Time: Friday, 15/Nov/2024: 2:15pm - 3:45pm Session Chair: Luisa Nardini, University of Texas at Austin |
Location: Grant Park Parlor 6th floor, Palmer House Hilton Hotel |
Axes of Time in Eastern Orthodox Sonic Space
The papers in this session explore questions of time and space in Eastern Orthodox musical traditions from multiple perspectives: liturgical exegesis, compositional analysis, intellectual history. Taking as a common premise the idea that different registers of time—linear, historical, eternal, suspended—can be experienced simultaneously within spaces of worship and listening, these contributions range across the Orthodox world, from Georgia in the Caucasus to Stuttgart, Germany, where Sofia Gubaidulina’s St. John Passion premiered in 2000. The first paper lays out a theological framework for understanding the role of music as a time-mediator through a meditation on the Cherubic Hymn, a central moment in the Orthodox liturgy. By comparing melodic and harmonic aspects of this hymn from Byzantine through modern Slavonic settings, common elements of a heavenly soundscape gradually emerge, through which the faithful simultaneously identify with angels, Biblical figures, and themselves in the act of sacrifice. The second paper approaches Gubaidulina’s St. John Passion, a work commissioned for the 250th anniversary of J. S. Bach’s death, as a sonic icon. As an icon, it demands reading in “inverse perspective,” with the listener incorporated into its temporal and spatial setting. In this way, the work enacts multiple crossings, bridging binaries of horizontal (sequential) and vertical (simultaneous) time as it juxtaposes texts and traditions. The final paper locates these shifting axes of sacred and mundane time within the intellectual climate of early-twentieth-century Russia. Here, a non-Slavic Orthodox chant tradition in Georgia, remarkable for its three-part polyphony, offered archaeologists, linguists, and musicologists a model of a living practice that was at once archaic (a supposed legacy of the ancient East), evolutionarily advanced (in its use of polyphony), and, after the Bolshevik conquest of Georgia, doomed to near-eradication. Uniting these papers is a concern for the way Eastern Orthodox musical practices draw time and space together in moments of lucid recognition akin to literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of “chronotope.” Whether one is participating in liturgical chant, listening to paraliturgical concert music, or imagining the singing of ancient tribes of the Caucasus, time is never singular.
Presentations of the Symposium
Anaphora, Anamnesis, Apocalypse: Music and Time in the Hymns of the Great Entrance in the Orthodox Church
“We, who mystically represent the Cherubim, and sing the thrice-holy hymn to the Life-creating Trinity, now lay aside all earthly cares, that we may receive the King of all, Who comes invisibly upborne by the Angelic Hosts.”
These words of the Cherubic Hymn, sung during the Divine Liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox Church, present a vision of singing in imitation of the supratemporal worship of angels. In this paper, I will examine how the Cherubic Hymn and its Lenten counterpart “Now the Powers of Heaven” serve as musical examples of a unique tripartite experience of liturgical time for the Orthodox faithful. This moment in the liturgy allows the faithful, according to Orthodox theology, to mystically participate in three levels of time, simultaneously: the present linear time, religious events of the Biblical past, and the ongoing supratemporal worship of God in heaven. By singing and hearing these hymns, the participants take part in a concrete present liturgy (the beginning of the anaphora, or the central sacrifice of the Eucharist), re-present the Biblical entrance of Christ into Jerusalem (in preparation for the anamnesis, where the Passion is recounted) and receive the apocalyptic vision of Christ entering His heavenly throne room, escorted by the angelic host. In all of these moments, the earthly expression of music reflects the singing of the angels in heaven, which can only be understood as out of time.
By drawing on theologians such as Clement (1959) Stăniloae (1971) and St. Dionysius the Areopagite (c. 1st century), as well as musicologists such as Conomos (1974), von Gardner (1980), and Vladyshevskaya (2022), I will demonstrate how music enables and is essential to this intersection of time(s) for the Orthodox faithful. Further, musical analysis of both melodic and tonal (modal) content in specific examples of the Cherubic Hymn and “Now the Powers of Heaven” from late medieval Byzantine sources, early modern, and modern Slavonic sources, along with an examination of their contemporary ritual directions for sonic participation, will highlight how varying expressions of sacred music in Orthodoxy have rendered this particular historical and supratemporal belief into an audible heavenly soundscape.
The Veil Was Torn: Inverse Perspective in Sofia Gubaidulina’s St. John Passion
Upon receiving a Y2K commission from the International Bach Academy for a new Passion commemorating the 250th anniversary of J.S. Bach's death, composer Sofia Gubaidulina was exploring a maturing interest in different kinds of time. Her compositions of the 1990s experiment with the rhythm of time, time in proportion, and time in its vertical and horizontal vectors. Among these, the St. John Passion especially asks for temporal analysis: it stitches together narrative texts from different timeframes, though all traditionally written by St. John the Evangelist, and plays with their relations musically.
This analysis supports a reading of Gubaidulina's Passion as a sonic icon, with the nondiegetic orchestration functioning as lines of inverse perspective, pulling the listener experientially into the mystery of the Passion in its plural timeframes. Drawing on concepts and methodology from musicology (Tamara Levaya, 2017), music theory (Jonathan Kramer, 1988), literary criticism (Mikhail Bakhtin, 1981), film theory (Michel Chion, 2021) and biblical studies (Scott Hahn 1999), my paper brings these traditions into conversation to explore the chronotopes intersecting in the narrative and musical setting of Gubaidulina’s Passion, connecting compositional techniques to the interweaving of various excerpts from scripture.
Through the crossing of timeless/time-bound, life/death, divine/human, spiritual/physical, Gubaidulina makes an orthodox profession of faith, gesturing ultimately towards the intersection of the Cross itself, on which is located Christ Himself. To that end, this analysis focuses on the eighth movement of Gubaidulina's St. John Passion, "Way of Golgotha," her Passion’s musical depiction of the Crucifixion—and, traditionally, a moment tightly linked both to the Apocalypse and to the Divine Liturgy. Thus, this sonic icon serves as a paraliturgical work: in a concert setting, Gubaidulina's Passion represents the Divine Liturgy’s function in spiritually bridging the sacrifice on Golgotha and the extemporal heavenly banquet for the congregation.
Deep Time of Polyphony: Twentieth-Century Excavations of Medieval Georgian Chant
In a text roughly dated to the early twelfth century, the Georgian Neoplatonist philosopher Ioane Petritsi famously compared the Trinity to three “voices” in music. For more than a century, scholars of Georgian music have cited this passage as evidence for the antiquity of Georgian three-part polyphony—notwithstanding disagreements about whether Petritsi was referring to Orthodox chant or folk song, vocal or instrumental music, or meant something other than polyphony altogether. Momentarily sidestepping these philological debates, this paper will consider the search for polyphony’s origins in Georgia as part of a broader reevaluation of time in the late Russian Empire and early Soviet Union. Whether in the Bolshevik interpretation of Marxist historical materialism, or in the iconoclastic theories of language and archaeology put forth by the Georgian-born academic Nikolai Marr, multiple timelines or historical stages could exist simultaneously: feudal societies living alongside revolutionary proletarians, deposits of prehistoric language cropping up in vernacular dialects of the Caucasus. Polyphony, in this framework, implied an “advanced” stage of musical evolution and was thus promoted as a goal to which all the peoples of the Soviet empire should aspire (Sonevytsky 2022; Frolova Walker 1998). At the same time, polyphony was being “discovered” among far-flung peoples on the Russian periphery, as in the field-recording expeditions of the early 1900s by such collectors as Evgeniia Lineva. Writing on the eve of the First World War, Nikolai Marr referred to Georgian singing as “a remnant of the religious cult of the Ancient East,” a thesis he and his students would elaborate over the next two decades through manuscript studies, ethnographic fieldwork, and even experiments with sound-recording technology. Although the Orthodox Christian context for medieval Georgian chant was often diminished in these studies—amidst Bolshevik campaigns against religious practice—they represent a continuation of the “musical metaphysics” developed in late Imperial Russia (Mitchell 2015), in which the overcoming of time had social and spiritual significance. Much as the musical concept of polyphony problematizes temporal relations of sequence and simultaneity, the search for polyphony’s origins reveals a tension between historical, linear time, and the eternal present of sacred time.