A chant sung in the Byzantine Divine Liturgy (see Divine liturgy (byzantine)) and at the Offices of Hesperinos and Orthros. Prokeimena consist of a response, usually known as the prokeimenon, the text of which is taken from the psalms, and between two and four psalm verses, called stichoi. They are normally chanted before scriptural readings: in the Divine Liturgy, before the Epistle (corresponding to the position of the Roman gradual); at Hesperinos, before the Old Testament reading; and at Orthros, before the ‘Morning Gospel’. Two prokeimena, one for Marian feasts (Luke i.46–9) and one for the Holy Fathers of Nicea (Daniel iii.26–7), are based on canticles rather than psalms.
The earliest evidence for the singing of selected psalm verses as refrains in the liturgy dates from the 4th century. For example, Psalm cxvii.24, Hautē hē hēmera (‘This is the day’), was sung at Easter and Psalm cxvii.26, Eulogēmenos ho erchomenos (‘Blessed is he that comes’), on Palm Sunday; both refrains were later used as prokeimena in the Byzantine rite (for the Easter refrain see Byzantine chant, ex.6). It is likely that a responsorial chant was established by the early 5th century as an individual item in the service of readings. Some time after this, however, the responsorial singing of whole psalms was suppressed, and the chant was eventually reduced to a response and one or two verses. This abridgement may have been caused by the development of a more elaborate style of liturgical music in the great cathedrals and the taking over of the people’s response by a professional choir. The evolution of the Church year and the simultaneous increase in the number of psalm verses specifically chosen to match the themes of the various feasts may also have influenced this process.
The term prokeimenon is first documented in the 9th century. Before that time, the chant was probably referred to as ‘psalmos’ (i.e. ‘psalm’), judging by the rubrics contained in the archaizing 10th-century Codex Sinaiticus (RU-SPsc gr.44) and the chanted announcement Psalmos tō Dauid (‘A psalm of David’) that introduced both the prokeimenon and the allēlouïa of the Divine Liturgy.
The music of the prokeimena is transmitted in three different chant books – the psaltikon, asmatikon and the akolouthiai manuscripts – each of which preserves a different section of the repertory. The psaltikon (for soloists) and asmatikon (for the choir) together contain three series of 48 prokeimena in melismatic style for the Divine Liturgy and Hesperinos. Although the earliest surviving manuscripts of these chant books date from the 12th and the 13th centuries respectively, their melismatic prokeimena probably derive from an older cathedral rite at Constantinople; this repertory, together with that of the allēlouïaria, may have influenced the creation of melismatic melodies for the kontakia in the 10th century. A comparison of the florid prokeimena with the Gregorian and Old Roman graduals and the Ambrosian psalmelli suggests that these melismatic responsorial chants possess some common features and may, therefore, derive from an early Christian ‘cathedral’ practice.
The psaltikon tradition is divided into two branches, one of which gives the melodies in a slightly more ornamented form than the other. Many recurrent melodic elements are found in the repertory, and in some modes one basic melody is used for several prokeimena and stichoi. A remarkable feature of the psaltikon settings is the omission of up to half of the psalm verse; for example, Ho poiōn tous angelous (Psalm ciii) uses the first half-verse of verse 4 as the response (prokeimenon), the first third of verse 1 as the first stichos and the last third of verse 1 as the second and last stichoi. It has been suggested that the missing words should be supplied in simple psalmodic style, but it is also possible that the missing phrases were no longer sung at the time when the music of the psaltikon was notated.
Choral responses for the prokeimena of Hesperinos and the ‘great prokeimena’ of Lent, Easter Week and Easter are contained in the asmatika under the heading dochē. However, in many akolouthiai manuscripts and in one source of the psaltikon (I-Rvat gr.1606) the prokeimenon, stichoi and dochē are given in immediate succession. The akolouthiai manuscripts often present two responses: a shorter or ‘little’ dochē (the ‘Thessalonian’ dochē), and a longer dochē corresponding to the asmatikon tradition. The dochē repeats the text and melodic outline of the prokeimenon, but the text continues beyond the first half-verse and the style is more elaborated than that of the psaltikon. The dochai also contain recurrent melodic elements, and their final cadences conform to one of two basic types: one for the 3rd plagal mode (ēchos barys) and one for all other modes (though adapted to take account of the different modal finals).
The Akolouthiai manuscripts, which date from the 14th century onwards, contain both simple and melismatic melodies for prokeimena. Simple, syllabic settings, such as those for the morning prokeimena, usually embrace two complete psalm verses, that is, one prokeimenon (refrain) and one stichos, and are performed with the repetition of the prokeimenon. A large number of the prokeimena prescribed by the Byzantine typika (ordines) are preserved without music in the extant chant books; they were probably sung to simple melodies, like those in the akolouthiai manuscripts, that could easily be generated from conventional psalmodic patterns. Such chants include the Lenten and Easter series of about 150 two-verse prokeimena, the verses being selected from each of the psalms in turn.
The repertory of embellished prokeimena in the akolouthiai manuscripts includes settings in the kalophonic style. One of the earliest is a composition by Joannes Koukouzeles (c1300–50) based on the text Ho kyrios ebasileusen (‘The Lord reigns’; Psalm xcii.1) for Saturday Hesperinos; it contains many partial repetitions as well as changes to the original word order.
The prokeimenon for Easter, Tis Theos megas (‘Who is a great God’; Psalm lxxvi.14–16), also enjoyed a certain popularity outside the liturgy. According to the emperor Constantine Porphyrogennetus’s Book of Ceremonies, written in the 10th century, the chant was sung responsorially at the imperial triumphal ceremony in Constantinople, and the chronicler John Skylitzes reported that the soldiers of the imperial army intoned the response of this prokeimenon spontaneously and ‘with one voice’ as a hymn of victory during a campaign in Armenia in 1049.
J. Mateos: La célébration de la parole dans la liturgie byzantine: étude historique (Rome, 1971)
G. Hintze: Das byzantinische Prokeimena-Repertoire (Hamburg, 1973)
O. Strunk: ‘Some Observations on the Music of the Kontakion’, Essays on Music in the Byzantine World, ed. K. Levy (New York, 1977), 157–64
J. McKinnon: ‘The Fourth-Century Origin of the Gradual’, EMH, vii (1987), 91–106
P. Jeffery: ‘The Lost Chant Tradition of Early Christian Jerusalem: some Possible Melodic Survivals in the Byzantine and Latin Chant Repertories’, EMH, xi (1992), 151–90
C. Troelsgård: ‘The Prokeimena in Byzantine Rite: Performance and Tradition’, Cantus Planus VI: Ēger 1993, 65–77
S. Harris: ‘The Byzantine Prokeimena’, PMM, iii (1994), 133–47
M. Dimitrova: ‘Prokimenite vav vizantiyskite muzikalni rakopisi ot XIV i XV vek’ [The prokeimena in 14th- and 15th-century Byzantine music MSS], Balgarsko muzikoznanie, xix/1 (1995), 39–53
CHRISTIAN TROELSGÅRD