Chants of the Byzantine rite in Sicily: historical transcriptions and contemporary studies

The publication of Fr. Bartolomeo Di Salvo’s Chants of the Byzantine Rite as a Subsidium of the Danish editorial series Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae (2016) is an outstanding piece of evidence for the presence, survival, and development of Byzantine chant on the fringes of the Byzantine Empire. For the first time, this volume offers transcriptions of the full repertoire of orally transmitted hymns for the celebration of the Byzantine rite in Sicily. This chant tradition has been cultivated by the Albanian- speaking minority in Sicily since their ancestors arrived as refugees from the Balkans in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Hence, chanting was performed without musical notation until around 1900, when local connoisseurs of the tradition started to write down a selection of the melodies in staff notation. Bearing such a background in mind, this paper offers an introductory description of the melodic and modal organisation of the repertoire, as well as a discussion of some of the challenges entailed in the analysis of an oral liturgical chant tradition developed and handed down to the present day