A Cantor Who Wanted the Ottoman Out of the Chant

Ioannis Sakellarides did not set out to write history when he began singing his own simplified settings of Byzantine chant in the churches of Athens in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Born in the town of Litochoro in 1854, he trained in both Byzantine and Western musical systems and built a reputation as a cantor gifted with a flexible tenor voice, drawing large congregations to hear him at central Athenian churches, including the Metropolitan Cathedral of Athens, the seat of the Archbishop of Athens and the Church of Greece itself. What he offered there was a departure from the ornamented chant most parishes still used, which he argued had accumulated Ottoman era decoration obscuring an older and, in his view, purer melodic core, and his solution was to strip that ornamentation away into simpler, sometimes lightly harmonized settings that a congregation could follow more easily than the elaborate original.

His Cherubic Hymn setting, sung during the Great Entrance of the Divine Liturgy when the bread and wine are carried to the altar, became one of his most widely adopted pieces. It and his other liturgical compositions were eventually gathered and printed together as Sacred Hymns in Three Volumes in 1923, fifteen years before his death in Athens in 1938, giving his reform movement a durable printed form long after the live congregations who first heard him sing had moved on.