The Place in the Rite

St. Romanos’s kontakia were composed for, and lived in, the sung night office of the Great Church of Constantinople — the cathedral asmatikē akolouthía and its vigil (pannychís), where a soloist chanted the long poem from the ambo after the Gospel and the people answered the refrain. This file traces that original liturgical home, the rise of the nine-ode canon in the seventh and eighth centuries that displaced the kontakion from Matins, and the monastic Sabaite-Studite synthesis that fixed the present rite — explaining why only the prooimion, and sometimes the first oikos, of a kontakion now survive in use.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

The Kontakion’s Original Home: The Sung Cathedral Office

The kontakion was not a private poem but a liturgical genre with a specific home, and that home was the cathedral rite of Constantinople — the asmatikē akolouthía, the “sung services” of the Great Church of Hagia Sophia (Taft, The Byzantine Rite: A Short History, Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1992; cf. the “asmatic” cathedral office, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Rite). This was the public, festal, musically elaborate rite of the imperial capital, distinct from the spare psalmody of the monks: a rite of processions, of soloists and trained singers, of the people answering refrains. Within it the kontakion had a defined place. It was a long sung verse-sermon — a prooimion and up to twenty-four oikoi — performed by a skilled cantor from the ambo, the raised pulpit at the centre of the church, the text unrolled from the scroll wound about the kontax that gave the genre its name, while the assembly joined in the recurring refrain (Metropolitan Cantor Institute, “Kontakia,” mci.archpitt.org).

Its liturgical moment was the vigil, the night office. Romanos’s kontakia belong to the all-night or evening festal service — in the technical vocabulary of the Constantinopolitan rite the pannychís, the sung night-vigil of the cathedral — and were chanted in connection with the reading of the day’s Gospel, the kontakion functioning as the poetic homily that drew out the feast (Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode et les origines de la poésie religieuse à Byzance, Paris, 1977; mci.archpitt.org, “Kontakia,” noting performance “during vigil services”). The genre was, in this sense, preaching set to music: a sermon the whole assembly could sing. That is the setting in which Romanos worked as deacon-cantor in sixth-century Constantinople, and for which his nearly complete corpus was made (see The World of Justinian and Emesa to Constantinople).

Two Offices: Cathedral and Monastic

To grasp why the kontakion rose and fell, one must see that two quite different liturgical worlds coexisted in Byzantium, and that Romanos belonged to the one that did not finally prevail. The first was the cathedral office — the asmatikē akolouthía, the “sung service” of the Great Church of Hagia Sophia and the other major urban churches. This was a public, ceremonial, frankly musical rite: an office of processions and stations, of trained soloists and a psaltes-led choir, of antiphonal psalmody and refrains answered by the people, conducted with the splendour proper to the imperial capital (Taft, The Byzantine Rite: A Short History, Collegeville, 1992; “Byzantine Rite,” en.wikipedia.org). Its hours were comparatively few and its texts comparatively spare in number but elaborate in performance. The kontakion — a soloist’s poem sung from the ambo with a congregational refrain — is unintelligible except as a creature of this sung cathedral world (Taft, 1992; Grosdidier de Matons, 1977).

The second was the monastic office, and above all the Palestinian tradition of the Great Lavra of St Sabas near Jerusalem (the Sabaite office) as it was received and developed in the monasteries of the capital (Taft, 1992). The monastic ideal was different in kind: a long, ascetic, text-heavy round of psalmody and biblical canticles, the entire Psalter recited each week, the hours kept in full, the emphasis falling on sustained reading and prayer rather than on ceremonial song (Taft, 1992; “Typika,” en.wikipedia.org). It was into this monastic frame — with its nine biblical odes at the morning office — that the canon would fit so naturally, and it was this frame that, fused with surviving cathedral elements, would ultimately govern the whole Orthodox rite (Taft, 1992). The kontakion’s eclipse is, at bottom, the eclipse of the cathedral office that bore it by the monastic office that replaced it.

The Pannychis: The Vigil Where Kontakia Were Sung

Within the cathedral rite the kontakion had one home above all: the pannychís, the sung night-vigil of the Great Church. The pannychis was a festal night office, kept on the eves of the great feasts and other solemn occasions, distinct from the ordinary Vespers and Orthros, given to extended psalmody, litanies, and hymnody through the hours of darkness (Taft, 1992; Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, 2014, 29–66). It was in this nocturnal cathedral service, in connection with the festal Gospel, that the long kontakion was unrolled — a poem of two dozen strophes had room to breathe in a vigil that filled the night (Grosdidier de Matons, 1977; Krueger, 2014, 29–66; and see metre, music and performance on the vigil setting). When the pannychis itself faded with the decline of the cathedral office, the natural liturgical occasion for the full kontakion faded with it, hastening the genre’s contraction to the stump now lodged in monastic Matins (Taft, 1992).

The Rise of the Canon

From the late seventh century a new and rival hymnographic genre arose that would, over time, push the kontakion out of its place at Matins: the canon (kanṓn). The canon is a composite hymn organized around the nine biblical odes — the scriptural canticles (the Song of Moses at the Red Sea, the Song of the Three Children, the Magnificat, and the rest) — with a cluster of newly-composed troparia attached to each ode, so that the whole sweeps from the Exodus to the Incarnation across nine movements (Canon (hymnography), en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_(hymnography); orthodoxwiki.org, “Canon”). Where the kontakion was a single sustained poem on one theme, the canon was a many-stranded structure woven through the biblical odes — more elaborate, more scriptural in scaffolding, and better suited to the developing monastic Matins.

Its great architects are the hymnographers of the late seventh and eighth centuries: St. Andrew of Crete (c. 660–740), whose vast Great Canon of repentance is the genre’s most famous monument; St. John of Damascus (c. 675–749), author of the Paschal canon among many others; and St. Kosmas of Maïuma (Kosmas the Melodist, d. c. 752), John’s foster-brother and fellow canon-writer (Canon (hymnography), en.wikipedia.org; and see the sibling collection St. John of Damascus for his hymnographic work). From the eighth century the canon “prevailed… as the most represented hymnographic genre in the Byzantine liturgical tradition” (so the summary at sites.nd.edu/manuscript-studies and orthodoxwiki.org, “Canon”). As the canon filled the odes of Matins, the kontakion — which had once been the principal sung poem of the festal vigil — lost its structural function and was squeezed to the margins of the service.

The Eclipse: How the Canon Displaced the Kontakion

The displacement was not a sudden abolition but a slow eclipse, and it is bound up with the larger transformation of the Byzantine rite that Robert Taft has charted: the gradual fusion of the cathedral office of the Great Church with the monastic office, in which the monastic synthesis ultimately prevailed (Taft, The Byzantine Rite: A Short History, 1992). The kontakion was a creature of the cathedral rite — the sung, soloistic, ambo-centred office of Hagia Sophia. As that rite gave way, the genre native to it gave way with it.

The decisive solvent was the Sabaite–Studite synthesis. In the eighth and ninth centuries the monks of the Stoudios monastery in Constantinople imported the Palestinian monastic Typikon of the Great Lavra of St. Sabas and melded it with elements drawn from the cathedral asmatikē akolouthía, producing the hybrid “Studite” office that, further developed, became the neo-Sabaitic synthesis governing the Orthodox services to this day (Taft, The Byzantine Rite, 1992; Typikon, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typika). In that synthesized Matins, the nine-ode canon occupied the place the kontakion had once held, and the kontakion was retained only as a small inserted unit — no longer the great poem of the vigil, but a brief remnant lodged at a single joint of the canon. By the ninth century, as the Metropolitan Cantor Institute summarizes, “the kontakion gave way to the more elaborate canon” (mci.archpitt.org, “Kontakia”).

Why Only the Prooimion (and the First Oikos) Survive

The mechanics of that survival explain the puzzle of the modern service-books. When the canon absorbed Matins, the full kontakion had no room left in the service — but rather than vanish, its opening was preserved and slotted into a fixed gap in the canon: after the sixth ode, between odes six and seven, where the books now print a “Kontakion” and an “Oikos” (mci.archpitt.org, “Kontakia”: the proemium and first oikos “persisted in liturgical use, integrated into Matins after the sixth ode of the canon — a placement that continues today”). What is printed there is only the prooimion and the first oikos of what was once a poem of two dozen stanzas; the remaining oikoi were simply dropped (mci.archpitt.org; Canon (hymnography), en.wikipedia.org, noting a “vestigial kontakion… with only its prooimion… and the oikos or first strophe”). In very many feasts even the single oikos falls away in practice, and the service-book “Kontakion” is the prooimion alone.

So the reason is structural, not editorial: the kontakion lost the office it was built for, survived only as a token inserted into the office that replaced it, and was therefore preserved at exactly the length that the new slot could hold — its head, severed from its body. The full poems did not cease to exist; they passed out of the living rite and into the manuscript tradition, where the critical editions later recovered them (see The Surviving Fragments for what remains in use and what survives only on the page). The Akathist is the single great exception — the one complete kontakion that kept its whole length in the living liturgy — and its uniqueness is the measure of what was generally lost (see Kontakion and Akathist).

The Kontakarion as a Liturgical Book

That manuscript survival had its own dedicated vessel. The kontakia were gathered into a distinct liturgical book, the kontakarion — the chant-book of the cantor that collected the kontakia, with their melodies in its notated form (the soloist’s volume being known as the psaltikon), for performance in the rite (Wellesz, A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography, 2nd ed., 1961; Metropolitan Cantor Institute, “Kontakia,” mci.archpitt.org). The very existence of a book named for the genre is a witness to how central the kontakion once was: a class of hymn important enough to require its own volume in the library of Byzantine service-books, alongside the Triodion, the Menaion, and the rest. As the full kontakion passed out of use, these kontakaria became less a working tool than a repository — the channel through which the texts and the later melodies of the genre were carried down to the age of the printed editions and the modern critical recovery of Romanos (Wellesz, 1961; and see the surviving fragments). The book outlived the living practice it was made to serve.

References

Taft, Robert F. The Byzantine Rite: A Short History. American Essays in Liturgy. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992. (The cathedral / asmatic rite, the monastic office, and the Sabaite–Studite synthesis that fused them.)
Grosdidier de Matons, José. Romanos le Mélode et les origines de la poésie religieuse à Byzance. Paris: Beauchesne, 1977. (The kontakion’s place in the Constantinopolitan vigil and its performance.)
Wellesz, Egon. A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961. (The cathedral office and vigil; the kontakarion and psaltikon as liturgical books.)
Krueger, Derek. Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. (The pannychis vigil as the kontakion’s setting.)
Metropolitan Cantor Institute. “Kontakia.” mci.archpitt.org/liturgy/Kontakia.html. (Original form and ambo-performance; displacement by the canon in the ninth century; survival of prooimion and first oikos after the sixth ode.)
“Canon (hymnography).” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_(hymnography). (The nine-ode canon; Andrew of Crete, John of Damascus, Kosmas; the vestigial kontakion between odes six and seven.)
“Canon (hymn).” OrthodoxWiki. orthodoxwiki.org/Canon_(hymn). (The canon’s rise to dominance from the eighth century.)
“Byzantine Rite” and “Typika.” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Rite; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typika. (The asmatikē akolouthía of Hagia Sophia; the Sabaite Typikon imported at the Stoudios.)