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.