The use of instruments in Rus Christian worship was discouraged by the early church fathers i.e., St. Basil the Great and St. John Chrysostom, because they felt that instrumentation distracted the mind from thoughts of God and turned them toward the self.
The Book of Psalms played a central role in early Christian worship, and in the East, the antiphonal method of chanting the psalms was well established by the end of the 4th century A.D.
After having received Christianity from Byzantium, the early Rus Church soon began to modify the newly-acquired Byzantine chant, while at the same time drawing upon the musical experience of the pre-Christian Rus.
The Rus Church attributes the creation of the system of the 8 tones of the Byzantine Church to St. John of Damascus in the 8th c. A.D., although the Rus accepted the Byzantine form of chanting according to the system of the 8 tones, the Rus tones differ considerably from those denoted as Byzantine.
Chants & Chanting Styles
During the time of the conversion to Christianity of Russia, Byzantine priests brought with them the best of the Bulgarian chanters. It was these men who made use of Bulgarian melodies & Byzantine melodies adapted to fit the language of the Bulgars, i.e., Slavonic. The Russians were attracted to these melodies which was actually only natural considering that the Bulgars and the Russians share a common language-base. Bulgarian chants, were readily accepted by the Russians and are similar to but not quite the same, as Russian Znamenny Chants.
Znamenny Chants
Znamenny chants are a unique and specific type of Russian chant. They are slow moving and make use of lengthy melodic lines. These chants were originally written using a series of symbols or signs. Znamenny, the word, derived from the old Rus word znak, or sign. Rus invented 100's of unique and specific signs to represent single notes, even pairs and groups notes, or short musical patterns and placed them above the liturgical text.
As time progressed, this system of musical notations using signs fell into disfavour. Eventually it was replaced by a system of square notations, kvadratniya noti, which more closely resemble modern notations. This square notation was brought to Kiev from the West in the late 17th century, and it was actually not introduced in Moscow until the middle of the 18th century. Eventually the chanters were able to convert completely to the square notation, many chants were written with both square and sign notation.
