The sacral monody of Byzantium and Kyivan Rus as a means of youth spiritual development
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32405/2308-8885-2019-4-2-6Keywords:
sacral monody, Middle Ages, Orthodox church singing, spiritual development of youthAbstract
The sacral monody of the Middle Ages is one of the most striking and mysterious pages in the history of spiritual culture in the world. Its creators and performers were people of high morality and creative abilities, Orthodox Church canonized most of them as saints. Eastern Christian thinkers considered music as the most important after theology in the process of ethical and aesthetic development of students. Constantinople emperors and Kyiv princes studied the liturgical singing. It was one of the essential subjects in fraternal and parish schools. At the beginning of the 21st century, the attention to the archaic layers of the Ukrainian spiritual culture and to its Byzantine origins was intensified. The meticulously regulated by the Typikon diverse system of liturgical manuscripts and singing hymns, the plurality of musical styles and neumes notations, carefully described in theoretical treatises and musical alphabets, can be a wide field for study in modern Ukrainian schools, institutions of out-of-school and higher education.
The study of the spiritual singing of Byzantium and Kyivan Rus should go hand in hand with the studios of the entire Eastern Christian liturgical rite, as a synthesis of many kinds of art – visual, audio and audiovisual. The Middle Ages hymnography was studied at leading universities in Europe and America for a century and a half. Not only individual scholars have worked in this field, but powerful schools of medievalists (both byzantologists and paleoslavists) were formed. Native musical culture is famous due to its authentic folk heritage and archaic liturgical art. We believe that it is time to return this original national heritage to Ukrainian educational institutions. This can be done either in the form of special courses, hobby clubs or electives, or by introducing specific questions, topics or thematic blocks into the curricula of the cultural studies.
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