The Forms

The section on genre: the distinct kinds of Byzantine hymn — troparion, kontakion, canon, sticheron, theotokion — and the Octoechos, the system of eight musical tones in which the whole movable cycle of hymnody is cast and rotated.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

Overview

Orthodox hymnography is not a single form but a family of genres, each with its own history, structure, and liturgical place, and each layer of the family arose in its own age: the short troparion of the earliest period, the great sung sermon of the kontakion in the sixth century, the multi-ode canon that displaced it from the seventh, and the stichera and theotokia woven through every office. The first file of this section describes these genres and how they relate — what a troparion is, how the kontakion and the canon differ, what a sticheron and a theotokion do in the service. The second file treats the Octoechos, the “Book of Eight Tones,” and the eight-mode system that organizes the entire movable cycle of hymnody into a rotation of musical tones changing week by week — the framework within which all the forms are actually sung.

Files

File	Description
troparion-kontakion-canon.md	The genres: troparion, kontakion, canon (irmos and troparia, the nine odes), sticheron, theotokion — their forms and liturgical uses
the-octoechos-and-the-eight-tones.md	The eight-tone system, the weekly rotation, the resurrectional cycle, and the origins of the Octoechos

See Also

• Hymnography as Dogma Sung — what these forms carry
• The Akathist Hymn — the great kontakion, treated in full
• Orthodoxy: The Daily Cycle — the offices in which the forms are sung