Znamenny Chant

The chant of the Russian Church from the conversion until the seventeenth century, written in hook notation, the kryuki, and sung in unison without harmony or instruments. It is built from formulae rather than from scales: a singer learns the popevki, the melodic turns proper to each of the eight tones, and a chant is assembled from them. Polyphony arriving from the West in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries very nearly killed it, and it survived among the Old Believers and in a few monasteries. It has been recovering since the late nineteenth century, and many Russian parishes now sing at least the tones from it.