Orthodox Church in America - Help for Readers

For Readers

Continuation of an article written by Dn. Sergius Halvorsen, offering helpful insights for readers. This article is copyrighted, and used by permission.

The Practical Side of Church Reading: Create A Chant Strategy

Once the reader has studied the text and obtained some sense of what it says, the next step of preparation is developing a strategy for chanting the text. In common church parlance, we say that the reader "reads" the epistle, yet what we actually do in the Liturgy is profoundly different from, for example, reading a child a bedtime story. In most traditions, the scriptural text is intoned recto tono with an occasional one- or two-step variation. Put another way, the scriptural text is sung to a very simple melody that stays on the same note most of the time, and occasionally rises or falls one or two full steps. The complexity of this chant can vary considerably, with some liturgical traditions employing highly melodic chant melodies and cadences.

It is often asserted, even in some written instructions to church readers, that the reason the Scripture readings are chanted (as opposed to being read in a speaking voice) is so that the reader does not have the opportunity to impose distracting inflections on the scriptural text. While there is a degree of truth to this assertion, the tradition of chanting or singing liturgical texts (prayers, Scripture, or composed texts) also addresses a far more practical concern: the transmission of the human voice. Quite simply, it is much easier for a solo voice to be audible through the chanting or singing of a text than through reading it in a spoken voice. Anyone who has ever lectured or done much public speaking knows that it is far more taxing on the human voice to speak loudly than it is to sing at a comparable or greater volume. And anyone who has ever served in a Divine Liturgy in an outdoor venue (such as a pavilion set up for a large gathering) with little or no electrical amplification knows that even the best speaking voice would simply never be heard. Chanting the scriptural text helps allow the words of the text to be heard by all those assembled.

As we noted earlier, there are a variety of performance styles for chanting or "reading," depending on the tradition. Yet, whatever chant tradition is used, the reader should apply to the liturgical reading of Scripture the same paradigm that underlies all effective liturgical singing—namely, that the text takes priority over the melody. Every language has a natural rhythm. Generally, in the English language rhythm is expressed within words through a sequence of accented and unaccented syllables. Rhythm is also expressed within sentences through the relative stress of individual words. Should this rhythm be violated, words can be rendered incomprehensible, as in the cliché, "You put the emphasis on the wrong syllable."

Sentences have their own rhythm as well. For example, in the first sentence of the reading for Pentecost (Acts 2:1), the text has the following accents: "When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place." One final, though no less important, type of rhythm is narrative or rhetorical rhythm. When a story is told, there is at least one climax (narrative climax); or in an argument, there is at least one moment when a conclusion is made based on the preceding arguments (rhetorical climax). Whatever chant pattern is used, all three types of linguistic rhythm should be rendered so that the text is as intelligible as possible and the beauty of the language is preserved.

There is, within the Slavic tradition, a chant melody that starts on a very low pitch and ascends step-wise, concluding at a very high pitch with a simple cadence. This melody is exactly the same for every reading, regardless of length. It is highly dramatic, especially when the reader or deacon possesses a large vocal range. This has been referred to as the "up from the grave" style of chanting. There is an inherent problem with this melody in that it is almost guaranteed to distort the natural rhythm of the text. The melody "assumes" that every scriptural reading has its narrative or rhetorical climax at the very end, and this is simply not the case. Often the narrative climax of a given text will fall towards the middle, as it does in the reading for Pentecost. In the text quoted above from Romans, there is one rhetorical emphasis in the middle, and at least two others fall in the latter half. Clearly, these two texts require chant melodies that allow for enough freedom to respect the multiple forms of rhythm inherent in the text.

Some might argue that the aim of the church reader is to chant with as little accent or rhythm as possible, and certainly any style of reading that imposes a distracting or distorting rhythm on the text should be avoided. However, people do not talk like machines, and anyone who has ever heard computer-generated speech knows how unnatural it sounds. It sounds unnatural precisely because the computers are not smart enough to capture the highly nuanced rhythm of human language. Thus, the task of the church reader is to chant the scriptural text in a manner that conveys the full range of meaning through the human medium of language.

With these guidelines in mind, even the most experienced reader should always read through the text at least once prior to the service, in an audible voice, practicing the reading. The beginner would be wise to chant the text in front of another person prior to the service and ask for criticism. The reader might even want to make marks in the text so that he or she can easily recall the various accents when reading in the Liturgy.

For Readers

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