(fl c1325–50). Byzantine monk and composer of liturgical chant. According to the akolouthiai manuscript GR-An 2458, dated 1336, Korones was lampadarios at Hagia Sophia, that is, the cantor of the left choir and the second highest office in the chant hierarchy. Sources from approximately one century later indicate that he even attained the rank of prōtopsaltēs, but the precise date and circumstances of his promotion to this office are not known. Korones also set a religious poem written by Patriarch Isidoros I (1347–9), thereby confirming the dates of the composer’s activity.
Although he was probably somewhat younger than Joannes Glykys, Joannes Koukouzeles and Nikephoros Ethikos, Korones belonged to the first generation of composers writing in the mature kalophonic style. He reworked older kalophonic stichēra and a considerable number of his new compositions appear in Koukouzeles’s redaction of the kalophonic stichērarion. In the akolouthiai manuscripts Korones’s name is attached to several pieces for both the Office and the Divine Liturgy, including a Trisagion in the ēchos deuteros (authentic mode 2) that is introduced by the deacon’s shout ‘dynamis’ and expanded by a melismatic kratēma, and Epi soi chairei kecharitomenē in the ēchos plagios tetartos (plagal mode 4) for the Liturgy of St Basil; both compositions are found in almost every akolouthiai manuscript copied from the second half of the 15th century onwards.
The akolouthiai manuscripts contain at least six different methodoi by Korones, which confirms his reputation as a teacher of chant and his asssociation with the maistores Glykys and Koukouzeles. The simpler pieces, for example, an exercise demonstrating Byzantine intonation formulae by modulating through the eight modes, shed light on the elementary chant training in the 14th century. The two longest methodoi, however, are of a different class: one, the longest preserved exercise in the kalophonic style, consists, like Koukouzeles’s methodos, of teretismata in the ēchos prōtos (authentic mode 1); the other, known as ‘Method of the Stichērarion’, uses the first item in this traditional chant collection (Epestē hē eisodos) as the formal framework for a highly sophisticated cento of melodic formulae and phrases drawn from the entire stichērarion collection.
M. Velimirović: ‘Byzantine Composers in MS. Athens 2406’, Essays Presented to Egon Wellesz, ed. J. Westrup (Oxford 1966), 7–18
D. Conomos: Byzantine Trisagia and Cheroubika of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (Thessaloniki, 1974)
M.K. Chatzēgiakoumēs: Mousika cheirographa tourkokratias, 1453–1832 [Music MSS from the period of Turkish rule] (Athens, 1975), 316–21
G.T. Stathēs: Hē dekapentasyllabos hymnographia en tē byzantinē melopoiîa kai ekdosis tōn keimenōn eis hen corpus [Hymnography in 15-syllable verses in Byzantine melodic composition and an edition of the texts in one corpus] (Athens, 1977), 102–03
E. Trapp: Prosopographisches Lexikon der Palaiologenzeit, vi (Vienna, 1983), 21 only
D. Conomos, ed.: The Treatise of Manuel Chrysaphes, the Lampadarios: On the Theory of the Art of Chanting and on Certain Erroneous Views that Some Hold about it, MMB, Corpus scriptorum de re musica, ii (1985)
A. Jakovljević: Diglōssē palaiographia kai melōdoi-hymnographoi tou kōdika tōn Athēnōn 928 [Old dual-language writings and hymn writers in Athens codex 928] (Leukosia, 1988), 79–81
G. Stathēs: ‘Hē asmatikē diaphoropoiēsē, hopōs katagraphetai ston kōdika EBE 2458 tou etous 1336’ [A comparison of the chants in codex Gr-An 2458 dating from 1336], Christianikē Thessalonikē, palaiologeios epochē: Vlatadōn 1987 (Thessaloniki, 1989), 165–211
C. Adsuara: ‘The Kalophonic Sticherarion Sinai gr. 1251: Introduction and Indices’, Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen-Age grec et latin, no.65 (1995), 15–58
CHRISTIAN TROELSGÅRD