HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

262 Reviewsissue the work in Russian). The decision to conform all Russian words andtitles to the new orthography, when quoting in Cyrillic, and employ the old forSlavonic alone is questionable. The practice of indicating the stress in Russiansurnames, as in some of Gardner's German-language articles, should havebeen adopted here, and extended to the Slavonic and Russian technical terms.The translation of these terms is careful and on the whole successful; in view ofWestern liturgical usage, "Ordinary Hymns" would be preferable to "CommonHymns" (p. 120) for Obixod, whereas it seems hard to improve on"Common Chant" (p. 110 —possibly "Usual Chant"?) for obyćnyj napév,although it has no particular connection with the "Common of Saints."Of the book's four chapters, only the last two concern specifically Russian orEast Slavic developments. The first two deal with relevant features of Orthodoxliturgical genres and structures (applicable also, of course, to ByzantineriteCatholic practice, where this has been maintained in its integrity). The firstchapter includes discussions of the essence of church singing (Gardner insistson its theological, and not merely aesthetic and musical, character); thecontent of Byzantine-rite hymnography; styles of choral and cantorial performance;types of hymns according to liturgical function; the contrafactsystem; levels of musical performance, including the psalmodie recitative andekphonesis; the eight-mode system; aesthetic considerations; and the influenceof various national cultures. The discussion is thorough and well organized.Technical terms are given in Greek and Slavonic; the definitions are careful,clear, and generally adequate. The definition of idiomelon (p. 53) is unexceptionable,but further discussion is needed to avoid confusing readers who mayencounter the generic samoglasen tones of East Slavic usage.The second chapter, written for Western readers, consists mainly of outlinesof the major Byzantine-rite services, somewhat similar to those of Nikol'skij.The calendrical cycles receive less attention. 2 A minor slip occurs in a footnote(p. 57): "in Greek . . . chanting many intervals ... do not exactly correspondto the half- and whole-steps of the modern equally-tempered scale"; in fact,they do not correspond to any diatonic scale, regardless of temperament. Inthis chapter, Gardner introduces the concept of a liturgico-musical tensioncurve of the services, which might serve not only to identify musical highpoints, but also to clarify psychological aspects of Byzantine-rite liturgicalspirituality; why, for example, an abridged round of services may fail toestablish the transformed consciousness of time experienced in traditionalworship.Further valuable introductory material of this sort is to be found in the prefatorymaterial and appendices of The Festal Menaion, translated by Mother Mary andArchimandrite Kallistos Ware (London, 1969).