(fl c1300). Byzantine composer of liturgical chant. Ethikos held the office of domestikos, the leader of the left choir in a Byzantine church, but it is not known in which church or city he worked. His name is mentioned by Manuel Chrysaphes (fl c1440–63) in a chronological list of five important Byzantine composers of kalophonic kontakia, and is placed between the names of Joannes Glykys (fl late 13th century) and Joannes Koukouzeles (fl c1300–1350). He was, therefore, probably active during the late 13th century, and possibly also during the first years of the 14th, that is, contemporary with the early part of the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Andronikos II Palaeologos (1282–1328).
About 40 chants by Ethikos survive in the Akolouthiai manuscripts and the kalophonic stichēraria of the 14th and 15th centuries. The melodies transmitted in the Akolouthiai manuscripts are relatively simple, but Ethikos also composed one or two highly melismatic pieces in the kalophonic style (see Kalophonic chant). Among the simple settings are chants for both halves of the Doxology, several allēlouïaria for Christmas and Holy Thursday, and a number of selected verses from the amōmos psalm (Psalm cxvii) and the polyeleos (Psalms cxxxiv–cxxxv) sung at Orthros. A few verses from antiphons for Christmas and the feast of the Transfiguration also survive, as well as settings of Byzantine hymn texts. In the 15th-century akolouthiai manuscript GR-An 2406 are preserved a single kratēma by Ethikos, a short prologos intended to precede a kratēma and a through-composed kalophonic setting of Psalm ii for Hesperinos. A greater selection of his longer compositions are contained in the kalophonic stichēraria.
Ethikos’s compositions and those of his most important younger contemporaries and successors are significantly more conservative in style than the melodies of Koukouzeles, Korones and Joannes Kladas. Ethikos’s chants are shorter in length, narrower in vocal range and less boldly disjunct in their melodic lines – leaps of more than a 4th are rare. Only in the kratēma in GR-An 2406 are intervals of a 6th, 7th and octave used. The through-composed setting of Psalm ii, like those by Joannes Glykys and Tzaknopoulos, is also less extended; only a single line from the psalm is melismatically elaborated and most of the second half of the chant is taken up by a single teretisma. These three chants by Glykys, Ethikos and Tzaknopoulos are examples of an early stage in the development of the kalophonic style and are more compact than the longer, often effusive settings (with lines from several psalm verses) by later composers such as Koukouzeles, Korones and Kladas. Ethikos’s compositions occupy a position in the development of Byzantine chant that lies between the older anonymous and traditional repertory and the more innovatory chants of his successors in the 14th and 15th centuries.
K. Levy: ‘A Hymn for Thursday in Holy Week’, JAMS, xvi (1963), 127–75, esp. 155–7
M. Velimirović: ‘Byzantine Composers in MS Athens 2406’, Essays Presented to Egon Wellesz, ed. J. Westrup (Oxford, 1966), 7–18
E.V. Williams: John Koukouzeles' Reform of Byzantine Chanting for Great Vespers in the Fourteenth Century (diss., Yale U., 1968)
M.K. Chatzēgiakoumēs: Mousika cheirographa tourkokratias, 1453–1832 [Music MSS from the period of Turkish rule] (Athens, 1975), 295–6
D.E. Conomos, ed.: The Treatise of Manuel Chrysaphes, the Lampadarios, MMB, Corpus scriptorum, ii (1985), 45 and 53
A. Jakovljević: Diglōssē palaiographia kai melōdoi-hymnographoi tou kōdika tōn Athēnōn 928 [Old bilingual writings and poet-composers in Athens codex 928] (Leukosia, 1988), 94–5
C. Adsuara: ‘The Kalophonic Sticherarion Sinai gr. 1251’, Cahiers de l'Institut du Moyen-Age grec et latin, lxv (1995), 15–58
EDWARD V. WILLIAMS/CHRISTIAN TROELSGÅRD