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.
