Byzantine Music

Extract

Until recently the study of Byzantine history and civilisation has had to fight against an almost insuperable prejudice. The whole Byzantine world was considered as petrified, bloodless and decadent both in its life and in its artistic creation, and gifted scholars refused to waste their energy on a study which seemed unimportant. Although a large number of Byzantine manuscripts were brought to Europe in the seventeenth century and, in spite of the publication of Allacci's Studies in the Liturgical Books of the Greek Church, Goar's Commentary on the Euchologium and Montfaucon's Palœographia Grœca, yet knowledge of these works and the study of Byzantine art were confined to a small number of people and aroused no regular interest. Sixty years ago a famous German scholar—Professor W. Christ, of the University of Munich—in his Preface to the Anthologia Grœca Carminum Christianorum apologised for deserting the “elegance and fine freedom of the poets of Greece and Rome for the thorny bypaths of mediæval Christian verse.” The prefaces, too, of later works dealing with Byzantium all contain the same apology, the author wishing to make it clear that he has undertaken his task in a spirit of scientific enquiry rather than out of conviction or enthusiasm.