Communion Chants in Magna Graecia and Byzantium

Church of the Holy Sepulcher, provides us with a valuable account of early Christian liturgical practices, and is one of the first to record that during the Communion rite a psalm was sung.' Considering the gap of eight to nine centuries that intervenes between Saint Cyril's testimony and the beginnings of the written tradition for Communion psalmody in the East, we could scarcely hope to establish a convincing argument which would demonstrate a musical relationship between the two. "Throughout the early Christian world," writes Oliver Strunk, "an impenetrable barrier of oral tradition lies between all but the latest melodies and the earliest attempts to reduce them to writing."2 It is my intention to address this recurrent central problem from an entirely new perspective, basing my evaluations on the Eastern Communion chants preserved in a body of twelfth- and thirteenth-century musical documents from Magna Graecia and Byzantium. The study takes two related paths. The first, an analytical one, defines a stable, pervasive melodic pattern which has resisted significant alteration in spite of modal ordering; while the second, stylistic path opens new channels of investigation into the genesis and subsequent development of melismatic chant. Desirable as it would be to break Strunk's formidable "sound barrier" -to confirm a direct survival of the chant of the early Church in the later Byzantine tradition-my paper is more modest in scope. I see the question not so much in terms of a faithful melodic preservation but rather as the degree to which traces of an ancient model may be gleaned from our