Bylina

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Terminology#

The word derives from the past tense of the verb “to be” () and implies “something that was”. The term most likely originated from scholars of Russian folklore (folklorists); in 1839, Ivan Sakharov, a Russian folklorist, published an anthology of Russian folklore, a section of which he titled “Byliny of the Russian People”, causing the popularization of the term. Later scholars believe that Sakharov misunderstood the word in the opening of The Tale of Igor’s Campaign as “an ancient poem.” The folk singers of called their songs stariny (, ; ) or (), meaning “stories of old” (). In the 18th and early 19th centuries, scholars and popular writers typically referred to as , since it “applied to any folk narrative, whether in prose or in verse”. At this point, were not classified into specific groups. In the second half of the 19th century, Vsevolod Miller classified into three groups which are now commonly accepted: fairy tales, tales of everyday life, and animal tales. The acceptance of the term in the mid-19th century for folk epics was due to increasing awareness of the differences between them and the fairy tales. According to Orest Miller: “The connects the primal mythical base common to all folklore genres, with historical places and events. The does not have such connections.”

Byzantine music

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Imperial age#

The tradition of eastern liturgical chant, encompassing the Greek-speaking world, developed even before the establishment of the new Roman capital, Constantinople, in 330 until its fall in 1453. Byzantine music was influenced by Hellenistic music traditions, classic Greek music as well as religious music traditions of Syriac and Hebrew cultures. The Byzantine system of octoechos, in which melodies were classified into eight modes, is specifically thought to have been exported from Syria, where it was known in the 6th century, before its legendary creation by Arab monk John of Damascus of the Umayyad Caliphate. The term Byzantine music is sometimes associated with the medieval sacred chant of Christian Churches following the Constantinopolitan Rite. There is also an identification of “Byzantine music” with “Eastern Christian liturgical chant”, which is due to certain monastic reforms, such as the Octoechos reform of the Quinisext Council (692) and the later reforms of the Stoudios Monastery under its abbots Sabas and Theodore. The triodion created during the reform of Theodore was also soon translated into Slavonic, which required also the adaption of melodic models to the prosody of the language. Later, after the Patriarchate and Court had returned to Constantinople in 1261, the former cathedral rite was not continued, but replaced by a mixed rite, which used the Byzantine Round notation to integrate the former notations of the former chant books (Papadike). This notation had developed within the book sticherarion created by the Stoudios Monastery, but it was used for the books of the cathedral rites written in a period after the fourth crusade, when the cathedral rite was already abandoned at Constantinople. It is being discussed that in the Narthex of the Hagia Sophia an organ was placed for use in secular processions of the Emperor’s entourage.

BY on Music Theory Print

Bylina

Terminology#

Byzantine music

Imperial age#