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Over the centuries Orthodox church music has expanded and become more elaborate. The Church uses eight 'tones' or 'modes,' which are broad categories of melodies. Within each of these tones are many small more precise melodies. All of these tones and their melodies rotate weekly so that during each week a particular tone is used for singing music.
Over the centuries Orthodox church music has expanded and become more elaborate. The Church uses eight 'tones' or 'modes,' which are broad categories of melodies. Within each of these tones are many small more precise melodies. All of these tones and their melodies rotate weekly so that during each week a particular tone is used for singing music.
= Byzantine Notation =
Byzantine notation, also called Chrysanthean notation (Chrysanthean of Madytos being one of its inventors) is a neumatic system of musical notation used for rendering Byzantine chant into written form.
Byzantine notation is very different from Western notation in most ways. The following comparison assumes familiarity with Western notation.
Western notation is based on a staff, where the pitch is determined by the location of the note with regard to the staff, regardless of the previous note. Byzantine notation, on the other hand, is relational; the note is dependent on the previous note and the symbol itself, which specifies the interval from the previous note.
While there are differences in speed and in whether a certain note should be flat or sharp in Western music, Byzantine music has this down to a (very complicated) artform, using certain tones which always have a specific note being sharp or flat.
One near-similarity is the scale. In Western music, Do (the start of the scale) corresponds to the Byzantine note Ni, which is a note below the start of the Byzantine scale.
Byzantine music has eight tones (or modes), sometimes associated with particular "moods" (though the notion that the music is designed to be emotional would certainly be distasteful to the saints who developed it). Also, much of Byzantine chanting can be done without use of written music, due to the use of original melodies (Greek, αυτόμελον) and improvisation. While there are tens of thousands of hymns in Byzantine music, they are all based on less than two hundred original melodies.
== History ==
= Oktavist =
= Oktavist =