(fl ?early 16th century). Romanian domestikos, prōtopsaltēs and composer. He was active at the monastery of Putna in Moldavia (now Moldova). Two extant manuscripts copied by him, RUS-Mim Shchiukin 350 (dated 1511) and SPan 13.3.16, which originally formed one akolouthia (the ‘Evstatie songbook’), show him to have been a remarkably competent scribe, skilled in Greek and Church Slavonic and in the late Byzantine musical tradition. He was also a prolific composer, whose chants (trisagia, chēroubika, koinōnika and stichēra), with both Greek and Slavonic texts, were sung at Putna during the 16th century. Most of the 24 works bearing his name were widely copied in Moldavia, and many other, anonymously transmitted chants in similar style are also considered to be by him.
Evstatie’s compositions betray a strong allegiance to contemporary Byzantine musical practice, although certain distinctive personal features are also evident. He appropriated familiar melodic devices, made use of textual tropes and teretismata, and occasionally applied kalophonic techniques (see Kalophonic chant) that make great demands on the singers. He also employed ciphers (including Glagolitic numbers) for certain rubrics, titles and marginal notes, making his material difficult of access, and he delighted in experiment and scholastic jokes.
D. Conomos: ‘The Monastery of Putna and the Musical Tradition of Moldavia in the Sixteenth Century’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, xxxvi (1982), 15–28 [also pubd in Pennington]
A.E. Pennington: Music in Medieval Moldavia (Bucharest, 1985)
DIMITRI CONOMOS