The extent of Byzantine music culture vs. liturgical chant proper

The term Byzantine music is commonly associated with what should more correctly be termed the medieval sacred chant of Christian Churches following the Constantinopolitan rite. The identification of "Byzantine music" with "eastern Christian liturgical chant" is a misconception due to historical cultural reasons. Its main cause is the leading role of the Church as bearer of learning and official culture in the Eastern Roman Empire ( Byzantium ), a phenomenon that was not always that extreme but that was exacerbated towards the end of the empire's reign ( 14th century onwards) as great secular scholars migrated away from a declining Constantinople to rising western cities, bringing with them much of the learning that would spur the development of the European Renaissance . The shrinking of Greek-speaking official culture around a church nucleus was even more accentuated by political force when the official culture of the court changed after the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire on May, 29, 1453.

Today, far too few sources and studies exist about Byzantine music on the whole. It is beyond doubt that Byzantine music included a rich tradition of instrumental court music and dance. Any other picture would be both incongruous with the historically and archaeologically documented opulence of the Eastern Roman Empire. There survive a few but explicit accounts of secular music. A characteristic example are the accounts of pneumatic organs , whose construction was most advanced in the eastern empire prior to their development in the west after the Renaissance . To a certain degree we may look for remnants of Byzantine or early (Greek-speaking, Orthodox Christian ) near eastern music in the music of the Ottoman Court. Examples such as that of the eminent composer and theorist Prince Kantemir of Romania learning music from the Greek musician Angelos indicate the continuing participation of Greek-speaking people in court culture. However, the sources are too scarce to permit any well-founded stipulations about what cultural musical changes took place when and under which influences during the long histories of the Byzantine and the Ottoman empires. Hypotheses that Turkish (Ottoman) music was influenced by Byzantine music, or the other way around, remain highly speculative. It seems more logical to consider that these influences were probably more manifold, considering the breadth and length of duration of these empires and the great number of ethnicities and major or minor cultures that they encompassed or came in touch with at each stage of their development.