Sacred Music in the Armenian Church

Armenian Church music originated in the fifth century a.d., but its roots lie even further back, in Jewish biblical cantillations, Zoroastrian ritual melodies and pre-Christian folk songs.  The earliest known examples of Armenian liturgical chant are credited to such figures as St. Mesrob, devisor of the Armenian alphabet (for example, the chant "Anganim arachi ko"), the catholicos St. Sahag ("Aysor kolov i petania"), and the historian Movses Khorenatsi ("Khorhourt medz yev skancheli").

The crown jewel of Armenian sacred music is the sharagan, or canonical hymn, and the sheer volume of sharagan created over the centuries indicates how beloved the genre was among Armenian monks.  Eventually, these hymns were compiled in the sharagnots (or "book of sharagan"), and were canonized by assigning specific sharagan to particular days in the church calendar.

Arguably the most eloquent creator of Armenian Church music was the twelfth-century Catholicos Nerses Shnorhali, who perfected the sharagan form and added several hundred by his own hand (e.g., "Norahrash") to an already large repertoire.  Like other hymnographers, Shnorhali created both the melody and the text, and chanted the music he authored.

Traditional Armenian music is distinctive not only in terms of its sound, but also in its structure, which differs in major ways from the more familiar Western forms.  It is monophonic, consisting of a single melodic line without support of harmony.  It is built on melody-modes, as opposed to the major and minor scales used in the West.  Its rhythm is organized in intricate cyclical forms, rather than in regular metric divisions.  The most ancient chants were written as prose, with versified hymns becoming prominent later.  The setting of the text evolved over time from syllabic (one note to a syllable) to neumatic (a few notes to a syllable) to melismatic (extended melodic patterns to a single syllable).  Armenian Church music is traditionally chanted by men alone, without accompaniment by musical instruments.

Despite such differences, Armenian musicians did eventually adopt Western compositional methods, but not until the mid-nineteenth century, when liturgical chants along with music of all kinds underwent substantial changes.  Curiously, it was an Italian composer, Pietro Bianchini, who first set the music of the Armenian Divine Liturgy for four-part mixed choir, in a work published in Venice in 1877.  Makar Yekmalian's familiar setting of the liturgy first appeared in an 1896 Leipzig edition.  In Calcutta, India in 1897, Amy Apcar arranged the melodies of the Divine Liturgy for four parts; Komitas Vartabed employed Apcar's setting as a model for his own.  Komitas was still working on his version (arranged for a cappella male choir) in 1915, but in the wake of the Armenian Genocide he was never able to complete it.  The Komitas liturgy was eventually published in Paris in 1933, after editing by his student Wardan Sarxian.

Various versions of the Armenian Divine Liturgy abound today, including those by Ara Bartevian, Egdar Manas, Parseh Atmaciyan and Khoren Mekanejian.

Unlike Western church music--with its rich variety of large-scale masses and oratorios--Armenian sacred music is more compact in dimension.  Whether the form is common prayer or the high mass, Armenian services generally consist of brief spoken or intoned exchanges among the priest, deacon and choir.