ORTHODOX CHURCH MUSIC - Volume One, Issue Two

• In Pursuit of “Churchliness” in Liturgical Singing — Vladimir Morosan

• Sing Praises with Understanding — Vladimir Krassovsky

• A New Znamenny Chant for the New World — Monk Philaret (Farley)

• The “Other” Boris Ledkovsky (1894–1975) — Elizabeth A. Ledkovsky

• Boris Ledkovsky’s Years at St. Vladimir’s Seminary — An Interview

• The Author’s Foreword from Boris Ledkovsky’s Obikhod

• Examples of Liturgical Recitation (Psalmodizing) of Prayers & Hymns — Alexander Kastalsky

• Antiochian Orthodox Music in North America — Michael G. Farrow

• Creating Liturgical Beauty — Valerie Yova

Editorial: In Pursuit of “Churchliness” in Liturgical Singing — Vladimir Morosan

What constitutes “churchly” music in the context of Orthodox worship? This is a complex question that every leader of singing in an Orthodox parish has likely grappled with at one point or another. The answer may appear to be simple on the surface: “Churchly” music is, well, whatever we hear when we enter an Orthodox church, particularly a church where one may have grown up or been received into Orthodoxy as a convert. It “sounds like church”!

In reality, however, the matter is not so simple. If, indeed, we have ever visited another church besides our own, particularly if it is of another jurisdiction that has roots in a different ethnic tradition, be it Slavic or Byzantine, the sound of what we are likely to hear may be quite different from what we are accustomed to. Even within a church of the same ethnic background, if one pays closer attention, the repertoire that is sung and the manner in which it is rendered by the choir or chanter may be very different. 

One may charitably assume that whoever made the choices of what music to sing and how to interpret it was acting in good faith, motivated by a desire to select “churchly” music and perform it in a “churchly” manner. Yet experience shows that the results of those choices affecting what one hears can vary greatly. 

The question thus arises: Are there objective criteria for selecting and interpreting liturgical music, and if so, what are these criteria and by whom are they determined? The hierarchy or synod of a particular jurisdiction? A central repertoire committee of composers and scholars? Or are these choices made subjectively on the basis of personal taste and preference, and if that is the case, whose? The choir director’s? The parish priest’s? The collective mind of a given congregation? Are they dictated simply by habit and tradition, as in, “This is the way it’s ‘always’ been done”?

Questions such as these were easier to answer in earlier times, in countries and societies where Orthodox Christianity was the prevailing faith and where musical and aesthetic norms were relatively homogenous across the culture. Today, complex issues and choices arise that have barely begun to be explored and processed. This is particularly acute in the West—that is to say, in pluralistic cultures where the Orthodox are a minority comprising multiple national and ethnic musical traditions—where, by means of recordings and various internet resources, one has access to an enormous variety of repertoire and musical styles. 

However interesting and intriguing a quest to define “churchliness” might be, it is not one that could possibly be fully explored, much less resolved, within a single or even many issues of our journal. Nevertheless, it is a topic that happens to be a common thread running through most if not all of the articles in the present issue.

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Sing Praises with Understanding — Vladimir Krassovsky

“As a living and copious fountain, O Theotokos, do thou establish those who hymn thy praises and are joined together in spiritual fellowship for thy service, and in thy divine glory make them worthy of crowns of glory” (Irmos, Ode 3, Canon of the Akathist Hymn to the Theotokos). Thus the Church turns to the Mother of God in fervent prayer for those who sing during the divine services.

There is an episode in the lives of the saints—which saint I don’t remember—as told to me by my spiritual father, Father Nicholas, when I was quite young. There was a priest standing before the holy altar during a divine service, and he asked God to let it be known to him who among His flock will receive the greatest reward in the Heavenly Kingdom. When he turned around he saw a tall, radiant man, an angel, among His faithful, who was placing a feather on everyone’s head. Then he moved to the kliros and was among the singers. On their heads he placed golden crowns.

What an awesome responsibility the choir director and singers have, and a very complicated one it is. Think about it for a moment: the choir isn’t accompanying the service and isn’t just participating in the service. The choir is serving in the divine services together with the bishop, priest, and deacon. It is the choir director’s responsibility to facilitate elevation in prayer during the service through text and music. In order to do so, he or she must not only have a profound knowledge of the order of the service but must also take into consideration the symbolic meaning of the different parts of the service.

The director must deeply understand the place that a service has within the church calendar and, alongside, the “liturgical moments” in each service (of which there are many). It is of the utmost importance that each liturgical moment be understood and felt by the choir director at all times.

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A New Znamenny Chant for the New World — An Overview of the Musical Practices of Holy Cross Monastery — Monk Philaret (Farley)

The soundscape of liturgical music at Holy Cross Monastery in Wayne, West Virginia, is varied and distinctive—comprising multiple styles, each sung primarily in English. Here we have a particular fondness for Georgian chant and enjoy singing its suspended chords and non-tertian harmonies to grant solemnity and ethereality to pinnacle liturgical moments. Byzantine chant is likewise sprinkled throughout our services, both punctuating our regular cycle of worship and adorning parts of Holy Week and hymns to certain Greek saints throughout the year. Our average weekday concludes with the singing of Gregorian chant supported by an ison-like drone. We also employ Obikhod and Kievan melodies—as would be typical for a monastery within the Russian church in the twenty-first century—notwithstanding their frequently reduced textures. However, the majority of our hymnody falls under the umbrella of a different Russian church singing tradition: znamenny chant¹.

Although not widely sung today, znamenny chant was the dominant form of liturgical music of the Russian Orthodox Church for five hundred years, from the twelfth through the seventeenth centuries. Its name derives from the word znamia (знамя, the old Russian word for “sign”), as this chant’s earliest notation conveyed musical information through neumatic symbols or “signs” known as znamiona (знамёна²). Fortunately for those not well-versed in deciphering these “signs,” a significant corpus of znamenny melodies was later transcribed into Kievan square note notation (a system similar to modern Western music notation) and published by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, beginning in 1772 and continually republished until the turn of the twentieth cen­tury³. The preservation of these chant books has thereby made a large number of melodic examples accessible and, thus, more readily adaptable into English-language settings—an endeavor which our monastery has modestly sought to pursue. 

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Notes

1. We also sing a handful of settings of Demestvenny, Strotny, and Valaam chant.

2. Johann von Gardner, Russian Church Singing, Vol. 1: Orthodox Worship and Hymnography, Vladimir Morosan, trans. (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980), 104.

3. The relevant volumes within the Notnoe Penie (Notated Chant) series include the Triod’ [Lenten Triodion and Pentecostarion], in a single volume, 1899; the Prazdniki [Festal Menaion], 1900; and the Oktoikh [Octoechos], 1900. PDFs of these chant books can be found at glagol-verbum.com/biblioteka.

The “Other” Boris Ledkovsky (1894–1975) — Research, Recollections, and Reflections Fifty Years after His Repose — Elizabeth A. Ledkovsky

Boris Mikhailovitch Ledkovsky breathed his last in 1975, on August 6 (July 24, his patron saint’s day, on the Julian calendar). On the Gregorian calendar, August 6 is the Feast of Holy Transfiguration, and the Orthodox Church of America (OCA)’s Saint Vladimir’s Seminary noted the coincidence in an article remembering the professor and conductor who played “a key role in changing the style of singing in North American Orthodox churches.”

I was not at my grandfather’s bedside when he died. I was only seven. Most of my memories of the tall, thin, ebony-haired, bespectacled basso profundo with a glass eye and calm demeanor are from his final year: sitting quietly at his piano on “Russian” Christmas Day, watching grandchildren tear into presents; sleeping on a narrow bed in a darkened room, which we were forbidden from disturbing; laid out in a coffin in the center of the ROCOR Cathedral of our Lady of the Sign, thick-lensed glasses inexplicably on his face. So this paper is not a memoir. 

Fifty years after his death and burial, Boris Ledkovsky as an influence on Orthodox liturgical music is anything but dead and buried. His creative output as a composer did not merely survive him: It flourished. 

Interestingly, the work for which Ledkovsky is best known—his arrangements of Kievan, Russian “Greek,” and znamenny chant, and an emphasis on austere tserkovnost’ (“churchliness”)—turns out to be only part of the story. Likewise, biographical details curated by an adoring widow and filtered through a grieving heart are only partial histories. This article tells more about a giant of post-­revolutionary Russian liturgical music—the other Boris Ledkovsky. 

In Part I, through photos, letters, scholarship, and even archives of Nazi records, tragic facts about Boris Ledkovsky’s long, interesting life are revealed. Part II, co-authored by Dr. Katya Ermolaeva, discusses the recent discovery of several unpublished manuscripts, exposing a more layered, more dramatic side of Ledkovsky’s musical creativity. Part III reflects on the Ledkovsky legacy, postulating a shared bequest to scholars and musicians and considering what could be done next to cultivate the fruits of this inheritance.

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Boris Ledkovsky’s Years at St. Vladimir’s Seminary — Reflections and Reminiscences Fifty Years after His Death — An Interview with Professor David Drillock by Dn. Harrison Russin

August 2025 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Professor Boris Ledkovsky (1894–1975), one of the most influential figures in the development of Orthodox church music in America. Through his work at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary and the Synodal Cathedral (ROCOR) in New York City, Ledkovsky introduced a generation of American Orthodox Christians to the principles of the Moscow School of Church Music, emphasizing a return to traditional Russian chant and the concept of tserkovnost’ (churchliness) in liturgical singing.

This article combines biographical material with the personal recollections of Professor David Drillock, who studied under Ledkovsky at St. Vladimir’s beginning in 1956 and served as his assistant from 1957 onward. The interview provides rare insights into Ledkovsky’s personality, conducting style, and musical philosophy.

Professor Boris Ledkovsky was born on May 9, 1894 (April 26, Old Style), in Agrafenovka, Russia, near Novocherkassk, the capital city of the Don Cossacks. His father was Archpriest Mikhail Ledkovsky, and his mother, Sophia, was a pianist. Music permeated his childhood home—from age fourteen, he was already directing the choir in his father’s parish.

Ledkovsky’s musical education began at the Novocherkassk Theological Seminary. He later wrote that in that high school seminary, “There were many useful courses in music for future choir conductors. Choral singing was taught so well that a musically gifted person graduated as an excellently trained choirmaster.” He then attended the Rostov Real School (a school concentrating on natural and mathematical subjects), where during his final two years he conducted a student orchestra and composed music for it.

Following secondary school, Ledkovsky evidently enrolled in the Moscow Conservatory, studying theory, composition, counterpoint, and voice training. Among his professors were Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov (1859–1935), then director of the Conservatory, and Alexander Kastalsky (1856–1926), the noted composer who would become director of the Moscow Synodal School of Church Music¹, located immediately next door to the Conservatory, whose choir sang in the Uspensky (Dormition) Cathedral in the Kremlin. Even in his early twenties, Ledkovsky possessed a magnificent bass-octavist voice, which did not go unnoticed by the Moscow choirmasters. Later, when David Drillock knew him, he could easily reach a low C (also known as C2) and would frequently add the lower octave at the end of pieces at concerts. In Ledkovsky’s words, Kastalsky and the Moscow Synodal School had a great influence on his musical tastes, his church compositions, and his directing style.

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Notes

1. For more up-to-date biographical information, see Elizabeth Ledkovsky’s article in this issue; she observes that the evidence for his study in Moscow is not abundant.

The Author’s Foreword from Boris Ledkovsky’s Obikhod

In publishing this Obikhod, my aim has been to restore the traditional melodies of Russian church singing to a sound closer to their authentic form, taking as my guide the unison Obikhod—the so-called “square note” edition—published in 1792 by the Most Holy Governing Synod¹.

A glance at the history of our church singing reveals that its foundation was the Byzantine chant, received together with the adoption of the Greek Orthodox faith. This Byzantine chant was not adopted literally, but was gradually adapted and reshaped in accordance with Russian musical sensibilities, giving rise to our native “znamenny” chant (eleventh–twelfth centuries). These chant melodies were recorded by church singers of that time using special signs (variously known as “kriuki” [“hooks”] or “znamiona” [“banners”] or “stolpy” [“pillars”]), since five-line staff notation had not yet been developed. From these signs the chant took its name: znamenny or stolp chant. The chief center of its development was the city of Great Novgorod.

Later, in Kievan Rus’, there emerged another native chant known as Kievan chant. While it bears some resemblance to the znamenny, it is distinguished by greater liveliness and melodic brevity.

Both the znamenny and Kievan chants are the products of the folk creative spirit—not the work of any single composer, but shaped gradually, like folk songs, from unknown origins. They hold immense value, for in them is expressed the very soul and heart of the religious Russian people. Sadly, in our own time few appreciate or truly understand them. Together, these two chants form the essential foundation of Russian Orthodox liturgical singing; they are the true national voice of our sacred chant.

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Notes

1. Editor’s note: This is likely a typographical error, since in the series of Obikhod editions of the Synodal period—from 1772 to 1909—there is no Obikhod published in 1792. See, for example, A. A. Guseva, Katalog izdanii kirillovskoi pechati 1801–1918 gg.: iz sobraniia NIO redkikh knig (Muzeia knigi) Rossiiskoi gosudarstvennoi biblioteki [Catalog of Cyrillic-print editions, 1801–1918, from the Collection of Rare Books (Museum of the Book) of the Russian State Library] (Moscow: Indrik, 2021). Тhe composer may have had in mind one of the editions published closer to his own time, likely the 1892 Obikhod.

Examples of Liturgical Recitation (Psalmodizing) of Prayers & Hymns — Alexander Kastalsky

Next to the singing performed by a choir or a solo chanter, the second most frequently heard musical element in Orthodox liturgical worship is the recitation (psalmodizing) of texts that are intended to be rendered by a designated reader. These texts include prayers, such as the Trisagion prayers; appointed psalms (Psalm 103, the Six Psalms at Matins, Psalm 50, etc.); troparia of a kanon; and readings (paremias) from the Old and New Testaments. 

In his foundational work Russian Church Singing, Volume 1: Orthodox Worship and Hymnography¹, Johann von Gardner describes the following characteristics of recitation recto tono (“on a single pitch”) that distinguish it from ordinary speech:

• a constant level of pitch upon which the words are pronounced

• a slightly extended duration of the vowels, which . . . remain rather constant in their dynamic level instead of being exploded as in ordinary speech

• mensurably indeterminate duration of individual syllables

• deviations from the basic pitch only at the ends of phrases or texts

• a lack of clear rhythm 

• virtually no variation in dynamic level

It is worthwhile to recall the purpose of such recitation and the reasons that church tradition adopted this manner of rendering many liturgical texts. The purpose may be regarded as twofold: to give the texts read in such a manner an elevated sense of solemnity, dignity, and importance, while projecting the words in a way that makes them audible and comprehensible to everyone present. At the same time, reading a text on essentially a single pitch prevents the reader from injecting a subjective or dramatic interpretation into the delivery of that text.

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Notes

1. Johann von Gardner, Russian Church Singing, Vol. 1: Orthodox Worship and Hymnography, Vladimir Morosan. trans. (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980), 55–57.

Antiochian Orthodox Music in North America: Archive Project — Michael G. Farrow

The choral music presently used in the Antiochian Archdiocese in North America is somewhat unusual among the Orthodox jurisdictions of the world in that it is a blend of music from many ethnic Orthodox traditions. Now it even includes aspects of American musical tradition, as expressed in new native compositions, while still adhering to an Orthodox ethos. 

This music originated with the first Orthodox service book in English, published in 1906, barely one generation after the first immigration of Middle Eastern Orthodox Christians to North America. This was the Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-­Catholic Apostolic Church by Isabel Hapgood¹, a compilation of Church Slavonic service books and those of the Greek Orthodox Church. It was quickly adopted by Syro-Levantine Orthodox Christians in the United States and Canada. After World War I, these Christians, originally under the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church in North America, formed their own archdiocese, now known as the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America.

The first published music of the Antiochian Archdiocese was the Divine Liturgy in English in a book entitled The Paradise². This book was published by Metropolitan Archbishop Germanos (Shehadi) in 1920. In 1939 Michael Gelsinger, who later was ordained a priest, published Orthodox Hymns in English³, a collection of both Russian and Byzantine melodies in English. Throughout the twentieth century, the churches of the Antiochian Archdiocese utilized mainly Russian and Ukrainian hymns. These had been adapted and translated into English, most notably by priests Vladimir and Igor Soroka and by Michael Hilko, who also used Carpatho-­Russian sources. 

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Notes

1. Isabel Florence Hapgood, Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic (Greco-Russian) Church (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1906).

2. Metropolitan Germanos (Shehadi), The Paradise: Parts of Mass Services from the Byzintian Orthodox Church Music (New York: author, 1920).

3. Michael G. H. Gelsinger, Orthodox Hymns in English: Melodies Adapted from the Russian and Greek Traditions and their Texts Translated from the Greek (Brooklyn, NY: Syrian Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese of New York and All North America, 1939).

Creating Liturgical Beauty — Valerie Yova

As we move further down the road of revitalizing and reimagining PSALM, my aim is to tap into the wisdom of individuals who have been at the forefront of building Orthodox liturgical music ministry at the parish level. My prayer is that by learning what has worked well for them, as well as how they think, we can all be inspired with new ideas, actionable suggestions, and ways of thinking about what we do as we strive to create beautiful worship.

I decided to start by sharing some wisdom from two of my own mentors and colleagues—professional musicians from whom I have learned a great deal about leading music in the Church. They are both accomplished classical musicians who have extensive performing and teaching experience. Additionally, they have invested a great deal of time, energy, and heart into training other Orthodox musicians and in leading music in liturgical services.

Inspiration

Photini Downie Robinson is a tonsured cantor in the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese and the Protopsáltria (First Cantor) at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Portland, ­Oregon. She is a specialist in Byzantine chant and is in international demand as a cantor, ensemble artist, teacher, writer, speaker, and workshop leader. <…>

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Practical Advice

Alice Hughes is one of the founders of PSALM and an active musical theater performer, voice teacher, and conductor who moved recently to Loudun County in Northern Virginia from Santa Cruz, California. She was music ­codirector for over three decades at St. Lawrence Orthodox Church in Felton, California. In October 2025, Alice was invited to pre­sent her one-woman show called Snapshots in New York City as part of the 19th Annual United Solo Theatre Festival.

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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

• 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!

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.