Music practices, catholic devotion and creative syncretism in the Greek archipelago in the 17th and 18th centuries : the cases of the hymnal of Scordialo and the Calomati manuscript

Résumé 0

This paper explores devotional, musical and poetic practices that were developed in Catholic environments of the Hellenic area and in particular the insular space of the archipelago, during early modern period. We will focus on the example of some very interesting and rare sources kept in the archives of the Archbishopric of Naxos, Tinos, Andros and Myconos, located in Xynara (Tinos). These sources reveal traces of improvised practices, which we will evaluate through two unique documents. The first is a handwritten, richly decorated and unpublished hymnal from the end of the 17th century, composed of texts in modern Greek transcribed phonetically into Latin characters (a form of writing known locally as frangochiotika). The second is an unpublished collection of masses and fragments of masses in plainchant notation, containing, among others, musical transcriptions of what must have been improvised diphonies of the chant of the mass; this is a later document that I have recently discovered and which attests to vocal practices still encountered today in these communities. The composition, the writing and the sound rendering of these documents is quite singular; their status mobilizes a number of questions relating to liturgical and devotional expressions that generate original musical —and, more widely, cultural— practices. These practices integrate at the same time the problematics of the counter-reformation, and in fact confer a crucial status to the vernacular languages —a modern vernacular Greek other than that, hieratic, of the Gospels—, in a catholic environment within a multi-confessional and insular Greek space, those of orality and writing, of poetry and music, of pedagogy and pastoral strategies.