Welcome to Chant Notes, a weekly podcast from the Metropolitan Cantor Institute of the Byzantine Catholic Archeparchy of Pittsburgh. This week we will talk about church services and music for the seven days beginning Monday, January 11, 2016.
We are still in the post-festive days of the feast of Theophany, the baptism of our Lord Jesus Christ, which we celebrated last week on January 6. The final day of the feast is January 14, and so until this Thursday inclusive we will continue to sing the post-festive antiphons and liturgical hymns of Theophany at the Divine Liturgy, in addition to the troparion and kontakion for the saint of the day.
Monday, January 11 is the feast of our venerable father Theodosius, Founder of the Common Life. “Venerable” in Byzantine terminology refers to a monk or nun, and Saint Theodosius was a young man from Cappadocia who became a hermit in the neighborhood of Jerusalem, and later established a community of monks in Bethlehem which cared for the elderly and for those suffering from physical and mental disabilities. He was a friend of St. Sabbas the Sanctified (whom we commemorated on December 5) and died in 529 AD.
The feast of St. Theodosius is said to be “of poyeleos rank” – in order words, a special version of Psalms 134 and 135, “Praise the name of the Lord”, is sung at Matins. This hymn is called the Polyeleos, a Greek word meaning “much mercy”, from the refrain, “…for His mercy endures forever”, and it is sung at Matins on medium and great feasts in the Byzantine Rite.
St. Theodosius has his own troparion and kontakion, which can be found in the January volume of the Menaion for the Divine Liturgy, in the Publications page of the MCI website. The prokeimenon, Alleluia, and Communion Hymn for St..Theodosius are the common ones for a single venerable saint, and can be found on page 377 of the Divine Liturgies book.
Thursday is the leave-taking or end of the feast of Theophany, and on this day we repeat the feastday hymns from January 6 once more.
With Saturday evening, we begin a new liturgical week. Since the previous week was in Tone 8 out of a cycle of eight tones, this coming Saturday at Vespers we begin singing the daily hymns in Tone 1. Here is the beginning of Psalm 140 in the Tone 1 Vespers or samohlasen melody, and the first hymn or sticheron of the Resurrection in Tone 1.
Because Pascha or Easter falls so early this year, we begin the so-called “time of the triodion”, consisting of Great Lent and its preparatory weeks, on this coming Sunday, January 17. In fact, Pascha is SO early that this year we omit the Sunday of Zacchaeus entirely, and begin with the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee. The hymns of this Sunday focus on the humility that was shown by the publican in the Temple, and warns us against the pride of religious complacency.
Beginning with this Sunday, and continuing through the Sunday of Cheesefare that signals beginning of the Great Fast, we add the singing of Psalm 136, “By the Waters of Babylon” after the Polyeleos at Matins. This is a psalm of desolation, sung by the Hebrew exiles during their captivity in Babylon, and perfectly matches the wretchedness of the Prodigal Son which we will hear about in next week’s Gospel.
In the prostopinije tradition, Psalm 136 is sung to a very beautiful and florid melody. Here it is in Slavonic, recorded by Fr. Nikifor Petrashevich in 1970, during the brief freedom of the Slovak Greek Catholic Church from Communism.
This version can be found, in English, in the Lenten section at the back of the MCI Sunday Matins book.
By the way, cantors “of a certain age” may remember the setting of the opening of Psalm 137, sung as a round, that was included as the last track on Don McLean’s 1971 album, “American Pie.”
On this Sunday, and continuing through all the Sundays of the Great Fast, we sing stichera of repentence at Matins after Psalm 50, beginning with the words, “Open to me the gates of repentence…” Like Psalm 137, these hymns can be found at the back of the MCI Sunday Matins book.
January 17 is also a feast day, the feast of our venerable father Anthony the Great, called the Father of Monks. Anthony is credited with beginning the practice of desert monasticism in the middle of the third century; he lived in the desert to the age of 105, and died in 356. This feast is of “vigil rank” – that is, in a monastery the all-night vigil would be celebrated on the eve of the feast. Whenever the feast of a major saint – that is, of Polyelelos rank or higher – falls on Sunday, we sing the hymns of the saint together with those of the Sunday. (Normally, on Sundays we don’t commemorate the saint of the day at the Divine Liturgy.)
So this Sunday is somewhat full: we commemorate the Resurrection (with the troparion of the Resurrection in Tone 1), St. Anthony of Egypt (with his own troparion), and the Sunday of the Publican of the Pharisee (with its own kontakion). We sing the prokeimenon, Alleluia, and Communion Hymns for both Sunday and St. Anthony. The complete order can be found in the Divine Liturgy propers for this day on the MCI website.
Sadly, I don’t have a recording of the troparion of Saint Anthony readily at hand. Here are the troparion of the Resurrection in Tone 1, and the kontakion for the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee.
On January 20, we will celebrate another vigil feast in honor of a monastic saint, namely St. Euthymius the Great, an Armenian saint who became a hermit in Jerusalem, dying in 473 AD. It would be entirely reasonable to ask why so we have several major feasts of saints that are largely unknown to ordinary Byzantine Catholics, especially in the West. The answer is that our Byzantine Rite order of services, especially for Vespers and Matins, came from the monastic tradition of Palestine. Our liturgical books, containing so many beautiful and theologically rich hymns to God, were written by monks of this tradition, and so even today we honor those notable saints who founded and led their communities.
Love the new Chant Notes! Thanks for posting it for us, and I look forward to more in the weeks to come.