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“On the music of St. Nersēs the Gracious (1102-1173): chants, corpora and contrafacta” – Talk by Haig Utidjian
April 4 @ 14:00 - 15:00 WEST
The legacy of St. Nersēs Šnorhali (the “Gracious”, 1102-1173) includes a corpus of works in musical genres embracing hymns, odes, and chants for the Offices and Divine Liturgy. Early sources are neumated in a notational system that we are unable to decipher. However, the oral tradition, coupled with a partial and crude interpretation of the incomprehensible neumes, coupled with successive waves of re-composition over the centuries, allowed transcriptions to be undertaken in the nineteenth century in the “new” Limōnčean system and in Western staff notation – constituting an artistic legacy encompassing corpora from disparate centres of Armenian traditional chant such as Constantinople, Venice, Bzommar and New Julfa. I shall provide a brief exposition of my research on (i) methodologies to ascertain the Saint’s authorship, (ii) the Saint’s deployment of contrafacta, (iii) the recent re-discovery of hitherto neglected melodies, and on the somewhat surprising results of my experimentation with the juxtaposition of musical variants of diverse provenance.