On the Music of the Armenian Divine Liturgy

A Survey of Transcriptions and Harmonisations

Abstract

The purpose of the present investigation is to trace the development of the music of the Divine Liturgy of the Armenian Church from the earliest mediaeval neumated sources to the present day, revealing the mosaic of extant musical versions and arrangements, which is far richer than hitherto acknowledged. I have sought to embrace an unprecedentedly extensive array of extant variants recorded through various means at diverse monastic and parochial centres, examining unpublished transcriptions as well as contemporaneous sources such as correspondence, newspaper articles and reviews. I discuss the dilemmas encountered by musicians and clergy in the face of encroaching Westernisation, particularly in connection with the growing desire to give fixity to corpora of chant melodies and to endow them with harmony and instrumental accompaniment—with theological arguments both in favour and against. I expound the respective aesthetic merits of the celebrated Ekmalian and Komitas versions in some detail, comparing and contrasting their divergent treatments of chants abstracted from essentially the same sources. The article ends with a brief discussion of a selection of sound recordings of the Komitas version.