ORTHODOX CHURCH MUSIC - Volume One, Issue One

Dedicated to the blessed memory of Archpriest Daniel Skvir (1945-2025)
and
Published with the support of the Elsie Skvir Ganister Foundation

• Editorial: Orthodox Church Singing in North America: Looking Backwards and Forwards —Vladimir Morosan

• Liturgy and Music for Mission — Archpriest Sergei Glagolev

• The Moroccan Musical Moment: Evgeny Ivanovich Evetz (1905-1990), His Post-World War II Russian Choir, and Their Legacy in the Orthodox Music World — Nicholas and Michelle Ganson

• Inflecting Orthodox Music with African-American Spirituals — Jaime Rall

• Revisiting Phrase Connections in Recitative Chant as an Aid to Communicating the Grammar and Meaning of Sung Texts — Vladimir Morosan

• A Vision for Beauty in Worship & the Models that Can Help us Get There — Valerie Yova

• CD Review: Kurt Sander — Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom (in Church Slavonic), Canticum Festum, Liubov Shangina, conductor — Priest Mikel Hill

• Tikey Zes (1927–2025): In memoriam — Richard Barrett

Editorial: Orthodox Church Singing in North America—Looking Backwards and Forwards — Vladimir Morosan

Orthodox liturgical music is … one of the most tangible outreach tools available to churches today.
Music is often the first thing which deeply strikes people when they walk into an Orthodox church,
even before they absorb the iconography, the architecture, the words of the services, or the preaching….
Beautiful sacred art — and sacred music especially — … works to soften [people’s] hearts,
preparing them to receive the things of God without their even realizing it.
— Metropolitan Tikhon (Mollard)

2025 is an exciting time to be an Orthodox church musician! I do not say this merely as an idealistic gesture designed to drum up support for the new venture that this journal, Orthodox Church Music, represents. Certainly, as some fairly recent assessments have pointed out, Orthodox church singing—and the Church as a whole—in North America faces many challenges and uncertainties. At the same time, these challenges, viewed in a positive light and from the vantage point of faith, offer unprecedented opportunities. In the ensuing paragraphs, I would like to share some thoughts and observations from the perspective of one who, over fifty years ago, felt called to devote a life and a musical career to the realm of Orthodox church music. In the course of these personal reflections, some of the motivations and inspiration behind the revival of a journal dedicated to this topic will become clear.

The Orthodox Church in North America, even if we consider the Russian Mission to Alaska established in 1794 as its genesis, is still quite young. We modern-day Orthodox, living in a world saturated with multimedia and instantaneous world-wide communication, can hardly imagine what effort (and grace) was required to establish nearly one hundred parishes across the vast territory of Alaska, to equip them with scriptural and liturgical texts in a variety of local native languages, and to teach the people in these communities to sing divine services in those languages. That is a process whose history still awaits discovery and documentation. But for nearly one hundred years, Orthodox church singing in North America was a distinctly local phenomenon, confined to Alaska. Not until the late 1880s, when the seat of the Diocese of Sitka and Alaska was moved to San Francisco, did the first trained church singers arrive from Russia in the New World.

Liturgy and Music for Mission — Archpriest Sergei Glagolev

The following article closely follows the text of two keynote lectures given by the author in the late 1980s at the Summer Liturgical Institute of Music and Pastoral Practice, an annual event held at St. Vladimir’s Seminary in Yonkers, New York, between the years 1978 and 2008. With the flourishing of new Orthodox missions in North America, the problems and solutions addressed in this article are as relevant today as they were forty years ago.

When David Drillock and I first met with Fr. Alexander Schmemann ten years ago to lay out a plan for the Summer Liturgical Institute, we had in mind particularly a gathering of people already engaged in parochial responsibilities—pastors, educators, administrators, musicians—for the purpose of intensely sharing their parish realities in an atmosphere of worship and theological reflection. We proposed having a “keynote” theme for the main lectures, agreeing that the “practical” sessions for the rest of the day must be rooted in the theological insights that would reveal the applications of a given lnstitute’s central theme to the specific areas of concern.

Well and good! We hear a keynote aspect of the theme; then the pastors go off to discuss pastoring, musicians go off to sing, and the people in the middle have to decide which of the two tracks might be for them—hoping not to blunder, because the rule was that one can’t switch tracks in midstream.

This year I was invited to give one of the main theme lectures. Thus, I’m not talking just to the musically gifted or the singing specialists. The challenge is exciting because I don’t ever remember talking about church music as anything other than a liturgical discipline in a theological context. The way we worship inevitably raises issues that pastors and educators must grapple with in order to grasp what sacred singing is all about; what we sing, why we sing, the way we sing, who sings, and where—these are liturgical problems of considerable pastoral, didactic and parochial proportions. Certainly this is the case in new missions! Singing is a sonant image that reflects a perception of ourselves in church. This is a matter of iconological concern. Given the confusion of cultures in an absence of an indigenous Orthodox culture in North America, liturgy for mission must approach music as an intensely pastoral question. Pastors and educators cannot leave music to be the specialty solely of musicians.

The Moroccan Musical Moment: Evgeny Ivanovich Evetz (1905-1990), His Post-World War II Russian Choir, and Their Legacy in the Orthodox Music World — Nicholas and Michelle Ganson

All of us who sang in the choir in Casablanca received good musical training, learned choral discipline,
and retained our love for the rich repertoire of sacred, classical, and folk music for the rest of our lives.

—Tamara Joukov (a choir director trained under E. I. Evetz)

We should not close our eyes to the fact that our [church music] culture in most countries of the Russian diaspora
is in a state of decline or, at best, is on the eve of decline. One would like to add: catastrophic and irreversible decline…. 
[T]he Russian youth choir in Paris, directed by the wonderful choral pedagogue Evgeny I. Evetz made an especially
strong impression on me because it…is preparing replacements for the generation of ‘fathers’ and ‘grandfathers.’

—Johann Von Gardner, 1969

In the late 1940s, Russian Orthodox refugees who had been displaced by World War II and concomitant political turmoil began to trickle into French Morocco. Many of them settled on the outskirts of Casablanca, in a neighborhood called Bournazel, which became the center of a community under the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russian (ROCOR).[3] Within a few years, these refugees managed to establish a vibrant liturgical and cultural life. The spiritual leader of the community was Fr. Mitrophan Znosko, while his brother-in-law, Evgeny Ivanovich Evetz, was the choral director. Evetz’s choir, made up entirely of Orthodox laypeople, became well-known among the French population of Casablanca. In a span of roughly fourteen years, between 1948 and Evetz’s departure from Casablanca in 1962, the choir—in addition to singing at all the divine services—managed to perform approximately one hundred concerts of sacred, classical, and folk music. With the end of the French protectorate of Morocco in 1956, Russians began to gradually abandon Morocco for western countries, where they often came to be known in émigré circles simply as “the Moroccans” (marokkantsy). This title stayed with the Russian-Moroccan émigrés even outside Morocco because the years spent in Morocco were formative for the singers. Evetz, as their musical leader, instilled a strong culture of singing, which they carried with them to other countries and contexts. Many of them, in turn, sought to transmit the culture of singing they had acquired to a younger generation as they served as church conductors, singers, and mentors in Paris, where the Evetz family ended up, and in a number of parish communities in the United States. In working toward documenting the afterlife of the Moroccan choir, this article fills in a crucial piece of the rich mosaic of Orthodox church singing culture and history in America. The research is based on a variety of primary sources—including published and unpublished memoirs, interviews, photographs, artifacts from private collections and, on occasion, the first-hand knowledge and experiences of the authors—and seeks to bring the story of Evgeny Evetz and his choir out of obscurity and document its substantial impact on the international Orthodox music world. 

The Russian Émigré Context

The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in October 1917 and the subsequent establishment of Soviet power spurred the flight of millions of people from the country. Emigration happened in numerous waves: the first major emigration, or the First Wave, happened shortly after the revolution and ensuing Russian Civil War (1917-20); the Second Wave occurred during the chaos of World War II. The new Soviet state sought to eliminate entire social classes, supplanting the old order with a new proletarian society; in the process, it sought to extirpate the culture of old Russia. Bolshevik iconoclasm targeted all elements of the old order. In following a policy of militant atheism, the Soviet state directed its assault most forcefully at the Russian Orthodox Church, the main religious institution in the country, deemed by the communists to be the handmaiden of the Russian imperial state. By the time of World War II, the Church and old culture to which it was tied had been subjected to numerous waves of attacks through the 1920s and 1930s, first under Vladimir Lenin and then Joseph Stalin. Those in the emigration who maintained the Orthodox Christian faith through this old culture sought to preserve it in the diaspora, recognizing that the failure to do so could lead to its complete loss. Opposition to the communist experiment in Russia constituted a defining characteristic of what Marc Raeff refers to as “Russia Abroad”; likewise, this characteristic extended to the Russian émigrés in the community in Morocco to which Evetz belonged.

Inflecting Orthodox Music with African-American Spirituals — Jaime Rall

A Case Study for Incorporating Local, Non-Orthodox Traditions into Liturgical Compositions

In recent years, Orthodox thinkers and liturgical composers have begun the work of identifying possible synergies between traditional African American spirituality, as it emerged out of the suffering of slavery, and the practices and beliefs of the Orthodox Church. These developments have, in part, been associated with the Fellowship of St. Moses the Black, a pan-Orthodox body that since 1997 has made efforts to equip Orthodox Christians for the ministry of racial reconciliation and to share the Orthodox Christian faith with African Americans and other people of color. In 2022, the Fellowship’s publishing arm released Jubilation: Cultures of Sacred Music, a collection of essays reflecting on the rich heritage of African American worship music from an Orthodox Christian worldview. Among other topics, the book identified several composers who have written Orthodox liturgical music inspired by African American traditions. These composers include Abbess Katherine Weston, who has created a spirituals-based setting of the Divine Liturgy called the Jubilee Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom; Dr. Shawn “Thunder” Wallace, who in 2020 showcased “How Sweet the Sound,” a setting of Orthodox Vespers in the style of black Gospel music; and Nazo Zakkak and Benedict Sheehan, who have both used themes, textures, and melodic fragments from African American music in their compositions.

These developments have been inspiring, while also raising questions for the would-be liturgical composer. What are the implications of incorporating elements of local, non-Orthodox musical traditions into Orthodox liturgical music? Why do it (or why not)? How would one assess whether a particular source of musical expression is suitable to draw on for Orthodox liturgical use, and by what criteria? And how, in practical terms, might a composer effectively integrate features from diverse musical traditions into compositions that continue to serve their sacred functions for the worshiping Orthodox community in the context of the liturgical rite?

The current project offers some preliminary answers to these questions. In doing so, it first provides a broader consideration of liturgical music in the context of Orthodox mission and ministry, and suggests some possible guidelines for assessing whether a local musical tradition is appropriate for adaptation to liturgical use. As an applied case study, it then presents two new and experimental compositions, each of which takes a different approach to incorporating identifiable elements of African American spirituals into Orthodox liturgical music, and outlines how the foregoing research and analysis informed those compositional choices. The project’s overall aim is to offer additional options for liturgical music that are in continuity with existing traditions of sacred singing in the Orthodox Church, while also welcoming a broader diversity of Americans into our worship and communities.

The Potential of Liturgical Music for Supporting Orthodox Mission and Ministry

Since the Orthodox Church in America was granted autocephaly in 1970, there has been ongoing discussion as to whether the local church in North America should develop its own distinct style and repertoire of liturgical music, including a local system of eight tones. Yet, as Alexander Lingas has argued, the assumption that liturgical music is and should be a marker of ethnic or national particularity—an assumption that can underlie arguments on both sides, either for uniquely American forms of Orthodox music or for strict adherence to the musical traditions that immigrants brought here from their ancestral churches abroad—is not borne out by the long history of liturgical music, but rather is linked to nationalist narratives that only took hold in the modern era. Before that, although there were regional and local variants in liturgical music, musical developments also moved freely across borders, even between East and West, and among different traditions there were deep continuities and mutual recognition.

Revisiting Phrase Connections in Recitative Chant as an Aid to Communicating the Grammar and Meaning of Sung Texts — Vladimir Morosan

A significant percentage of what is sung during Orthodox services consists of text-dependent and text-driven hymns that may be described as “recitative chant.” This style is particularly prevalent in singing that emerged from Slavic roots—lesser znamenny, Kievan, and Russian “Greek” chants; the principles of phrase connection that will be discussed in this article, however, are equally applicable to chants emanating from the Byzantine realm, particularly when written in Western linear notation.

Recitative chant consists of a series of phrases, ranging in structure from a single melodic phrase repeated numerous times (for example, Troparion Tone 8 of Russian Imperial Court Chant) to two, three, four, or five (rarely more) phrases, that are repeated as many times as is necessary to accommodate a given liturgical text—e.g., a sticheron, a troparion, or an heirmos. Each typical phrase begins with an intonation, a melodic passage of two or several metered notes, usually half notes, then settles upon a reciting pitch, and concludes with a cadence, which, again, consists of several notes that are metered. The passage of recitative in between the intonation and cadence can vary greatly in length, from a few syllables to perhaps as many as twelve, fifteen, or even more, depending on the given text.

Much can be said regarding the performance practice of these recitative-style chants—the tempo, the constancy or variability of the rate at which the syllables of the recitative progresses, and the techniques involved with conducting such passages. But these topics lie outside the scope of this article. In this piece we will focus on a very important but oftentimes neglected aspect of performing recitative chant—the connections between the musical-textual phrases and how they affect the meaning and the intelligibility of the sacred texts that these chants are so predominantly called upon to convey.

Church singing in Orthodox America has been inevitably shaped by what may be called the “received tradition”—the written scores and collective singing experience brought to the New World by immigrants from the Old World. The notation one tends to find in these received scores was adopted, for better or for worse, by those who created English-language adaptations of our service music. Specifically in the realm of the topic at hand, phrase connections, the standard practice was to end each phrase with a half note and to follow that half note with a solid bar line extending through both staves.

A Vision for Beauty in Worship & the Models that Can Help us Get There — Valerie Yova

Training ensembles composed of mostly amateur singers at the parish level requires a long-term perspective. To do it with any degree of success requires a rather large toolbox of skills, knowledge, and strengths: vocal technique, music theory, theology, rubrical knowledge, organization and communications savvy, psychology, leadership, fluency in numerous chant systems, a healthy prayer rule, accountability to a spiritual father, and a vision. I have probably left some things out.

If I were to list these skills by priority, at the top I would put: Having a clear vision of what “beautiful” sound means in the context of worship, with the goal of creating beauty in every service, all the time, to the best of our ability at any given moment, using the best resources available.

Abbess Thaisia, a spiritual daughter of St. John of Kronstadt, once described what I believe most of us liturgical musicians sense on some level at every service:

The singing of the chanter passes over to the hearts of those who are praying; if the singing proceeds from the heart, it meets the heart of the listener and so influences him that it is able to rouse him to prayer, to incite reverence even in those minutes when the heart itself is distracted and hard. Often it happens to those who enter the church without any eagerness toward prayer, from compulsion or from propriety, begin to pray fervently and tearfully, and leave the church in quite another frame of mind, in a spirit of tender feeling and repentance. Such a revival is produced in them by the magnificent service and fine singing. And conversely, often it happens that those who enter the church with the intention to pray from the soul, to pour out before the Lord their sorrowful soul, when they hear scattered, careless singing and reading, themselves little by little become distracted and instead of profit they find harm, they receive no consolation and, having been tempted by the conduct of the singers, involuntarily fall into the sin of condemnation. (Thaisia of Leushino. “Letters to a Beginner: On Giving One’s Life to God,” Wildwood: St. Xenia Skete, 2005).

The first time I read this quote, her words struck me deeply, as they should any liturgical musician. They invoke an overwhelming sense of responsibility for us, not to manipulate people emotionally during worship, but to be conscious of the fact that music has the power to either engage or distract people in prayer, to pull them into or push them away from an encounter with our Creator, Lord, and King.

Beauty is more difficult for most of us to describe than is distraction. Instead of offering my own definition, I am going to suggest a word that I believe can enable us to create beautiful, or at least more beautiful, worship. It is a word we don’t talk about very much. The key concept is “modeling.”

We all need models of beautiful singing. First, I am referring to beautiful singing in general: solo singers who have spent years learning how to enhance and refine the natural, God-given beauty of their voices. We also need models in group singing: fine choral ensembles that have worked hard to create the cohesion of sound that is truly transcendent through pure and consistent vowels, accuracy of tuning, and artistic phrasing. And then we need to study these models carefully to understand how this beauty is reached. It certainly is not by accident nor through “good intentions.” All the better when we can hear this modeling in Orthodox repertoire!

CD Review: Kurt Sander — Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom (in Church Slavonic), Canticum Festum, Liubov Shangina, conductor — Priest Mikel Hill

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Tikey Zes (1927–2025): In memoriam — Richard Barrett

On 7 May 2025, Panagiótes Zés, Árchon Protopsáltis of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, known to the world as the beloved Greek Orthodox composer Tikey Zes of San Jose, California, fell asleep in the Lord at the age of 97. His wife of nearly 58 years, Theodora, better known as Teddi, had predeceased him in 2021. He is survived by his children: sons Athan and Evan, and his daughter Anna-Matína, who had also served as his longtime organist, as well as multiple grandchildren.

While perhaps Tikey’s music is relatively unfamiliar outside of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, he frequently contributed to pan-Orthodox projects; his setting of “Come, Receive the Light” may be found in Musica Russia’s collection Great and Holy Pascha, and he was one of six composers who participated in the multi-composer work Heaven and Earth: A Song of Creation (published in 2020 by Musica Russica).

Tikey is one of four polyphonic choral composers whose works have largely defined the musical culture of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of the Archbishop Iakovos era (1959-1996) and thereafter. The other three are Theodore Bogdanos (1932-2019), Frank Desby (1922-1992), and Presvytera Anna Gallos (1920-2015). Together, the four of them outlined the contours of an acculturated choral idiom that employed Western tonal harmony, counterpoint, Romanticism, and organ accompaniment while still preserving the melodic material and modal character of their Byzantine roots.

Tikey’s distinctive contribution to the Greek-American choral tradition was to rearticulate the simplified Byzantine melodies of John Sakellarides (1853-1938) within a thoroughly Renaissance sensibility. In works such as his 1991 Divine Liturgy (revised in 1996), Tikey brings tremendous technical skill to bear, using counterpoint and independent polyphony along with the organ to ornament, to expand, and to demonstrate virtuosity in those areas where Byzantine music characteristically ornaments, expands, and demonstrates virtuosity in performing the underlying chant. One perhaps hears the suggestion of an alternate stream of musical history after the fall of Constantinople, as though the Eastern Romans who fled to Venice had captured the attention of a composer such as Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) and convinced him to convert and compose for Orthodox services.