The Octoechos and the Eight Tones

The Octoechos, the “Book of Eight Tones,” organizes the movable hymnography of the Church into a rotation of eight musical modes (echoi), changing week by week so that the whole cycle runs its course in eight weeks and begins again. This file describes the eight-tone system, the weekly resurrectional cycle, and the origins of the book — where the traditional ascription to St. John of Damascus and the scholarly picture must be held apart.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

The Eight-Tone System

Byzantine liturgical music is organized on a system of eight tones or modes (Greek ēchoi, sing. ēchos; Slavonic glasy): a set of eight melodic frameworks — each with its own characteristic scale, cadences, and formulae — through which the hymnody of the movable cycle is rotated (Wellesz, A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography, 2nd ed., Oxford, 1961; Conomos, Byzantine Hymnography and Byzantine Chant, Hellenic College Press, 1984). The eight are conventionally numbered as four authentic tones (Tones 1–4) and four plagal tones (the plagal of the first through the plagal of the fourth, numbered 5–8 in the Slavonic reckoning). A tone is not merely a key or a pitch but a whole modal idiom, a family of melodic gestures within which the hymns assigned to that tone are sung.

The organizing principle is rotation. The hymnography of the ordinary weeks of the year — the weeks outside the great fixed and movable feasts — is set to one tone per week, and the tone advances by one each week, so that Tone 1 gives way to Tone 2, and so on through Tone 8, whereupon the cycle returns to Tone 1. The complete rotation therefore takes eight weeks, and it runs continuously through the year, its count reset each year from Pascha (specifically, the tones begin again from the first tone on the Sunday after Pascha, Thomas Sunday, and run through the weeks after Pentecost and the rest of the year). This eight-week musical cycle is the pulse beneath the whole movable year: every ordinary Sunday and weekday is “in” one of the eight tones, and the faithful of a given parish know which tone governs the week.

The Book Called the Octoechos

The book that contains this rotating hymnography is the Octoechos (Greek Oktōēchos, “eight-toned”; Slavonic Osmoglasnik), also called the Paraklitiki in its fuller form. It is one of the principal liturgical books of the Byzantine rite, standing alongside the Menaion (the fixed calendar of saints and feasts), the Triodion (the pre-Lenten and Lenten cycle), and the Pentekostarion (the Paschal season) — the interlocking of these books is treated in The Liturgical Books Interlock. The Octoechos supplies the changing hymnody of the ordinary weeks: the stichera, troparia, kontakia, and canons for Vespers, Matins, and the other offices of each day, arranged tone by tone and day by day. The book is organized first by tone (eight sections), and within each tone by the days of the week, each day carrying its own commemorative theme — Sunday the Resurrection, Monday the bodiless powers, Tuesday St. John the Baptist, Wednesday and Friday the Cross, Thursday the Apostles and St. Nicholas, Saturday the departed and all saints.

The Resurrectional Cycle

The heart of the Octoechos is its Sunday resurrectional hymnography — the anastasima. Each of the eight tones supplies a complete set of resurrectional hymns for the Sunday Vigil: the resurrectional stichera at “Lord, I have cried” and at the Praises, the anabathmoi (the “Songs of Ascents”), the resurrectional troparion, and above all the resurrectional canons sung at Sunday Matins (Wellesz, 1961; and see St. John of Damascus: Canons and the Octoechos). Through this cycle every Lord’s Day becomes a weekly “little Pascha,” each Sunday re-singing the Resurrection in a different one of the eight modes, so that the Paschal proclamation is distributed across the whole calendar and sounded, week by week, in all eight tones in turn. The Octoechos thus does for the ordinary Sundays of the year what the Pentekostarion does for the Paschal season proper: it keeps the Resurrection continually before the Church, in an ordered rotation of song.

Origins: Tradition and Scholarship Held Apart

The origin of the Octoechos requires the same honesty this collection applies to every disputed attribution: the traditional ascription and the scholarly picture must be held apart, exactly as in the fuller treatment at John of Damascus and Cosmas.

The traditional ascription. Orthodox liturgical tradition credits St. John of Damascus (c. 675–749) with creating the Octoechos — with inventing or fixing the eight-tone system and supplying its hymnography. This is the form the claim takes in popular synaxaria and service-book prefaces.
The scholarly picture. The eight-tone system is older than John and was not his invention. A liturgical eight-mode framework was developing in Jerusalem and the Palestinian monastic milieu before and around his time; the practice of varying hymns across an eight-fold cycle has roots in the earlier Hagiopolitan (Jerusalem) tradition, the so-called Hagiopolitan Octoechos. The judicious account is that John contributed substantially to the Octoechos — very plausibly composing the Sunday resurrectional hymns and helping shape and arrange the corpus — but did not create the eight-tone system, which he inherited and developed (Frøyshov, “The Early Development of the Liturgical Eight-Mode System in Jerusalem,” SVTQ 51 [2007]: 139–178; Louth, St John Damascene, Oxford, 2002, ch. on the hymnography). The received book, moreover, grew by accretion long after John: later scholarship has connected the Georgian Euthymius of Athos (d. 1028) with the transmission of the fuller book, a sign of how much the received Octoechos exceeds anything a single eighth-century author could have fixed.

[Disputed: the creation of the Octoechos and the eight-tone system — Orthodox liturgical tradition ascribes it to St. John of Damascus (so the synaxaria and service-book prefaces); modern scholarship holds that the eight-mode system predates John in the Palestinian/Hagiopolitan tradition and that John contributed the resurrectional cycle and helped shape, but did not invent, the system — Frøyshov, SVTQ 51 (2007); Louth, St John Damascene (2002). The received book is further a layered compilation grown after John.]

The honest summary is the one the Damascene collection reaches: John of Damascus is rightly venerated as the hymnographer of the Octoechos and the probable author of a substantial part of its Sunday resurrectional cycle, but the creation of the eight-tone system is a traditional ascription that the scholarship corrects to contribution and shaping (see John of Damascus and Cosmas). The distinction matters for this whole collection, because the Octoechos is the framework within which every other form is actually sung, and its authorship is the model instance of a tradition-honoured ascription that the evidence refines rather than overturns.

The Tones in the Living Services

For all the technicality of its structure, the Octoechos is not an antiquarian book but the everyday music of the Church. In a parish keeping the full cycle, the tone changes at Vespers on Saturday evening, and the week that follows is sung in that tone; the choir and the faithful learn to hear the year as a rotation of modes, each with its own colour and association. The system also governs how the fixed and movable feasts are set: a hymn in the Menaion or Triodion is appointed “in Tone 4” or “to the melody of” a known model, and the singer reaches for the modal idiom the Octoechos has taught. In this way the eight tones bind the whole hymnographic corpus — Octoechos, Menaion, Triodion, Pentekostarion — into a single musical language, so that the many books and the many forms are heard as one continuous song, turning through its eight modes as the year turns through its weeks (see The Liturgical Books Interlock).

References

Wellesz, Egon. A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961. (The eight-tone system; the Octoechos; the resurrectional cycle.)
Conomos, Dimitri E. Byzantine Hymnography and Byzantine Chant. Brookline, MA: Hellenic College Press, 1984. (The modes and their idiom.)
Frøyshov, Stig Symeon R. “The Early Development of the Liturgical Eight-Mode System in Jerusalem.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 51 (2007): 139–178. (The Hagiopolitan origins of the eight-mode system; John’s contribution.)
Louth, Andrew. St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. (The Octoechos attribution; the resurrectional hymns.)
“Octoechos” and “Hagiopolitan Octoechos,” used to locate the scholarly discussion and followed to Frøyshov and Louth.