The Twelve Days of Christmas in the Greek East

The Christian East originally celebrated the incarnation of God on January 6th
in a single feast entitled “Epiphany” (Greek ἐπιφάνεια, “manifestation”) that
commemorated both the Nativity and the Baptism of Jesus Christ. By the fifth century
most Christians in East and West had come to observe these historical events
separately, adopting the western practice of celebrating Christmas on December 25th
and retaining Epiphany on January 6th. Eventually this twelve-day period was
enhanced by a dependent cycle of commemorations related to the birth of Christ
including the Circumcision (January 1st, on which St. Basil the Great is also
celebrated), the Meeting or Presentation in the Temple (February 2nd), and the
Annunciation (March 25th).

Even after the harmonization of the Eastern and Western calendars, regional
differences persisted. In the Greek East, the Adoration of the Magi was incorporated
into the new feast of Christmas, while Epiphany became exclusively a celebration of
Christ’s baptism in the Jordan by John. The latter was renamed “Theophany”
(“manifestation of God”) to emphasize its Trinitarian significance, marked in scripture
by the voice of the Father and the appearance of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove.

Although separated from Theophany, Christmas in the Christian East

continued to be colored by the original concept of Divine Epiphany, emphasizing
God’s condescension in taking on human nature. The picturesque details of the Baby
Jesus lying in a manger were not ignored, but placed in the cosmic context of the
Incarnation, as in the following hymn:

Today He who holds the whole creation in the hollow of His hand is born of the
Virgin.

He whom in essence none can touch is wrapped in swaddling clothes as a

mortal.

God who in the beginning founded the heavens lies in a manger…

–Sticheron doxastikon from the Ninth “Royal” Hour of Christmas Eve

 This program presents ancient and modern musical works for the Nativity
cycle that are taken from or inspired by the services of the Byzantine rite, the form of
worship employed today by millions of Eastern Orthodox and Greek Catholic
Christians. The traditional Greek name for the musical repertories of the Byzantine
rite is “(ecclesiastical) psalmody,” an appellation recalling early Christians’
enthusiasm for singing biblical psalms and canticles. A little over a century ago the
repertories that emerged in Late Antiquity from Greek and Syriac-speaking peoples
acquired the name “Byzantine chant.” This modern term emphasizes its foundations
in the work of poets, composers and singers worshipping in the urban churches and
monasteries of the East Roman (“Byzantine”) Empire.

About a thousand years ago the texts of Byzantine chants began to be

accompanied by musical signs (neumes) which were codified by the 12th century into
a melodically precise notational system that, with some 19th-century modifications,
remains in use across a geographic arc from the Eastern Mediterranean to the borders
of Russia. While it has been customary in some of these regions to perform Byzantine
chant with additional vocal parts—typically the ison (drone), but in some places also
more elaborate forms of spontaneous harmonization—it is only in modern times that
the techniques of Western art music have been widely applied to Byzantine melodies.

Byzantine Chants

The Kontakion (Prologue) for Christmas opens what is perhaps the most
famous hymn by Romanos the Melodist (6th c.), the patron saint of music in the
Orthodox East. Born in Beirut and probably of Jewish origin, Romanos served as a
deacon at the church of the Mother of God in the Kyrou district of Constantinople
during the first half of the sixth century. In the complete hymn, “Today the Virgin
gives birth” appears before a series of 24 metrically identical stanzas (oikoi), all of
which ended in the congregational refrain “A little Child: God before the ages.”
According to legend, Romanos began to chant this Christmas hymn during an all-
night vigil when the Mother of God appeared and asked him to swallow a scroll. We
sing the melody for its prologue recorded in fifteenth-century manuscripts. By the end
of the Middle Ages the prologue had come to be sung most often independently of its
stanzas, only one of which was retained in contemporary service books. Reduced thus
to a monostanzaic hymn, this kontakion was chanted in churches repeatedly during
services for the Nativity of Christ, as well as at the imperial court during the
emperor’s Christmas banquet.

The Prokeimenon for 1 January is another chant from the repertories of

medieval Constantinople. Commemorating St Basil the Great (4th c.), it appears in the
Psaltikon, a book containing melodies for the soloists of the Great Church of Hagia
Sophia. The prokeimenon was performed at the Divine Liturgy (Eucharist) just before
the Apostle (Epistle) reading of the day from the ambo, a raised pulpit under the
eastern edge of the basilica’s enormous dome. Structurally it is a responsorial chant
comparable in musical and textual form to the gradual of the Roman rite.

Kanons are multi-stanza hymns structured as a series of poetic “odes.” They

were originally composed to accompany the verses of the nine biblical canticles or
“odes” of the Palestinian Psalter, eight or nine of which were sung at solemn
celebrations of the morning office of orthros. Each ode of a poetic kanon begins with
an heirmos, a stanza providing a metrical model for further stanzas (troparia) sung to
its melody. By the late Byzantine period, it had become customary on great feasts to
replace the verses of the Magnificat—the Song of Mary (Luke 1:46–55) that forms
the first half of the Psalter’s ninth biblical canticle—with poetic verses (megalynaria)
proper to the occasion. The heirmos and troparia of the Ninth Ode sung on this
concert were edited by Dr Ioannis Arvanitis from MS Sinai Greek 1256, the second
earliest copy of the late Byzantine version of the Heirmologion revised by St John
Koukouzeles. Dated 1309 and copied by Eirini, daughter of Theodore Hagiopetrites,
this musically notated reference collection of model stanzas for kanons was updated
by Koukouzeles to reflect the oral traditions of his time.

Polyphonic Choral Works

Michael Adamis (1929–2013) was a composer, musicologist, and choral

conductor who founded the first electronic music studio in Athens and for ten years
(1975-85) was president of the Greek Section of the International Society for
Contemporary Music. In his mature works Adamis created innovative polyphonic
textures by combining melodically ornamented lines drawn from Greek folk or sacred
music. His Four Christmas Idiomela (1967), all of which Cappella Romana has
previously recorded, apply this technique to post-Byzantine melodies of hymns for the
Christmas vigil.

A different range of harmonic and polyphonic styles is to be found in liturgical

choral music written for the Greek Orthodox churches of America. For historical and
cultural reasons, Byzantine melodies generally appear without ornaments and often in
versions simplified or composed by Athenian cantor John Sakellarides (ca. 1853–
1939). The pioneer of a distinct “West Coast School” of Greek Orthodox choral music
was Frank Desby (1922–92) of Los Angeles, whose early reliance on Renaissance
prototypes gave way to more modern harmonies in his later works. Both styles are
represented in his contrasting settings of simple (1951) and elaborate (1980) versions
of the processional chant “As many as have been baptized into Christ” (Gal. 3:27),
which replaces the Trisagion Hymn (“Holy God, Holy Strong, Holy Immortal, have
mercy on us”) at the Divine Liturgy on Easter, Christmas, Theophany, and other
ancient feasts associated with Christian initiation.

Peter Michaelides (1927–2017) began composing music for the Orthodox

Church as a doctoral student at the University of Southern California. His elegant
settings of Byzantine chant from the 1960s encompass works in both Greek and,
unusually for the time, in English (including a complete Divine Liturgy recorded by
Cappella Romana). On this concert we perform three works by Michaelides, the first
two of which are English settings of the Christmas hymns: the Apolytikion (Dismissal
Hymn) of the feast and the Magnification, a verse and stanza from Ode 9 of the
Christmas Kanon by Kosmas as sung during the Divine Liturgy of Christmas Day.
The third work is his arrangement of a Kontakion (Prologue) for 1 January, the text of
which is primarily concerned with the Circumcision of Christ but concludes with a
reference to St Basil marking his simultaneous commemoration. Metrically identical
to the Christmas Kontakion of Romanos, the Kontakion for 1 January employs
Sakellerides’ melody for that chant.

Also educated in Los Angeles was the prolific Tikey Zes (b. 1927), who
studied composition under Ingolf Dahl and is a Professor Emeritus of San Jose State
University. In his choral settings of Byzantine chant, Zes has cultivated a mostly
consonant style of polyphony colored to varying degrees of modally inspired
chromaticism. The Megalynarion is a hymn from Ode 9 of the Kosmas's Kanon for
Theophany that, like the “Magnification” chant for Christmas, is sung both at morning
prayer and during the Divine Liturgy. Dr Zes’s Communion Verse for Theophany is a
setting for mixed voices of a chant by Sakellarides as partially recomposed in a
quasi-“Gregorianizing” style by Desby. The latter achieved this by first altering
Sakellarides’s rhythms in the main body of the chant and then replacing its
concluding “Alleluia” with a newly composed melody.

We represent the next generation of Greek Californian composers with the

world premiere of Neal Desby’s setting of the Communion Verse for Christmas. The
son of Frank Desby, he studied at USC where his principal teachers were Donald
Crockett in composition and Daniel Lewis in conducting. He also studied composition
with Lukas Foss and William Kraft. In addition to writing music for orchestra, various
chamber ensembles, solo piano, and chorus, Neal Desby is active as a conductor and
orchestrator for film and television. Most recently he conducted and orchestrated Jack
Wall’s score for the video game, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.

Neal Desby wrote his setting of the Communion Verse for Christmas using the
techniques of 16th-century Renaissance counterpoint, the influence of which can also
be heard in numerous Greek Orthodox choral works by his father and Tikey Zes. To
place this heritage in historical context, we have paired Neal Desby’s new work with
the Gloria in excelsis from the Missa Laetatus sum for 8 voices by Franghiskos
Leontaritis (ca.1518–ca.1572). A native of the island of Crete, Leontaritis began his
musical career at the Catholic cathedral of St Titus in Candia before journeying to
Venice to join the choir of Adrian Willaert. He eventually moved to Munich, where
he sang for Orlando Lassus. His published works include the settings of the mass
ordinary of the Roman rite, motets, and madrigals.

Richard Toensing (1940–2014) was a composer whose music bridged West

and East, as is perhaps appropriate for a Lutheran who for decades found himself
drawn to “the gold-leafed icons of Byzantium and the sonorous music of the Russian
church.” This eventually led him to convert to the Eastern Orthodox Church in 1997.
Toensing's path as a composer in some ways paralleled his spiritual path, moving
from free atonality to what he called “the stability of modal/tonal writing,” which he
experienced “as an analog for the stability of Orthodox theology.”
 Toensing’s efforts to forge a creative synthesis often led him to such
monumental expressions as his Kontakion on the Nativity of Christ: A Choral
Concerto, a 40-minute setting of St Romanos’s hymn for double choir and soloists
(recorded in 2008 by Cappella Romana). His New Orthodox Carols for the Nativity,
on the other hand, are modestly scored recastings of Byzantine Christmas hymns in
poetic Western forms. The Rev. Dr. Jack Sparks originally adapted these texts to meet
an urgent pastoral need, namely that of former evangelical Protestants to assimilate
the repertories of Byzantine hymnography through the medium of their own musical
traditions. Toensing subsequently set them to original music that oscillates freely
between evocations of eastern and western Christian tradition of chant and hymnody.

Now living in the San Francisco Bay Area, Theodor Dumitrescu received a
B.A. in Computer Science from Princeton University and a D.Phil in Musicology
from the University of Oxford. In addition to producing research and publications on
the history, analysis, and theory of Western European music ca. 1500, he has
composed music for both concert and liturgical use. The Hypakoe “Heaven brought
the first fruits” is a setting of text originally created for the rite of the Great Church of
Hagia Sophia and sung today in the received Byzantine rite after Ode 3 of the Kanon
at the morning service of Orthros. Dumitrescu intended his setting of it to be “gentle,
quiet, contemplative, humble, with cradle song echoes in its repetitive oscillations,
generating new variations out of a very limited palette of basic musical materials...like
a miniature painting of the Child in the manger.”

Ivan Moody was a British composer and scholar who resided in Portugal with
his family from the early 1990s until his recent passing this last January. He was the
founding Chair of the International Society for Orthodox Church Music and served
his local Orthodox community in suburban Lisbon first as a cantor and later,
following his ordination in 2007 by Metropolitan Polykarpos of Spain and Portugal
(Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople), as a priest. Fr. Ivan based his Carol of
the Magi for female voices and The Prophecy of Symeon on multiple textual sources.
Carol of the Magi is mainly a setting of a hymn from the Christmas vigil, to which the
Fr. Ivan added brief quotations from the Kanon for the Nativity by Kosmas and the
Christmas Kontakion of Romanos. The Prophecy of Symeon frames passages from the
Gospels of Luke and John with a refrain from Byzantine morning prayer. The text
from Luke relates the encounter in the temple of the elderly priest Symeon with the
infant Jesus. Omitting the Symeon’s famous prayer of thanksgiving (“Lord, now you
let your servant depart in peace”), Fr. Ivan emphasized his bittersweet words to the
Virgin Mary. The quotation from John presents the fulfillment of that prophecy on
Golgotha, where she is pierced by grief beholding the crucifixion of her Son.

Alexander Lingas