The Kanon Form

Andrew’s place in the history of Byzantine hymnody as one of the founders of the kanon — the multi-ode hymn built upon the nine biblical canticles — which he developed alongside St. John of Damascus and St. Kosmas of Maiouma and which, from the eighth century, became the dominant poetic form of the Orthodox services. This file explains the structure of the kanon, the nine odes and their scriptural canticles, the heirmos and troparion, and the omitted second ode.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

What a Kanon Is

A kanon (κανών, “rule” or “measure”) is a structured liturgical hymn sung principally at Matins (Orthros), built upon the nine biblical odes or canticles — the songs of praise and prayer scattered through the Old and New Testaments which the Church had long sung at the morning office. Each ode of the canon is a cluster of newly composed stanzas attached to one of these biblical canticles. The first stanza of each ode is the heirmos (εἱρμός, “link”), which sets the melody and the metre and makes the connection to the biblical canticle; the stanzas that follow are the troparia, which carry the hymn’s own theme — a feast, a saint, or, in the Great Canon, repentance itself (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Kanon” and “Heirmos”; Canon (hymnography), Wikipedia; OrthodoxWiki, “Canon (hymn)”). The troparia are normally chanted to the heirmos’s melody, so that a canon is at once a literary and a musical structure.

The nine biblical canticles that underlie the odes are, in their classic order:

The Song of Moses after the Red Sea (Exodus 15:1–19);
The Song of Moses in Deuteronomy (Deuteronomy 32:1–43);
The Prayer of Hannah (1 Samuel 2:1–10);
The Prayer of Habakkuk (Habakkuk 3:1–19);
The Prayer of Isaiah (Isaiah 26:9–20);
The Prayer of Jonah (Jonah 2:3–10);
and 8. The Prayer of the Three Holy Children (the Song in the fiery furnace, Daniel 3);
The Song of the Theotokos (the Magnificat, Luke 1:46–55) joined to the Song of Zachariah (the Benedictus, Luke 1:68–79).

(Canon (hymnography), Wikipedia; OrthodoxWiki, “Canon (hymn)”; the canticles as numbered in the Triodion and the Psalter’s appendix of Odes.) The ninth ode, drawn from the New Testament, crowns the whole — which is why a canon’s movement from the first ode to the ninth is also a movement from the Law to the Gospel, from Moses to the Mother of God.

The Omitted Second Ode

In ordinary use a canon has only eight odes, not nine: the second ode, based on the stern canticle of Moses in Deuteronomy 32 (“Give ear, O heavens, and I will speak…”), is normally omitted, because that canticle is a song of judgment and reproach unsuited to festal joy. It is retained only in canons of a deliberately penitential or archaic character — chiefly in the Triodion services of Great Lent, and above all in Andrew’s Great Canon, which keeps the second ode precisely because its severity serves the work of repentance (Canon (hymnography), Wikipedia; Great Canon, OrthodoxWiki; see The Great Canon). The Great Canon’s use of the full nine-ode frame, second ode and all, is one mark of its archaic gravity.

Andrew Among the Founders

The kanon did not begin with Andrew — its roots lie in the troparia long sung between the verses of the biblical canticles, reaching back to the fifth and sixth centuries — but it was in the late seventh and early eighth century, in the Palestinian and Constantinopolitan monasteries and cathedrals, that the kanon was raised into a fully developed literary genre and came to displace the older kontakion (the long sung sermon-poem perfected by St. Romanos, on which see St. Romanos the Melodist) as the dominant form of Byzantine hymnody (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Kanon”; Canon (hymnography), Wikipedia). The tradition and the modern handbooks name three hymnographers as the great developers of the mature kanon, all of them of the same generation and the same Palestinian-Byzantine world:

St. Andrew of Crete (d. c. 740), the eldest, to whom the Great Canon and the earliest large body of festal canons are credited;
St. John of Damascus (d. c. 750), the systematizer, author of the resplendent Paschal Canon and of the Octoechos (see St. John of Damascus);
St. Kosmas of Maiouma (Kosmas the Melodist, d. c. 752 or 760), John’s foster-brother and fellow Sabaite, author of canons for the great feasts.

(Canon (hymnography), Wikipedia; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Andrew of Crete,” “John of Damascus,” “Kosmas of Maiouma.”) Among these, Andrew has a fair claim to chronological priority: he is generally reckoned the eldest of the three and the one who first composed canons on a large scale, so that John and Kosmas built upon a form he had already brought to maturity (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v.). [Disputed: the relative priority of Andrew, John, and Kosmas in “inventing” the developed kanon is not settled by the sources — the genre evolved across the seventh-century Palestinian monasteries rather than being the creation of any one man, and the handbooks credit all three jointly with its flowering; Andrew’s seniority in age and the antiquity of the Great Canon make him the natural first-named, but no source assigns him sole authorship of the form (Canon (hymnography), Wikipedia; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v.).]

The Kanon and the Kontakion

The rise of the kanon is bound up with the eclipse of an older and very different form, the kontakion, and the relation between the two is worth setting out, because it marks a real shift in the character of Byzantine liturgical poetry. The kontakion — perfected in the sixth century by St. Romanos the Melodist (see St. Romanos the Melodist) — was essentially a sung sermon in verse: a long sequence of metrically identical stanzas (often eighteen or twenty-four), all sharing a refrain, which together unfolded a single scriptural episode as a dramatic, often dialogued, meditation. It was a continuous poem with a narrative arc. The kanon, by contrast, is discontinuous and architectural: nine separate odes, each anchored to a different biblical canticle, each with its own heirmos and melody, the whole bound not by a single story but by the frame of the nine canticles and by the feast or theme they are made to serve (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Kanon,” “Kontakion”; Canon (hymnography), Wikipedia).

From the late seventh century the kanon progressively displaced the kontakion as the dominant form sung at Matins, until only fragments of the old kontakia — a single stanza (the prooimion) and one oikos — survived in the regular services, while the multi-ode kanon expanded to fill the office (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Kontakion”). Why the shift happened is debated — changes in the monastic office, the appeal of the canticle-frame, the sheer productivity of the new Palestinian hymnographers — but its result is plain in the modern service-books, which are built around the kanon. Andrew stands at the head of that transition: the Great Canon is, among other things, a demonstration of what the new form could do that the old could not — sustain not a single episode but the entire sweep of Scripture, turned upon the soul.

Heirmos, Theme, and the Movement to the Gospel

Two further features of the kanon repay attention, for they shape everything Andrew did with the form. The first is the relation of the heirmos to the biblical canticle. Each heirmos is composed to echo, in theme or image, the canticle of its ode — the first ode recalling the crossing of the Red Sea and the song of victory, the sixth recalling Jonah’s cry from the belly of the fish, the eighth the song of the three youths in the furnace, the ninth the Magnificat of the Virgin. A canon is therefore not a free composition but one perpetually anchored to a moment of Scripture; the poet’s art lies in drawing his theme into the orbit of each canticle in turn (Canon (hymnography), Wikipedia; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Heirmos”). In the Great Canon this anchoring becomes a structural engine: each ode’s biblical canticle suggests the cluster of scriptural figures Andrew will summon there, so that the form itself helps to organize the sweep from Adam to the Gospel (see The Great Canon).

The second feature is the canon’s built-in movement from the Old Testament to the New. Because the first eight odes draw on Old Testament canticles and the ninth on the songs of the Theotokos and Zachariah, every canon enacts, in its very structure, the passage from the Law and the Prophets to the Gospel — from expectation to fulfillment, from Moses to Mary. Andrew exploits this with particular power in the Great Canon, whose final odes cross over from the sinners and penitents of the Old Testament to those of the Gospel, so that the form’s native movement toward the New Testament becomes the soul’s movement toward the mercy of Christ.

The Great Canon as the Form’s Extreme

Andrew’s own supreme contribution to the genre is the Great Canon, which is the kanon form pressed to its absolute limit: where an ordinary festal canon offers three or four troparia under each ode, the Great Canon offers dozens, multiplying the troparia until the whole reaches about 250 (see The Great Canon). It is, in a sense, what the kanon form looks like when it is asked to do not the work of celebration but the work of an entire examination of conscience. The same structural genius — the nine odes anchored in the biblical canticles, each ode a meditation that the heirmos links to a moment of Scripture — is here turned to the single, sustained purpose of repentance. The form Andrew helped to found found in his own hands its largest and most famous monument.

References

Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. A. Kazhdan. Oxford University Press, 1991, s.v. “Kanon,” “Heirmos,” “Andrew of Crete,” “John of Damascus,” “Kosmas of Maiouma.” (Structure of the kanon; the three great developers; Andrew’s seniority and corpus.)
Canon (hymnography). Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_(hymnography)) — used to locate the nine biblical canticles, the heirmos/troparion structure, the omitted second ode, and the joint credit to Andrew, John, and Kosmas; cross-checked against the ODB and the Triodion.
“Canon (hymn).” OrthodoxWiki — the structure of the kanon and the biblical odes.
Scripture: the nine canticles — Exodus 15; Deuteronomy 32; 1 Samuel 2; Habakkuk 3; Isaiah 26; Jonah 2; Daniel 3 (Song of the Three Children); Luke 1:46–55, 68–79 (Magnificat and Benedictus).