Melos of the Undivided Church. Notes on the Interchurch Researches of Early Music

Abstract

New attention towards the ancient Church chant is especially on time in today’s Ukraine, where the renewed autocephalous Church is entering the global Christian community, looking back at its own historical and liturgical roots and trying to overcome the stereotypes about its tradition. The present article deals with the myths of different Christian musical traditions concerning themselves and their neighbors. Such myths implicitly express the yearning for the lost unity of the Church and condemn the Other for this loss. Hence they continue the dogmatic polemics in the domain of aesthetics. As we have demonstrated, such myths were constructed by the 19th-20th centuries historiographies of Church chant as an ideological impetus for the renewal of the relevant traditions. However “positive” mythologization of one’s own chanting tradition, firstly, retouched those dimensions of its image that were underestimated at that time, and secondly, often denigrated the neighbor traditions. So, the one-sidedness of such mythologization has provoked some modern cantors to engage into the joint reconstruction of authentic history of music together with their foreign colleagues. In this paper such collegial reconstructions - theoretical as well as practical - were for the first time assessed as an important dimension of interconfessional and interchurch dialogue. As we tried to show, they are not less necessary than the discussions in dogmatic field and their fruits are much more powerful than any “musical Esperanto” of popular Christian hymns.