Early Music Sacred and Secular (the transition of music from Old to New Testament Church).
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Friday, November 18, 2016 9:12:37 AM
Got David and myself breakfast at McDonald's, he wanted a breakfast parfait and oatmeal, myself a egg mcmuffin with canadian bacon and cheese. Orange juice and a diet dr. pepper, dropped it off at the guard shack, got me a hug and headed back to the room for my meds and to eat.
Once done back to the Library of Music at NOBTS. Maybe my answer to Old vs New Testament music in secular and sacred music. In the time that Jesus lived to about his 33rd year, music in the church, old and new, has really puzzled me; especially in the past 25 years. My research leads me down a curious road of broken information, not fluidity, as the stories go. The music of the New Testament Church should have began during the ascension of Christ but I am finding now that the music for "the New Testament Church" would not start until some 100 to 300 years later, and songs about the Christ, the Savior, would not be sung with instruments but as in a chant by Georgian singers or Greeks bearing Oxyrhynchus chants. There are instruments praising God in the Psalms but the actual music that celebrates and commemorates the Lord Jesus Christ does not come into existence until much later after his death and ascension as mentioned above (some 300 plus years). I have researched around the 50's and 60's AD and do not find any reference about the birth, death, resurrection or ascension in song. Shortly after the death of Jesus, persecution of Christians was still happening in and around the 60 AD. It would have been with the massive fire that wiped out most of Rome (only a 1/4 of Rome was left) in 64 AD, that was a relief in the Christian world. Perhaps composers were even thinking about a music that they could offer to the King of Kings at that point. We are finding out more and more about Christians in the "Early Church" and I have read recently that after the GREAT PERSECUTION in 303 AD (43 years after peace, hardly any news of Christian Persecution was heard of), then in 303 AD, vengeance started again in a wrath so strong it became the Great Persecution. Shortly after this did the relief finally happen and almost 325 years after the death of Christ could Christians finally speak about Jesus as a Savior and live the life modeled after him. Music now could be written and composed about this marvelous man. The New Testament mentions singing hymns during the LAST SUPPER. "When they sung the hymn, they went to the Mount of Olives...Matt 26:30. Other ancient witnesses such as Pope Clement 1, Tertulllian, St. Athanasis and Egeria confirm the practice, although in poetic or obscure ways that shed little light on how music sounded during this period. The 3rd century Greek "OXYRHYNCHUS HYMN" survived with musical notation, but the connection between this hymn and the plainchant tradition is uncertain. Musical elements that would later be used in ROMAN RITE began to appear in the 3rd century. The Apostolic Tradition, attributed to the theologian Hippolytus, attests the singing of Hallel psalms (Jewish songs, from the Psalms 113 to 118), which get this was used for PRAISE and Thanksgiving songs includes "with Alleluia as the refrain" (which is Hebrew BUT the Christians picked it up later) in early Christian agape feasts. Hello ??? any of this sound like what goes around comes back around.... WOW... So... Chants of the Office (of the Divine Office), sung during the canonical hours, have their roots in the early 4th century, when desert monks following St. Anthony introduced the practice of continuous psalmody, singing the complete cycle of 150 psalms each week. Around 375 AD antiphonal psalmody became poplular in the Christian East. In 386 St. Ambrose introduced this practice to the West. In the 5th century a singing school Schola Cantorum (was founded in Rome) to provide training in the church musicianship. Below is an example of the Greek OXYRHYNCHUS HYMN. circa about 3rd century Greece.)) doesn't it seem ironic that the singing of CHRISTIAN SONGS Schools.... birthplace began where the very person about the singing died ?
WOW. what a wake up call that was for me.
NOW on to the New Orleans Collection after a stop at NOBTS Library...(see Francis at the Collection)....
In the Oxford University / Early Music edition vol xxxiv/2, May 2006 referenced that early Georgian chant (Latin and English) was the bridge way for the om sound (borrowed from the early Tibetan Monks) in their song. Did they pick up the idea from the Tibetan monks or did they have an intuition that the OM sound was just what was needed as the soothing sound of God ? or what it took to heal the mind, body and soul. Nevertheless, the tranquil relaxing sound (almost haunting chants) of the Georgian vocals, is what would entertain and serve as music for sacred and secular alike. Let's face it the entertainment of the early 200's to 900's (if it was not stringed, percussion, woodwinds) it had to be vocal.
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Published: 29 April 2009
...Alexander Lingas At all events, a systematic update of the dossier of evidence for Greek influence on the development of Latin chant would have to begin by acknowledging that the patterns of musical and liturgical influence were undoubtedly more complicated than previously imagined. David Hiley...
Constantin Floros, an eminent and prolific scholar of wide-ranging interests who taught for many years at the University of Hamburg, is well known in the English-speaking world for his writings on 19th- and 20th-century music, especially that of Gustav Mahler. Nearly half a century ago, however, he began producing a series of what are now recognized as seminal contributions to the study of Byzantine and Slavonic chant that began in 1961 with a three-volume Habilitationsschrift on the Middle Byzantine repertory of Kontakia of 1961 and continued with pioneering articles on the decipherment of enigmatic early notations. Complementing and in some ways paralleling the efforts of scholars in Anglo-American academia (including Oliver Strunk, Egon Wellesz, and their students), Floros followed these specialized studies with his monumental three-volume Universale Neumenkunde (Kassel, 1970). The first volume of this ‘Universal theory of neumes’ consolidated his previous work on the development of Byzantine and Slavonic...
http://
this takes you to the sight that lists the types of chant music and early music in the church.