International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Jaakko Olkinuora
University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland; 
[e-mail]
Rhetoric in Byzantine Chant and Its Transmission to Other Languages
In recent scholarly work, it has become almost a cliché to state that rhetoric is the most 
dominant art form of the Byzantine Empire. It affected all artistic creation, from literature to visual 
arts, architecture and music. However, there have been very few studies that concretely demonstrate 
the different rhetoric functions of Byzantine chant. As the recent doctoral dissertation of the author of 
this paper shows, musical rhetoric can be deciphered through different musical elements, including 
the selection of melodic formulae and their parallelisms, the use of 
Tonmalerei 
and modulations. 
Even the use of cheironomy could be seen as a musical parallel for the use of gesture in rhetoric 
declamation. However, much more research is needed in order to create a complete image of the 
different rhetoric processes in Byzantine chant, including its performance.
Guided by the topic of the thematic musicological session, the present paper aims at expanding 
this idea to the adaptations of Byzantine hymnography and chant into languages other than Greek. 
Similar studies have been conducted in the field of homiletics, for instance, but the analysis of the 
role of the art of eloquence in the translation of hymnography and music still remains a 
desideratum. 
The purpose of this study is to observe whether or not the rhetoric of music survived in these 
translation processes, and to speculate how aware the adaptors were of these rhetorical structures. 
Examples will be drawn from Slavonic and Romanian sources, dating from both Byzantine and 
post-Byzantine eras. Due to the preliminary state of this on-going study, the presentation aims at 
posing questions rather than providing conclusive remarks.