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56 RUSSIAN CHANT
sound of the canticle, as most of the patterns are characterized by
great beauty and expressiveness. They vary in length:
Ex. it
! (from a Christmas heirmos^ first mode) (from a heirmos for the
Annunciation, second mode)
(from the famous Christmas
kontakion of Romanes, third mode)
(from the Theotokion-dogmaiikon
in honour of the Virgin, fifth mode)
(from the sticheron upon thVglorif ication
verses' In the Oktoechos> seventh mode)
r \ r r
(from the sticheron upon the Psalm
verses in the Triodion, fourth mode)
3 (from a prosomoion-i. canticle built on
an malready existing pattern, sixth mode)
r..!t ,,,*
Pi
(from the heirmos for the eighth
ode of the JEatnon, eighth mode)
The transcriptions on the staff were made from the last stage of the
neum notation, late in the seventeenth century, the time of the intro
duction of the staff into Russia. Our authority is one Tikhon Maka-
rievsky, bursar to the Patriarch Adrian. Tikhon was still alive in 1705,
and he explained his method in his Klyuch (key). In 1772 these tran
scriptions were printed in four separate books (the Obikhod, the
Oktoechos, the Heirmologion, and the holy-day Menaid), but Smolen-
sky in 1888 challenged the accuracy of Tikhon's transcriptions.
It is premature, as yet, to speak of the structure of the canticles
as a whole. Up to now the bulk of the Russian chant is untranscribed
and the source material has not yet been examined. Not enough atten
tion has been given to the North Russian style in architecture. A Pskov
or Novgorod church or chapel is a seeming paradox: the architect's
method is clearly an improvisation. He seems to have proceeded on
his task as the spirit moved him, and suddenly to have pasted on an
extra arch or belfry; here a vault that appears like an afterthought,
there a stairway out of nothing. But the effect is one of rare beauty
and harmony, and any correction by technical standards would mean
the ruination of the structure. The same might be said of the architects
of the northern chant. There may be forms of an enviable clarity and
symmetry, 1 but any general deductions about the structural inten
tions of the Russian masters would be dangerous.
1 See some of the analyses in A. J. Swan, "The znamenny chant of the Russian Church',
Musical Quarterly xxvi (1940).