I am nearing completion of a musical setting of the Saturday night Oktoechos in Kievan Chant.  Originally, the idea was discussed 2 years ago now, with a neighboring priest who is also a “Liturgics Geek”: Fr. Christopher Swanson (OCA).  He and I thought it high time that a well-typeset and complete collection including everything needed for Saturday night Vespers be developed.  Fr. Lawrence Margitich, my former priest in Santa Rosa, CA, also gave full support for getting the version developed there and used for many years into publishable format.

.

Gathering a select handful of interested parties with skill and experience, we took almost 3 months to develop a working template.  Many considerations of style came into play.  How large should the page be?  St. Vlad’s musical publications, clearly the most widely-used for Russian chant, are oversized and don’t fit on many home copiers.  This presents a practical problem sometimes for desperate choir directors copying materials at the last minute (does it sound like I know what I’m talking about?).
After determining an 8×11 size sheet of paper, the next question was size.  To fit 4 systems of music per page or 5?  Weighing readability vs. paper wastage and page flipping isn’t as easy as it sounds.  Who knew people could get so passionate about such a thing?  And alongside this question was the horizontal spacing issue: how tight or loose?  The Sibelius type-setting software does a great job with guessing what you want as you input information, but there is definitely human interaction needed for the question of spacing horizontally.  Because musical and verbal notations are considered in conjunction with one another, a judgement needs to be made for most every syllable, so that it ends up placed properly in connection with the syllables around it. If a programmed space was imposed per input note, many words would collide.  We settled on a tighter horizontal spacing.  Although initial reading may require a little more attention, it cuts way down on page-flipping and since this text will be done over and over and over again, after awhile the singers have it memorized and the page is actually more like a simple reminder of what they already know, and they are no longer reading everything.  Whew.

.

Were we there yet?  Well, not quite.  We had to discuss translation questions, too.  The basic translations were taken from the Pentecostarion by Holy Transfiguration Monastery, however the Theotokia presented a problem, since not all tones are present in that volume.  Furthermore, many parishes use the St. John of Kronstadt Menaion for menaion material and we thought it more prudent to match the Theotokia to that translation, as they would be following menaion stichera and may sometimes need to be sung straight from text in the book.  So we chose a mixture.

.

We also had to address all the little formatting details: providing the half Psalm verses set to music; how far the title should be pulled up from the text; whether or not to include “Now and ever” on the Dogmatika page; denoting page numbers both in the music collection and for each individual set of stichera; whether to use numerals or spell out numbers, and etc.  Mostly due to work Fr. Lawrence has done on this over the years, I finally had a good working style sheet.

.

After a year of working on the setting (granted, slowly, among many other things) I was notified that the OCA is preparing a new translation of the Oktoechos and was requested to hold off publishing the HTM translation I’d been working on and wait for the new translation instead.  I willingly complied, but after 8 months and no progress forwarded to me I’ve decided to do both/and.  The text for Tone 1, which is the only I’ve actually seen, is so close to the HTM translation that the changes would be nearly imperceptible to most users. And I figure regardless of how long it takes for the OCA translation to come out, there are those who already use and will continue to prefer the HTM translation, for whom this work will still be valuable.

.

I’m not a translator, and don’t read Greek or Slavonic.  The only thing I can conscientiously bring to the table is some discernment when it comes to setting the English text musically.  I’m aware of poor English grammar and sentence structure, which has a particular kind of immediacy when adding the process of musical settings for Kievan chant.  One doesn’t want the meaning obscured because a passive clause coincides with a musical phrase that has a strong ending or cadence.  In this case, without being able to see commas, one looses the “gist” of the text, and can actually be given an incorrect meaning by the choir. But when, in English, 2 translations carry different shades of meaning that are nearly imperceptible, I don’t see how investing in one over the other becomes so very crucial.  Taking archaic and cumbersome translations, such as Nassar and Kazan, or more simplistic and casual translations where shades of deeper meaning are not even attempted, as in modern translations sporadically found both in the OCA and Antiochian websites, it’s much easier for me to see clearly why one ought to seek out a better translation.  At any rate, I’ll provide both, I figure.

.

Now it is just proofing, which seems a never-ending task.  There are always a few more tiny typos or spacing shifts that could be done to improve the final version.  However, it’s close to being done.  And finally, I will be able to offer something complete and trustworthy to those who need it.  Quite a number of people go looking for this set in Kievan and there’s nothing out there for sale.  I’m glad we’re almost done with it.

Trackback URI |