The Late Byzantine and Slavonic Communion Cycle: Liturgy and Music

Dumbarton Oaks
Dimitri E. Conomos
ISBN: 0884021343
price: $35.00  

This book is a study of the complete extant repertory of Greek and Slavonic Communion hymns preserved in Byzantine, Russian, and Moldavian musical manuscripts of the twelfth to sixteenth centuries.
The author draws upon evidence from diverse data including manuscript tradition and provenance, concordances, contrafacta, musical and textual variants, notation, calligraphy and other paleographic evidence, stylistic traits, approximate date of composition, and source of the melodies. The study, complete with a generous number of musical examples, attempts to place the varied repertory of Communion chants into its proper musical, liturgical, and historical environment and touches on the innovative processes of contrafacta, bilingual chants, and the practice of adding parts to existing material.