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Participation vs. nostalgia

I watched a movie in my Greek class a few weeks ago called Rembetiko. It’s an excellent film on several levels; it uses the form of Greek music referred to in the title (basically Greek blues, but it’s a lot more than that) as a way of dramatizing what is essentially the national mourning of the Greeks following the 1922 disaster in Smyrna and the population exchange with Turkey. What pervades Rembetiko is a sense of the music being a way that people are trying to find and keep their dignity under what are absolutely tragic circumstances. Here’s a sample of the music:

Um, yeah, so about the Edward James Olmos lookalike with the very intimidating fake moustache… well, never mind that now.

One of the really interesting things about the film is how it presents the venue of the music changing over the years and how people are presented as engaging with the songs. In the first extended musical scene after the Asia Minor tragedy, we see the band right in the middle of the audience, and the people reacting to the music in ways that show it is very much a way of dealing with a shared pain and sense of mourning. The members of the audience weep, they dance, they drink, they slash their wrists, they punch things until their hands bleed — the music means, and functions as, a kind of catharsis. It isn’t pretty, but it’s real and unvarnished, and it matches closely with songs that are about prostitution and drugs and in general about the seamy side of the life they are all sharing.

As time goes on, the band becomes a little more separated from their audience. The music is still on the darker side (the song in the above clip is about, and is being performed at, a hash bar), but it is becoming more formalized, and it is more self-consciously “performed” and “listened to”. There’s a scene where a singer tells her manager that she can’t sing comfortably even as close to the audience as you see in the clip; she’s got to be farther away still. The music is starting to become “entertainment”.

At the end of the movie, in the late 1950s, a tribute concert is staged for a particular singer, and this is where the transformation is complete — the singer and the band are on a stage in front of rows of seating. However, it isn’t just the performers who have become self-conscious — now the audience is getting into the act. Rather than dancing or drinking or smoking or in general using the music as an outlet for pain, now the audience is singing along cheerfully and clapping to the exact same songs they were literally shedding blood and tears for thirty years ago. The music no longer engages memories of a shared tragic past — the music engages memories of the music itself. Really, what it has become is an exercise in nostalgia. The music no longer means what it used to mean — now the singers and audience members are remembering what the music meant. As such, I would argue that, despite a communal action more closely coordinate with the onstage action (i. e., singing along and clapping), they are actually not participating so much as they are remembering the time when they used to fully participate in a way that engaged what the music means.

Which brings me to a particular experience I had during a service recently (for various reasons, I do not wish to identify which service or the precise time when it occurred).

As of late, one of my colleagues at the kliros has taken to singing a particular hymn in a language other than English (for the same aforementioned reasons, I’d rather not get any more specific than that). This is something that this particular cantor used to do back in the early days of All Saints; for reasons I won’t go into, he stopped this practice for awhile, but he has reintroduced it when he’s singing. I don’t have a problem with it; a rather tight leash has been put on me when it comes to liturgical languages, and I abide by the restrictions that have been expressed to me, but this gentleman is able to do it and get away with it because, well, he can, and nobody really wants to fight with him.

(For the record, I’d love to do more than we do with the various liturgical languages, but the problems there are twofold: 1) I try to conceive of and sing services as a musical whole; I really think that a hodgepodge of different musical styles that were never intended to be sung in the same service does neither the liturgy, nor the music, nor the congregation any justice. I believe that services are intended to be “of a piece”. 2) It’s one thing for me to say, “Oh, sure, we’ll do that particular hymn in Greek/Slavonic/Romanian/Arabic/Syriac/Finnish/Estonian/whatever.” It’s something else entirely for many of my choristers, to say nothing of the congregation, many of whom maybe had a bit of Spanish in high school years ago. It’s just a different comfort level for such things altogether, illustrated by the confusion a few years ago when some people thought that in our acclamation for the bishop — “Eis polla eti, Despota” — we were singing about Hezbollah.)

Well, at the point in this service where this particular hymn is sung, my cantorial counterpart asked me, “Do you want me to sing it?” I indicated that yes, I did, which was overheard by somebody else in the congregation, another founding member of the parish. This prompted this person to run over to the kliros and join in for just this particular hymn sung in this particular language. Once the hymn had concluded, the drop-in psaltis clasped their hands, sighed “Beautiful,” clapped my colleague on the back, thanked me for letting them stand there, and returned to their chair.

I am still trying to figure out exactly what happened and why. I do not say that to be critical or condescending; what this person did is just not something that would ever occur to me to do, having sung in church for almost half of my life.

Perhaps, as in Rembetiko, what we’re talking about is “participation” manifesting itself as “nostalgia” (or should that be vice versa?). I rather got the sense of two people engaging the hymn as a way of remembering what All Saints was like 20+ years ago, when they met in a borrowed space and still had 300 people for Easter. I don’t relate to the giddy excitement about this particular person singing this particular hymn in this particular language, “just like we used to do years ago,” because I wasn’t there. I don’t, nor can I ever, have the emotional attachment that is in play there. I’ve been there all of seven years, which is the longest I’ve ever spent worshipping with the same congregation, but which pretty much makes the “But we always used to do it this way” argument incomprehensible to me when I’m talking to people who helped start All Saints. I don’t know if that kind of nostalgia is a legitimate argument for a particular liturgical practice one way or the other; I just know I don’t share it, and I approach my own participation in the services looking through a very different set of lenses. What that means, however, is that when I hear “But we always used to do it this way” and try to answer it with “But the service book actually says this,” more often than not my interlocutors and I wind up talking past each other. Perhaps we can say that it is because I am trying to function according to how I understand particular things mean; others are functioning according to their memory of what things meant.

My only other thought is that my instinct is to want to resist nostalgia; there is an element of interaction with the past in our liturgical practice, yes, but as Orthodox liturgy is also eschatological we also interact with time yet to pass. To the extent that we interact with the past we do so with the shared Christian past — that is, Tradition. The other side of that is that I say that as somebody who has never been involved with the founding of a mission, so I fully concede that my perspective is exactly that — my perspective. That and $4 will you get you a soy latte at Starbucks.

I suppose that in a historically Orthodox country, this is a dynamic that would ultimately be self-regulating; here, it’s rather more complicated. My assumption is that in a relatively isolated community like ours, what we’re talking about probably will take two or three generations to work out.

Just a bit more about Orthodox Hoosiers and Friends of Music at All Saints

Published 31 January 2010 General , Media , music , The Orthodox Faith Leave a Comment
Tags: anonymous 4, chant camp, friends of music at all saints, χρόνος, καιρός, orthodox hoosiers, susan hellauer

I realize that there are a couple of brief items, probably most properly belonging to the category of chronos, that are buried in two blog posts that require a sense of kairos just to read them from start to finish. Thus, it seemed good to excerpt them here.

As I’ve noted, I’m working on setting up an alumni network for Orthodox Christians who have attended Indiana University. This is for a number of reasons, not least (but not only) because we anticipate that such a network would have an interest in supporting potential building efforts in the near future. There’s a Facebook group, a domain name has been registered, and I’m slowly but surely compiling a mailing list. What I don’t have is a budget for any of this — the parties thus far whom I have informed of this work (who were the ones who thought this would be a good idea in the first place) have said only, “Sounds good, keep us posted”; they have, unfortunately, not been in a position to say, “Sounds good, let us know how we can help.” If I had, say, 20-30 interested parties willing to pool ~$1,000 in startup costs for charter membership benefits to be determined later, that would speed things along considerably. Alternately, if I had fifteen people willing to pool those costs and fifteen people willing to contribute some time, that would also be extraordinarily helpful.
The chant workshop last weekend was a much bigger success than I could have dreamed, but because we weren’t charging admission, food and printing costs were quite a bit higher than what we had originally planned. As I said, we had a private donor at the outset, plus WEST’s support, and we’ve had some additional gifts that have been extremely helpful, but we had also hoped to end the weekend with some seed money for the next event, and we’re not there yet. To give people an idea, an upcoming one-day Gregorian chant workshop with Susan Hellauer of Anonymous 4 is charging $60 a head while advertising limited space. This was a weekend, and we neither charged nor turned anybody away. I am toying with the idea of setting up a booster organization specifically to support these kinds of things moving forward; Friends of Music at All Saints or some such. Again, if there are people interested in being a benefactor for charter membership benefits TBD, we can arrange something.

In any event, if either of these efforts (or both of them!) strike you as being the kind of thing you’d like to help support, please get in touch with me; I can be reached at rrbarret (AT) indiana.edu. Alternately, there’s always the PayPal button on the Tip Jar page, but there might be more efficient ways of doing things as well. Let’s talk.

Thanks!

On the difference between καιρός and χρόνος and building a church that makes the difference clear (Part II)

Published 30 January 2010 Academia , General , music , The Orthodox Faith 8 Comments
Tags: all saints bloomington, all saints orthodox church, american church architecture, american orthodox architecture, american orthodox music, american orthodoxy, byzantine chant, chant, church architecture, early music institute, ecclesiastical chant, hazards of church music, john michael boyer, liturgical architecture, liturgical music, medieval byzantine chant, militant americanist orthodoxy, modern byzantine architecture, music as iconography, orthodox architecture, orthodox architecture is bloody expensive, random acts of chant, sacred music, this american church life, we need more american saints

Organizing an event is a heck of a lot of work.

I had originally contacted John Boyer in late fall of 2008; I was looking around for Western notation transcriptions of Byzantine chant in Greek, and my friend Mark Powell said he was the guy with whom to inquire, and that I might also be interested in the curriculum he was developing for Byzantine notation. John was more than generous in providing very useful materials, and I figured, while I was corresponding with him and he was seeming friendly, I may as well ask what it would take to get him out to Bloomington for a workshop. This had been an idea I’d been trying to develop for a couple of years, since we were encouraged at PSALM in 2006 to try to put together local and regional events, but I’d never gotten more than a lukewarm response — “Who?” “Isn’t he too far away and too expensive?” etc. I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask him while I had his attention, however, so I did.

He quoted me a much more reasonable number than I was anticipating. I told him, right, let me check on a couple of things; I was able to convince a private donor to pay John’s fee and travel, Fr. Peter had no problem with it (particularly since it wasn’t being paid for by the parish), and I wrote back and said, let’s do it.

Well, then it took a year to make it work with everybody’s schedules. We decided on this last weekend back in August, and what I will say is that given a host of factors (not the least of which was the decision, made a month later, to bring out Andrew Gould the weekend before John’s visit) I would not have wanted any less time to get everything together. Even with five months’ advance planning, a significant chunk of my choir still couldn’t make the weekend work (although, in all fairness, one of them, Megan’s goddaughter Erin, was busy winning the Met auditions, so I guess that’s an acceptable excuse).

In October, the money from West European Studies happened; this really expanded the scope of what I had originally considered from maybe my choir and a couple of other interested parties to something that could be (well, had to be, given WEST’s terms) open to the public and conceived of as an educational outreach event. John and I finalized the schedule and the repertoire on 23 December; the Friday evening session would be the “lecture” of the series, intended to function as the academic side of the weekend, and then Saturday would be the all-day practical part. I set up a Facebook event and sent out press kits to 30 different churches, chairs, institute directors, community choral ensembles, and local news organs the first week of January, and was astounded at the responses that started rolling in. I heard from School of Music faculty; both an Early Music Institute and a Choral Conducting professor registered, and it came back to me that the Choral faculty member was even telling her entire doctoral seminar to come. I heard from a faculty member at University of Louisville presently teaching a seminar on early notation (although she ultimately decided she couldn’t make it); I heard from choir directors and priests in Indianapolis, Evansville, and Louisville; I heard from a Medieval Studies professor at Wabash College; I heard from local people in the community. By the time the registration deadline passed the week before, 45 people were registered; another ten confirmed over the course of the following week, and then still more showed up unannounced.

The last week before the workshop, the event planning was approaching a fulltime job; I had to make sure food got ordered and picked up, I had to track down CD shipments so we could have things to sell over the course of the weekend, I had to bug overworked Cappella Romana executive directors for scores (sorry to have been a nag, Mark, truly), I had to get registration materials printed and assembled, and I had to field phone calls from people who wanted to come but lived a couple of hours away and wanted to make sure it would really be worth their time. The last couple of days I wasn’t quite a one-man army; Megan, God bless her, helped with a lot of the last-minute errands and the putting together of the registration binders. I put together a couple of displays of Andrew’s concept sketch (pictured) so that workshop attendees could see it, at least trying to give a nod to the non-singer-friendliness of our space and indicating that we intend to do something about it.

On the other hand, once John actually got here, my job was significantly easier — I pretty much just got to sit back and enjoy the proceedings.

I must say it was worth it; all in all, throughout the course of the weekend, about 65 different people came. Not bad for an event centered around this obscure, gaudy Eastern repertoire that supposedly we Westerners can’t stand without the edges sanded down.

I picked John up at the airport last Thursday evening; his flight arrived at 10:30, and then between his checked luggage taking forever and my very smooth wrong turn leaving the airport, we didn’t get back to Bloomington until about midnight. Luckily, Megan had a wonderful meal and a good bottle of wine waiting for us when we got home (a Saveur recipe that turns lentils and sausages into a bowl of gold), and we three were up talking until around 2 in the morning.

In what would prove to be a pattern for the weekend, four hours later, it was necessary to be up and about. It was, as I told John, the “showpony” day; he was doing a radio interview for Harmonia in the morning (watch this space for details), a mini-lecture for WEST in the afternoon (no thanks to me; I had both the time and the place wrong, forcing us to rearrange our afternoon a bit), a coaching with Lucas, Megan and me on epistle cantillation, and then the first formal session of the workshop in the evening.

One thing that putting on such an event at All Saints did was push us to the absolute limits of what we’re able to do in our current space. John had a PowerPoint slide deck as part of his lecture; well, we’re a pretty low-tech parish on the whole, so I had to go out and hunt down a projector and a screen. WEST loaned us the projector by way of the Russian and East European Studies Institute; my old employers, the Archives of Traditional Music, were good enough to loan us the screen. Even so, it was difficult to figure out how to set up the presentation in our nave to maximize the size of the slides, minimize keystoning, and be within reach of our power outlets (even with extension cords). We managed, but I’d want to figure out how to do better next time.

We had made the decision to install a comprehensive sound system in the nave as the only real cost-effective solution to our acoustic woes for the time being; we gave the thumbs up to the order on 11 January, and the guys at Stansifer Radio turned it around as quickly as the possibly could, knowing that we hoped to be using it by 22 January, and they got it installed by Vespers on Wednesday, 20 January. John had also wanted to be able to plug his laptop into the sound system; I told Greg at Stansifer what I needed to do, and he told me, “Give me an hour to make you a cable.” An hour and twenty dollars later, I had exactly what I needed, and it worked beautifully.

In the end, where we needed to set up John’s presentation was nowhere near the condenser microphone installed for the homilist, so we still had to give him a handheld mic hooked up to Fr. Peter’s old amplifier so he wouldn’t kill his voice. (Why, you might ask, did we not plug the handheld into the nice sound system? Well, the mixer is back in a closet in the sanctuary, roughly 30 feet away from where John was standing. We had a long enough cable, but plugging it into the mixer produced no result. “Oh, right,” Fr. Peter said, stroking his chin. “I forgot — the long cable is dead.” Like I said — we’re kind of a low-tech community. Note to self: replace long cable before next such event.)

Nonetheless, John was a hit, a big one, and something that I heard from more than one person at the end of the session was, “You know, I was only going to come for tonight, but I need to rearrange my day tomorrow so I can come here.”

Following the lecture session, in lieu of a formal reception (which I’ll have to remember to set up for next time), a number of us tried to go to Finch’s for dinner, it being one of the nicer places in Bloomington. Alas, we got there just as the kitchen was closing, and so we relocated to Nick’s. It was a bit louder than we we might have liked otherwise, and they didn’t quite know how to make a Manhattan properly, but perhaps not an inappropriate venue, given that it was founded by a certain Νικόλαος Χρυσόμαλλος (Nick Hrisomalos).

It was a full house at Chez Barrett; besides John, our friend Max Murphy, my counterpart at Ss. Constantine and Elena in Indianapolis, was staying on our other futon for the night so that he wouldn’t have to commute. Once again, we found ourselves up until about two in the morning chatting, and needing to be up by about 6:30 to make sure our houseguests would be sufficiently plied with coffee and eggs, pick up the food for Saturday’s lunch (shout out to Eastland Plaza Jimmy John’s; three 30-piece party platters was a perfect amount of food for a very reasonable price, and they were gracious enough to have somebody there at 8:30am so I could pick it up, since All Saints is waaaaay far out of their delivery area), and get everything at the church set so that the 9am session could start on time.

Well, it didn’t quite. We might say that everybody was inspired enough by the previous evening to recalibrate their clocks to “Greek time,” and we didn’t get started until about 9:30am. Έτσι είναι η ζωή (that’s Greek for c’est la vie, which is itself French for “Life sucks, get a helmet”).

Without giving a blow-by-blow of the whole day, I’ll say that much of the day was dedicated to rehearsing the Divine Liturgy music, but there were a couple of theoretical points made that I’ll note. First, there was the issue of time, which John got at a few different ways. He has a principle, stated many times over the course of the weekend, that “If you think you’re not going fast enough, slow down.” Too often, he says, we just zip through the text like it doesn’t mean anything, which makes it not mean anything. This can be in chanting a hymn, reading the epistle, whatever. We treat hymns and readings like they’re just the next thing to get through so we can be that much closer to getting out the door, rather than adorning them with the beauty that a) they deserve and b) will make us want to be there and take part in the services as though they are gifts from God rather than as burdens to bear. So, again — if you think you’re not going fast enough, slow down.

Another way he stated this was to discuss the difference between χρόνος (chronos) and καιρός (kairos). The former is the world’s time; the latter is the Church’s time. This came up when he was talking about why some hymns are slow and melismatic, and even sometimes will revert to nonsense syllables — in the case of the latter, when this happens, the text has been stated thoroughly in a slow and melismatic fashion, and the hymn is now using “terirem” or some such to provide the opportunity to meditate on the text. Not only that, however; the whole point of the slow, melismatic style has a practical component — to cover a liturgical action, for example — but it also emphasizes the reality that in the liturgy, we are no longer in the world’s time (chronos) but on God’s time (kairos). I was reminded of what Met. Kallistos Ware says about the first time he was in an Orthodox church:

…I had no idea how long I had been inside. It might have been only twenty minutes, it might have been two hours; I could not say. I had been existing on a level at which clock-time was unimportant” (“Strange Yet Familiar: My Journey to the Orthodox Church” in The Inner Kingdom, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000, p. 2).

As he acknowledges in the same essay, this itself was a trope (albeit realized after the fact) of what the Kievan emissaries are reported to have said after their visit to Hagia Sophia: “We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth…”

Another thought came to mind during this discussion — what do we sing in the Cherubic Hymn? “Let us now lay aside all earthly cares.” What do most of us do with the Cherubic Hymn in our parishes? Sing a setting short and fast enough so that we repeat it three times, because we worry that people will get bored otherwise. Isn’t that rather missing the point?

The other theoretical point John made was that there are three textures of singing in our liturgical practice: soloist (priest or deacon or cantor, depending on what’s happening), choir, and congregation. “We need all three,” he said repeatedly. “It’s very much a dance of who sings what when, and if you limit yourself to only one of those textures, you lose something important and beautiful.” As you may recall, the week before, somebody told Andrew Gould that they didn’t come to church for the beauty but for the participation; one wonders how such a perspective would understand what John had to say on this point. My thought is that he’s right, but dances have to be both taught and learned or they become mass confusion.

The services themselves were an adventure, but a good one; at the kliros, the weekend suddenly turned into Byz Chant Boot Camp (or Parents’ Weekend of same, as our friend Laura Willms suggested), and John was the drill sergeant. This Was A Good Thing; he was able to do get away with making certain points in a way I simply can’t, partially because a) he won’t have to see these people next weekend b) we paid him to be here specifically to do that c) he’s Greek. He was not shy about being emphatic in terms of instructing people during services; if you were on the isokratima, for example, and were sleeping on the job and missed his cue for the move, you got an elbow in the ribs. (As John said later, and I absolutely agree with him, “Please tell me a better way to communicate with people who aren’t watching me while I am singing.”) The thing is, coming from him, people ate it up; after the service, a lot of the folks who got the business end of his drill sergeant-ness said only, “Wow — what an amazing teacher.” For me, how this manifested was him pointing to the Byzantine scores he was following and saying, “You’re reading with me, got it?” Up to that point, I hadn’t dared putting enough confidence into what I had learned over the summer to actually use it during services, but much to my own surprise, I managed to keep up. I wasn’t perfect (and when it was just me on my own I fell down and went boom a couple of times), but I kept up.

After Vespers, we were all tired and hungry enough that it seemed best to simply call off the 7-9 session — we had reached enough of a logical stopping point that anything further that evening would be a matter of diminishing returns. It was early enough that Megan, Laura and I were able to take John to Finch’s for dinner after all, and once again we all found ourselves up until 1am or so talking.

Matins and Divine Liturgy the next morning were not without their speed bumps — everybody was just enough out of their element to make sure of that — but everything went quite well regardless. (We even made it successfully through the Cherubic Hymn, which had been a cause of some lack of sleep on my part.) A lot of non-Orthodox workshop attendees came, so we had a very full church. That said, I’m not entirely certain that everybody in the parish knew what was going on or why we were doing what we were doing (despite my plugs for the weekend along the way), and some of the reactions I got from parishioners were worded accordingly (“That was beautiful, Richard, but I will be very happy when we go back to normal” was one example). On the other hand, there was the chorister who told me, “I felt like my musical soul had been fed for the first time in a long time.”

Here’s a comment made by a workshop attendee to which I keep returning — the commenter in question is part of the local UUC congregation and retired English faculty here at IU:

Excellent workshop on Byzantine chant this weekend at All Saints Orthodox church in Bloomington, with John Michael Boyer, cantor and teacher… The whole attitude of the Orthodox faith tradition is very flexible, welcoming, inclusive, and constantly changing–such a welcome change from most of the Western Christian churches… As it happens, I’m not a theist of any variety, but if I were monotheistically inclined, I’d give this church a serious thought. Good people all around… This was my third visit to your church and in every case, I was much welcomed.

Seems to me that’s successful outreach right there.

John’s flight out was scheduled for 4pm on Sunday. However, as we left All Saints around 12:30pm, he looked at me with deeply exhausted eyes and said, “Would you mind horribly if I changed my ticket and stayed an extra day?”

Well, I told him, I didn’t know for certain where he’d stay, but I’d see what I could do.

Megan and Laura made biscuits and gravy, which I think may have cemented John’s friendship with Bloomington (to say nothing of his arteries). He got a nap, and made a wonderful dinner for us that night — a recipe of his own devising, incorporating pasta, kielbasa, kalamata olives, mushrooms, and green peppers.

(Tellin’ ya — how do we rate all of these friends who ask, “Hey, can I cook in your kitchen while I’m here?”)

And, once again, we looked at the clock while talking, found that the hours had slipped away and it was three in the morning.

On the way out of town the next morning, we had lunch with Vicki Pappas, the chair of the National Forum of Greek Orthodox Church Musicians — also a Bloomington resident and founding member of All Saints (alas, in absentia for years, since she commutes to Holy Trinity in Indy). It was a very interesting conversation for which to be a fly on the wall; the musical situation in GOArch has its own intricacies, complications, and vicissitudes, to say the least.

The drive to the airport (no wrong turns this time, thank God) mostly consisted of us discussing how to get John back here, and soon. Watch this space.

Just to make sure I’ve said it: as with Andrew, I wholeheartedly recommend John if you’re looking for somebody to bring out as a speaker or as a guest instructor with respect to Byzantine chant. He’s knows his stuff inside and out, both in terms of chant and in terms of liturgics in general, he’s a great teacher, and of course he’s a wonderful cantor. He is a very effective speaker and teacher for an academic audience, an Orthodox audience, and a general audience — not something everybody can claim.

All in all, the weekend was a huge success in terms of being outreach, being educational, being of musical interest, and, more personally, building friendships. It’s very true that there’s very little in the way of specifics you can cover in a weekend; notation wasn’t discussed beyond some theoretical ideas, and there was only so much he had time to do with respect to the tuning systems, but I think what it did was threefold: it established that there is in fact interest in this material here in Bloomington, for the School of Music, the greater community, and the parish, it proved that you could talk about this subject from an explicitly confessional standpoint and have it be more informative for non-Orthodox participants than it would have been otherwise, and it stimulated interest in doing more. The School of Music faculty who came were very clear about wanting to participate more directly the next time John is here; people from the parishes of surrounding areas said, “Hey, how can we help with the next one?” and it’s also been expressed to me that there is a desire to figure out what portions of what we did last weekend we can keep as our normal practice. That will likely be a complicated conversation with a complicated outcome, but it’s a better response from the people in question than “That was nice, now let’s never do it again”.

What I will say is this: by virtue of the fact that we were open to the public and not charging admission, our own success made it quite a bit more expensive than we had originally planned. If you participated and would like to help, or would like to help regardless, please contact me (rrbarret [AT] indiana.edu). Our original donor has been very generous, but we had hoped to come away from this event with perhaps some seed money for the next one as well. Looking ahead, I am contemplating starting something which we might call “Friends of Music at All Saints” or some such, specifically to exist as some kind of a booster organization for such things; again, I am pretty much a one-man army here, so if you’re interested in participating, please let me know.

So, we had two visitors two weekends in a row. One told us about beautiful churches, another told us about what we do in those beautiful churches. Now what?

I think, if we want a useful synthesis of Andrew’s and John’s respective messages, it boils down to John’s point about kairos and chronos, and how that relates to the church building being an icon of the Kingdom. As Lucas pointed out to me, the word kairos kicks off the whole Divine Liturgy: Καιρός τοῦ ποιῆσαι τῷ Κυρίῳ — it is the time/moment/opportunity of acting for the Lord. Even better, if we want to read τῷ Κυρίῳ as a dative of the possessor, it is the Lord’s time of action. And what is the priest’s first blessing? Blessed is the Kingdom… The Liturgy is the Lord’s action in His own house on His own time. (I will note that this does not go well with the populist misunderstanding of “liturgy” as “the work of the people”, but it goes much better with the more accurate rendering of it as “public service”. It is the Lord’s public service being offered to His people, in other words.)

So, you have to liturgize in a way that emphasizes the fact that it’s God’s time, and you have to have a worship environment that emphasize’s that it’s God’s house. As Lucas also put it, you have to get across the idea that, no, actually, you don’t have anyplace better to be.

Schmemann, of course, talked about the idea that we should liturgize in a way that takes the Liturgy back out into the world. What I wonder is if we have a problem with the valve running the wrong way — that we bring our busy lives, our distractions, that is to say the world into the Liturgy with us and then expect the Liturgy to be run in a way that accommodates us. As I said with the Cherubic Hymn — we say that we are now laying aside all earthly cares, but do we really approach that text in a way that indicates we believe that that’s what we’re doing?

And when you’ve got a building that, no matter how you cut it, looks like an office building with icons and which traps our psalmody rather than lifting it up to heaven, is it any wonder that that’s our approach? Andrew was absolutely right — we’ve got the saints and the angels, but no City.

We’ve got our work cut out for us. On the other hand, here’s the good news — Fr. Peter told me a couple of days ago, “You know, a comment I got from a few people was that things seemed too slow. But you know what? In a lot of places, by having the choir sing it so slowly, I found that it matched better with the liturgical action, and it made a heck of a lot more sense.” We talked about a lot of this stuff, and it seemed to click with him that we need to figure out, and make a concerted effort reinforcing, the difference between kairos and chronos. It’s not going to be easy, but we’re at a point where it’s what we have to do.

The project that All Saints has ahead of it is not a building project or a musical project. Those are components, yes, but what it really is is a spiritual project. We’ve got to be the City on the Hill, the Heavenly City, the New Jerusalem, the Light that is not hid under a bushel. It is desperately needed in this town, in this area, in this world, and we’ve got to convince ourselves that we want to be that, that we want to be an icon of the Kingdom, more than we want to be what we’ve been pretty good at being up until now, which is a little, struggling church in a little, struggling Midwestern town.

If we can do that, then we will have the hard part out of the way. If we can convince ourselves that we believe that and that we can walk in faith, then the temple will just about build itself, $2.5 million or no, and people will stop worrying about whether or not the music is too Byzantine or too slow or not congregational enough or not “American” enough or whatever. (By the way, I found over the course of the weekend that just joining a good English translation with a melody written for the English made things pretty well more “American” on their own. Others may disagree with me, but that was my perception.) If there’s a point that both Andrew and John made, it is that the ethos of the received tradition is not a buffet, not a “meat and three”, not a list of things from which you pick and choose. There are things that we can adapt for local circumstances, but you do that after you’ve received the tradition, and then only in a way that doesn’t obscure what you’ve received. You don’t filter out the parts of the received tradition you don’t like pre-emptively. You may well come to church for participation rather than beauty, but that doesn’t mean that beauty isn’t part of the organic whole.

The church building and the liturgy have to reflect the fact that we worship a God who is bigger than we are. God already “met us where we’re at” in the Incarnation; it is up to us to respond to that in faith.

Now, having said all of that, I’m at the head of the line of people who need to figure out chronos and kairos. With these two weekends out of the way, I have a ton of reading to do on Ancient Greek democracy and a couple of weeks’ worth of working out on which I need to catch up. I’m going to be juggling things for a bit yet before I’m really into the rhythm of the semester. Along similar lines, last Wednesday, John texted me at about 8pm my time: “I’ve turned nocturnal. Just woke up. I’m not sure, but I think it’s Bloomington’s fault. :-)” I guess the gap between chronos and kairos gets us all in the end. Pray for us.

More importantly, however, pray for All Saints. We’ve got a lot of hard work ahead of us. With God’s help and by your prayers, we can do it. If you want to be involved more substantially, I’ve suggested a couple of ways you might be able to do so; contact me if you want more information.

Okay — back to being a student.

On the difference between καιρός and χρόνος and building a church that makes the difference clear (Part I)

Published 29 January 2010 Academia , General , Media , music , The Orthodox Faith 6 Comments
Tags: all saints bloomington, all saints orthodox church, american church architecture, american orthodox architecture, andrew gould, christ kamages, church architecture, holy ascension church charleston, IU alumni, χρόνος, καιρός, john michael boyer, modern byzantine architecture, orthodox architecture, orthodox architecture is bloody expensive, orthodox hoosiers, the city on the hill, the difference between χρόνος and καιρός, things for the choir director to think about in a new church building

It’s really hard for me to believe that January of 2010 has just about gotten away from me entirely. Classes started on 11 January, then there were two Somethings Big at All Saints the next two weekends that pretty much ate my life, and now this last week, the third of the semester, has felt like the real first week of classes.

Oh yeah, and Great Lent starts up in two weeks.

My class schedule feels a bit more focused on my interests this semester than it did last semester; this is good, but it also feels like I’ve got more work to do. I’m sitting in on a class looking at the medieval city as well as an ethnomusicology seminar on music and sacred experience, I’m taking a seminar on Ancient Greek democracy (easily the class where I feel most outside of my area), a colloquium titled “Essential Readings in Early Medieval History,” third year Modern Greek, and then I’m supposed to do some Latin reading with one of my professors. I’m also reading St. Athanasius’ Greek life of St. Anthony.

It’s not really any more work than last semester was, to be truthful, but I’m just getting into the rhythm of it this week, so I’m feeling a little more behind than I’d like. I’ll live, and not every eye will weep for me.

So, Andrew Gould visited All Saints the weekend of 15-17 January. All Saints’ building effort has effectively been dead in the water for ten years; the “temporary” building in which we presently worship is a shoebox (the left wing of the pictured concept painting), and it was deemed reasonable to build an ultra-utilitarian, multipurpose space first based on the logic that “people come for church but stay for the other things a church does” — plus, at the time (2001) they figured they’d be in there for less than five years. Well, when I arrived in 2003, Fr. Athanasius pointed at that painting and said, “That’s ten years away.” In 2005, it was still ten years away, and the parish council started toying with the idea of hiring a different designer, since it just seemed like there was no motivation on anybody’s part to build the original idea. We talked to Christ Kamages in 2006, but Fr. Athanasius announced his retirement shortly thereafter, and a number of people felt it would be unwise to jump into a capital campaign and building project under such circumstances. Ironically, Fr. Athanasius explicitly warned us against delaying, telling us at his last parish council meeting, “We walk by faith and not by sight, and I want you to go ahead with this,” but any conviction he intended to leave us with vanished as soon we had to start paying a fulltime priest with a family for whom this was how they put food on their table, as opposed to a retiree who didn’t need the money.

In 2007, Fr. Peter tried to figure out what we might be able to do to expand our facilities in small steps, and in returning to the original concept, he tried to push the idea of building the narthex and southernmost wing of the complex. The extension could be built to be an intentional worship space with provision for acoustics and so on, and would allow us more room to grow — we’d be facing south rather than east, but we would make do. The estimate came in at a half million dollars, which seemed to constitute a reasonable step in the right direction.

We raised, I think, all of $35,000. Maybe. “Pretty good for a church full of working people,” our treasurer told us, but it was clear that nobody in the community felt inspired to try to make sure it happened. Certain people who had originally said, “Let us know when you’re ready for us to write checks,” now were making excuses as to why they couldn’t — excuses like “Well, Dad’s old Episcopal church is building a new wing and we had to give to that…” I wish I were kidding. Worse, at least two large parishes outside of Bloomington were running capital campaigns and got to some of these people before we were ready. We were back to square one.

The situation didn’t improve any; we got to a point where the choir had to be relocated so that we took up half of the space we used to have, and eventually we were trying to figure out how we could configure the building so that the partition wall separating the virtual nave from the virtual fellowship hall could just be left open. We were (and are, make no mistake) in that horrible catch-22 where you need to build in order to grow, but you have to grow in order to build (and it is not an economic option to relieve the pressure by planting a mission). You will either figure out a way to build, or the problem will be self-correcting because you will die.

Enter Andrew.

Andrew’s work on Holy Ascension first came to my attention around Pascha of 2008, and I talked about him a bit here. I contacted him last spring in order to find out what it would take to get him out here when we started talking about how to get rid of the partition wall, and a number of us then made a concerted effort to convince the parish council that we should bring him to Bloomington to see what he would have to say. Long story short (too late!), we finally went ahead and booked Andrew in September, and the weekend of 15-17 January was the first time we could get the church’s calendar to sync with his.

When Andrew arrived a couple of Fridays ago, the first thing we did when we got him to the church was walk him around the property. He got to see a very representative sample of our 24 acres, and when we finally finished the tour, he asked a question which changed the game as we had known it up to this point.

“Why don’t we build on the hill by the corner?”

Keep in mind this is a question that has been asked before. The hill in question is the highest and most visible spot on our property from the road, and it’s a no-brainer to wonder why that wasn’t the plan from the get-go.

The answer has always been, and thus was dutifully trotted out on this occasion, “Because that’s where the septic field is.” This has effectively always ended that line of inquiry.

Except that Andrew didn’t go down without a fight. “Show me,” he said. “Where is your septic field exactly?”

We showed him. We showed him exactly where it was marked off as being. And his answer was, “This is a non-issue. We can build right up to this point, and this is exactly where and how the church you want can fit here.” He paced it out for us. “You’ve already got a boxy utilitarian building over there,” he told us. “On the 24 beautiful acres you have, why do you want to surround your temple with cars and asphalt when you can put it someplace where people can really use it to transition into a different world and engage your land?”

We spent the next couple of days talking about it. Miraculously, we didn’t spent two days arguing about it. The conversation wasn’t, “Well, why don’t we see what might be less expensive?” Rather, the conversation was, “How do we make this happen?”

Andrew talked about a lot of things. He talked, for example, about how you have to build for the liturgy. I had asked John Boyer if there was anything I should be prepared to talk about from the choir’s perspective in the design process; acoustics, of course, were the concern at the top of John’s list. Besides that, however, he also a big narthex, an apse that functioned as a resonating chamber, and the choirs placed in transepts. Andrew, as it happened, brought up virtually all of those things unprompted as practical “must-haves” that aren’t negotiable. (And the one thing he didn’t present as such, transepts, once I told him what we’re trying to do, he said, “Yes, of course, you’ll want transepts.”) Acoustics, in fact, were the very first thing that he mentioned to me as one of the design features he won’t not do.

Andrew talked about money. To build what he would design for the number of people we’re talking about (200 on Sundays, 300 on feast days), we’re looking at ~$2 million. His fees will be 6-8% of that, including construction documents. Plus, we have ~$220,000 on our existing mortgage that we have to retire. So, at the end of the day, $2.5 million is what we’re looking at, soup to nuts. (This prompted the question — what was the estimate on the original concept? $2 million for the temple and the south wing, was the answer, and that was in 1999 dollars. So, we’re not out of our original range by any stretch of the imagination.)

One of the ideas that came up while talking about money was trying to establish an alumni network for Orthodox Christians who have come through Indiana University. Surely there have to be hundreds out there who were in Bloomington when there was no church at all — hence Orthodox Hoosiers; I am slowly but surely getting this running, but I’m a one-man army on this front. If you’d like to help in any way, administratively or financially, please get in touch with me (rrbarret [AT] indiana.edu); there is no support from All Saints behind this effort except for the moral kind, and if perhaps there were 20-30 interested parties willing to pool ~$1,000 of startup costs for charter membership benefits to be determined later, that’d be immensely helpful.

Most importantly, however, Andrew told us why we need to build a beautiful church. This alone was a game-changer, and how. To have somebody who knew what he was talking about, and who is clearly a faithful Orthodox Christian, tell us with humility yet authority that in our current building we appear to be God’s people in exile — well, the terms of the conversation are permanently different now, because everybody who heard Andrew’s answer understands that the point is not to build four walls and a roof, but rather to write an icon of the heavenly city. A gentleman who had just been through a $1.7 million building campaign at his own parish to build something, well, not quite as nice, shook his head and said, “If only we’d heard that before.”

Andrew was kind enough to leave us with a concept sketch:

What you see is the view of the building from the southwest, somewhat in the air. The corner of building on the right is our existing building, surrounded by the parking lot. The church has a basement level which would function as the parish hall once finished; the temple itself would be level with the existing parking lot, and the covered bridge (a clever nod to famous Indiana landmarks) would extend from the parking lot to the narthex, over the valley that runs between the parking lot and the hill (plus you can also see the stairs leading up to the entryway on the north side of the narthex,). There would, of course, be whatever handicapped parking spaces are necessary, plus an elevator from the basement level to the narthex, but Andrew’s idea is that for the 99% of the parish that is able-bodied, the 200 feet from the parking lot to the church, however you choose to walk it, will function as a transition from the busy world into the Kingdom. “The temple will be 100 feet long to begin with,” he said, “so you’re walking 200 feet to and from Communion anyway. We walk that in the Target parking lot without even thinking about it. The church building shouldn’t be the place where we emphasize suburban ideas of convenience.”

Andrew’s other idea was to use a slab of limestone from our property (it used to be a working quarry) as our permanent altar. As I’ve told a couple of people, then we could tell C. S. Lewis fans that we have the real Stone Table.

Will we build it? It sure seems possible. Nothing has been decided formally (and I should emphasize that, lest I come across like I’m speaking out of school), and it will still be another week or so before the parish council can meet about how to move forward, but Andrew definitely got a lot of people excited. I think we should challenge ourselves to break ground within two years. I think we can build the city on the hill if we make it a priority to do so as a community.

The thing is, Fr. Peter is reasonably certain that we’re not going to be able to get a mortgage for more than half a million dollars. This means we’re going to have to come up with $2 million in cash, somehow. In the short term, we’re going to have to raise around $250k — ~$220,000 to retire the existing mortage, and somewhere around $21,000 to engage Andrew to formally get the design to the level of detail where he can produce the pretty watercolors that get people to write checks. That’s nothing when you’re talking about building a permanent church, but when you’re telling that to a lot of working-class Hoosiers, you realize just how much of an asset the imperial treasury actually was back in the day.

(Did I mention that I’m working on an Orthodox IU Alumni Network?)

By the way, I would absolutely, unhesitatingly, and without qualification recommend Andrew Gould to any church going through this process. He has a terrific eye, a wonderful sense of how architecture interacts with the landscape, and a frightening amount of knowledge when it comes to talking about the tradition of Orthodox Christian church buildings. Andrew is also very affable and easygoing, there isn’t a hint of arrogance about him, and he’s a great guy with whom to have a beer as well. All of us had a great time getting to know him, and we really hope to see him again soon.

What Andrew is not, just so we’re clear, is cheap and obedient — and I rank these negatives in the “plus” column, no question about it. Now, he doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, but neither does he say, “You’re a church, so I’ll charge you next to nothing.” He’s very up front about saying that he charges market price for what he does, and that this is his living, not how he fulfills charitable obligations. It cost $2,000 plus his travel to bring him out for the weekend to do this kind of consultation; as noted, the next stage will be $18-21k. The construction documents will be another chunk of change. This is not unreasonable; it’s just that that’s actually what these things cost. Our old design was done for “the discount” — and, well, as my father likes to say, the most cost effective way of doing anything is to do it right the first time, and sometimes free is too expensive. So, as far as I’m concerned, This is a Good Thing.

(By the way, because I’m clumsy, I accidentally spilled coffee all over the original watercolor of the old design during the course of this weekend, utterly ruining it. I swear to God it was absolutely an accident, but I was asked by somebody later, “Was that a Freudian spill?”)

As far as “obedience” goes — what I mean by that is, Andrew is not going to design whatever you want no matter what. He wants to design things that look like they belong where they are, but what he puts his name on has to be rooted somehow in Orthodox architectural tradition; if that isn’t what you want, call somebody else. Somebody challenged him on some points related to that over the course of the weekend; “I don’t come to church for the beauty, I come for the participation,” this person told him, more or less telling him that they felt like certain structural insistences on his part seemed unnecessary and foreign (at best) to what they were used to in churches. Andrew didn’t back down, and simply continued to explain with patience, humility, and his encyclopedic knowledge. This person was eventually won over — but the point is, don’t expect him to chuck centuries of tradition because you don’t like it. His churches are bigger than you, and bigger than him. Again, as I see it, This is a Good Thing.

This is already over 2,700 words, so I think I’m going to split this post in two. Thus endeth part the first; part the second, in which All Saints goes to Parents’ Weekend of Byz Chant Boot Camp, will be coming soon.

John Michael Boyer: “Why do we need beautiful music in church?” “So that it gives us joy in church”

Published 29 January 2010 Media , music , The Orthodox Faith Leave a Comment
Tags: all saints bloomington, all saints orthodox church, andrew gould, byzantine chant, chant, church acoustics: how not to do them, ecclesiastical chant, john michael boyer, liturgical music, random acts of chant, sacred music, st. john chrysostom, why do we need beautiful churches?, why do we need beautiful music in churches?

We had Andrew Gould’s answer a bit ago as to why we need beautiful churches; last weekend, we got John Michael Boyer’s answer to the question, “Why do we need beautiful music in those churches?” What John said is of a somewhat different tone than what Andrew told us; it is less theoretical and more practical, but to that extent I think the answers complement each other. John provides an excellent patristic reference for his practicality, and I think he says a number of things worth thinking about. I’ll have more to say shortly.

(I will note that, thanks to how the acoustics at All Saints work, or rather don’t work, I had to be a bit creative in figuring out how to edit this so that it could be heard. There are still a couple of spots that are wonkier than I’d like, but I think it’s all audible. It looks like every second of decay in the proposed new temple will cost us approximately $1 million, so please pray for our building project!)

My opening remarks for John Michael Boyer in Bloomington: “…it is my fondest hope that this is not just the completion of one thing, but perhaps the beginning of a number of other things”

Published 29 January 2010 Academia , General , Media , music , The Orthodox Faith Leave a Comment
Tags: all saints bloomington, all saints orthodox church, American Society of Byzantine Music & Hymnology, annunciation church sacramento, archives of traditional music, axion estin foundation, byzantine chant, cantores in ecclesia, cappella romana, carmen-hellen tellez, daniel reed, early music institute, franklin hess, harmonia, IU dept of folklore and ethnomusicology, iu medieval studies institute, iu west european studies, john michael boyer, john tavener, koukouzelis institute, lamentations and praises, liturgica.com, liturgical music, luann johnson, mark powell, orthodox outreach, robin freeman, sacred music, stansifer radio, the byzantine chant narrative of continuity, the divine liturgy in english

I’m still writing the applicable blog post, but this seemed long enough to justify breaking out separately. More to come.

Good evening, everybody. I am very keenly aware that none of you came to hear me speak, so I will do my absolute best to keep my opening remarks as short as possible.

A few informal orders of business before I launch into my introduction – first of all, let me welcome you to All Saints Orthodox Church. Just to get it out of the way, let me emphasize that we are in a church, and we ask that you be respectful of the space. If you are unsure about what that means, by all means please ask me or Fr. Peter.

[…]

A word about the card and the envelope [in your packets]: this weekend represents, in virtually every respect, an experiment for All Saints. We have never done anything like this before, and there has been a lot of figuring things out as we go. We would really like to be able to do it or something like it again, maybe even on a somewhat regular basis if it works out. So, with respect to the card, we’d like to hear from you all what you thought. Whatever you have to say – this worked, that didn’t, maybe this could be covered next time, you need a jacket with elbow pads – we’re all ears so that we can do better next time.

Now, as for the envelope – as I said, this has been an experiment, and it’s the kind of thing of which we’d love to be able to do more. We’ve been very fortunate to be able to put this together with some very generous help from the Indiana University Center for West European Studies and a private donor. That said, there are always costs one wasn’t anticipating, but more importantly, it would be terrific to have some seed money for the next event like this. All of that is to say, the envelope is there not because this weekend isn’t paid for; it is there because the next one isn’t… yet. If you decide you want to do something in that regard, please make checks out to All Saints Orthodox Church, and put in the notes “chant workshop” or something like that. The point is, if you come away from this weekend having felt it was of value to you, both the card and the envelope represent a couple of formal ways you can express that. By all means talk to me if you have any questions; you can leave cards and envelopes on your chair or give them to me, or to Fr. Peter.

There is also a retail means by which you may support these kinds of events at All Saints. There is a table in the parish hall where you can buy recordings of the kind of music we’re here talking about tonight; a lot of these can be reasonably difficult to get in the States, and we encourage browsing – and buying! – at the breaks. All of these are recordings John told me to have around for this weekend, so perhaps he’ll be able to say more about them.

All right, enough of the administrative chatter.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all very much for coming tonight. The road to this weekend has been a long one; if I wanted to, I could trace it back to approximately 1996 or 1997 when I first met and became friendly with Mark Powell, the executive director of Cappella Romana and then a colleague of mine in its sister ensemble, the Tudor Choir. It is the network of relationships that seems to hover around Mark that in the end brought this weekend about, after all. That, however, would be far too long of a story for our purposes, so I will fast forward to the fall of 2006. Having traveled reasonably significant distances three summers in a row to various workshops and conferences for Orthodox Christian liturgical music, and subsequently lamenting the impossibility of being able to bring my entire choir to such an event, I began to consider how an effort might be launched to bring the event to my choir. Initial ideas were floated about trying to stage something in Indianapolis, but these conversations didn’t go anywhere, and to be truthful, it ultimately seemed worthwhile, particularly if I wanted to maximize the participation of the All Saints choristers, to try to put something together right here. If I played my cards right, it might even get some people in Indianapolis to come down to Bloomington – imagine that!

A number of objectives intersected in the planning for this weekend. First of all, it was very important for the All Saints choir to have the opportunity to work with an expert with a strong link to the received tradition, to experience an intensive kind of master class situation with the kind of person we hadn’t had the opportunity to work with before, somebody who could give us water from the well rather than artificially synthesized hydrogen and oxygen. As mentioned, it would also be nice to have an event that would make All Saints in Bloomington the destination for interested parties.

An additional goal was to find a way of reaching out to and engaging the local community through music. In the last few years we have looked for opportunities to do this; we have hosted a youth music festival on the grounds here two summers in a row, and a couple of years ago we contributed a concert of Holy Week music to a Middle Eastern arts festival put on by IU’s Program for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. A person who would be of interest to the Orthodox Christians who worship here, of musical interest to the local community, and of academic interest to the university community, would represent a huge step forward in that effort.

The first goal has this entire weekend to be accomplished. With respect to the second goal, however, as I look around the room, as well as glance at my list of registrants, I see my choir, I see All Saints parishioners, I see people from Bloomington, I see faculty and students from IU’s Early Music Institute, the Department of Choral Conducting, the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, and the Center for West European Studies. I see people who have come from Indianapolis, Greenwood, Evansville, and Louisville. I see faculty from, besides IU, Wabash College and Butler University. It is a very real blessing to have you all here, I can truly say that the interest in John’s visit has exceeded my wildest expectations, and it is my fondest hope that this is not just the completion of one thing, but perhaps the beginning of a number of other things.

I will tell you that the planning of John’s visit originally moved ahead with private money. In the course of events, however, Dr. Lois Wise, the Director of the Indiana University Center for West European Studies approached me out of the blue one day and said, “Richard, are there any music events coming up at All Saints that we can help support?” Through WEST’s support and partnership, much more has been possible than would have been otherwise, and I am truly grateful for their sponsorship. WEST is represented this evening by Dr. Franklin Hess, the instructor of Modern Greek at IU – also my own Greek teacher, and a good friend. Frank, please accept on behalf of WEST this token of our appreciation.

There are a number of other people to thank as well for helping to make tonight possible, either through promotion, logistics, or other support; the Archives of Traditional Music, the Medieval Studies Institute, the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Robin Freeman, Dr. Carmen-Hellena Tellez, Dr. Daniel Reed, WFIU, the program Harmonia and their staff, especially LuAnn Johnson, the Bloomington Herald-Times, the Indiana Daily Student, Stansifer Radio for installing this wonderful sound system on Wednesday, Liturgica.com, all of my choir for their support, and of course Fr. Peter and the people and parish council of All Saints for taking me seriously when I said, “This may sound crazy, but what if we could make something like this work?” Above all, a special thank you to my wife Megan for all of her last-minute help with errands, assembly of materials, and being just all around some of whom I am undeserving.

Finally, this brings me to our honored guest himself. John Michael Boyer, it has been said, sang before he spoke. At the age of 7 John was singing as the then-youngest member ever of the Portland Opera Association. Over the years he has gone from singing for a papal audience as a boy as part of the liturgical choir Cantores in Ecclesia, to being the Protopsaltis, or first cantor, of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of San Francisco and one of the principal singers of the professional vocal ensemble Cappella Romana. He is also the Protopsaltis and director of liturgy at the Greek Orthodox Church of the Annunciation in Sacramento. He has studied for a number of years with Greek master cantors Lycourgos Angelopoulos and Ioannis Arvanitis. In addition, he coached the vocal ensemble Chanticleer in their Grammy-winning recording of John Tavener’s Byzantine-influenced Lamentations and Praises. He is very active as a composer and adapter of traditional Byzantine liturgical music in the English language, and many of his efforts in this area culminated in Cappella Romana’s recent release, The Divine Liturgy in English – which, I am told, has just gone into a second pressing. He is one of the main movers and shakers in the United States in the movement to reincorporate traditional music in American Orthodox churches, and to this end he lectures and conducts workshops in Eastern Orthodox liturgical music at churches across the country. John has spoken at the conferences of the American Society for Byzantine Music and Hymnology as well as the Axion Estin Foundation, and he is also the director of the Koukouzelis Institute for Liturgical Arts, an outgrowth of the educational aims of his role as Protopsaltis of San Francisco.

It truly is a pleasure and a blessing to have him here – please join me in welcoming John Michael Boyer.

Richard Toensing on NPR’s Performance Today

Published 8 January 2010 General , Media , music , The Orthodox Faith Leave a Comment
Tags: american orthodox music, cappella romana, christmas hymnody, is a kontakion anything like a skevophylakion?, kontakion on the nativity of christ, leaanne denbeste, music, Nativity, nativity hymnody, new choral music, richard toensing, romanos the melodist, sacred music, st. romanos the melodist, what is a kontakion?

Just so people are aware, an excerpt from Cappella Romana‘s recording of Richard Toensing‘s Kontakion for the Nativity of Christ (reviewed here) is being played as part of today’s program on NPR’s Performance Today, complete with a mini-interview with Toensing as a lead-in. You can find today’s show online here.

(As a side — but still related — note, somebody whom I’ve known since seventh grade and who happened to go on to be a grad student of Toensing’s at UC-Boulder e-mailed me yesterday to tell me that they’re being blessed as a catechumen on Sunday. This is still stunning me for any number of reasons.)

John Michael Boyer at All Saints Orthodox Church, 22-24 January 2010

Published 6 January 2010 Academia , Early Christianity , General , Media , music , The Orthodox Faith Leave a Comment
Tags: all saints bloomington, all saints orthodox church, both kinds of music: byzantine and gregorian, byzantine chant, cappella romana, chant, ecclesiastical chant, hazards of church music, john michael boyer, liturgical music, medieval byzantine chant, random acts of chant, sacred music

This has been in the works for a little over a year, but the time approaches quickly and with the new semester upon us, I am kicking the publicity into high gear (at least as high as I can working on my own).

John Michael Boyer, protopsaltis of the Metropolis of San Francisco (GOArch), protopsaltis and Director of Liturgy at Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in Sacramento, and one of the principal singers of Cappella Romana, will be coming to Bloomington to conduct a series of lectures and workshops at All Saints Orthodox Church from 22-24 January 2010.

The schedule is as follows:

Friday, 22 January 2010
6-9pm: Lecture, Practicum, and Q&A – A Historical and Theoretical Overview of Issues in Byzantine Chant

Saturday, 23 January 2010
9am-12:30pm: Byzantine Chant Practicum, Pt. I
12:30-1:30: Lunch (on-site)
1:30-5:30pm: Byzantine Chant Practicum, Pt. II
6pm: Great Vespers
7-9pm: Conclusion of Chant Practicum

Sunday, 24 January 2010
8:30am: Resurrectional Orthros (Matins)
10am: The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom

Lecture, practica and services are free and open to the public; donations will be accepted, but just to clarify what’s happening here — between a private donor and very generous support from Indiana University’s Center for West European Studies, this is pretty much covered, but there are always last-minute expenditures one wasn’t expecting, and it is one of my goals to establish some seed money to be able to do something like this again. It’s good for All Saints to be able to do things like this that can draw the interest of the local and university communities, and musical events have a unique ability to attract a lot of different kinds of people. So, anyway, the point is, we’re not taking donations because this isn’t paid for; we’re taking donations because the next one (whatever it may turn out to be) isn’t.

If you want to come, there are two ways to register: You can either e-mail me at rrbarret (AT) indiana.edu and let me know that you’re coming, or you can RSVP on the Facebook event I’ve created. Either way, please let me know if you plan on bringing somebody besides yourself; it’s totally fine if you are, but I just need to know how many sets of materials to prepare.

If you want a press kit for this event to help get the word out, you can download a headshot here, get a press release here, and find a color flyer here.

(Side story about the press kits: on Monday, as I was starting to assemble a mailing of press kits to several different department chairs, newspapers, and neighboring parishes, I realized in horror that all of the materials listed the dates as 22-24 January 2009. This was, of course, after I had already spent money on color prints of the flyers, and naturally five different proofreaders had failed to notice it entirely. Twenty-four hours later, I had corrected versions of everything ready to go, and it was one of those weird quirks of fate that in putting together the 2010 version, I came up with an idea that made everything look far better than would have otherwise been the case. Of course, when I arrived at the post office with 27 individual manila envelopes to be individually weighed and stamped, the line to the counter was out the door and the line for the automated kiosk was about seven people long. Two or three of the people in line for the kiosk took a good ten minutes apiece; I felt rather self-conscious and guilty with my stack of things that was going to take a long time, and let several people go ahead of me who only had one thing to send off or who only wanted to buy stamps. When it was finally my turn, however, within about three minutes I had people hovering over my shoulders, until I finally turned to them and said, “With all respect, I let about eight people go ahead of me before you showed up.” They backed off, but I still got to be “that guy” for about 20 minutes or so. I at least waited to actually put the postage on the envelopes until I was out of line, but nonetheless, as Larry Miller said, “I was makin’ friends all over the place.”)

Anyway — more to come.

Update, 11 January 2010: A bit ran in the Bloomington Herald-Times about this on Sunday (won’t bother linking to it since it won’t do non-subscribers any good) and gave the church’s website as the only source of follow-up information. Thus, I have posted everything here.

Fun things from the Synaxarion…

Published 21 December 2009 Early Christianity , General , music , The Orthodox Faith 6 Comments
Tags: antiphonal choirs, antiphonal singing, chant, ecclesiastical chant, liturgical adventures, liturgical music, liturgy, random acts of chant, sacred music, st. ignatius of antioch

From yesterday’s Synaxarion reading:

As Bishop of Antioch, Ignatius governed the Church of God as a good shepherd and was the first to introduce antiphonal chanting in the Church, in which two choirs alternate the chanting. This manner of chanting was revealed to St. Ignatius by the angels in heaven.

My hope is to eventually have antiphonal choirs at my parish. I keep being told “Nobody does that,” but there seems to be a vehemence to that insistence, so that it comes across as though it actually means, “That’s too much trouble, so don’t even talk about it.” I can point out places in our rubrics where a left choir and right choir are assumed, and I certainly saw plenty of counterexamples in Greece, so it’s not that “nobody” does it, it’s that by and large it isn’t done here. Well, why not? Because the Orthodox Christians who came here weren’t exactly overflowing with psaltai and that was a way they could consolidate, and so when converts started coming, that particular tradition just wasn’t there to pass on anymore? I don’t know, but that seems like a possibility.

Anyway, what I find fascinating is that there was at least a time when antiphonal choirs were such a distinctive part of Christian liturgy that it was important that it be acknowledged within the Liturgy itself whence it came. (And yes, I’m aware that there are a handful of saints credited with its implementation, which is also fascinating.) The next time somebody tells me, “Nobody does that,” I’m going to pull out the Prologue and show them the reading for 20 December.

Review — Cappella Romana The Divine Liturgy by Peter Michaelides and Ensemble Organum: Chant de l’Eglise de Rome: VIe-XIIIe Siecles

Published 17 December 2009 General , Media , music , The Orthodox Faith 1 Comment
Tags: alexander lingas, american orthodox music, both kinds of music: byzantine and gregorian, byzantine chant, cappella romana, chant, chant de l'eglise de rome vie-xiiie siecles, ecclesiastical chant, ensemble organum, john sakellarides, liturgical music, liturgy, lycourgos angelopoulos, marcel peres, music as iconography, new choral music, old roman chant, our liturgy is older than your liturgy, peter michaelides, random acts of chant, sacred music, the byzantine chant narrative of decline, the divine liturgy by peter michaelides

My copies of The Divine Liturgy by Peter Michaelides and the latest installment of Ensemble Organum’s Chant de l’Eglise de Rome arrived while I was traveling for Thanksgiving, and upon my return I was neck deep in finishing things up for the semester. Now that fall term of 2009/2010 is in the books, time to give these recordings its due attention.

My experience with a lot of the four-part Orthodox liturgical music that’s out there is that, frankly, it’s either terrible or plain mediocre. I have sometimes heard it said that Western ears are too used to harmony to like unison singing, so we have to add parts to chant melodies, and this attitude seems to be borne out in much of what we sing in our churches today. A lot of what I’ve encountered consists of Byzantine melodies harmonized very badly, as though somebody said suddenly, “Oh! I need a four-part arrangement of this hymn for tomorrow!”, proceeded to bang the melody out on some keyboard instruments, and wrote down whatever progression underneath it that was simplest and most tonal (and which also typically produced part-writing errors). A related problem is an overabundance, at least in some scenarios, of simplistic utility music. At the other end of the spectrum is really overblown, self-consciously polyphonic music — I can think of one example (which I decline to name) that seems to essentially ask the question, “What if Palestrina wrote a Divine Liturgy?” There are, of course, exceptions; Fr. Sergei Glagolev’s music is very nice and singable, for example, and I’ve expressed my appreciation for Kurt Sander before.

I am very happy to add Peter Michaelides’ Divine Liturgy to the list of exceptions. Michaelides’ choral music is certainly prayerful, and while it is certainly not an exercise in compositional excess (like, say, Tchaikovsky’s Divine Liturgy), neither is it so restrained as to simply be an unnecessary sheen over the text. The character of the music is evocative enough of the Byzantine tradition that it is identifiably Orthodox music; some of the melodies of Sakellarides are used as a jumping-off point, but then the medium of the mixed choir is used to its advantage, always sounding like a completion of, rather than an addition to, the melody. That is to say, the music actually needs the harmonies — the vertical and horizontal dimensions of the music are complementary rather than one being tacked on. The Cherubic Hymn of the setting is perfect example of this balance; the different voices intertwine and interlock beautifully but never gratuitously.

The recording strikes a very nice aural balance of clarity of text and resonance of the room, and it is a credit to Cappella Romana that they have the flexibility to sing this kind of choral music and the Byzantine repertoire as beautifully as they consistently do. One thing I am very appreciative of is that the setting is presented practically, as a real Divine Liturgy, with the Very Rev. Archpriest George A. Gray III singing the priest’s parts (including the Gospel reading) and Alexander Lingas chanting the Epistle. This is music that should be presented in a liturgical, rather than a concert, setting. As an additional “realistic” detail, parts of the setting are alternated between Greek, English and Arabic — both a nice touch and a nod towards the pastoral reality in many parishes. It is exactly because of this attention to liturgical authenticity, however, that Lingas speaking the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer by himself, rather than these parts being said by the entire choir, comes off as a bit jarring.

It has been said that, in terms of how Orthodox liturgical music might develop in this country, what the Byzantine repertoire has to offer is a richness of melody, and what the Western idiom has to offer is a richness of harmony. Along these lines, while acknowledging that the Sakellarides material does not necessarily represent the best of what the Byzantine tradition has to offer, Michaelides’ music nonetheless suggests what could be a way forward. Rather than haphazardly forcing modal melodies into a tonal box with sloppy part writing that’s little more than a sop to “that guy” in the congregation who instinctively sings parallel thirds to everything, with the result sounding neither like good chant or good four part music, it is possible for these melodies to serve as a springboard into something more carefully crafted and more, dare I say it, iconographic in quality.

Now, what does any of this have to do with Ensemble Organum’s recording? Hang on for a second and I’ll explain.

Over the last twenty years, Ensemble Organum has put out a series of recordings of Western liturgical music off of manuscripts that represent the so-called “Old Roman” repertoire. I’m probably the wrong guy, at least at this stage of the game, to try to go into all the issues surrounding this music; suffice it to say that the liner notes of these recordings present this is as the older, pre-Gregorian chant repertoire of the Roman church.

Now, these recordings are, essentially, reconstructions of what they think the chants sounded like; knowing what notes the signs represent are only half the battle, of course, there are also the questions of rhythm, tuning, ornamentation, and overall vocal approach. Working with Lycourgos Angelopoulos, Ensemble Organum has taken the approach of interpreting these manuscripts more like Byzantine chant than Gregorian chant, complete with isokratema (drone) and very Greek ornamentation. Are they right? I don’t know — it sure sounds convincing enough. On the other hand, I can imagine that there is no shortage of counterarguments. Maybe something like this: how convenient for Byzantine psaltai that the Old Roman repertoire, which may or may not date from before the sixth century, sounds exactly the same as their music (which of course isn’t really Byzantine at all, but Ottoman, per the “narrative of decline” which I’ve discussed earlier). I’m not a musicologist, so I can’t really argue one way or the other for Ensemble Organum’s performance practice, but I do think that seeing the diversity of liturgical practice within the context of a unified Roman Christian identity is a fascinating idea.

What I can say is that these recordings sound really beautiful. For that reason alone, whatever their musicological merit might be, I find them quite compelling.

The latest in the series is hymnody from Christmas; the Vigil Mass, the Midnight Mass, the Mass at dawn, and the Mass of the day itself. If you’re used to the Gregorian repertoire, something like “Puer natus est nobis,” the introit for the Mass of Christmas day, is going to be quite foreign to you. It’s over twice as long as presented by EO (almost six minutes, as opposed to the two and a half minutes the Gregorian version typically takes), it’s a much more elaborate melody, it’s in a different mode, and the earthy, rich Byzantine approach is very different from the austerity employed by the typical Gregorian schola.

I suppose the value of a recording like this is that it gets people thinking differently about the context in which the Gregorian repertoire emerged and what that might imply for how it should be approached. It also suggests a way we might aurally frame the united Christendom of the Roman world, and how could have been both alike and different from the modern received chant traditions inherited from that world.

In the case of both of these recordings — told you I’d get to this eventually — you have a suggested musical ethos that draws from both the Christian East and West. Michaelides uses Western harmonic vocabulary to elaborate Eastern melodies and does so in a way that creates something new; Ensemble Organum uses Eastern stylistic practice to interpret Western melodies in order to suggest something very old.

These recordings share a common problem, too — essentially, what is the impact either of these recordings could potentially have on modern parish practice? Is there a Catholic church out there that is going to be rushing out to incorporate the Old Roman repertoire in their Christmas festivities? Despite Cappella Romana’s presentation of the Michaelides setting as music for practical use in worship rather than as a concert piece, is it likely to find a place in a church culture that sees the Liturgy as a sing-along and defines “participation” as “everybody sings everything”? Are people going to hear the recording and say, “Wow, our choir should sing this!” or are they going to say, “Boy, that sounds like it would be too hard for the congregation to be able to sing along with.” One thing about bad part-writing that caters to parts people are improvising anyway — it makes congregational singing very easy, if that’s the goal.

At any rate, I would love for the answer for both recordings to be “yes”. I would love to think that this kind of music could find a place in the venue for which it was written, the church, and not be treated as concert pieces best appreciated at arm’s length. I would love for Catholic and Orthodox churches to be striving for musical excellence, and to be incorporating music like this as a way to pursue that excellence. Time will tell.

In any case, both recordings would make excellent stocking stuffers, and consider them recommended.

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Leitourgeia kai Qurbana: Contra den Zeitgeist

Archive for the 'music' Category

Participation vs. nostalgia

Just a bit more about Orthodox Hoosiers and Friends of Music at All Saints

On the difference between καιρός and χρόνος and building a church that makes the difference clear (Part II)

On the difference between καιρός and χρόνος and building a church that makes the difference clear (Part I)

John Michael Boyer: “Why do we need beautiful music in church?” “So that it gives us joy in church”

My opening remarks for John Michael Boyer in Bloomington: “…it is my fondest hope that this is not just the completion of one thing, but perhaps the beginning of a number of other things”

Richard Toensing on NPR’s Performance Today

John Michael Boyer at All Saints Orthodox Church, 22-24 January 2010

Fun things from the Synaxarion…

Review — Cappella Romana The Divine Liturgy by Peter Michaelides and Ensemble Organum: Chant de l’Eglise de Rome: VIe-XIIIe Siecles

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