Communication:
“Fontes do canto sacro do Leste: Diálogos entre manuscritos e tradições“, by Ivan Moody (CESEM-NOVA FCSH) and Svetlana Poliakova (CESEM-NOVA FCSH)

This open class provides basic information about liturgy and music in the Christian East. Besides an analysis of the most important characteristics of the Orthodox rite, we also examine some local traditions, such as the unique tradition of Orthodox sacred music in Serbia. Emerging initially out of the Byzantine world, Serbian ecclesiastical culture soon developed very particular characteristics. Starting out with Byzantine manuscripts of medieval Serbia, this part of the seminar will trace the path of the sacred repertoire from this time through the Ottoman period, when it became an oral tradition, through to the 19th century, when it again began to be noted by “melographers” such as Stevan Mokranjac. In turn, this repertoire, recovered as a body of written music, has formed the basis of new processes of polyphonic composition right through to the present day.
This paper will be presented in Portuguese within the framework of the CESEM Eastern Christian Chant in Portugal project.


Biographical notes:
Ivan Moody is a composer, conductor and musicologist of international renown. His major works to date are Passion and Resurrection (1992), the Akáthistos Hymn (1998), and Qohelet (2013). He has conducted choirs throughout Europe and the American continent. He has lectured and written on the contemporary music of Russia, the Balkans and the Iberian Peninsula, on music and spirituality, and on the musical cultures of Southern Europe. In 2014, he published the book Modernism and Orthodox Spirituality in Contemporary Music. He is a researcher at CESEM – NOVA University, President of the International Society for Orthodox Church Music, a founding member of the European Academy of Religion music panel and head of the music section of the International Orthodox Theological Association. He is protopresbyter of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople for the Diocese of Spain and Portugal.

Svetlana Poliakova is a graduate of the Tchaikovsky Higher Conservatory of Moscow and received a PhD from Nova University of Lisbon. Since 2008, she has been teaching music education, composition techniques, theory and practice in Byzantine rite music, theory and analysis of Western medieval and continuo bass music at the Department of Musicology, the School of Social Sciences and Humanities, in the same university. Since 2004, she has been a researcher at CESEM (Centre for the Study of Sociology and Musical Aesthetics at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities) at NOVA University. The founder and director of the Coro Académico Romanos Mélodos, FCSH, UNL, she is also director of the Pravoslava Chamber Chorus.

This session is part of the second series of “Manuscritos em Diálogo” (Manuscripts in Dialogue) seminars.