And about those eight tones …

  • I had a fond idea of using the oppor­tu­nity of the CD to pro­vide a lit­tle edu­ca­tion about the eight tones. But I got the edu­ca­tion myself, and found out that the tones weren’t as I expected them to be. I think there’s some info that might be worth the read. But first, let’s catch up on what you may not know.


    Eight tones? Whas­sat?
    Basi­cally, there’s a musi­cal sequence always in progress at your church and all Ortho­dox churches. On any given week, the Church has pre­scribed a cer­tain tone for that week. We were on tone 5 this week; next week we’ll be on tone 6.
    .
    Wait. That sounds like …
    Yep, that’s right. Another cycle the Ortho­dox Church uses to mea­sure time. So in addi­tion to being some­where in the daily cycle of wor­ship ser­vices (for monas­tics and other tough guys), weekly cycle of ser­vices (for all of us) and the yearly cycle of feasts, the Church keeps an 8-week cycle, rotat­ing through a dif­fer­ent tone each week and then start­ing over again.
    .
    I’m get­ting dizzy.
    Just look at the hori­zon and think about holy bread.
    .
    What the heck is a ‘tone’?
    This is a lit­tle hard to describe for us West­ern­ers, because we expect to hear that a tone must be a cer­tain song or a cer­tain melody. If only it were that sim­ple. A tone is really more of a set of rules for build­ing an end­less num­ber of songs and melodies. It’s as if a song were a toy air­plane you bought at a store and a tone was a set of Tin­ker­toys that allowed you to make planes, trains and auto­mo­biles. There are lim­i­ta­tions to Tin­ker­toys — there are cer­tain things you can and can’t do with them — but how you put them together is up to you.
    .
    What’s the advan­tage of that?
    As with the Tin­ker­toys, you get the max­i­mum flex­i­bil­ity to make the music fit the words, rather than the other way around. And a chanter can sing in what­ever range they sing best.

    .
    Sounds com­pli­cated. Where’d it come from?
    Not sure. On one hand, the PSALM archives say that it all sprung out of the Church’s tra­di­tion of repeat­ing the entire Pascha ser­vice each day of Bright Week, from Sun­day to Sun­day — eight days. That the­ory holds that those in the early Church just began vary­ing the sound of the ser­vice, and that that grew into the cycle of eight being repeated all year long.

    But one chant­ing instruc­tor I asked said that it’s sim­ply a mat­ter of a Greek tra­di­tion that was used by the early Church, in the same way they bor­rowed some of the ele­ments of Jew­ish tem­ple worship.

    So those are two pos­si­bles. Maybe there are more.
    .
    So what do the Tin­ker­toys for this week’s tone look like?
    It changes depend­ing on whether you’re doing Russian-, Byzan­tine– or Greek-style music. In the Anti­ochian Church, it’s a major scale, it parks tem­porar­ily on the note that cor­re­sponds to ‘do’ on the old do-re-mi scale you might’ve learned in school, but then — like a lot of tones — it always ends on a cer­tain home note that gives it that “all done” sound. There are cer­tain lit­tle musi­cal phrases that set it apart. Tone 5 tends to be quick and lilt­ing. If you can think of the song about halfway through Orthros that starts “Blessed art Thou, O Lord. Teach me Thy statutes” (which is called the evlog­i­taria, BTW), that is clas­sic Tone 5. If that’s too far to cast your mind back, then click on the song link HERE. That’s also Tone 5.
    .
    I don’t get it. If we were in Tone 5 this week, why didn’t every­thing sound like this?
    Well, chang­ing the set of rules for how the music is made from one week to the next prob­a­bly sounded like a much bet­ter idea in the early cen­turies of the Church, when the ser­vices were all chanted. These days, with both chanters and choirs doing the hon­ors, it isn’t really fea­si­ble to do the whole ser­vice in one tone (though I’ve heard there are some peo­ple out there work­ing on it).

    If you only went to Divine Liturgy today, the only way you had of know­ing what tone the church was in that week was the hymn that the choir sung at Lit­tle Entrance (when the priest car­ries the Gospel Book to the altar). Unless it’s a spe­cial week, that hymn is a short hymn on the theme of the res­ur­rec­tion and it is done in the tone of the week.
    .
    On the other hand, if you made it to Orthros where more things are chanted, you heard quite a num­ber of songs in Tone 5. The song that starts “God is the Lord”, the long song at the end that begins “Let every­thing that has breath praise the Lord” and a lot of chant­ing in-between were all in Tone 5. Next week those will all be in Tone 6.
    .
    And those songs are always impro­vised on the spot?
    Not always. Slowly but surely, the Church is start­ing to have more of those hymns writ­ten out, tran­scribed from a chanter who knew what he was doing.
    .
    So all the chanted music at Orthros this week was done in Tone 5?
    Wellll … no. Not all the chanted music ends up in the tone of the week. Some­times it changes tones. In the Anti­ochian Church today at Orthros the long chanted por­tion at the end went from being in Tone 5 to Tone 1 and then 3, 1 and 8. That’s why you may hear your chanter sing a quick lit­tle ditty to him­self before he starts. He’s using a musi­cal key called an apichima to try to recall the tone before he starts. It doesn’t always work, and that’s why you also see your chanter mak­ing faces.
    .
    Why does the tone change like that?
    I’ve never been able to find out. Some­times the tone changes so that the chant can sound like one of the Church’s par­tic­u­lar hymns. But that’s not always the case, so it goes into the Big Ortho­dox Box of Who-knows.
    .
    So would a non-chanter be able to hear when the tone changes?
    Not always, and this is what I didn’t under­stand until just recently. I always assumed that the eight tones all sound really dis­tinct from each other and that with prac­tice, any­one could hear the dif­fer­ence between them. But that turns out not to be true. Or at least, the dis­tinc­tions are some­times so minute that only a really trained chant­ing instruc­tor would be able to tell. Tones 2 and 6 are kind of hard to miss, because they’re the most “Byzantine-sounding.” But Tone 4, which gets used a lot, can bor­row some of the, um, Tin­ker­toys from these two tones on occa­sion, and then of course it sounds all 2– and 6-like. And Tones 3, 5 and 7 almost always sound the same.
    .
    You’re kid­ding. Well, so if they end up sound­ing the same, then what’s the point?
    I was afraid some­one would ask me that. It is a lit­tle hard to put your fin­ger exactly on what’s right about an elab­o­rate and dif­fi­cult scheme of music that ends up being rather unde­tectable to the aver­age lis­tener. All I can say is that in my hum­ble opin­ion, there is some­thing going on that affects the music, even if it is very nuanced. You may not hear the dif­fer­ence between Tone 2 and Tone 6, but that age-old sys­tem is at work on the chanter all the same, and it may just allow you to hear some­thing much more impor­tant — the words. I’m not say­ing that it’s not pos­si­ble for chanters to go wrong both by get­ting too elab­o­rate or just plain goof­ing up. But that’s what you might call pilot-error — the sys­tem as handed down by the Church is still one of its many jewels.


    Related posts:

    1. O Heav­enly King …
    2. It is truly meet
    3. Off to chant and pray
    4. Be the first in your parish to own one!
    5. You know you’re Ortho­dox if …

    February 17th, 2008 | Grace | 8 Comments |

8 Responses and Counting...

  • Mimi 02.17.2008

    I got my CDs yes­ter­day, and had the plea­sure of lis­ten­ing to about half of it this morn­ing while get­ting ready for work. It is very lovely, and I don’t have a Byzan­tine Chant parish, so it was really neat to hear it.

    My favorite Res­ur­rec­tion Tropar­ion is #3, and I par­tic­uarly loved hear­ing it this morning.

    Thank you and my best wishes on your endeavor!

  • Grace

    Glad you liked it. It has turned out to be ter­ri­bly fun to be able to put this out. Ortho­dox music is the true music of love — or Love, I should say — and it’s won­der­ful to hear all its permutations.

    You reminded me that I mis­spoke in this post by men­tion­ing Russ­ian chant. I don’t think there is such a thing, is there? I mean, there’s Zna­menny chant, which is sort of Russian-Byzantine, but I’ve only heard that on CDs and I get the impres­sion it’s only done in monasteries.

  • Erica

    I loved this post! I’ve been chant­ing for about a year now and also try­ing to teach my sis­ter how to chant. I loved your expanations.

  • Mimi

    Our OCA parish uses Zna­menny Chant and a lot of Carpatho-Rusyn melodies as well — our roots are Carpatho-Rusyn.

    Your post about shar­ing the eclipse with Greg was so sweet! Thank you!

  • Grace

    I’d love to hear that. Do you have chanters for it or does the choir do the honors?

    Lunar eclipse com­ment: You know, it was such a brief moment to share (the eclipse, not the com­ment ;-) ) and yet it turned out to get more pro­found with time. I’m glad we got to share it — doing the long-distance thing takes its toll sometimes.

    For those of you who have no idea what I’m talk­ing about, look for my com­ment on Mimi’s post <a rel=“nofollow” href=“https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=5286186&postID=889617984985150934&quot; rel=“nofollow”>HERE.

  • Mimi

    I have to say, it was kind of a popoff blog post, but I got the sweet­est com­ments all the way through. It really touched a chord.

    Mostly choir, but some chanters. We have a CD actually.

  • Grace

    Do tell. How do I get a copy?

  • Mimi

    I can hook you up — I have a copy at home, but let me look at church on Sun­day and I’ll email you.

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