Im going to put this short history up on the website soon, just so people have some background to the organization: A Short History of New Byzantium Publications by Stanley J. Takis Twelve years ago I began the New Byzantium Publications website, newbyz.org, with the intention of assisting Greek Orthodox church choirs. The primary reason was to provide good, accurate, understandable, poetic, and flowing English translations of the hymns choirs needed to sing at the Liturgy. That expanded into providing good English for other services, so that a choir member could step in and be a chanter at these services, if needed. Since my wife, Nancy, was most adept at providing these kinds of translations and would write them down on paper in staff notation, I began to use a computer notation program to digitize her work and put it up on the website for people to have free access to it. In addition, since most Greek Orthodox churches use a combination of Greek and English texts, I decided to provide side-by-side Greek versions of the music, so the practice of two languages could be easily accommodated. At the beginning, I had been a member and a conductor of a choir for some years, and my wife had been chanting in the Church for many years. I wondered what the different roles between the chanters and the choir were, because, on the face of it, there were many obvious differences. The choir sang at the Divine Liturgy and a few important feasts. The chanters chanted at all services. The choir used four-part harmonized music with organ written in staff notation. The chanters chanted unaccompanied using Byzantine chant written in its own unique notation. When I realized the answer to the main question—choirs and chanters fulfilled the same role, that of leading and representing the lay people in worship—then it was obvious that the main differences were that chanters knew more about the hymns and services and had more resources than the choirs did. Chanters, I discovered, were specifically trained in things not having to do with making music, whereas choirs did not have that training. Therefore, I set out to gain this information myself, so that I could relate it to choirs and choir directors, so that their knowledge base about the music of the Church would be equal to those of chanters, and the access to all of the hymns they would need would be all in one place—on newbyz.org. In addition, we would provide educational articles, charts, and lists that choir directors and members could use to increase their knowledge of when, where, how, and why to render the chanting for church services. We also started a Yahoo Groups page and a Facebook page to help with notifications when new materials were put up on the website. We decided to use music that consisted only of a melodic line and a drone on the fundamental tone of the phrase. In this way, we would call attention to the texts of the services, which is the most important function of music in the Orthodox Church. This is also the form of music used with the Byzantine system, the official music of the Greek Church, so it will be familiar and consistent with history, even if it does not contain all of the subtleties written into Byzantine notation. We decided upon Western staff notation because it was the kind of notation already used by almost all Orthodox lay choirs. With the knowledge that many, if not most, Greek Orthodox church choirs use harmonized music, we invited all who used our website to harmonize our music if they wanted to, as long as they did not alter the melodic line and the words, especially the English translations. We also asked that they mark their music with the copyright information we provide on our hymns and the name of the website so that people may contact us, if need be. I intend to keep up the website for the remainder of my life, and I would like people to keep it going after I am no longer able to do it. All of the hymns and information on the site are free for public use and duplication, as long as they are not altered without our permission. I’ve receive much communication from many people around the world informing me that our website is useful to them. This is why we do it, even if it is a secret to many people for whom it was intended. I’m not very good at publicity, so we basically rely on word of mouth for public relations. Feel free to contact me at any time on Facebook using the name of New Byzantium Publications or Stan Takis, through email at takistan@yahoo, or by telephone at 517-980-3830.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Sep 2014 16:27:19 +0000
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