Church hymns: prayer or art?

2024 Author: Miguel Ramacey | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 06:11

Worship in the Orthodox Church affects all the senses: icons for sight, singing and reading by ear, incense for smell, and eating prosphora, shrines for taste. All this is important, all matters. In the temple, in worship, a person lives a full life. Service in the church goes on a daily, weekly and annual cycle.

To a person who is not familiar with Orthodoxy, the service seems monotonous, exactly the same. But there are certainly differences.

Each worship service consists of an unchanging and a changeable part. Unchanged church hymns - is, for example, the Cherubic Hymn at every Liturgy. It sounds at every divine service (with the exception of a few times a year) and remains unchanged. The Cherubim was written by some composers, and their works are also sometimes performed. But this decision is usually made by the choir director, it is not regulated by the Charter: whether to sing the Cherubimskaya Grechaninov, Tchaikovsky or just some monastic chant today.

Practically all church hymns that are performed and known are such invariable parts of divine services. Changeable Parts Consider:

• day of the week (every day of the week -special event memory);
• number (there is a memory of saints every day);
• the presence of Lent now or in the near future (considering 4 weeks of preparation for Lent, Easter "controls" for almost half a year).

Church hymns are signed daily according to the charter. This is done by an experienced regent, a person with a special education. Completely worship is the same throughout the year only once in 518 years. That is, even if you go to all services, church hymns will not be repeated twice in exactly the same way throughout the life of a dozen generations. But, of course, the full observance of the entire charter is extremely laborious, this is possible only in monasteries, and in the world people cannot endure such long services.

Notes of church hymns are divided into eight voices. A voice is just a tune, a melody to which the troparia of a given day are sung. The voices alternate by weeks: that is, they are repeated about once every one and a half to two months.

Not always a particular parish can afford a chic choir. In the central cathedrals of the capital, professional singers often sing, and in small churches on the outskirts, these are usually parishioners who are somewhat familiar with musical notation. Professional singing, of course, is more impressive, but often such singers are unbelievers, and after all, church hymns are prayer.

What is more important: beautiful voices on the kliros or the prayerful mood of the choir - the rector of the temple should decide. Recently, there has even been a fashion for churchchants. They are broadcast on the radio, performed in the halls of the philharmonic and chapels, records can be bought.

It's good that church art attracts people, but listening to such records is often completely non-prayer, superficial. But the hymns of the most intimate moments of worship are sung. What should a churched person do at the same time: pray or enjoy the voices? Or remember that this is not a service at all and that everything that happens in the concert hall is just music, not prayer? Therefore, not all Orthodox attend such concerts and in general are fans of such art.