A Byzantine Emperor at King Henry’s Court

Program: #23-01   Air Date: Jan 02, 2023

NOTE: All of the music on this program comes from recording A Byzantine Emperor at King Henry's Court featuring Cappella Romana and led by founder and music director Alexander Lingas. It is in the Cappella label. For complete information: https://cappellarecords.com/announcing-a-byzantine-emperor-at-king-henrys-court/. 

Alexander Lingas’ discovery of never-before recorded works for Christmas, illuminated by the latest research on historically informed performance of medieval Byzantine chant, brings to listeners everywhere the experience of musical worlds colliding against the backdrop of international politics and war. Go back in time to 1400, when Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos, seeking foreign aid for besieged Constantinople, spent Christmas at the court of English King Henry IV.

Under Alexander Lingas’ direction, the same men and women of Cappella Romana who brought you the Lost Voices of Hagia Sophia bestseller (44 weeks on Billboard) bring to life medieval Byzantine and Sarum chant and royal ceremonial performed by two very different historic choirs, one singing in Greek and the other in Latin, as they celebrated the feast of Christmas at London’s Eltham Palace.

A Byzantine Emperor at King Henry’s Court is the fourth Cappella Records release in a row this season produced by multi-GRAMMY® Award winner Blanton Alspaugh and the engineering team at Soundmirror. Soundmirror’s outstanding orchestral, solo, opera, and chamber recordings have earned more than 100 GRAMMY® nominations and awards, with releases on every major classical label.

It is available on a Hybrid CD/SACD in 2.0 stereo and 5.0 surround sound (DSM192K/24bit), recorded in DSD and downloadable to audio servers and devices. The accompanying 36-page booklet provides an extensive essay and bibliography, manuscript facsimile and complete biographies of all singers.

I thought to myself how sad it was that this great Christian leader from the remote east had been driven by the power of the infidels to visit distant islands in the west in order to seek help against them. …O God, what has become of you, ancient glory of Rome? From The Chronicle of Adam Usk, 1377–1421 (Given-Wilson 1997, 121) At his coronation in Constantinople as Emperor of the Romans on 11 February 1392, Manuel II Palaiologos (1350–1425) inherited a shrunken state in deep crisis. Riven internally by dynastic and religious struggles, the so-called “Byzantine Empire” (a modern term invented by western Europeans) was surrounded by hostile powers. The Crusades had left its trade largely in the hands of the Italian merchant republics of Venice and Genoa, the commercial networks of which were supported by outposts of Latin rule scattered across the eastern Mediterranean. Yet the greatest threats to the existence of Romanía (as it was known to its inhabitants) now came from the Ottoman Turks. Firmly established in Europe by capturing Gallipoli in 1354, they had forced Manuel’s father John V (1332–91) to become their vassal in 1373. Manuel had made an independent attempt to resist from Thessalonica, but in 1387 Sultan Murad I (1326– 89) forced him to abandon the empire’s second city. Murad’s son Bayezid I (reigned 1389–1402) forced Manuel to fulfill his vassalage by having to join the Ottoman army on campaigns in Asia Minor during 1390 and 1391. Manuel resumed a policy of resistance soon after becoming emperor. This provoked the Ottomans to blockade Constantinople in 1384, beginning a siege that was to last for eight years. Manuel responded by seeking support from Latin Christendom and forged an alliance with Sigismund of Hungary. Bayezid, however, promptly destroyed the resulting multi-national crusading army on 25 September 1396 in a battle at Nikopolis on the Danube. Forced to look further West, Manuel then appealed to Charles VI of France, Richard II of England, and the Roman papacy for aid. By 1398 Pope Boniface IX had issued a general plea backed by indulgences for Christian rulers to provide troops or money in the empire’s defense. The French and English monarchies responded with pledges of assistance. Their first tangible result was the arrival in 1399 of a small French army in Constantinople under the command of Jean le Meingre, the Marshal Boucicaut, who convinced Manuel that the only way for him to obtain support on a scale sufficient to remove the Ottoman was to make further appeals in person. Entrusting Constantinople into the care of his nephew (and erstwhile rival) John VII, Manuel and his immediate family set out for the West with Boucicaut on 10 December 1399. Conveyed by Venetian galleys, they were joined by a substantial retinue of as many as fifty secular officials and clerics. Their first stop was the Peloponnesus, where Manuel left his wife and children in the care of his brother Theodore, Despot of the Morea. In the spring of 1400, the imperial delegation proceeded through Italy and France to Paris, where Charles VI formally received Manuel on 3 June. For the next two years the emperor made the French capital his base for cultivating relations with the rulers of Latin Christendom. Not long after his arrival in Paris, Manuel started exploring the possibility of a personal visit to the court of Henry IV, who on 13 October 1399 had replaced Richard II as King of England. By October, negotiations conducted through the Hospitaller knight Peter Holt had progressed sufficiently for the emperor to relocate to Calais as a guest of the English crown. After nearly two months on the shores of the Channel, Manuel and his retinue crossed over to Dover on 11 December. The emperor was received with honor and feasting by the clergy of Canterbury on the feast of St. Lucy (13 December) and finally met Henry IV at Blackheath outside London on 21 December. The king conducted him to Eltham Palace, where they celebrated Christmas together with lavish entertainment. Manuel was deeply encouraged by the magnanimity of his host, as he indicated shortly thereafter in a letter to the scholar Manuel Chrysoloras. Writing to his friend, the emperor effusively praised Henry as a virtuous monarch who had provided “a virtual haven for us in the midst of a twofold tempest— both of the season and of fortune—in himself and in his gestures toward us who have come into his port” (Barker 1969, 179). At the end of the festal season, the Constantinopolitan delegation moved back to London and settled with the Knights Hospitallers in Smithfield and Clerkenwell. Waiting for Henry to collect the financial aid promised by his predecessor, Manuel and his entourage impressed the English with the noble simplicity of their dress and their piety. 

One chronicle records that “Each day [Manuel] had a private mass said in his chamber by his bishops, according to the rite of the Greeks; and each day the emperor and all his men took communion” (Given-Wilson 2019, 102–3). Similarly, the Welsh historian and canonist Adam of Usk notes how “These Greeks were extremely devout in their religious services, having them chanted variously by knights or by clerics, for they were sung in their native tongue” (Given-Wilson 1997, 120–21). On 3 February Manuel wrote a note, preserved in Latin, thanking Henry IV for his hospitality and the three thousand gold marks he had rendered in fulfillment of Richard II’s pledge. The emperor returned to France in time to join Charles VI for services celebrated at the royal Abbey of St. Denis on 25 February. He left behind in England a part of his delegation to continue negotiations and the gift of a precious relic from Constantinople: a portion of the seamless robe of the Virgin Mary. After another year of fruitless efforts to acquire military assistance, Manuel finally left Paris on 21 November 1402 for home, retracing his route via Italy and the Peloponnesus. By the time he returned to Constantinople in June 1403, the City had been relieved of its Ottoman siege following Tamerlane’s defeat of Bayezid I at the Battle of Ankara (28 July 1402). The Services Sung at Eltham Palace for Christmas 1400 Manuel II’s Christmas visit to Henry IV brought the clerics and singers of two royal chapels together at Eltham Palace. Although we know that the celebrations on that occasion were both magnificent and expensive, no extant documents offer detailed descriptions of their music. From the English chroniclers’ report that the emperor’s clerics performed daily services and the state of schism that existed between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches, however, we may conclude that each monarch would have attended festal worship celebrated according to their respective rites. Consequently, most of the contents of their services may be reconstructed from other textual and musical sources. Manuel and his entourage would have worshipped according to the traditions of the imperial court in Constantinople. Since at least the ninth century (and possibly earlier), the palace chapels of the emperors had, like increasing numbers of monastic and parish churches under the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, employed the hybrid system of worship known to modern scholars as “the Byzantine rite.” Formed initially from syntheses of elements drawn from the cathedral and monastic traditions of Jerusalem and Constantinople, by the year 1400 it was reaching its last stages of substantial development. The monks of Mount Athos were then in the process of codifying a “Neo-Sabaïtic” approach to Byzantine worship, so-called by modern scholars in recognition of its debts to the usages of the Palestinian monastery of Mar Saba. “Neo-Sabaïtic” versions of Byzantine services were subsequently published in Renaissance Italy and today, with only minor alterations, form the primary basis for the modern worship of Eastern Orthodox and Greek Catholic Christians. Greek liturgical manuscripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, reveal that this synthesis was not yet complete. Sung worship at the courts of the last Roman emperors remained distinct in its application of contemporary trends in Byzantine liturgy and music. Especially on major solemnities of the church’s liturgical year, court ceremonial blended with the Byzantine rite. It did so in ways that echoed, yet understandably were more modest in scale than, the imperial rituals outlined in the Book of Ceremonies commissioned by Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos (905–59). An anonymous treatise attributed today to “Pseudo-Kodinos” (Macrides, Munitiz, and Angelov 2013) preserves a detailed account of court rituals observed during the empire’s twilight. Originally compiled during the second half of the fourteenth century, its oldest surviving manuscript comes from the reign of Manuel II and is dated 1419. The treatise describes in minute detail how ceremonies unique to the court were interwoven with the Byzantine rite’s services and hymnody for the Nativity of Christ. The most elaborate court ritual was the prókypsis, during which the emperor was presented in full regalia on a stage with special lighting while the imperial wind band alternated with singers leading the assembled people in polychrónia (acclamations wishing long life to the imperial family). 

The music played by brass, winds, and percussion on these occasions is now lost, presumably because the instrumentalists of Romanía, like their Arab and Italian colleagues, rarely if ever employed musical notation. Notated vocal music of the prókypsis, on the other hand, is transmitted in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century collections of Byzantine liturgical chants alongside other items sung by the Royal Clergy during the Christmas season. This music is stylistically diverse, ranging from simple forms of psalmody and traditional melodies for predominantly syllabic (onenote-per-syllable) hymnody to sophisticated and often lengthy works in the “kalophonic” (“beautiful sounding”) idiom of vocal music cultivated by late Byzantine cantors. Central to the repertory of kalophonic chant sung in the imperial chapel at the dawn of the fifteenth century were the works of two students of the Constantinopolitan Protopsaltis (“First Cantor”) John Glykes (mid. 13th c.–ca. 1320): Saint John Papadopoulos Koukouzeles (b. ca. 1270–d. before 1341) and Xenos Korones (late 13th c.– mid 14th c.). According to his sixteenth-century vita, Koukouzeles was summoned by the emperor from his birthplace of Dyrrháchion (now Durrës, Albania) to join the singers of the imperial court. In Constantinople he distinguished himself as a cantor, theorist, editor, and composer of chant. Having acquired the title of Maïstor (from Latin magister), he retired from public life to the Great Lavra monastery on the Holy Mountain of Athos. Koukouzeles spent his remaining years in a manner typical for monks of his era who wished to practice the contemplative disciplines of hesychasm (literally “quietude”) while remaining rooted in monastic common life: he alternated periods of time spent outside the monastery walls as a solitary with assisting his community in the chanting of festal services. At some point after his death he was canonized as a saint of the Orthodox Church and is today commemorated annually along with Saint Romanos the Melodist on 1 October. Since we lack a narrative biography for Korones, his career must be reconstructed largely from the titles and brief comments attached to his works in musical manuscripts. These record that he served as a cantor both among the Royal Clergy and at the cathedral of Hagia Sophia. He acquired the titles of Lampadarios and Protopsaltis, designating (as today) the directors of the left and right antiphonal choirs. If the report of an eighteenth-century manuscript that he was tonsured as a monk with the name Xenophon is accurate, Korones may also have followed Koukouzeles into monastic retirement. At the time of Manuel’s visit to Eltham Palace, the English Chapel Royal was in the middle of an expansion of its personnel that had begun under Richard II and peaked later during the reign of Henry V (1413–22). The accounts for Henry IV’s household chapel record that on Christmas in 1400 it had 33 members, which Andrew Wathey (1987, 119–26) suggests is a composite total. Itemized lists made at other times during the early years of Henry IV’s reign typically list eighteen adult clerks, around another five junior clerks, and nine or ten boys. The dominant form of Christian worship celebrated at the beginning of the fifteenth century in the non-monastic churches of southeast England was the Sarum Use of the Roman rite. Named after a corruption of the Latin name for Salisbury (“sarisburia”), it was soon (in 1414) to displace most of what remained of the local use of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. The Sarum Use was not monolithic but existed as a series of local applications of the traditions of Salisbury Cathedral. Uniform in its broad outlines, its variations were embodied in manuscript copies of its liturgical service texts, rubrics, and chant destined for particular users and institutions. In this way the Sarum Use resembled the contemporary Neo-Sabaïtic version of the Byzantine rite, the texts and rubrics of which achieved a greater degree of uniformity only after being fixed in mechanically printed service books. Another similarity between the liturgical practices of the English Chapel Royal and the Royal Clergy of the Roman Emperors was their reliance on their respective repertories of traditional chant, which in both cases made up the bulk of music sung in worship. They differed, however, in their contemporary means of musical enrichment. Late Byzantine composers elaborated upon earlier forms of chant by expanding them horizontally through the techniques of kalophōnía: recomposing, often extending and generally making them more virtuosic through the widening of vocal ranges and the insertion of melismas, passages on strings of non-semantic vocables such as “anané” and “terirém,” and textual troping. English singers of the period, on the other hand, were accustomed to embellishing the chant repertories of the Sarum Use with music in multiple voice parts. Polyphony was probably heard most frequently when chant was performed with the addition of complementary parts that singers spontaneously created according to conventions learned primarily by ear. One such practice of directed improvisation was known as “faburden,” described in an early fifteenth-century treatise as a method for producing a three-part texture by adding voices moving largely in parallel above and below the chant. English singers at the time of Manuel II’s visit to Eltham Palace also produced polyphonic textures by performing works explicitly written for multiple vocal parts recorded in mensural (rhythmically measured) musical notation. Our knowledge of English mensural polyphony from this period is unfortunately limited by the small number and generally poor state of its extant sources. 

Thanks mainly to the ruptures in religious life that followed the Protestant Reformation, not a single manuscript of English polyphony from the fourteenth century remains intact. The surviving fragments include both complete and incomplete works notated either in score (with all parts vertically aligned) or choirbook format (with each part notated separately). Taken together, these sources reveal that mensural polyphony in England around 1400 was stylistically diverse and varied considerably in its complexity. Some works quote or paraphrase existing chants in one or more of their voices, while others are free compositions. The simplest works in score resemble improvised multi-part singing in their frequent use of parallel intervals. What makes them characteristically English is a tendency to favor strings of thirds and sixths over the “perfect” consonances (fourths and fifths) emphasized in contemporary Italian simple polyphony (a style imitated later in the fifteenth century by the Byzantine musicians Manuel Gazes and John Plousiadenos). The most complex works of English polyphony are mass movements and motets for four voices copied in choirbook layout. In the complexity of their rhythms and layered interaction of their rhythms, they resemble stylistically the works of such continental composers as Guillaume de Machaut (d. 1377). The Present Recording This recording is not a strict reconstruction, but a selection of chant and polyphony for the Nativity of Christ that is stylistically representative of the repertories of the Roman and English royal chapels around 1400. Rubrics and other evidence regarding the two groups of singers celebrating Christmas in parallel at Eltham Palace have been taken into account, but applied with some flexibility to suit the voices of Cappella Romana. We present the music in a roughly liturgical order, beginning with items for Christmas Eve and ending with the Magnificat for the service of Second Vespers celebrated on the evening of 25 December. Greek and Latin selections follow in a sequence emphasizing common textual themes and parallel musical techniques. Since the Roman and English royal chapels both used received forms of plainchant as their default form of music and their late medieval repertories are today well documented, it is not difficult to identify Byzantine and Sarum Christmas chants that almost certainly were sung at Eltham Palace. This contrasts strongly with the historical record for Latin and Greek sacred music that was either technically advanced for its time or unique to court ceremony. The English Reformation, as we noted above, left behind only incomplete and often highly fragmentary sources of fourteenth-century sacred polyphony. The monastic libraries of Sinai and Mount Athos, on the contrary, preserved intact from the Ottoman conquest of Romanía not only many rich sources of Byzantine kalophōnia, but even multiple copies of the vocal music for the imperial Prókypsis ceremony. Consequently, we are in the somewhat surprising position of being able to know with greater certainty what was chanted in Greek for Manuel II than in Latin for his English host. Iudea et Hierusalem is a responsory chant appointed in the Sarum Use to be sung by up to three cantors at vespers for the Vigil of the Nativity of the Lord on Christmas Eve. The number of singers required by the rubrics is reflected in the scoring of the polyphonic settings of its verses and doxology heard on this recording. Preserved in different fragmentary sources, both feature parallel consonances recalling the textures of contemporary improvised polyphony, a style known as English discant. The music for the verse is in tempus perfectum and features triple note values throughout, while that for the doxology renders the chant primarily in “imperfect” duple rhythms. 

On the morning of Christmas Eve (or, if it is a year when 25 December falls on a Sunday, on the preceding Friday) in the modern Byzantine rite, even non-monastic churches celebrate extended versions of the daily prayer services marking the First, Third, Sixth and Ninth Hours of the day (equivalent to the canonical hours of Prime, Terce, Sext, and None of Latin Christendom). Today these special festal services are known collectively as “the Royal Hours,” a title recalling that the Christmas ceremonies of the imperial court commenced with their chanting in the presence of the emperor. The treatise of Pseudo-Kodinos relates how, at the climax of the Ninth Hour, the singers of the Royal Clergy marked his attendance by inserting acclamations wishing the imperial family long life (“Many years”) between solemn renditions of the hymn “Today is Born of the Virgin.” Further acclamations for the emperor and his family were sung at the evening office of vespers and the eucharistic Divine Liturgy of Christmas Eve. After the dismissal of the Divine Liturgy (or vespers, if Christmas fell on the weekend), the emperor ascended a stage bearing the name of the ritual that commenced immediately, namely the Prókypsis. Literally meaning “emergence,” the word Prókypsis denoted the ceremonial presentation of the monarch, who appeared from behind a curtain dressed in full regalia to receive acclamations from his court. Since complete observance of this ritual assumed access to an imperial palace with its full complement of ceremonial paraphernalia and personnel (including a wind band), PseudoKodinos mentions the possibility of scaling down its ceremonies when the emperor was on campaign. Manuel certainly had with him in England the resources necessary to execute the purely vocal musical segments of the Prókypsis. These begin with the declaration “Christ, who crowned you, is born, O King,” after which soloists and the assembled people take turns singing chants wishing Manuel and his wife Helen “Many years.” 

In their repeated leaps of a fifth, the melodies of these acclamations imitate the fanfares of the brass instruments that would have participated in a full celebration of the ritual at home in Constantinople. The standard sequence of acclamations for the Prókypsis ends with the Polychrónion, for which the fourteenth-century court singer Xenos Korones provided an optional coda in kalophonic style. Its first word immediately dissolves into abstract music sung to sequences of non-semantic syllables (vocables) known variously as ēchē´mata (a word used also to denote the vocal intonations sung to establish the mode (ēchos) of a chant) or teretísmata (a term recalling the buzzing of insects). When the words reemerge, they do so in a florid melodic style with textual repetitions. Melismas eventually blur into more vocables that prepare musically for a reprise of the standard (nonkalophonic) acclamation. Roughly contemporary with the Polychrónion by Korones is Ovet mundus letabundus, an anonymous setting of a non-liturgical Christmas text for four voices from the first half of the fourteenth century. Peter Lefferts (1983, I, 70–77) classifies it as a “large-scale sectional voice-exchange motet” because its upper two voices exchange parts at the repetition of each of its two large sections. The motet is preserved on two folios reused as flyleaves in a fifteenthcentury collection of statutes from reigns of English monarchs beginning with Henry IVand ending in the fourth year of Henry VI (1426). The first of these fragments also contains two voices of another motet of the same type paraphrasing the Christmas hymn A solis ortus cardine. Although Margaret Bent (1981, 76) has argued convincingly that Ovet mundus is a continuation of A solis ortus, Lefferts notes that each retains a separate musical identity and suggests that they could have been “sung at different times on Christmas Day.” When at home in Constantinople, according to Pseudo-Kodinos, the singers of the Royal Clergy followed court protocols for observing the Nativity of Christ by chanting for the emperor at services and formal meals. 

Musical manuscripts confirm this by following the Prókypsis acclamations with chants for the morning office of orthros, a service combining the psalmody of Palestinian nocturns and lauds with many hymns. First among these matutinal chants are pentekostária (a term denoting hymns attached to Psalm 50), including several not found in the modern service books of the Byzantine rite: the second pentekostárion sung on this recording is a chant from Thessalonica, while the third takes as its model the Easter refrain “Jesus is risen from the grave.” Some manuscripts also contain a setting (not sung here) of this latter pentekostárion in kalophonic style that concludes with a reprise of the polychrónion sung previously at the Prókypsis. This suggests that “Jesus is born from a Virgin,” like the hymn “Magi, Persian Kings” copied alongside it in some manuscripts, belonged to the group of chants sung both in church and at table. Although separated by centuries of parallel development, the Sarum and Byzantine morning offices both contain chants describing the birth of God incarnate from the Virgin Mary in a Bethlehem manger as a mystery beyond human comprehension. Placed as a moment of musical repose between two readings in the middle of the second nocturn of matins, the melismatic responsory O magnum mysterium addresses this theological theme with textual concision. Kosmas of Jerusalem (8th c.) reverses the relative precedence of music over text in the responsory by employing the strophic poetic form of a kanon. Its strophic poetic form gave Kosmas the freedom to extend his exposition of the topic to encompass the visit of the Magi, an event commemorated in the Byzantine tradition on Christmas day. 

Kanons are multi-stanza hymns structured as a series of poetic “odes.” They were originally composed to accompany the verses of the nine biblical canticles or “odes” of the Palestinian Psalter, eight or nine of which were sung at solemn celebrations of the morning office of orthros. Each ode of a poetic kanon begins with an heirmós, a stanza providing a metrical model for further stanzas (tropária) sung to its melody. By the late Byzantine period, it had become customary on great feasts to replace the verses of the Magnificat—the Song of Mary (Luke 1:46–55) that forms the first half of the Psalter’s ninth biblical canticle—with poetic verses (megalynária) proper to the occasion. The heirmós and tropária of the Ninth Ode sung on this recording were edited by Dr. Ioannis Arvanitis from MS Sinai Greek 1256, the second earliest copy of the late Byzantine version of the Heirmológion (a book of model stanzas for kanons) revised by St. John Koukouzeles. Dated 1309 and copied by Eirini, daughter of Theodore Hagiopetrites, this musically notated reference collection was updated by Koukouzeles to reflect the oral traditions of his time. The Koukouzelian heirmoí for the Christmas Kanon of Kosmas tend to compress the vocal range of their counterparts in the earliest manuscripts with fully diastematic (intervallically specific) musical notation. This was achieved mainly by eliminating passages descending from the upper final of Mode 1 on A to its lower basis on D (for comparison, listen to Ode 1 from the thirteenthcentury Heirmológion Grottaferrata Ε.γ. II on Cappella Romana’s earlier recording When Augustus Reigned). It is customary in festal performances of a kanon to repeat each heirmós at the conclusion of its respective ode as a katavasía (literally a “descent”). Koukouzeles composed two virtuosic katavasíai for the Ninth Ode of the First Kanon of Christmas in kalophonic style with extended (rather than compressed) vocal ranges. In the setting sung on this recording, St. John immediately interrupts the text of its prefatory poetic verse with sequences of vocables derived from the vocal intonation formula for Mode 1 (“ananés”). Once he finally presents the verse in its entirety, it is revealed to be not, as would normally be expected, the first megalynárion of the ode, but a later one praising Christ as “the King born in a Cave.” Koukouzeles then proceeds to the heirmós, but reorders its text to heighten its rhetorical impact. 

The verse returns, but its words once again dissolve into teretísmata (“tototototerere…”) before executing a musical transition preparing the reprise of the usual syllabic heirmós, edited here from a fifteenth-century Heirmológion now in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge (MS O.2.61). Techniques of textual and musical extension analogous to those employed by the composers of Byzantine kalophōnía occur also in some genres of Latin liturgical chant. The sequence, for example, appears in its earliest sources (9th–11th c.) as an extension to the Alleluia of the Franco-Roman mass consisting of paired melodic lines performed with or without hymnic texts. Wordless performance of sequences became increasingly rare after 1100 as the genre became synonymous with its textual verses, a change signaled by its acquisition of the alternate name of “prosa.” Late medieval Sarum Use, however, preserved on great feasts the archaic practice of performing sequence verses with and without their texts in alternation. Wordless renditions were usually vocal, but in some places their melodies could also be played on an organ. The Sarum Processional directs that verses of the prosa for Christmas Day Te laudant alme Rex should be chanted first with their texts by three clerics, then by the choir as a wordless melisma. Some copies of the Processional require only a single repetition on the vowel “A,” as was customary on most feasts. Others heighten the ecstatic nature of this chant by specifying that each phrase should be repeated three times to “A,” “O,” and “E.” At the conclusion of Te laudant, the Processional instructs the choir to make its entrance singing Hodie Christus natus est. The text of this antiphon echoes Greek hymnography in its repeated assertions that events in the Christian history of salvation relating to the birth of Christ are occurring “Today.” Perhaps the most famous Byzantine Christmas hymn to make this same proclamation is the prologue to the Kontakion on the Nativity by Saint Romanos the Melodist. Born in Beirut and probably of Jewish origin, Romanos served as a deacon at the church of the Mother of God in the Kyrou district of Constantinople during the first half of the sixth century. “Today the Virgin gives birth” originally served as the prologue to a series of 24 metrically identical stanzas (oikoi), all ofwhich ended with the congregational refrain “A little Child: God before the ages.” By the year 1400, the prologue was heard most frequently on its own. It was sung not only at various points during services for the feast of Christ’s Nativity, but also at the emperor’s ChristmasDay banquet. 

Another vestige of the liturgical heritage of antiquity shared by medieval Greek and Latin Christians was the chanting of Kyrie eleison in the Roman mass. On festal occasions the Sarum Use also preserved the archaic practice of performing the Kyrie with supplicatory verses. Reserved for the most important (“Principal Double”) feasts such as Christmas, Deus Creator omnium is notable for its use of Greek words in addition to “eleison” (“have mercy”). The polyphonic Gloria in excelsis following the Kyrie is an anonymous work that modern scholars have reconstructed from two sources, each of which contains two of its four voices: a fragment from Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire (British Library 40011 B) and thstyliste Old Hall Manuscript (British Library 57950). As the largest surviving collection of English polyphony from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, Old Hall is perhaps most famous for its Gloria in excelsis attributed to a “Roy Henry” whom most scholars now think was Henry V (although a few have argued for Henry IV’s authorship). The anonymous Gloria sung on this recording, however, comes from the manuscript’s retrospective first layer copied by a single scribe between 1415 and 1421. Stylistically it recalls continental music composed decades before in its slow-moving lower parts and relatively high levels of diatonic dissonance. The Communion Verse for Christmas day belongs to a modest body of chants for the All-Night Vigil and Divine Liturgy by the monk Agathon, a composer of the first half of the fourteenth century identified in musical manuscripts as the brother of Xenos Korones. It begins with the appointed biblical verse (“The Lord has sent redemption to his people,” Ps. 110:9a) set syllabically to a simple recitation formula. 

Agathon sets the following extrabiblical phrase “in peace” in a melismatic style that he maintains for the “Alleluia.” Through textual repetitions and the interpolation of non-semantic syllables, the music for this originally congregational refrain extends to approximately 60% of the chant’s length. The whole work is most frequently transmitted in musical manuscripts with a different psalmic text, namely that for Sundays (Ps. 148: 1, “Praise the Lord from the heavens”). It was in this ordinary Sunday form that it was bequeathed to modern cantors by Chourmouzios the Archivist (ca. 1770–1840), one of the Three Teachers who invented the reformed New Method of ecclesiastical chant notation still in commonuse in Orthodox churches from Moldavia to the Middle East. Chourmouzios accomplished this by making an interpretation (exē´gesis) of its medieval Middle Byzantine Notation in a generally melismatic style, rendering its musical formulas according to the oral conventions of his time. Dr. Ioannis Arvanitis, the editor of the more compact realization of the medieval notation recorded here, has followed Chourmouzios in locating the modal basis of its melody on Zo (equivalent to low B natural) instead of the more usual F natural. The last major Latin service celebrated at Eltham Palace on 25 December 1400 would have been the evening office of Second Vespers, at the climax of which the Magnificat was chanted with the antiphon Hodie Christus natus est. An incomplete fourteenth-century polyphonic setting of this Marian canticle is recorded in mensural notation on the last two folios of a fifteenth-century manuscript of religious texts (Cambridge University Library K.k.i.6). It places the traditional recitation formula for Mode I mainly in the middle of its three voices. On this recording we emphasize its close relationship to spontaneous harmonization by alternating full performances of its three-part texture by soloists with renderings of only its lower two voices by the choir. --Alexander Lingas