Talk:Znamenny chant

Article name

The most common Anglicized term for this is "Znamenny chant". The article ought to be renamed. TCC (talk) (contribs) 05:06, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

Quality

While sticking with the Old Believer minority tradition, the viewpoint of the article effectively ignores the history of Znamenny chants during the period from the end of the 17th century to the present in which they were copied and printed in staff notation, as well as their continuing usage after the Old Believer schism in Russian mainstream Orthodoxy, within which these chants have most often been sung in harmony.

The few remarks regarding the musical qualities of this chant are inaccurate or superficial. There is confusion in other details also. For instance: "Because Znamenny Chant requires a specific manner of performance, the chant books contain several instructions as to dynamics and tempo." In reality, of course, no music requires a specific manner of performance, even if the musical culture around may suggest such a manner. More than that, chant books of Znamenny Chant just do not contain any instructions whatsoever as to dynamics and tempo. Old Russian neumatic primers do contain such (often obscure) instructions, suggesting certain formalistic styles of articulation for some neumatic characters or passages, but that is a different story.

References are either missing or irrelevant. Not even are commonly available printed sources of Znamenny chant cited.

Зинон (talk) 16:22, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

I do not agree, because there can be no doubt that there is no musical notation in the world which is detailed enough to fix the "manner of singing". I mean it is a commonplace that behind each written transmission there has always been an oral tradition and without it it can hardly be understood. The circumstance that there might be different manners and that certain schools do not agree among each other, does not change anything about this simple or even banal fact.

The main problem of this article is that it is ahistorical, because there are not only different manners in the synchronic (the different opinions between contemporary singers with respect to their schools), but as well in the diachronic sense, since znamenny notation is not just a synonyme for hook or kryuki notation (as it is now said in the article). It existed well before this late stage of znamenny chant, when a more detailed notation was used to specify the intervals of the melody. Znammeny refers simply to the znamennaya notatsya, which just means "sign notation", and is commonly translated in English literature as "sematic notation". Its earliest forms can be already found as additions on some pages of unnotated manuscripts dating back to the 11th century, next to earlier forms like theta or fita notation which just used one sign (either the Greek letter θ called "theta" or in Slavonic "fita" or the neume oxeia / or double oxeia //) over a certain syllable where a longer melisma was expected. This notation obviously developed parallel to Old Byzantine notation like Chartres or Coislin notation in Slavic chant books between the 11th and the 13th centuries without becoming more specific about the intervals like Middle Byzantine notation used since the 13th century. It basically means it could never be understood over the centuries without an oral instruction by an experienced singer or master until the 17th century, when kryuki notation was used, but it has not changed over the centuries. With respect to Southern Slavonic chant manuscripts written in the Balkans one should also mention that almost no manuscript with an Old Church Slavonic redaction of the Greek hymns survived which has any musical notation. In Russian libraries, we have fully notated manuscripts between the 12th and the 16th centuries whose notation must be called znamennaya notation in order to make a difference from hook notation. It means that znamennaya chant refers to a very broad pool of different local traditions between Scandinavia, the Black Sea and the Balkans, and only a very few were administrated by the Russian Patriarchate! The chant of the Russian Patriarchate must rather be called demestvenny chant and referred to the demestnik (a corrupted form of the Greek title domestikos), which referred to specialised singers educated at the Patriarchate.

Since this Patriarchate went through many reforms which were not widely accepted by manifold communities in the very huge territories between Russian, Siberia and the Black Sea, and definitely not by Old Believers, I do agree with you that the knowledge to understand znamennaya notation properly mainly remained with the Old Believers, because they refused the transcription into staff notation (including Kievan staff notation) which was the effect of certain patriarchal reforms. Therefore it is not very plausible to call any neume notation (kryuki, or its earlier znamennaya forms used until the 17th century) as the "one of the Russian Patriarchate", because the neumes were actually the apple of discord, where the Patriarchate did fail. It also threatened and neglected other local traditions, like Georgian church music which had its own notation, before it was saved by the transcription into modern staff notation by the end of the 19th century, for instance.

In order to summarise what needs to be done with this article, is to quote the manifold sources which had recently been made available by Russian libraries and archives, and to describe their differences (concerning the organisation of different types of chant books, their notation and when it was used and not used). Hook notation could be also described in an own article and it should also be roughly explained how it can be read. --Platonykiss (talk) 10:23, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

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