Sticheron

A sticheron (Greek: στιχηρόν "set in verses"; plural: stichera; Greek: στιχηρά) is a hymn of a particular genre sung during the daily evening (Hesperinos/Vespers) and morning (Orthros) offices, and some other services, of the Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic churches.

Stichera are usually sung in alternation with or immediately after psalm or other scriptural verses. These verses are known as stichoi (sing: stichos), but sticheraric poetry usually follows the hexameter and is collected in a book called sticherarion (Greek: στιχηράριον). A sticherarion is a book containing the stichera for the morning and evening services throughout the year, but chant compositions in the sticheraric melos can also be found in other liturgical books like the Octoechos or the Anastasimatarion, or in the Anthology for the Divine Liturgy.

In the current traditions of Orthodox Chant, the sticherarion as a hymn book was also used to call a chant genre sticheraric melos, which is defined by its tempo and its melodic formulas according to the eight modes of the Octoechos. Although the hymns of the sticherarion have to be sung in the same melos, there is no direct relation with the poetic hymn genre, because its musical definition rather follows the practice of psalmody. Today the sticheraric melos as opposed to the troparic melos are two different cycles of the Octoechos.^{[citation needed]}

In the past, they had been closer related by the practice of psalmody, and a troparion which is nothing else than a refrain sung with psalmody, might become a more elaborated chant from a musical point of view, so that it is sung thrice without the psalm verses, but with the small doxology. The troparion in its melodic form tends to move towards the sticheraric or even papadic melos, and this way, it becomes an own chant genre by itself.

Christian Troelsgård described the sticheron quite similar to the troparion and regarded the sticheron as a subcategory, only that a sticheron as an intercalation of psalmody, has been longer as a poem than a troparion, thus it had been chanted without repetitions of its text, but in sections. There had been a lot of stichera, but the book sticherarion was a rather dislocated collection of stichera from different local traditions and their singer-poets. It was obviously not used on a pulpit during celebrations, but rather an exercise book with various examples which could be studied for own compositions with similar accentuation patterns.

Concerning this paradigmatic use of notation the musical setting of a sticheron, the sticherarion had been mainly a collection of idiomela which had to be understood as individual compositions for a certain sticheron poem, although the melodic patterns could be rather classified according to one of the eight or ten modes (echos or glas) of the Hagiopolitan Octoechos. The reference to it is given by the modal signatures, especially the medial signatures written within notation, so the book sticherarion constituted the synthetic role of its notation (Byzantine round notation), which integrated signs taken from different chant books during the 13th century.

But there was as well the practice of using certain stichera as models (avtomela) to compose other poems (prosomoia), similar to the heirmos. This classification became even more complex by the translation of the hymn books into Slavonic, which forced the kanonarches, responsible for the preparation of the services, to adapt the music of a certain avtomelon to the translated prosomoia and the prosody of the Slavonic language, in certain cases the adaptation needed a musical recomposition of the prosomoion. In practice, the avtomela as well as the prosomeia are often omitted in the books of the sticherarion, they rather belonged to an oral tradition, since the avtomela were known by heart. Often the prosomoia had been written apart before the Octoechos part of Sticherarion, which was usually not organised according to the eight modes unlike the Great Oktoechos.

Since John Koukouzeles and other contemporary scribes who revised the sticheraria, there was development from the traditional sticheron, sung by a whole congregation or community, to a rather representative and elaborated performance by a soloist. Manuel Chrysaphes regarded John Koukouzeles as the inventor of the "embellished sticheron" (sticheron kalophonikon), but he emphasized that he always followed step by step the model, as it has been written down in sticherarion. Especially in the kalophonic genre, a systematic collection of compositions by Constantinopolitan maistores, made after the menaion of sticherarion, could already grow, as one part of the sticherarion kalophonikon (see also GB-Lbl Ms. Add. 28821), to a volume about 1900 pages, an expansion in chant which could be hardly performed during celebrations of any cathedral of the Empire.