(from Gk.: ‘beautiful sound’).
A genre of ornate liturgical chant found in post-14th-century Byzantine Akolouthiai and other musical manuscripts. The kalophonic technique of embellishment was applied to traditional melodies, which from the 14th century onwards were regarded as ‘ancient’, and in newly composed florid settings. Kalophonic chants gradually replaced the more limited centonate asmatikon chants of the 13th century.
Two types of text are generally interwoven within a kalophonic chant: one or more lines from a Greek liturgical text combined with teretismata (passages of meaningless syllables). In those chants with texts drawn from the psalms, composers would often juxtapose lines and edit verses to suit their own purposes (anagrammatismoi). The chant melodies are melismatically embellished and frequently amplified by kratēmata (independent melodic units made up of teretismata), resulting in a rhapsodic assemblage of melodic fragments linked sequentially. A characteristic of the kalophonic style, occurring particularly in the highly prolix kratēmata, is the use of series of repeated pitches – a repercussive vocal effect often accompanied by rapid changes of pitch at the interval of a 4th or 5th. The performance of the kalophonic repertory would have required not only a professional cathedral or monastic choir but also highly trained soloists; that singers existed who possessed the necessary vocal abilities is evidence of the flowering of Byzantine chant during the late empire.
The tendency towards virtuoso decoration and expansion was confined first of all to those musical items in the Byzantine rite that gradually acquired new and prominent positions, such as the doxastika, kontakia, allēlouďaria and processional chants; but in time the new style came to dominate all categories. More specifically, the Palaeologan composers understood this idiom in terms of the kratēmata, which they believed improved and enhanced the older hymns and psalms. A special kind of kalophonic chant in the akolouthiai is the ‘composite’ setting, in which a short texted prologos precedes a kratēma; the latter functions as an effusive coda and can be described as a single, long teretisma. Although most kalophonic chants are by a single composer, ‘composite’ chants may combine the work of two; for example, the prologos may be by one composer and its appended kratēma by another.
Since kalophony enabled composers to express their own creative preferences, the technique eventually became a medium for free composition, independent of traditional models. Nevertheless, the innovation was not without a theoretical foundation: the melismatic flourishes operated within a system of standardized ornaments known as theseis, which indicated the nature and extent of the embellishment. Below the diastematic neumes Byzantine composers added a subsidiary line of notation for the theseis, enabling singers to supply the required dynamic refinement and melodic extension to the chants.
See also Byzantine chant, §12.
E.V. Williams: ‘The Treatment of Text in the Kalophonic Chanting of Psalm 2’, Studies in Eastern Chant, ii, ed. M. Velimirović (London, 1971), 173–93
D.E. Conomos: Byzantine Trisagia and Cheroubika of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (Thessaloniki, 1974), 43–7
D.E. Conomos: The Late Byzantine and Slavonic Communion Cycle (Washington DC, 1985), 67–146
DIMITRI CONOMOS