Free Chapel Concert: Approximately once a month, Fridays at 12:15 pm, the Trinity Chapel presents Sacred Music in a Sacred Space, curated by Peter Drobac, which features vocal chamber ensembles in a variety of sacred music from Eastern and Western liturgical traditions. This is a free event and all are welcome.
Peter Drobac, Curator:
The Byzantines loved their long, intricate, multi-verse hymnography – some of these hymns could take hours to sing, but between their beautiful textual forms and engaging musical incarnations, they occupied a central place in Orthodox services for many centuries and remained widely popular even outside formal liturgical use in private devotion. This Friday, Sacred Music in a Sacred Space will present an excerpt from a late Byzantine setting of the 6th-century Akathistos hymn to the Mother of God. As a hymn whose text is still very much in use today, it is a study of not only the depth of Marian devotion over the centuries, but also a fascinating snapshot of how musical styles have changed with the flow of liturgy over time – this particular setting would have taken over three hours to sing in its entirety, while contemporary settings breeze through the entirety of the hymn in twenty minutes, allowing it to be incorporated today into the middle of service from the daily office without much trouble, rather than being the centrepiece of the liturgical act as it was in the past.
