Byzantine Music is the music of the Byzantine Empire, with its beginnings around the 4th century AD. The ecclesiastical forms of Byzantine music are the best-known forms today. It consisted of songs and hymns composed to Greek texts. Its characteristics are the monophonic performance, the rich expressiveness, the lyrical connection with speech, the gestures and the exclusion of the instruments. Byzantine Music differs from European medieval music, because it serves the needs of dressing words with music, while the European tradition is dominated by music dressed with words.
Byzantine Music, drawing from the emotional atmosphere of archaic oriental poetry, is modal and entirely dependent on the Ancient Greek concept of harmonics. Pythagoras was the first to connect music with mathematics and innovated by creating musical "sounds" and scales, which are the basis of the octoechos, the center of Byzantine music theory.
Byzantine hymnography highlights in the most melodic way the spiritual and mystical character of the chants. The principles that govern the language and rhythm, the ingenuity of the lyrics, the various forms of speech and calligraphy, the rich symbolism of the Byzantine Chant demonstrate the depth not only of the faith, but also of the lyricism and expressiveness of its creators. Byzantine Melodists theologize musically and chant theologically - they believe in the angelic transmission of inspiration.
The first famous hymn writers and melodists came from the monastic communities - Romanos the Melodist, the so-called Pindar of rhythmic poetry, Theodoros Studitis, Andreas Kritis, who was the first proponent of the poetic genre of the Canon.
In the 8th century, John of Damascus formed a new system to facilitate the performance and learning of music. Modifications to the Damascene system continued in the 17th century with John of Trapezounta Protopsalt of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, Peter Lampadarios the Peloponnesian, who was one of the leading representatives of the post-Byzantine tradition, student of Georgios from Crete, who taught in Constantinople, Chios and Cydonia and Manuel Byzantios, who was a student of James the Protopsalt and Georgios from Crete, who was distinguished for his serious ecclesiastical style.
Chrysanthos from Madytos, Grigorios Levitis and Chourmouzios the Archivist were the ones who did the necessary reform of the notation of Greek liturgical music in 1814, borrowing elements from European music, which was much simpler. Their purpose was to simplify the Byzantine musical symbols, which, from the beginning of the 19th century, had become too complex and technical. At the same time, there are significant contributions in the study of the music and theological theory of the art of chanting.
The "music of the angels" as Greek author Alexandros Papadiamantis used to say, links ancient music to todays, as it incorporates elements of ancient Greek music and bequeaths them to folk music, such as rebetiko.
"The rebetiko song is built on these rhythms, whose melodic line clearly observes the effect or better the extension of the Byzantine Chant.... Everything reveals the source, which is none other than the unostentatious and austere ecclesiastical hymn.” Manos Hadjidakis
Byzantine Music was recently included in UNESCO’s Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity as a living art that has existed for more than 2000 years.
