ABSTRACT
Konstantinos Angelidis makes the notion of equivalence explicit in his introduction to a series of recordings entitled ‘Classical ecclesiastical music’ made under his direction by the Athens-based Byzantine choir Tropos. Efforts began in the eighteenth century to employ the signs of ‘Middle Byzantine Notation’ in ways that captured with greater precision their expression in sound. The strong sense of historical continuity felt by Greek Church musicians with their late antique and medieval forebears after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 is evident from the contents of manuscript anthologies of chant, whose scribes often freely mixed composers of different eras. This directory appears as part three of a five-part treatise on music in which Kyrillos Marmarinos describes and situates the traditions of Greek ecclesiastical chanting not only within the history of Byzantine worship, but also in relation to contemporary practice in Ottoman secular music.
