Why Byzantine Polyphony Is Not Another Westernization Attempt
People hear the term “Byzantine Polyphony” and immediately assume “it uses four-part harmony and Western staff notation, therefore it must be Westernized.”
Polyphony is a texture and staff notation is a writing system. Equal temperament is a tuning system. None of these determines the musical identity or genre of a composition by itself. A melody does not cease to be Byzantine when several voices sing around it. It loses genre identity when its melody, modal behavior, cadences, characteristic degrees and phrase structure are subordinated to a different musical grammar.
That is the real question:
Does Byzantine Polyphony force Byzantine chant into Western major-minor harmony, or does it make harmony obey the musical structure of Byzantine chant?
It’s the latter. Byzantine Polyphony is Byzantine chant written in four-part SATB harmony, preserving its modes through Western notation. It is not traditional monophonic Byzantine chant, nor does it pretend to be. It is Byzantine chant expanded vertically.
No institution owns Byzantine chant
Byzantine chant is difficult to define because it is not the creation of one composer, one century, one nation, one monastery or one school. It is a large historical musical tradition transmitted through changing notation systems, regional practices, oral teaching, theoretical reforms and contact with neighboring cultures. No private ensemble, publisher, school, teacher, university department or commercial organization owns that tradition. They may own their recordings, editions, translations and books. They may advocate a particular interpretation of the repertory or specialize in a monastic sound, a patriarchal sound, a concert reconstruction or a modern academic approach. But that doesn’t give them exclusive authority to determine what Byzantine chant is.
Institutions are participants in the tradition, but they don’t own it.
Jurisdiction has nothing to do with prestige, academic affiliation, access to donors and concert halls. A heavily monastic or Athonite presentation is a legitimate performance choice, but it is not the definition of Byzantine chant. The problem (especially in America) begins when this is promoted as the most “genuine” school, the very definition of Byzantine music
Byzantine chant has never been a frozen sound
The historical record makes the idea of one changeless Byzantine sound impossible to sustain. Byzantine musicologist Dr. Gerasimos-Sofoklis Papadopoulos’s historical chronology traces major changes in notation, melodic practice, modal conception, rhythm, intervallic treatment and cultural interaction. It describes the growth of different daughter traditions, the development of prolonged exegesis, sustained interaction between Rum cantors and Ottoman musical circles, and finally the nineteenth-century New Method, which systematized one particular Constantinopolitan line of interpretation.
A tradition that changed its notation, intervals, rhythm, melodic elaboration and method of transmission did not cease to be Byzantine every time it changed. Musical identity cannot therefore mean perfect acoustic identity with one selected historical moment. Tradition is not permanent sonic taxidermy. Every living tradition changes. The important thing is that the governing musical structure survives the change.
A change from one voice to four may preserve the underlying musical grammar but it may also destroy it. Everything depends on how the additional voices are written.
What Westernization actually means
Westernization occurs when Byzantine material is forced to obey foreign tonal logic.
That includes:
- altering the melody to produce conventional chord progressions;
- collapsing the modes into major and minor;
- introducing leading tones automatically and replacing Byzantine cadence structure with dominant–tonic closure;
- allowing harmonic momentum to control the phrase, treating the original chant as decorative material placed on top of generic church harmony.
Dr. Evangelos Katsinavakis, a linguist, philologist, musician, and researcher of Greek Orthodox ecclesiastical polyphony, explicitly identifies this current as the School of Byzantine Polyphony. He documents precisely this historical distinction. He describes an early European School of Greek Orthodox polyphony whose composers frequently altered Byzantine melodies and harmonized them according to classical major-minor principles. He distinguishes that approach from a later School of Byzantine Polyphony, which studied the Theory of the Tones and developed harmony of a deliberately modal character.
The decisive principle was formulated in the nineteenth century by Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray: harmony must be adapted to the Greek melody and its modes, not the modes adapted to major and minor.
Katsinavakis identifies the consequences of that reversal. It led composers examine Byzantine scales and melodies in a second, harmonic dimension and develop techniques drawn from both the Theory of the Tones and living chanting practice. The aim was harmony adapted to Byzantine modes rather than classical tonality.
That is also the governing principle of Mastering Byzantine Polyphony (MBP):
The melody does not serve the harmony. The harmony interprets the melody.
A Tone is not a mode
One of the most damaging misconceptions in modern English-language discussion is the casual treatment of Tone and mode as though they were synonyms. They are not. I don’t know if some people do this to flex Gregorian terminology (church modes) or out of ignorance. In current, mainstream music theory:
- Tone translates ήχος (echos).
- Mode is a scale: either a parent scale itself, or a rotation of the parent scale.
First Tone, Plagal First Tone, Grave Tone and Plagal Fourth Tone are not names of scales. They are compositional, calendar and melodic behavior categories within the “Octoechos”. A Tone can use multiple modes, it can “modulate”. There is not such thing as “First Mode”, this is not Gregorian Music theory. Modern Tones are not scales, they set the rules on which scales (modes) a melody can use.
Calling every ήχος a “mode” is theoretically wrong and confuses readers. Octoechos does not consist of eight scales. This is not a harmless vocabulary dispute.
The historical School of Byzantine Polyphony
Byzantine Polyphony did not begin with MBP.
Katsinavakis identifies a modern School of Byzantine Polyphony founded theoretically by Bourgault-Ducoudray and Elisaios Giannidis and developed by composers including Spyros Peristeris, Michael Adamis, Panagiotis Georgiou, Theodore and Vasilis Papakonstantinou, Dimitris Papapostolou, Vasilis Chatzinikolaou and Katsinavakis himself. He emphasizes that the important representatives of this school possessed real knowledge of the Byzantine Theory of the Tones rather than merely applying ordinary Western harmony to unfamiliar melodies.
Giannidis described suitable harmonization as an interpretation of the melody. The appropriate harmony reveals the concealed musical meaning already present in the traditional melodic line and seeks to produce an impression corresponding to that created by the melody in its monophonic form.
That is an important formulation. It means the harmony is not an ornamental foreign layer, but it draws out vertical implications from the melody’s own modal structure.
As the School developed, Katsinavakis writes, its harmony became increasingly Byzantine in character. The composers supported their harmony on the pitches of the active mode, treated foreign notes carefully and sought a distinct harmonic color appropriate to each Tone.
This history destroys the simplistic equation “Polyphony = Westernization.”
There was Westernized Orthodox polyphony. There was also reductive harmonization that retained the Byzantine melody but failed to preserve its full modal structure, as much of Sakellaridis’ work demonstrates. And there was a deliberate movement toward modal Byzantine polyphony. These are not the same thing.
Earlier composers opened the door. MBP gives the room its architecture.