Icons in Sound: The Music of Fr. Sergei Glagolev

by HARRISON RUSSIN

It is commonplace to find the Orthodox Church’s music described as “icons in sound” (Google the phrase if you want proof ). This saying demonstrates how Orthodox Christians think visually, sometimes at the expense of the aural—though it’s a tendency that goes beyond the Orthodox Church. The field of sound studies has been developing since the early 2000s, and one of its unifying aspects has been to “temper a tendency to think of hearing as a ‘secondary sense’—secondary, that is, to vision” (from the Grove Music Online article on Sound studies). English vocabulary is indeed replete with multiple terms for sight—gaze, stare, look, gape, scrutinize, ogle, eyeball, among others; but there are fewer synonyms for hearing. Sight indeed imposes itself differently than sound, and it is a mistake to simply describe church music as “sounded icons” when the two media are different in nature.

Furthermore, we have difficulty understanding what an icon is. The icon is undoubtedly the most distinctive artwork of the Orthodox Church, but the term does not solely signify the panel icons we are used to seeing in churches—not to mention greeting cards, refrigerator magnets, and bracelets. The earliest Christian concepts of iconography include materials and representations we rarely think about today—the very architecture of the church building, the decorations on the chalice, the ornate knee-high chancel barriers (which later developed into the modern iconostasis), the processional cross, and so on. While icons are often called “windows into heaven,” a more appropriate metaphor is the mirror. As Byzantine art historian Anna Kartsonis writes in her 1991 essay “The Responding Icon:”

In other words, the icon’s essence consists of both the image and its beholder, the text and its reader, and the music and its listener.

Orthodox Church music has the tendency to invoke sentimentalism and nostalgia. We must carefully consider what that means for the reality that this “icon” bears witness to. That sentimental attachment underlies most arguments for singing Orthodox music in its original language: “It just sounds holier in Slavonic!” The work of the brilliant composer Fr. Sergei Glagolev, who was among the first to compose English-language pieces for Orthodox services, shows how music in our church can function in English. In his compositions, Fr. Sergei has always pushed against sentimentality. That is not to say his music is not beautiful—he displays compositional mastery in his diverse use of harmonies, voicing, and text settings. But, for Fr Sergei, the text holds primacy, and his musical settings serve the text. His music is written with American Orthodox in mind, and its essence—consisting of the music and its listener—obtains an awareness of the principles of Orthodox church singing and liturgy.

Take, for example, his setting of the Communion Hymn (“Koinonikon”) for the Nativity of Our Lord—“The Lord Has Sent Redemption to His People.” The usual presentation of the Communion Hymn in the Slavic tradition is to sing it as recitational text on one chord. Fr Sergei instead gives us an alternation between a refrain and the Psalm verses, an ancient liturgical formula still preserved in our Prokeimenon and Alleluia verses, as well as other hymns like “Blessed is the Man.” The musical meter here is telling—we have four bars of four. Such regular meter is infrequent in the “traditional” Orthodox hymns of the Greek and Slavic traditions (and when we do have them, it is usually a giveaway that the composition is of recent, usually 19th- or 20th-century, vintage). The harmonic style is idiosyncratically American but draws upon historical and national references which inform the Orthodox experience in America today. It is inclusive in its scope, drawing the listeners—cradle, convert, immigrant, and native alike—to witness to the Lord’s promised redemption for His people.

I think when most people speak of “icons in sound” they have in mind a strict discipline associated with Orthodox liturgical composition, the kind of censorship and rigor that barred the Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff ’s All-Night Vigil from being performed in church, and the kind of stoicism we are used to seeing in icon depictions of saints. But Fr. Sergei’s music opens another realm of meaning to “icons in sound,” icons which embrace the listener and reflect the jubilant reality of the Lord’s redemption.

Harrison Russin is a PhD candidate at Duke University and a lecturer in liturgical music at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary.

This article originally appeared onSynaxis, a blog of St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary.