Byzantium was founded around 300 A.D in today's Istanbul. Its strategic place and importance made this empire the cradle of the human civilization.
The first choir music was created there. And even the Byzantine notations. Byzantine music during the time of Emperor Constantine had reached its highest moment which even today is regarded as the highest point of the music history! The father of the classical music has inclinations to be forgotten. We must gather together and keep it alive.
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Once you know Byzantine music.... You know God and love
Once you hear it ...You face love you hear the voice of God
Byzantine music, the music of the Byzantine Empire composed to Greek texts as ceremonial, festival, or church music.
Long thought to be only a further development of ancient Greek music, Byzantine music is now regarded as an independent musical culture, with elements derived from Syrian and Hebrew as well as Greek sources. Its beginnings are dated by some scholars to the 4th cent., after the founding of the Eastern Empire by Constantine I.
Although two Greek instruments, the kithara and the aulos, were used, the principal instrument of Byzantium was the organ. No purely instrumental music is extant, however, and the exact nature of the instrumental accompaniment of vocal music is not certain. The eight Byzantine echoi (singular echos) correspond roughly to the eight modes of plainsong, but they were groups of melodies made of certain definite formulas. The Byzantine music that survives is all sacred, with the exception of some acclamations for the emperor. Byzantine chant was monodic, in free rhythm, and often attempted to depict melodically the meaning of the words. The language was Greek.
The Byzantine hymn, of which there were three types, was the greatest contribution of this culture. The troparion, a hymn, was inserted between the verses of the Psalms, and eventually the troparia overshadowed the Psalms. The origin of the kontakion, a hymn important in the 6th and 9th cent., is ascribed to Romanus, active during the reign of Anastasius I; it consisted of 18 or 24 strophes all in similar meter, with a contrasting introductory strophe. The subject matter was usually biblical. Often an acrostic is formed by the first letter of each stanza.
The time of Romanus and of Sergius (fl. early 7th cent.) is called the golden age of Byzantine music. In the 8th cent. the outstanding hymn writers were St. John of Damascus and Cosmas of Jerusalem. The chief type of hymn was the kanon, a series of odes, theoretically nine but often only eight in number, referring to the nine canticles of the Old and New Testaments. Until the 9th cent., poet and composer were always one; later, hymns were set to already existing melodies. With the codification of the Greek liturgy in the 11th cent. came a general decline in hymnody. Musical activity ceased with the fall of Constantinople (1453). Russian chant, the chant of the modern Greek Orthodox Church, and to a small extent Gregorian chant all owe something to Byzantine chant.Byzantine notation was originally only a system of ekphonetic symbols serving to remind a singer of a melody he already knew. Neumes derived from the ekphonetic notation were in use from c.950 until 1200. From 1110 to 1450 a staffless notation was in use that indicated the echos, starting note, and subsequent intervals of a melody. It is largely decipherable today. Signs were added to it in the centuries that followed. The notation used in the Greek Church today was devised in the 19th cent. by Chrysanthus, a Greek archimandrite, because of the confusion in deciphering the manuscripts of early Byzantine music. The term Byzantine music is commonly associated with what should more correctly be termed the medieval sacred chant of Christian Churches following the Orthodox rite. The identification of "Byzantine music" with "eastern Christian liturgical chant" is a misconception due to historical cultural reasons. Its main cause is the leading role of the Church as bearer of learning and official culture in the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium), a phenomenon that was not always that extreme but that was exacerbated towards the end of the empire's reign (14th century onwards) as great secular scholars migrated away from a declining Constantinople to rising western cities, bringing with them much of the learning that would spur the development of the European Renaissance. The shrinking of Greek-speaking official culture around a church nucleus was even more accentuated by political force when the official culture of the court changed after the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire on May 29, 1453