What It Means to be an American Orthodox Composer

The Case of Fr. Sergei Glagolev (1928–2021)  

VLADIMIR MOROSAN

From the time the Orthodox Church in America was granted its autocephaly in 1970, there has been an ongoing debate as to whether the local Church in North America should develop its own distinct liturgical arts. Should we expect to see the rise of uniquely American forms of Orthodox church singing, iconography, and architecture? And what would be the sources of American artistic expression that would inform and guide such a quest?  

In the realm of church music, I recall conversations among my colleagues back in the late 1960s and 70s: “It’s time that the Church in America develop its own distinct style of church music, its own system of Eight Tones,” some church musicians would say. “And what would such a system sound like?” came the sobering response. “Would it be based on the blues, or on jazz? Bluegrass, perhaps? Or some esoteric Native American scale?” And there the matter would rest, as we would turn our attention back to adapting yet another musical setting of Bortniansky, Arkhangelsky, or Kastalsky from Church Slavonic to whatever English translation was in vogue at the time.  

One participant in these debates, however, did more than simply adapt compositions from an Old World language to English. This original, creative voice was Fr. Sergei Glagolev (1928–2021). Fr. Sergei was arguably the first genuinely American Orthodox composer—not someone who wrote church music in a traditional “Slavic” or “Russian” style who happened to be living in America, but a composer who actually composed new liturgical music in English, which sounded quite traditional on the one hand, yet had a distinctively American quality.   

The name and person of Fr. Sergei Glagolev—both as a composer and a pastor—is well known to many within the Orthodox Church. He lectured extensively and in several instances wrote about his involvement with Orthodox liturgical music (including an article titled “Some Personal Thoughts on the Composition of Liturgical Music,” which appeared in the pages of this magazine). Those of a younger generation, who didn’t know him personally, have ample opportunities to become acquainted with his compositional output, the scope of his ideas, and the admiration he elicited among all those who were blessed to encounter him.   

In 2002, on the 50th anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood, PSALM Music Press published a 120-page anthology of his music, which included an extensive biography. In 2005, Cappella Romana, a Portland-based professional choir that specializes in Orthodox chant and choral music, recorded many of the pieces contained in that collection on an album titled Lay Aside All Earthly Cares. On the occasion of Fr. Sergei’s 90th birthday, Orthodox church musicians from around the world contributed reflections and photographs, as well as 22 original compositions and arrangements, assembled in a “festschrift” titled Prayer, Music, and Joy: Celebrating the Life and Legacy of the Archpriest Sergei Glagolev.  

We could say a great deal more about Fr. Sergei himself and his pastoral career, but in this reflection, I’d like to concentrate instead on his music and point out some of the qualities that distinguish him as an American Orthodox composer. We will try, as much as possible, to avoid technical musical jargon, so that any reader will be able to gain a greater appreciation of the unique contributions to liturgical music that were made by Fr. Sergei.   

Orthodox liturgical worship is intimately tied to language. There is no “rational worship” (logiki latreia in Greek or slovesnaia sluzhba in Slavonic) that doesn’t involve words. This principle was well expressed by Fr. Sergei in the article mentioned above: 

There is no sacred song without sacred words. In the Orthodox Church “pure music” is not melody without words, but rather the melody of the words. To compose, one must understand the poetic structure of the words... (the rhythm of the words, the syntax of the word groupings.... etc.)  

On the most fundamental level of chant, the pitches and rhythms that make up a melody actually flow out of the sounds of the words, which are elongated or extended in time and inflected—given varying degrees of emphasis—by bringing accented syllables to the foreground while deemphasizing unaccented syllables.   

In order to create what we might call successful melodies—ones in which the words and the melodic elements are intimately woven together—a composer must follow Fr. Sergei’s advice: to become, above all, musically literate and learn to “hear” the sacred song by reading it on the page. “Look at the musical phrase,” he wrote. “Why does it work here and not there? Why is it written that way?” As one becomes attuned to the sounds, inflections, and rhythms of the English language, and acquainted with the theory of melody and the rules of poetic structure, one begins to understand that the process of composing in English is very different from the process of taking an existing piece of music written in another language, such as Slavonic or Greek, and adapting it to an English text. The results will inevitably be different as well. To illustrate this, we will compare the treatment of the English language in two settings of the Anaphora—the first, an adaptation into English from Slavonic, and the second, a composition by Fr. Sergei. 

The Anaphora by Archimandrite Theophan (Alexandrov), better known as “Feofanovskoye” is one of the staples of the Russian Orthodox choral repertoire. Examples 1 and 2 show the opening responses in the original Church Slavonic (transliterated here for convenience) and a rather skillful adaptation of them into English, as found in the Divine Liturgy collection (2nd edition, 2005) published by St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.  

Even a cursory glance at the original shows the challenges faced when making an English adaptation. The Slavonic text has stresses in different places than the English, has many more syllables, and has a melody that accommodates the Slavonic words in a particular way. The English adaptor had to pare away a series of notes from the Slavonic original in order to fit the English words, but even then, certain English syllables receive undue emphasis: for example, the syllable “-fice” of the word “sacrifice,” and the syllable “-to” in the phrase “We lift them up unto the Lord.” (The correct stress in the word “unto” is on the first syllable.)  

Compare this now with Fr. Sergei’s setting of these same responses, shown in Example 3. From the very first chords, one cannot help but notice how both the rhythm and the melodic shape organically flow out of the natural sound and inflection of the English language. It may well be the case that, like many composers before him (and after him), Fr. Sergei spent time simply speaking the text, as one would in normal conversation, and then wrote down what he heard, imparting to the text what he termed “a heightened utterance” through the movements of the melody and harmony. Innately sensing how harmonic movement has the power to inflect the text, he achieves emphasis on the crucial words “praise” and “Lord” by having all the parts converge in a unison. Masterful strokes such as these are found throughout this composition, and indeed in a great many of his works, where at all points they mirror and enhance the poetics of the English text. 

American Orthodox church musicians, from composers to church choir directors to singers, can all benefit greatly from studying in detailed fashion the rhythm as it relates to text declamation in Fr. Sergei’s works, something we can only do in a few short examples in this article. A good deal of insight can be gleaned from the setting of the Great Doxology, the opening measures of which are shown in Example 4. Here we see the meter of 6/8, somewhat unusual for church music, but which is, in fact, organically derived from the rhythmic content of the text “Glory to God in the highest.” In addition, we see the intuitive rhythmic treatment of words having so-called “feminine endings”—strong-weak—seen in the word “highest” (and later in the text, in words such as “glory” and “Spirit”). The syncopated rhythmic pattern of an eighth note followed by a quarter note precludes the possibility of misplacing the emphasis onto the second syllable, which so often happens in adaptations derived from Church Slavonic. 

Throughout this composition, Fr. Sergei is keenly sensitive to the natural rhythmic groupings formed by the syllables of the text—sometimes groups of two, sometimes groups of three, and on rarer occasions, groups of four, five, or even seven. Listening to a rendition of this composition, it becomes clear that the notated rhythm of the music is derived from natural speech, rather than the other way around, whereby the music has a pre-established meter, and the text is then forced to conform to that meter. In this regard, Fr. Sergei followed the experiments in rhythmic notation found in the works of some of the leading composers of the "New Direction" in Russian Orthodox church music—Alexander Kastalsky (1856–1926), Alexander Nikolsky (1874–1943), Pavel Chesnokov (1877–1944), and Alexander Gretchaninoff (1864–1956)—whose works he loved and studied. 

A final example of how Fr. Sergei was led by the requirements of English liturgical texts can be seen in the opening phrase of the introductory Psalm at Vespers (Example 5). Numerous attempts to adapt Church Slavonic settings of the well-known Russian “Greek” Chant melody fail due to the fact that the English text “Bless the Lord, O my soul,” contains only six syllables (versus eleven in the Slavonic), and the most important word—“Lord”—which should receive musical emphasis, is the fourth syllable, rather than the ninth, as it is in Slavonic. Instead of attempting to truncate the melody so as to make the English words “fit,” Fr. Sergei takes a recognizable motive from the source melody and creates an original variant perfectly tailored to the English text—with the word “Lord” centrally emphasized by a melisma positioned between two structural pillars formed by the monosyllabic words “Bless the” and “O my soul.”

Fr. Sergei’s keen awareness of the poetics of the English language and his skillful management of the musical elements, informed by his innate instinct and advanced musical erudition, makes the liturgical text in his works come alive and speak to the hearer—the worshiper—in a most direct way, going straight to the heart in an ineffable manner known only to master artists, musicians, and poets. The bar he sets is high, but it is a bar that serves as an inspiration and a model for American Orthodox composers of the future. 

One of the psalm verses Fr. Sergei loved to quote in his talks is verse 15 from Psalm 88 [89]: “Blessed are the people who know the festal shout!” And to this verse we may add a corollary with which he would certainly agree: “Yes, and even more blessed are the people who give voice to that festal shout in their own native language!” 

Dr. Vladimir Morosan is founder and president of Musica Russica, a publishing company specializing in Orthodox choral music. He is the project lead for music editing and online instruction for the OCA’s Department of Liturgical Music and the director of liturgical singing at St. Katherine Orthodox Mission in Carlsbad, California.