Metre, Music, and Performance

The kontakion is built not on the classical quantitative metres of antiquity but on a metre of syllable-count and word-stress: each strophe reproduces, line for line, the same number of syllables and the same pattern of accents as a single model strophe. Its melody, governed by that model and once sung by a soloist with a responding choir at the night vigil, is lost — Byzantine musical notation postdates Romanos by centuries, and all reconstructions of how his kontakia actually sounded are conjectural.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

A New Kind of Metre

The kontakion belongs to a decisive turn in the history of Greek verse. The metres of classical antiquity — hexameter, iambic trimeter, and the rest — were quantitative: they were organised by the patterned alternation of long and short syllables, measured by vowel-length. By Romanos’s day the spoken Greek of the Eastern Empire had largely lost the distinction between long and short vowels, and a strong stress accent had taken its place; the old quantitative metres survived only as a learned, artificial accomplishment (Wellesz, A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography, 2nd ed. 1961, 171–179; Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode et les origines de la poésie religieuse à Byzance, 1977, 99–120). Romanos’s verse is governed instead by two principles native to the living language: the count of syllables and the place of the stress (Wellesz, 1961, 175–179; Maas–Trypanis, Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica, 1963, introduction).

The metre is therefore isosyllabic and tonic: corresponding lines in different strophes have the same number of syllables and bear their accents in the same positions. This is not quantitative scansion at all but a rhythm of stresses falling at fixed intervals over a fixed syllable-count (Grosdidier de Matons, 1977, 103–117; Wellesz, 1961, 175–177). The result is a flexible, speech-rooted music of language, capable of long narrative paragraphs and sudden rhetorical turns that classical metre could not easily accommodate.

Homotonia and the Model Strophe

The mortar that holds the whole edifice together is a principle scholars call homotonia — “same-toning.” Every oikos of a kontakion is modelled on one governing strophe, and the correspondence is exact: line by line, each oikos matches the model in the number of syllables per line and, ideally, in the position of every stressed syllable (Wellesz, 1961, 182–183; Grosdidier de Matons, 1977, 103–110). The strophes are thus metrically identical not by accident but by design — they are all copies, in respect of rhythm, of a single pattern.

The governing strophe carries technical names borrowed from the wider machinery of Byzantine hymnography. As the metrical-melodic model on which the others are built, it functions as a hirmos (the “link” or “model” strophe whose pattern subsequent strophes follow); where such a model melody was original to and proper to its own text rather than borrowed, it was an idiomelon, “with its own melody” (Wellesz, 1961, 182–183, 240–242). Because the kontakion’s strophes are homotonic, a single melodic line composed for the model strophe could be sung, without alteration, to every other oikos in turn — the music written once and reused for each “house” (Wellesz, 1961, 183–186). The acrostic and the recurring refrain (see the genre) sit atop this metrical uniformity, so that structure, signature, and song reinforce one another.

This principle reached beyond a single hymn. A strophe that supplied its own original melody was an automelon; a later text composed to be sung to a pre-existing model melody — matched to it in syllable-count and stress so that the borrowed tune would fit — was a prosomoion, customarily prefaced in the books by a rubric naming the model, “to the melody of…” (Wellesz, 1961, 240–243; Grosdidier de Matons, 1977, 103–117). The most famous of all such models was Romanos’s own Nativity prooimion: later kontakia were written as prosomoia to “Today the Virgin,” reproducing its metre so that the congregation could sing the new words to the established and beloved tune (Wellesz, 1961, 240–243; and see Today the Virgin). The same model-and-imitation logic underlies the hirmos of the later canon, where each ode’s first troparion sets the pattern for the rest — so the homotonic principle Romanos worked within became the structural grammar of Byzantine hymnody as a whole (Wellesz, 1961, 240–243).

The Lost Melody

Of how Romanos’s kontakia actually sounded, we have almost nothing certain. The decisive obstacle is chronological: developed Byzantine musical notation — the neumatic systems that let us read medieval chant — does not appear until centuries after Romanos, the earliest substantial notated sources dating from around the tenth century and later (Wellesz, 1961, 246–260, 261ff). Romanos composed in the sixth century, when no notation capable of preserving a melody existed; his tunes were transmitted, if at all, by ear and by the living memory of singers (Wellesz, 1961, 246–250; Grosdidier de Matons, 1977, 27–35).

By the time notation could have recorded them, the full kontakion had already been displaced in the rite by the canon, and only the proem and first oikos of each kontakion survived in regular use; the long bodies of the hymns, and with them whatever melodies once carried twenty-odd strophes, fell silent (Wellesz, 1961, 179–181, 198–200). What survives in the later notated kontakaria reflects an elaborate, melismatic medieval performance practice that is almost certainly remote from the simple, direct, syllabic delivery the sixth-century texts presuppose (Wellesz, 1961, 198–200, 261–271). Modern attempts to reconstruct or perform Romanos’s melodies are therefore frankly conjectural: scholars can recover the rhythm of his verse with confidence, because it is encoded in the syllables and stresses of the surviving words, but the tune is a matter of reasoned hypothesis, not transcription (Wellesz, 1961, 246–260; Grosdidier de Matons, 1977, 27–35).

The Kontakaria and the Neume Problem

What the later Middle Ages did preserve is gathered in a distinct class of chant-book, the kontakarion (the psaltikon in its soloist’s form), the manuscript that collected the kontakia with their melodies for the cantor’s use (Wellesz, 1961, 198–200, 261–271). These books are precious, but they pose a double problem for anyone seeking Romanos’s music. First, they are late: the notated kontakaria belong to the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, half a millennium after the poet, and they transmit not his sixth-century delivery but the ornate, slow, melismatic chant of the developed cathedral psaltikon style, in which a single syllable might be spun out over many notes (Wellesz, 1961, 198–200, 261–271). Second, the notation itself is only partly legible to us. The neumes of this period are interval signs that record the rise and fall of the melody relative to the preceding note, but for the earliest layers the precise pitches and the rhythm cannot be read off with certainty; the notation presupposes a living oral tradition to supply what the signs leave unspecified (Wellesz, 1961, 246–271). The melodies of the kontakaria are therefore recoverable in outline but not, for the oldest stratum, in full confident detail.

Modern Reconstruction: Wellesz and the Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae

The modern science of reading these books was largely created in the twentieth century. In 1931 Egon Wellesz, together with Carsten Høeg and H. J. W. Tillyard, founded the Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae (MMB), the series and editorial enterprise that published facsimiles and transcriptions of the Byzantine chant manuscripts and worked out the decipherment of the Middle Byzantine notation (Wellesz, 1961, 22–24, 246–260; “Egon Wellesz,” Polska Biblioteka Muzyczna). Their achievement was real: the Middle Byzantine round notation (from roughly the twelfth century on) can now be transcribed into staff notation with broad confidence, and Wellesz’s A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography remains the standard synthesis of that labour (Wellesz, 1961, 246–271).

But the enterprise has its limits and its critics, and they bear directly on Romanos. The MMB transcriptions reach back reliably only as far as the notation does — that is, to chant centuries younger than the poet — and the earlier “palaeo-Byzantine” notations remain in part undecipherable for exact pitch and rhythm (Wellesz, 1961, 246–271). The transcription method itself, with its assumptions about rhythm and interval, has been contested: later scholars and traditional cantors have disputed the rhythmic interpretations of Tillyard, Høeg, and Wellesz, and the whole project of rendering Byzantine chant into Western staff notation has drawn objection as importing alien assumptions (so the survey of the controversy in A. Lingas, “Performance Practice and the Politics of Transcribing Byzantine Chant”). For Romanos specifically the upshot is sobering: even the full apparatus of modern Byzantine musicology cannot give us his tunes, because no notated source preserves them — what it can give us is the later music to which his texts (or texts modelled on them) came to be sung (Wellesz, 1961, 198–200, 246–271; Grosdidier de Matons, 1977, 27–35).

The Setting: The Night Vigil

The kontakion’s home was not the Divine Liturgy of the Eucharist but the pannychis — the night office, the all-night or part-night vigil kept on the eves of the great feasts in the cathedral rite of Constantinople (Wellesz, 1961, 179–181; Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, 2014, 29–66; Pannychis, Wikipedia). The first Nativity kontakion, by the tradition attached to its composition, was sung at the vigil of Christmas (see Today the Virgin). This vigil belonged to the so-called asmatic or “sung” office of the Great Church — the cathedral rite of Hagia Sophia, distinct from the monastic office — in which psalmody, litanies, and hymnody were chanted in an elaborate ceremonial through the hours of the night (Wellesz, 1961, 179–181; Krueger, 2014, 29–66; see the place in the rite).

Within that vigil the kontakion took the place and function of the homily, chanted after the Gospel reading and forming the principal act of teaching for the assembled congregation (Wellesz, 1961, 179–181; Krueger, 2014, 67–105). Its length — eighteen to twenty-four strophes — and its dramatic, exhortatory manner are intelligible only in this setting of a sustained nocturnal service, where a poem of such scale could be unrolled at leisure before a watching, participating people (see the cathedral Divine Liturgy and the liturgical life of the Church).

Soloist and Choir

The metrical and musical design of the kontakion answers exactly to a two-part mode of delivery. The strophes belonged to a soloist — a single cantor-preacher who chanted the proem and then each oikos in turn from the ambo, the elevated pulpit at the heart of the nave (Wellesz, 1961, 179–181; Kontakion, Wikipedia). Because the strophes were homotonic, this soloist could carry the entire long hymn to one repeated melody, sustaining the narrative and the dialogue strophe after strophe without the burden of new music for each (Wellesz, 1961, 182–186).

The refrain belonged to the others. After each strophe a choir — or, in the plainer syllabic manner, the whole congregation — answered with the ephymnion, the fixed final line first sounded at the close of the proem (Wellesz, 1961, 181–183; Krueger, 2014, 29–66). This alternation of solo strophe and corporate refrain is the kontakion’s living rhythm in performance: the preacher advances the argument, the people punctuate it with the same confession, and the long poem becomes a dialogue between cantor and congregation. The technical homotonia of the verse and the responsorial division of voices are thus two faces of one design — a sermon shaped from the start to be sung, and sung together (Wellesz, 1961, 181–186; Krueger, 2014, 29–66; and see the poet as preacher).

References

Wellesz, Egon. A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961.
Grosdidier de Matons, José. Romanos le Mélode et les origines de la poésie religieuse à Byzance. Paris: Beauchesne, 1977.
Maas, Paul, and C. A. Trypanis (eds.). Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963–1970.
Carpenter, Marjorie (trans.). Kontakia of Romanos, Byzantine Melodist. 2 vols. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1970.
Lash, Ephrem (trans.). On the Life of Christ: Kontakia. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995.
Krueger, Derek. Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.
Lingas, Alexander. “Performance Practice and the Politics of Transcribing Byzantine Chant.” (On the Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae transcription method and its critics.) analogion.com/site/pdf/Lingas.pdf.
“Egon Wellesz.” Polska Biblioteka Muzyczna. (Founding of the Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae, 1931.) https://polskabibliotekamuzyczna.pl/encyklopedia/wellesz-egon/?lang=en
“Pannychis.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pannychis
“Kontakion.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kontakion