BRETT UMLAUF

click here for information about KASSIA Sound Icon (the film)

In Her Footsteps: (Re)sounding the Legacy of 9th-century Hymnographer Kassia of Byzantium

In Her Footsteps was the name of my 2022-23 Fulbright-funded research project in Greece and Turkey to explore the voice of 9th-century melodos (poet-composer) Kassia of Byzantium. Kassia built a monastery on the Seventh Hill of Constantinople, where she composed liturgical hymns and epigrams that illustrate her faith. According to the chronicles, the emperor Theophilos nearly selected Kassia as empress, but for her sharp retort to him at the bride-show competition. As a monastic, she composed up to forty-nine hymns, some of which are still sung each year according to the Orthodox calendar.

In Her Footsteps is a mixed-media installation built from Umlauf’s singing and recordings from her 2022 fieldwork in Greece. She lived with nuns in an Orthodox monastery, chanted with an all-women Byzantine choir, and pilgrimaged to the remote Aegean island of Kasos, where Kassia’s bones are rumored to rest. It draws from audio of chanting nuns, women reading and reacting to Kassia’s epigrammatic texts and gnomic verses*, sounds of the monastery environment, and conversations with hosts about their perceptions of Kassia, known to the faithful as Saint Kassiani.

In Her Footsteps will premiere on the soil of Kassia’s historical home of Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul. Kassia offers a portal to dialogue about the always-in-flux, multireligious cultural tapestry of the city. Umlauf considers Kassia in the context of music’s role as an expressive space for women past and present. In Her Footsteps is an invitation to imagine the rhythms of Kassia’s creative environment, the details of her life’s journey (beyond the scant evidence that remains), and the possibilities for her words and music to engage us almost 1200 years after their inception, across perceived borders of faith, nation, gender and memory.

Umlauf was a 2022-23 Fulbright fellow in Thessaloniki and Istanbul. This work is thanks to the generous support of the Greek Fulbright Commission and the Turkish Fulbright Commission, as well as Umlauf’s affiliates, Dr. Maria Alexandru at the Aristotle University Music Studies Department and Dr. Meral Akkent at the Istanbul Gender Museum.

*All translations of Kassia’s works into English are by Antonia Tripolitis (1992). All translations into Turkish are by Meral Akkent (2022). Other mother tongues represented are interpretations of Kassia offered by each individual participant-speaker.

IMPRESSION I.

Spiritual Lyre: Kassia the Monastic

This work immerses the listener in Kassia’s epigrams concerning the life of a monachos (monastic)*. Nuns encounter these verses for the first time. They recite and reflect on them amidst ritual sounds of daily monastic life. Feel the routine, the repetition, the calm and sublimity of the monastery, the discipline through which Kassia’s creativity flourished.

“Monachos is a walking corpse… Monachos is a concealed mind… Monachos is a spiritual lyre, an instrument harmoniously played.” (from Kassia’s epigram Τι είναι μοναχός)

IMPRESSION II.

Myrrhbearer: Kassia the Poet-Composer

Did Kassia the μελωδός (poet-composer) work as a professional musician before becoming a monastic? The Μυροφόροι (Myrrhbearers) were a category of salaried women chanters in Byzantium.

Listen to her masterpiece, the Hymn for Holy Wednesday, where the penitent woman “rises to the status of myrrhbearer.” Underneath, hear scholars and contemporary chanters voice their thoughts on the role of women in the church.

This footstep’s impression explores the material transmission of Kassia’s hymns down the centuries through liturgical books. The texts are clues to how the music sounded, but they can only tell part of the story.

Video features Umlauf’s hand writing text and notation of Kassia’s hymn, embodying the scribal hands that mediate between us and Kassia. Those who recorded, condensed and interpreted her works in the manuscripts preserved an enormous gift, but one that needs deciphering.

IMPRESSION III.

A Saint who Hates? Kassia in the City

Kassia lived in Constantinople before and after taking vows. Her epigram Μισώ comprises 27 verses, all beginning with the word “Μισώ,” meaning “I Hate.”*

Greek and Turkish* women’s voices express Kassia’s list, held together by rising and falling chants of Kyrie Eleison. We learn which acts and types of people—namely hypocritical ones--get Kassia the most exercised. Kassia the monastic was also a socially and politically engaged leader of a community within a heaving capital city.

Her muscular condemnation of wrongdoing belies what might also be a subtle confession; “I Hate” is an unusual salvo for the saintly. With this “Μισώ” mantra, Kassia challenges enduring perceptions of her, and makes known her humanity.

IMPRESSION IV.

Idolomania: Kassia on Beauty

Kassia’s hymn to St. Christina praises women for their strength in “abandoning the error of idol-mania.” Her epigrams “Woman*” and “Beauty*” are insights into the qualities Kassia—famed for her beauty and her wit—wants cultivated.

IMPRESSION V.

Dead Name: Kassia and Antioch/Antakya

Listen to Kassia’s hymn to St. Pelagia, the patron saint of performers. Pelagia worked in Antioch, the region of modern-day Antakya. She converted and pilgrimaged to Jerusalem, where she lived in hermitage as the ascetic male monk “Pelagios.” Her earlier identity was discovered only in her death.

Hear two versions of this healing hymn—a comforting reminder of “grace abounding” even in excessive pain—sung from the medieval notation, as well as Chourmouzios the Archivist’s later interpretation from the 19th-century, what many consider the peak of melodic development in the continuum of the Byzantine tradition.

Antioch, a regional capital of the Byzantine empire and incubator of early Christianity has suffered many major earthquakes, including the catastrophes in 115 and 526 CE before Kassia’s life. The city even changed its name. Antioch became “Theopolis” (City of God) in hopes of divine protection. The earthquakes and aftershocks of February 2023 brought unspeakable destruction to the people of the modern-day region of Antakya and beyond.

Kassia writes: “a powerful remedy for those in mourning is the tears and word of those sharing in their sorrow.” (Miscellaneous epigram)

“For with tears and prayers, Pelagia, you have dried up the vast sea of sins…” (Kassia’s Hymn to Saint Pelagia)

In this impression, the city that has continually revived is echoed in sounds of rebuilding: the steady pulse of these two different rhythmical interpretations of Kassia’s melody. The “identity” of her melody depends on our perceptions, our biases, our influences and imaginations.

IMPRESSION VI.

Voicing Support: Women Chant Kassia

Amateur and professional laywomen and nuns singing Kassia’s hymns mixes with sounds of their warm-up exercises: immersive voice training from the chanter’s perspective. We hear “The Wheel of St. John Koukouzelis,” (image above), as used in conductor Dr. Maria Alexandru’s innovative blend of distinctly Byzantine interval training with classical bel canto pedagogy.

Dr. Evangeli Spyrakou talks voice-training in Byzantium, the seven years spent humming and softly singing alongside expert chanters. Only after this apprenticeship is cheironomia, conductive hand movements and full-body engagement of the vocal mechanism, encouraged.

This impression incorporates tracks of Umlauf singing chants and hymns she learned in apprenticeship, especially a chant for St. Anysia, the choir’s patron saint. Disallowed to sit and observe, Umlauf was instead invited to “support,” that is, stand amongst the choir, even before knowing a single note. “You must be more Eastern in your music making” said her teacher; in other words, jump in!

IMPRESSION VII.

“For your Strength”: Hospitable Kassia

“One worthy of friendship when he meets a loving friend vigorously rejoices as if he found a large sum of money,” Kassia writes in her epigram “Friendship*” (Turkish translation here*). We meet a fellow pilgrim’s mother, who breaks into impromptu folk singing after reading Kassia’s epigram.

This impression considers insider- and outsidership concerning Kassia’s works. Who has inherited them, and how are they shared today within the faithful community and beyond?

One musicologist describes how Kassia’s medieval Greek and old Byzantine notation comprise a natural protection for the works. The barrier to accessing her works can feel high.

Hosts share their sacred spaces and rites, and offer food, song, booze, and laughter along the search to understand Kassia. Hear a panoply of Istanbullu voices Umlauf met on her journey. They react to Kassia’s take on friendship in their native languages, reflecting the City’s plural expressions of its most universal virtue: hospitality.

IMPRESSION VIII.

The Seventh Hill: In her Footsteps

This icon centers the sounds and sensations of the Seventh Hill, where Kassia’s monastery once stood, and where her body lived and breathed, a sensorium that translated her faith, intellect, and experiences into powerful texts and melodies.

We visit the ruins of Stoudios Monastery, a center of knowledge production in Byzantium where Kassia’s spiritual father, Theodore the Stoudite worked and lived. Perhaps Kassia’s own monastery was situated close by.

Umlauf’s chant teacher, Dr. Dimosthenis Spanoudakis, chants a hymn by Theodore the Stoudite, as Umlauf reads his letter to a young and already devout Kassia, who harbored iconophiles. From these Seventh Hill ruins, imagine Kassia’s proximity to the sea, the south-westerly lodos buffeting her living quarters, and imperial processions wending below. Theodore the Stoudite’s hymn hands over to Kassia’s masterpiece, the Hymn for Holy Wednesday, but this time in its early 1800s interpretation written down by Chourmouzios the Archivist.

IMPRESSION IX.

A Steep Ascent: Pilgrimage with Kassia

Kassia writes,

Anything forced deteriorates again quickly,

but what comes naturally lasts.

Evil is easier than good;

for the good is like a steep ascent,

but evil is more a declivity;

and everyone knows how much

easier it is

to descend than to ascend

Do you wish praise; act praiseworthy!

Atop a peak on Büyükada, the biggest of the Princes’ Islands off the coast of Istanbul sits Aya Yorgi (St. George), one of the last Orthodox monasteries still functioning in Istanbul.

Every April, on the feast day of St. George, pilgrims participate in a multifaith ritual on Büyükada. They climb—some barefoot, some backwards, all silently—up the narrow stone road to the monastery. Some hold a spool of thread and trail it carefully behind them as they go. An intact thread is an intact prayer.

Pilgrims whose wishes have been granted return to the site and hand out sugar cubes or candies to those who climb today. Once they reach the monastery, different stations call for different gestures: tying paper wishes to trees, candle-lighting in the extended narthex, observing liturgy inside the church, gathering sticks to fashion into little houses, sticking coins to the cliff wall with candle wax…

Moving and still images from this unique ritual accompany the sound icon.

IMPRESSION X.

Folk Hero, Failed Bride: Kassia as popular legend

New music accompanies key scenes of Kassia’s life as depicted in 1960s Greek cinema’s imagination of Kassia, the film Kassiani: the emperor’s bride show, Kassia’s vow ceremony, a romance with the emperor Theophilos, and her creation of her most famous hymn.

This icon is an exploration of her story’s journey from the chronicles to folk memory.

This icon mixes the film’s original score (for example its four-part western choral music in the film’s monastery rituals) with audio from popular renderings of her most famous Troparion: The Hymn for Holy Wednesday. 1960 film footage is mixed with footage of Umlauf playing Kassiani in a 2023 festival concert dedicated to Kassia’s works in Thessaloniki.

NB Due to rights, this icon might center instead the most famous line of Kassia, according to the chronicles: “But also through woman, betters things gushed forth.” Music TBD.

IMPRESSION XI.

On Her Tomb: Kassia’s Fate

Are Kassia’s bones truly to be found in a tomb on a remote island in the Aegean? Locals on the island of Kasos give clues, and Kassia’s Hymn to the Martyr Agathe accompanies the search. Kassia describes the miracle, where an angel placed a tablet on Agathe’s tomb that read “Holy mind, possessed of free choice, honor from God, and deliverance of the country.”

Kassia’s “tomb” on Kasos is unmarked, boasting neither divine inscription nor even name. No matter. The island, of about 1000 inhabitants, seems to hold almost as many versions of Kassia’s legend as souls to tell it.

This icon explores her journey in people’s imaginations, beyond the evidence of her life in the chronicles and the handful of letters written by her spiritual father. It also brings forward the theme of the body in Orthodox worship. Where is the saint’s body, and how does this affect her veneration?

IMPRESSION XII:

From One Saint to Another: Kassia and Hildegard von Bingen

Across the centuries and miles, Saint Kassia speaks with Saint Hildegard von Bingen, a 12th-century abbess and poet-composer in the southern Rhine.

Hildegard and Kassia together craft a response to the bishop who has disallowed singing of the divine office at Hildegard’s convent. “I hate silence, when it is a time for speaking!” says Kassia. “Those who…impose silence on a church and prohibit the singing of God’s praises…will lose their place among the chorus of angels!” agrees Hildegard.

In this imagined dialogue, melodies of the two saints converse and converge.