(fl late 13th century). Composer of Byzantine chant. Glykys was an older contemporary of Joannes Koukouzeles (fl c1300–50) and Xenos Korones and seems to have been active towards the end of the 13th century or in the early 14th. Many manuscript sources reveal that Glykys held the office of prōtopsaltēs (choir director) in an unnamed Byzantine church. It has been argued that he should be identified with the Joannes XIII Glykys, Patriarch of Constantinople from 1315 to 1319, but this identification is unlikely.
Glykys’s name appears second in a chronological list, written by Manuel Chrysaphes in the mid-15th century, of composers of kalophonic strophes for the Akathistos Hymn: Michael Aneotes, Joannes Glykys, Nikephoros Ethikos, Joannes Koukouzeles and Joannes Kladas. This order of composers is partially corroborated by a later copy of a miniature (now lost) from the late 14th- or early 15th-century Akolouthiai manuscript GR-AOk 475; it depicts Glykys in the role of teacher seated above his two students, Koukouzeles and Korones. Glykys has his hands raised, and a rubric states that he is instructing his students in the art of cheironomy. This miniature displays the cheironomic gestures used for the important neumes of the ison and oxeia. A basic method of cheironomy is ascribed to Glykys in manuscripts dating from the 14th and 15th centuries, and a didactic chant by him, Ison, oligon, oxeia, which demonstrates the Byzantine neumes and formulae in all the eight modes, was used by Koukouzeles when he compiled his own didactic piece of the same name. Glykys’s pedagogical activities and his pioneering contribution to the development of the kalophonic style earned him the epithet ‘Teacher of the teachers’.
There are more chants by Joannes Glykys transmitted in the akolouthiai manuscripts and the kalophonic stichēraria than by any other Byzantine composer before Koukouzeles. The melodies by Glykys in the 14th- and 15th-century akolouthiai manuscripts include a collection of relatively short settings of selected verses from several psalms sung in the Byzantine Office, including the amōmos and polyeleos psalms of Orthros. Longer chants composed by Glykys include settings of the Akathistos Hymn, the Cheroubikon, the Easter communion hymn (Sōma Christou) and the Byzantine Sanctus (Hagios, hagios, hagios, kyrios sabaōth).
The musical style of Glykys’s shorter chants is very different from that of his longer kalophonic settings. In the former, the melodic line is significantly more conjunct than in the latter; and although the leap of a 4th is rarely exceeded in the kalophonic settings, in the simple chants, intervals of a 5th or 6th are common and leaps of a 7th and octave may also be found. In his three kalophonic melodies for Psalm ii sung at Hesperinos, Glykys set only a single line of text, whereas Koukouzeles, Korones and others combined and reworked lines from several psalm verses. Musically, these single-line kalophonic chants of Glykys are more compact than the kalophonic settings of his students and followers and may represent an earlier and less developed stage of the kalophonic style in Byzantine chant (see Kalophonic chant).
M. Velimirović: ‘Byzantine Composers in MS. Athens 2406’, Essays presented to Egon Wellesz, ed. J. Westrup (Oxford, 1966), 7–18
E. Trapp: Prosopograpisches Lexikon der Palaiologenzeit, ii (Vienna, 1977), 218
D.E. Conomos, ed.: The Treatise of Manuel Chrysaphes, the Lampadarios, MMB, Corpus scriptorum, ii (1985), 41, 45, 61
N.K. Moran: Singers in Late Byzantine and Slavonic Painting (Leiden, 1986), 44, pl.6
A. Jakovljević: Diglōssē palaiographia kai melōdoi-hymnographoi tou kōdika tōn Athēnōn 928 [Old bilingual writings and hymn melodies in Athens codex 928] (Leukosia, 1988), 66–8
C. Troelsgård: ‘The Development of a Didactic Poem: some Remarks on the “Ison, oligon, oxeia” by Ioannes Glykys’, Byzantine Chant: Athens 1993, 69–85
EDWARD V. WILLIAMS/CHRISTIAN TROELSGÅRD