Kontakion to the Annunciation of the "Vzbrannoi Voevode" in the Greek-Slavic Medieval Notated Tradition: Transmission Problem

Main Article Content

Irina V. Gerasimova

Abstract

The article is devoted to the history of the text and chants of the Kontakion to the Annunciation of the “Vzbrannoi Voevode” in the Greek-Slavic notated tradition. The research focuses on the problem of the church singing heritage transmission: from Byzantium to Kievan Rus, the emergence of a new chant in the era of the change of the Jerusalem Charter in Russia, the transmission of the Balkan countries melodies first to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the sixteenth – first half of the seventeenth century and then to the Muscovite Kingdom in the second half of the seventeenth century. Despite the fact that scientists have turned to the study of Kontakion chants, the interrelationships between Orthodox cultures and transfers in the Greek-Slavic traditions have not been comprehensively studied. The material for the study comprised over 170 copies of kontakion in singing manuscripts of the XII–XVIII centuries. The main method of research was a comparative textual analysis of the copies, with the help of which it was possible to recreate a complete picture of the history of the chant “Vzbrannoi Voevode” in the Greek-Slavic traditions and the ways of transferring melodies in different historical periods. The structure in a simplified form was inherited from the Byzantine kontakion in Old Russian, but the Old Russian non-standard string as a whole did not correspond to the Byzantine one. The banner versions in the Kievan-Lithuanian and Moscow traditions of the XV–XVII centuries showed a tendency to further simplify the material. In the second half of the XVII century, the Greek-Balkan melodies of the Kievan Metropolitanate appeared in the Moscow church singing under various local names. Another way to create new melodies in the Muscovite Kingdom is to borrow Greek-Balkan melodies from other chants known from Kievan-Lithuanian Irmologions.


Keywords: kontakion of the “Vzbrannoi Voevode”, monody, Byzantine chant, znamenny singing, traveling chant, Kievan-Lithuanian church singing tradition, Bulgarian chant, Greek chant, the problem of cultural transmission

Article Details

How to Cite
Gerasimova И. В. (2024). Kontakion to the Annunciation of the "Vzbrannoi Voevode" in the Greek-Slavic Medieval Notated Tradition: Transmission Problem. Music Scholarship / Problemy Muzykal’noj Nauki, 55(2), 127–148. https://doi.org/10.17674/2782-3601.2024.2.127-148
Section
Sacred Music
Author Biography

Irina V. Gerasimova, Pskov State University, Pskov, Russia

PhD (Arts), PhD (History), Associate Professor at the Philosophy and Theology Department