study of the premodern sacred space, which bridges humanities with exact sciences. The result is a rich contribution to the growing discipline of sound studies and an innovative convergence of the medieval and the digital.

1 Aural architecture in Jerusalem, Rome, Constantinople, and Alexandria

Peter Jeffery

As the church emerged from persecution during the fourth century, two models of Chris tian community developed, each with its own shape of ritual: one type was formed in the great cities of the Roman Empire, the other in the monastic communities that rejected civil life. Subsequent “Christian history unfolds in an antithesis between the Empire and the Desert.”¹ The model urban community was the one in Jerusalem, Christianity’s holy city, whose ceremonies were widely imitated in much of the Christian world. But comparable urban rites emerged in the other great cities of the empire, different in both content and structure. Besides Jerusalem, we are best informed about the rites of Rome and Constantinople. In each of these three metropoleis, the known history of ritual life largely begins with architectural structures built by Emperor Constantine the Great (r. 324–37) or members of his family. Thus, the worship life of the three cities had something in common during the fourth century. By the fifth century, however, regional differences had already emerged. As we move to the eighth century and later, we can see the customs of each urban center developing in independent directions. Alexandria, which had no Constantinian buildings, offers a kind of parallel control, for here too we can observe gradual movement away from a shared late antique Greco-Roman culture. This essay explores this intensification of difference by tracing the interrelations among music, movable liturgical furnishings, and architectural form.

Jerusalem

In Jerusalem, the cult began with the recovery of the tomb of Jesus. Local tradition held that this had been covered over by the Temple of Aphrodite built under Emperor Hadrian after the Second Jewish War (135 CE), in a deliberate attempt to render it inaccessible. It was at just this time that all Jews were expelled from the city, and efforts were made to obliterate the memory of its history as a religious capital. But the Temple of Aphrodite may, instead, have had the opposite effect of marking the location of the site and thus preserving its significance. According to Eusebius, at any rate, the workers Constantine ordered to dig up the tomb had no trouble identifying what they were looking for: it emerged from the darkness into the light like an image of the savior returning to life.² Around it, Constantine built a complex of buildings: the rotunda of the Anastasis (Resurrection) surrounding the tomb itself, an open-air courtyard that incorporated the rock of Golgotha or Calvary, and a basilica known as the Martyrion or Martyrium.³ Today, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands on the site of the Constantinian Anastasis.

As for the cultic practices that went on in these buildings, we first learn about them from a unique travelogue, written in the late fourth century.⁴ This work never circulated widely; we have only two incomplete manuscripts of it, both discovered in modern times,⁵ along with the indirect witness of a few medieval readers who had access to now-lost manuscripts. Thus, we lack the original title of the work, as well as its beginning and ending, and several sections in between. Only fairly recently have we come to agreement that the author’s name was probably Egeria. Though she traveled with a group that is not described in the extant text, she seems to have been a celibate monastic, for she mentions no husband or family and clearly states that her record is intended for the “sisters” of her community back home. Indeed, her text is written in a peculiar dialect that reads like Latin turning into Spanish, and has therefore attracted much attention from Romance philologists.⁶ It is just the sort of idiolect we might expect in a woman of that time, who would have had fewer educational opportunities than an upper-class man of her generation. This, in turn, tends to confirm that her travelogue is the most substantial Early Christian text known to have been authored by a woman.

Egeria gave an account of an entire liturgical year in Jerusalem, which must reflect the period from 381 to 384 CE.⁷ As she tells it, on every day that commemorated an event in the life of Christ, the entire community went out to celebrate in the place where the event (according to local belief) had actually occurred. For example, on January 6, the birth of Jesus was celebrated at Bethlehem; on the last Saturday in Lent, the raising of Lazarus was celebrated in Bethany. Most events were commemorated at points within the city itself. At every location, the celebration included Bible readings about the original occurrence and the singing of psalms that were exegetically associated with it—a practice that Egeria greatly appreciated, though it seems to have been new to her:

And what I admire and value most is that all the hymns and antiphons and readings they have, and all the prayers the bishop says, are always relevant to the day which is being observed and to the place in which they are used. They never fail to be appropriate.⁸

The readings and psalms that Egeria heard were collected into a liturgical book that survives only in Armenian translation, made at a time when the church in Armenia adopted the Jerusalem liturgy as its own. The oldest manuscript of this Armenian lectionary seems to translate a lost Greek original that must have been compiled between 417 and 438–39, that is, about two generations after Egeria’s visit.⁹ Its provisions are nevertheless very consistent with what Egeria related.¹⁰

The later development of the Jerusalem rite can be recovered from manuscripts in the Georgian language, translations of lost Greek books from about the eighth century.¹¹ With the passage of time and under the pressures of Islamic rule, the Greek community in Jerusalem eventually adopted the Byzantine rite. As a result, very few Greek manuscripts of the original hagiopolite rite have been preserved. Until recently only one Greek manuscript of the Jerusalem rite was known, containing just Holy Week and Easter Week and dating from the year 1122.¹² A few others have turned up among the new finds at the Monastery of St. Catherine’s on Mount Sinai, which are just beginning to be investigated.¹³

Of all the rites described by Egeria, the most important has left a number of descendants; this is the Resurrection vigil that was celebrated every Sunday morning at the tomb of Jesus, “as if it was Easter.”¹⁴ According to Egeria, three psalms were sung, each followed by a prayer; then the bishop went into the tomb, where a light burned continually, and read a Gospel account of the Resurrection. The most dramatic survival of this is the rite of the Holy Fire, still celebrated every Easter.¹⁵

More important for music history was the evolution of the weekly celebration that took place every Sunday morning. The bishop’s reading of the Resurrection account gradually solidified into a practice of reciting all four Gospels in regular succession, one per week. But since most Gospels preserve more than one narrative of the Resurrection, by the sixth century each Gospel account was split in half, producing an eight-week cycle of Resurrection readings for orthros. It was during this period that we find the first evidence of the eight musical modes (octoechos), one for each week of the cycle.¹⁶ Tenth-century Georgian manuscripts, thought to preserve the eighth-century state of the liturgy, give us lists of the three psalms arranged according to each musical mode.¹⁷ The most developed form is preserved in the Byzantine rite, where there is now a sequence of eleven readings from the four Gospels, for which there is a set of eleven hymns or troparia heothina sung at orthros; this new hymnody has been attributed to Emperor Leo VI (866–912).¹⁸

Byzantine liturgical books still prescribe two of Egeria’s three psalms at the Sunday morning vigil, though they are now reduced to one or two verses: for the first, there are eight possible texts, one for each mode.¹⁹ For the second, often the only one performed today, the text is the last verse of the book of Psalms: “Let everything that breathes praise the Lord” (Psalm 150:6).²⁰

Rome

Chronologically, the next city for which we have evidence is Rome. There, on about half the days of the year, the pope celebrated Mass at one of the city’s churches. The selected church, where a stage of the liturgy would be celebrated, was known as the statio, a word that had a long association with fasting,²¹ but also came to mean a stopping ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Aural architecture in Jerusalem, Rome, Constantinople, and Alexandria
• 2 The great outdoors: liturgical encounters with the early medieval Armenian church
• 3 Byzantine chant notation: written documents in an aural tradition
• 4 Understanding liturgy: the Byzantine liturgical commentaries
• 5 Christ’s all-seeing eye in the dome
• 6 Transfigured: mosaic and liturgy at Nea Moni
• 7 We who musically represent the cherubim
• 8 Spatiality, embodiment, and agency in ekphraseis of church buildings
• 9 Acoustics of Hagia Sophia: a scientific approach to the humanities and sacred space
• 10 Live auralization of Cappella Romana at the Bing Concert Hall, Stanford University
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index