In Memoriam: Protopresbyter Ivan Moody (June 11, 1964–January 18, 2024) — Alexander Lingas
The death at the age of 59 of the Very Rev. Dr Ivan Moody, founder of the International Society for Orthodox Church Music, was deeply shocking for anyone who had experienced at first hand his seemingly boundless energy and enthusiasm. For decades he had maintained intersecting careers in academic, ecclesiastical, and musical spheres as a composer, conductor, editor, pastor, scholar, teacher, and translator. Fr Ivan sustained this activity by regularly crossing confessional, ethnic, linguistic, and national boundaries. In so doing, he built and maintained a dense network of personal and professional relationships. When I met him in the late 1980s, this meant keeping in touch mainly by post. Later he quickly adopted new communication media as they appeared: faxes, email, websites, electronic bulletin boards and listservs, instant messaging, Facebook, and finally Zoom and other forms of live video. The cessation of this stream of communication has left a void, still keenly felt, in the lives of Fr Ivan’s friends and colleagues. Yet the passage of six months since his repose has also offered an opportunity for preliminary reflection on the magnitude of his achievements in multiple fields. Even a cursory glance at the versions of his biography and curriculum vitae available on the internet is enough for one to conclude that a comprehensive assessment of his legacy as a musician, scholar, and cleric is a project that will take scholars years to achieve. I will therefore limit myself here to a brief tribute concentrating on Fr Ivan’s activities relating to the musical traditions of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
Fr Ivan Moody on the day of his ordination to the priesthood (October 7, 2007)
Ivan William George Moody became an Eastern Orthodox Christian soon after receiving his B.Mus degree from Royal Holloway, University of London, in 1985. By this point his parallel interests in the musical inheritances of Western and Eastern Christianity were well established. To perform their historical and contemporary repertories he founded in 1984 a vocal ensemble known alternately as Voces Angelicae and the Kastalsky Chamber Choir. He demonstrated a commitment to exploring the wider cultural contexts for Christian liturgical music in his Three Poems of Anna Akhmatova (1985), a work for high voice (soprano or tenor) and string sextet that won the Royal Holloway College Prize for Composition. This was an artistic orientation he largely shared with Sir John Tavener (1944–2013), who had been received into the Orthodox Church in 1977 and who, during Fr Ivan’s final year as an undergraduate student, began to offer him private composition lessons.<…>
