Church Music Group
Chairs:
Bogdan Đjaković, University of Novi Sad (Novi Sad, Serbia)
Dr. Bogdan Đjaković is a musicologist and choir conductor. His research in the history of Orthodox Church Music is focused on its development from the Middle Ages to contemporary times. He works as a Full Professor of Choral Literature at the Department of Composition and Musical Theory, at the Academy of Arts, University of Novi Sad. Following a number of years of singing in several Serbian and Yugoslav choirs, he founded the church singing society “St. Stephen of Dečani” and afterwards the St. George’s Cathedral choir, 1987 in Novi Sad, and is currently conducting the latter. Since 1993 St. George’s Cathedral choir represented the Serbian Orthodox Church at the TAIZE (Taize) meetings for young Christians in more than fifteen European capitals. In October 2014 he conducted “Sacred Songs of Serbia,” a program of Orthodox church music with Cappella Romana in Portland and Seattle (USA). He is the regular member of the Department for Theater & Music Art at the Matica Srpska, Novi Sad, member of the Serbian Society for Musicology, member of the Executive Board of the ISOCM Association (The International Society of Orthodox Church Music) under the aegis of the Department of the Orthodox Theology of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Joensuu, Finland.
Alexander Khalil, University College Cork (Cork, Ireland)
Alexander Khalil is a senior lecturer in ethnomusicology whose work centers on the temporal dynamics of people making music together. His doctoral work undertaken at the University of California, San Diego, investigated the experience of temporality amongst cantors at the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. More recently, he has investigated issues of temporality and tradition in the context of diaspora. Khalil has also pursued complementary research in cognitive neuroscience, having trained for four years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center (San Diego, USA). In 2014 he joined the Institute for Neural Computation (UCSD, USA), investigating group timing at both at the behavioural and neural level. He is also a visiting senior lecturer of research at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Neuroscience at King’s College London, where he is working on a project investigating sound and audition in dementia. In all his work, Khalil draws deeply on cognitive science and social psychology to explore the expression and manifestation of community, as well as theology, through music. Khalil is a cantor in the Greek Orthodox tradition and a student of John Mestakides (former first cantor of Jerusalem).
Maria Takala-Roszczenko, University of Eastern Finland (Joensuu, Finland)
Dr. Maria Takala-Roszczenko is an associate professor of Church Music and head of the Orthodox Theology Programme at the University of Eastern Finland’s School of Theology in Joensuu, Finland. Her research focuses on the history of Orthodox sacred music and liturgy in Finland, and early modern Byzantine Catholic hymnography and ritual. She is Vice-Chair of the International Society for Orthodox Music (ISOCM) and the managing editor of its Journal. She is also the editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal Ortodoksia.
Steering Committee:
John Michael Boyer, Saint John Koukouzelis Institute of Liturgical Arts (USA)
Tamar Chkheidze, Giorgi Mtatsmindeli University of Chant (Georgia)
Nicolae Gheorghiță, National Music University of Bucharest (Romania)
Tala Jarjour, King’s College London (United Kingdom)
Svetlana Poliakova, NOVA University of Lisbon – School of Social Sciences and Humanities, CESEM (Portugal)
Giuseppe Sanfratello, University of Catania (Italy)
Vision Statement
The sacred music of the Orthodox Church is not monolithic, but multifarious. The great corpuses of Byzantine chant, the various repertoires of Russian chant, Serbian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Georgian, and Arab traditions are all examples of collections of music for ritual worship that have developed over centuries and established a firm traditional basis for ecclesiastical chanting. As Orthodoxy has spread throughout the world, these repertoires have undergone change, in response to the linguistic and cultural challenges of new environments.
The Church Music Group of IOTA aims to be a place for open discussion of Orthodox church music of all kinds, avoiding narrowly phyletistic narratives and aiming to attract leading practitioners, composers, and scholars of church music from all over the world so that many aspects, including the historical, geographical, aesthetic, creative, and practical, of this extraordinary living legacy may be considered in an atmosphere of mutual learning and understanding.
To that end, aspects we would invite potential speakers to consider include, but are certainly not limited to the following:
- Traditional repertoires of Orthodox chant and their formation over the course of history;
- The way in which such repertoires have been adapted and transformed over the course of time;
- The way in which such repertoires have responded, or might respond, to adaptation to other languages or transplantation to new cultural environments;
- The way in which different styles of church music correspond to the needs of liturgical prayer;
- The theology of church music;
- Theories of liturgical music (ranging from the patristic to the contemporary);
- The aesthetics of church music;
- The composition of contemporary church music, in various traditions;
- Ways of discussing the transformation of repertoires (such as the purposeful simplification and harmonization of Byzantine chant and its formation of the basis of a new repertoire in the United States), how they might be evaluated historically and aesthetically, and how they may be incorporated into continuing historical narratives of Orthodox church music;
- Questions of politics and church music, which may include such subjects as nationalism, the intersection with western styles, and other external factors modifying a traditional corpus of chant.
We encourage submission of individual papers and panel sessions on any of the themes above, as well as free papers.
Another aspect of this group is the possibility of interaction with other institutions, such as the International Society for Orthodox Church Music (Finland) or the Saint John of Damascus Society (USA). Members of these Societies could bring group presentations to IOTA, and then hold separate meetings in parallel, if necessary and desirable: in any event, interaction with like-minded organizations is deemed essential to avoid duplication of effort and to encourage communication.
