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Byzantine Music and its Place in the Liturgy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Egon Wellesz
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Extract

Twenty-Two years ago I had the privilege of talking to the Royal Musical Association about Byzantine music. At that time, Professor Tillyard and I had succeeded in transcribing some Byzantine hymns, after spending long years in trying to solve the riddle of their musical notation. I soon realised that Byzantine liturgical music was not inferior to plainsong and that it was well worth pursuing these studies more widely in order to compare the treasury of Byzantine hymns—hidden in a large number of manuscripts dating from the ninth to the fifteenth century—with the melodies of the Western Church.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 81 , 1954 , pp. 13 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 1954

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References

1 Issued in Monum. Mus. Byz., Amer. Ser. 1 (Copenhagen, 1947).Google Scholar

2 Examples 1, 2, 3 and 5 are recorded in Vol. II of the History of Music in Sound, H.M.V., on sides 1 and 2, and transcribed in the Handbook to the volume pp. 11–14.Google Scholar

3 Record from the Phonothèque Nationale in Paris.Google Scholar

4 See Wellesz, E., A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography, Oxford 1949. pp. 306–8.Google Scholar

5 The editors of Monumenta Musicas Byzantinae have published six volumes of Byzantine melodies in the series ‘Transcripta’: two more will follow in 1955–56.Google Scholar

6 ‘Descriptions d'orgues’, etc. 1930.Google Scholar