Tones for the Readings

Cyprian

I am blessed at my parish with a reader who is very keen to do his best at fulfilling his role of bringing Holy Scripture to life within the liturgical offering to God, and is quite meticulous about learning the tones for the readings for their clarity and benefit to the people.

Over these last couple of weeks of Advent, he has been very excited about the abundance of readings from the prophecy of Isaiah in our lectionary for this season, and the very different feel that is given to them by the ancient Mozarabic tone to which they are traditionally chanted at the Mass. Some of you will know this as it is a version of this tone that is used for the verses of Rorate Cæli (The Advent Prose).

I myself have recently adopted the Russian "rising-from-the-dead" method when I read the Resurrection Gospel at Lauds on Sundays (until recently, I used the standard western Gospel chant). For years, I didn't much care for it and in my ten years in the Russian Orthodox Church, I was grateful to belong to a parish where it wasn't used.

However, it has grown on me and as it is the standard tone used for the Gospel in our jurisdiction (as a sort of homage to our origins), I feel I should use it at least some of the time. At the Mass, I still use the standard western chant but there is a crescedo and climax to the Gospel narratives of the Resurrection read at Sunday Lauds that I think is served well by this chant. You can hear it at about 20 minutes into this video from a couple of weeks ago.

If you have a system of tones for the readings in your tradition, how are they used, what do they sound like, what is their provenance, do they service to enhance the clarity of the readings?

stonespring

In Orthodoxy, must all readings at either the Divine Liturgy or the canonical hours be intoned, or is it at least customary to intone them whenever possible? Does Orthodoxy have the equivalent of "low" and "solemn" levels (and anything in-between) of liturgical solemnity like the Roman Rite of the RCC has had traditionally, and does that influence whether readings are intoned or not?

Cyprian

stonespring wrote: »

In Orthodoxy, must all readings at either the Divine Liturgy or the canonical hours be intoned, or is it at least customary to intone them whenever possible?

I'm sorry for the delayed response: it has been a very busy couple of days.

With the readings, as with anything liturgical, the Orthodox approach tends to be "do as much as you can with the resources you have". We happen to have people who have some musical capability and are able to sing the traditional tones. If we didn't, we would probably simply intone the readings on a single note.

Does Orthodoxy have the equivalent of "low" and "solemn" levels (and anything in-between) of liturgical solemnity like the Roman Rite of the RCC has had traditionally, and does that influence whether readings are intoned or not?

No, but yes.

It isn't a traditional Orthodox distinction in east or west. However, in the 20th century, a small number of communities (generally limited to the North American continent), came into the Orthodox Church with permission to use a form of the Western Rite. Only, instead of looking to the ancient Western liturgies (which has generally been the approach taken to the Western Rite in Europe), the agreement was that they would essentially take Roman and Anglo-Catholic liturgical practice as it existed in the 1950s as the basis for their practice. So their churches do often have such things as Low Mass, where there is a codified ceremonial and rubrics for a pared-down version of the Mass.

No such provision exists in our Western Orthodox churches in Europe, where the Liturgy is the Liturgy, much as it is in the east.