(With a Focus on Ninja Sili by Kyr Stefan Srbin)

The medieval period in Serbia is considered by many to be the greatest
age of development of Serbian culture, comparable even to the modern
era. After its Christianization, the Serbian kingdom quickly began to
flourish, in part due to the strong Byzantine influence which was en-
tering Serbian culture through the church. Medieval Serbian chant is
considered a cornerstone of Serbian heritage, and it has been the basis
for Serbian Orthodox chant to this day. Thanks to preserved manu-
scripts from the Middle Ages, church music is the longest standing
tradition in Serbian musical history. After the defeat of the Serbs by
the Turks at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, manuscripts were made to
preserve Serbian chant in middle Byzantine neumatic notation, and
during the Turkish occupation which lasted the subsequent five cen-
turies, Serbian church music had to continue largely in secret. How-
ever, Serbian culture did not simply cease to exist. In the face of a
shift from a Byzantine and Classical culture to an Islamic one, it re-
tained the majority of its traditional properties – perhaps stagnating
or diminishing, but never losing its continuity.3 The piece that will be
the focus of this paper is Ninja Sili by Kyr Stefan Srbin (“the Serb”),
dated at 1459 C.E. It is an excellent piece to examine in the context of
medieval Serbia since it exemplifies many key musical characteristics
of medieval Serbian church music: inheritance but modification of
Byzantine musical elements, use of bilingual texts, and transmission
by written and oral means.
The Slavs settled in the Balkan Peninsula approximately between
the years 550 and 630 C.E.4 A few centuries later, they were converted
to Christianity by two brothers from Thessaloniki, Constantine and
Methodius, at the request of the Moravian Prince Rastislav (847-870
C.E.), who did not want to accept the neighbouring Frankish rite as
he feared it would aid the Frankish conquest of his kingdom. The
brothers were well-educated and fluent in both Greek and the Slavic
dialect spoken around Thessaloniki. They devised an alphabet that
represented Slavic phonetics–first Glagolithic, and later Cyrillic. How-
ever, since vernacular Slavic was not nuanced enough to express ab-
stract theological concepts, they imposed a large number of Greek
words and certain grammatical constructs.5 This composite language
is now called Old Church Slavonic, and throughout the Middle Ages
it evolved as it became adapted in the various southern Slavic regions;
these evolved forms are referred to as redactions. The brothers trans-
lated the Bible and various other religious texts and used them as
tools for conversion. Presumably, Christianity spread to the Serbian
territory in the second half of the ninth century, and most scholars
believe that Byzantine influence in Serbia spread greatly during the
reign of Časlav (927-960 C.E.). It was only after the Great Schism and
the separation of the Church that the Serbs officially allied themselves
with the Byzantine church and Eastern Christianity, for a variety of
political reasons.
The Middle Ages in Serbia started later than in Western Europe,
and ran simultaneously with the Western Renaissance, Baroque and
Classical eras. The symbolic dates for the beginning and end of the
Middle Ages in Serbian history and culture are not the same signifi-
cant events as in the West; the fall of Rome or the establishment of
a Frankish kingdom do not designate its beginnings, nor do Dante’s
Divine Comedy or the invention of the printing press define its final
years. Significant events in Serbian culture are certainly the arrival
of the Slavs to the Balkan Peninsula, and especially Christianization
and deference to the Eastern rite. Historians debate in dating the end
of the Serbian Middle Ages: some designate the end with the Great
Migration of 1690, when Serbs left the Turkish-occupied southern ter-
ritories and migrated to the northern province of Vojvodina under the
cultural umbrella of Austro-Hungary, while others define the end even
as late as the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth centuries.
In any case, along with the Eastern rite, Constantine (who later
took the monastic name Cyril) and Methodius brought with them the
musical practices of the Byzantine church, as it was a vital part of East-
ern worship. The Byzantine influence on medieval Serbian chant is
immeasurable, and includes the principles of creative poetics and aes-
thetics, the musical principles of the Osmoglasnik, the conception of
voices, and general principles of melodic construction. Along with
Biblical texts, there is evidence that even in the days of Cyril and Meth-
odius there existed a translation of the Ochtoechos, or Osmoglasnik
in Old Church Slavonic. The Ochtoechos is a collection of songs that
evokes the resurrection of Christ in its content, arranged in eight
modes (echoi). Throughout the course of a week, starting from Sunday,
the songs of one mode are sung; the following Sunday, the cycle begins
in a different mode. This process is repeated until the end of the whole
cycle, which is called a stolp. After the eighth stolp, the cycle returns to
the first mode. Therefore, the same texts were sung every week, but in
different modes. Every mode is based on a number of rhythmic-mel-
odic formulae, and it is typical for pieces in the same mode to have
similar formulae at the end of songs. The Osmoglasnik is the most
important liturgical book, since it was the basis for further compos-
itions, and introduced the principle of working within an eight-mode
system in creating new repertoire–this principle, linguistically related,
is called osmoglasje. The Osmoglasnik included both syllabic and me-
lismatic settings of hirmos, troparions, kontakions and other hymns.
Some of these were composed as text and music together (idiomela),
while some melodies were taken as models (automela) for settings of
other texts (prosomoia).14 These often-sung melodies served as models
for the creation of new songs. Even in the earliest south Slavic manu-
scripts without notation written in Glagolitic (ninth century), there
are Slavic terms related to osmoglasje, and even a unique Slavic way
of indicating the modes: they are numbered one to eight, instead of
the Byzantine way of notating them as four authentic and four plagal
modes. The organization according to osmoglasje dictates that mel-
odies are divided into eight groups: in any given mode, the beginning
and ending tone are the same, as are the melodic dominants of the
groups of melodic formulae.16 Consequently, the similarity of tone se-
quences in melodies of the same mode is not as important as in Gre-
gorian chant.
It is not known how the first Slavonic church songs sounded, but it
can be assumed that they were Greek songs superimposed with Slav-
onic texts.18 The melodies of church hymns were most likely transmit-
ted orally and modified to fit the translated texts. Considering that
Old Church Slavonic texts were written in prose and did not have the
same form as the Byzantine metrical poetry, nor the same accents, the
modification of these melodies most likely included adding or taking
away certain tones, repeating others, and maybe some rhythmic modi-
fications. It is believed that up until the end of the 9th century, medi-
eval Serbian church music was very similar to that of Bulgaria and
Russia. Later, as the texts from various regions varied in dialect, so
did their musical practices begin to change. At the time SS. Cyril and
Methodius were translating Greek texts into the common Old Church
Slavonic, the literary language of the Serbs, Bulgarians and Russians
was identical; the regional variants had not yet evolved. It was this fact