Serbian Orthodox Chant as Concept and System — Protopresbyter Ivan Moody
Introduction
In this article, I wish to try to situate Serbian chant as a repertoire in terms of its acceptance as a chant system of value and interest, independently of any idea of it as merely a corrupt offshoot of Byzantine chant. This seems to me to be necessary because it is both underrepresented and little understood outside Serbia, quite apart from it being the object of frequent polemics within Serbia itself.
The appearance of “Serbian national folk chant—that is, srpsko narodno crkveno pojanje, or karlovačko pojanje (Karlovci chant)—as the music commonly sung in the churches of Serbia (and also the related chant in Romanian Banat, to which I will return below) is a well-documented phenomenon. Serbian church music moved from being Byzantine to this new condition during the time of the Ottoman domination of the country, becoming an oral repertoire that was written down (in staff notation) only from the nineteenth century onwards. This was in spite of endeavors to maintain links with Byzantine repertoire and to improve musical standards. As Vesna Peno has noted,
On account of the efforts of Metropolitan Mojsije Petrović (1677–1730) and Vikentije Jovanović (1689–1737), singers were given the opportunity to engage with the post-Byzantine singing tradition. It is important to note that these bishops, the main agents of pro-Western cultural tendencies in contemporary Serbian society, tried to maintain the balance between Russian (i.e., baroque) and Greek (i.e., Eastern) influences in church art. The Cathedral Church in Belgrade was the best witness to this trend during the 1840s. The services were celebrated by Serbian priests, Greeks sang, and Russians preached.
But the reality was that this repertoire developed in a different way, giving rise, as occurs with oral musical traditions, to a great number of variant melodies and, naturally, to chanting of various levels of competence. <…>
