International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Silvia Tessari
Falcade, Italy; 
[e-mail]
Cirillo Martini and Byzantine Music in the Nanian Collection 
at the Marciana National Library in Venice
«
Para entender [...] el estado de la Música entre los griegos, no se hallan en otra parte tantos 
monumentos como en la biblioteca naniana, donde se ven sucesivamente, desde hacia el siglo X hasta 
estos últimos, varios códices con sus notas musicales
». These words, written by the well-known 
Jesuit Juan Andrés in the late 18
th
century, will be the starting point of my presentation. The library 
collected by the Venetian patrician family Nani, now at the Marciana National Library, preserves 
in fact Greek Lectionaries with ecphonetic notation and hymn books with melodic notation. Many 
of the neumated mss. (mostly written after 1453) show peculiar features, because they – collected 
mainly in the Ionian Island – belong to a large extent to the postbyzantine Cretan musical tradition. 
After a summary of the features of these 
testimonia
, I will explain which role played the Florentine 
abbot Cirillo Martini, who accompanied G. Nani in the Levant, in the discovery and acquisition 
of these musical manuscripts. He also provided first hand information to the main musicological 
enterprises of the 18
th
century about theory and practice of that he called 
la musica dei Greci dei 
bassi tempi
. I will offer some data, hitherto unknown, about the biography of Martini, a pioneer 
Byzantine musicologist in the Italian Enlightenment.

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647
Daniel Mocanu
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania; 
[e-mail]
Macarie the Hieromonk ‒ 
Composer and Keeper of the Byzantine Musical Tradition. 
Case Analysis: Pentecost Heirmos
In the 17
th
century, at the same time with the acceptance of Romanian as a liturgical language 
within the provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia, a musical repertoire adapted to new hymnodic 
texts was indispensable. The process of adapting the original Greek melody to the Romanian text, 
while keeping the original melody within the limits imposed by the differences of emphasis, number 
of syllables and the word order of the Greek and Romanian texts, would be appointed, beginning 
with Anton Pann, through the concept of 
Romanizating the song
. An outstanding figure of the 19
th
century, Macarie the Hieromonk (1750-1836) was one of the most important main psalm singers 
in Wallachia. He established the methodological patterns that would allow the transposition of 
the liturgical Byzantine musical repertoire into Romanian. Starting from the specific feature of the 
Romanization
process, which was present throughout Macarie the Hieromonk’s entire compositional 
activity, our writing aims at analysing the 9
th
heirmos from a musical point of view. The starting 
point is the Matins of the Pentecost feast, depending on many analytical parameters, which include 
elements of the literary form (the notions prosodic structure and the ideational structure of the 
hymnodic text) and elements of the musical form (the functional and modal concatenation, the 
melodics, the cadence system, the neume spelling).
The sources used by Macarie the Hieromonk in order to transpose the melody of the heirmos 
of the 9
th
hymn into Romanian were to be identified in Petros Peloponessiou Lampadarios’ work: 
Ειρμολόγιον των καταβασιών. Hence, Macarie’s books, the 
Anastasimatar
and the 
Irmologhion
, 
transposed for the first time the musical repertoire of the great Church in Constantinople into 
Romanian. A comparative analysis of the two musical variants reveals Macarie’s method of adapting 
the original Greek melody to the hymnodic texts in the Romanian language. Thus, by adapting the 
heirmos of the 9
th
hymn at the 
Pentecost 
feast to the Romanian hymnography, Macarie attempted to 
comply, as far as possible, with the composition rules of the Greek original. As for the elements of 
the literary form, the Romanian hymnodic text was divided into melodic phrases, in order to match 
the final cadences within the Greek text.
In terms of musical form elements, one can distinguish three procedures that Macarie used in 
order to transpose the Greek melody into Romanian.
The first procedure involves matching the melodic and prosodic accents between the two 
languages. If the melody of the heirmos differs from the Greek original to a certain extent, it results 
from the word order of the text, the length and position of word accents within the Romanian 
hymnodic text.
The second one involves the cadence system. Macarie used the melodic and cadential themes of 
the Greek original up to a great extent. He observed both the same succession rules of musical phrases 
and the correlation rules of stressed syllables with strong beats of measures from cadence phrases.

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648
The third procedure of transposition refers to the adaptation of the Greek original to the 
Romanian language through constraints and freedoms assumed by the author. With artistic genius, 
Macarie assumed the freedom to estrange a lot from the initial melodic text. Thus, he composed 
a new melody, that is the third version of the heirmos from the 9
th
hymn of the Pentecost Canon, 
which is present in the 
Irmologhion
. In terms of the melody, the hymn is different from the Greek 
original, but it is based on the same Byzantine principles, which highlights the composer’s mastery.
The compositional process of adapting a melody taken from the Greek repertoire, which has 
already been consecrated within the great Church of Constantinople, to the linguistic peculiarities of 
the Romanian hymnodic texts, by rigorously keeping the original melodic line, qualifies Macarie the 
Hieromonk as a preserver and promoter of the Byzantine music within the Romanian ecclesial space.