1. Brief History and Members

The Music Association of Constantinople was founded in April 1863 in Pera and started to function in the Parish School of Panagia. Its founders formed a mixed group regarding social background and profession: on the one hand, members of the Greek professional elite of Constantinople with musical knowledge who were concerned about the promotion of a music, the national character of which was to be defined, and secondly some prominent church chanters, musicians and music teachers of Constantinople who were sharing these concerns. In the first group, there were members with high social status such as the Megas Logothetes of the Patriarchate Stavrakis Aristarchis and the banker Dimitrios Paspallis, as well as the doctors Iroklis Vasiadis and Ioannis Galatis, the teacher Gavriil Sofoklis and the mathematician Andreas Spatharis.

Among the church chanters, there were Georgios Violakis, Panagiotis G. Kiltzanidis and Ioannis Zografos from Geyve. G. Violakis, who later became the first chanter of the Great Church in 1890s, was renowned for his knowledge on Greek Orthodox ecclesiastical music as well as European music. Ioannis Zografos was a church chanter who was also adept at handling the theory and the complicated rhythms of the Ottoman music. Panagiotis Kiltzanidis, a prominent church chanter in Constantinople between the 1840s and the 1880s, was also well known for his deep knowledge as a theorist of ecclesiastical music. Already in 1859 he had published a collection of Turkish and Greek songs entitled Kaliphonos Seiren.¹ Considering his teaching in the 5th Patriarchal Music School (1868), his theoretical essay published in 1879 and his book on the theory of the lay music in 1881,² it is not hard to imagine him as one of the most active members of the association.

Considering this strong staff composed of church musicians, the referral of G. Papadopoulos, the prominent Greek musicologist of the nineteenth century, to the association as the “Ecclesiastical Music Association of Constantinople” was probably legitimate.³ Furthermore, there is more evidence for the focus of the association on ecclesiastical music, which was also parallel to the weight of the church chanters. In 1864, D. Paspallis, the chairman of association, announced that all the church chanters would be exempted from the annual membership fee - monthly contribution was 10 piaster - and that the day of meeting of the association would be shifted from Saturday to Sunday.⁴

In 1867 the music association moved to Phanar (Fener) – the district where the Patriarchate of Constantinople is situated- with the decision of the majority of its members.⁵ Even though we do not know exactly when the Association dissolved, from the information in Mousikon Apanthisma and the book of G. Papadopoulos we can deduce that the dissolvement must have taken place around 1867-68.⁶

2. Aims and Achievements

According to the program of activities of the Association, some of its aims were the «explanation of the different music notations used by the ancient Greeks (Aristoxenos, Alipios, etc.) and by the Christian composers (St. John Damascene, Ioannis o Koukouzelis, Petros o Peloponnesios, the three teachers Grigorios, Chourmouzios and Chrysanthos), the comparison of their music writings with foreign notations, the precise definition of the technical terminology of ancient and new music and songs, the study of the harmony and laws of ancient Greek music and of the demotic music of the Byzantines, the examination of the characteristics of the music of Arabs, Persians and Jews, the accurate and precise notations of the so-called Cretan style of [our] ecclesiastical chants as they were chanted in the churches of the Ionian Islands, Crete and elsewhere, and the precise notations of the Bulgarian ecclesiastical style of Slavs and their comparison with the melodies chanted in [our] Byzantine or Mt Athos traditions».⁷ In the daily newspaper Anatolikos Astir the association announced its aim as the improvement of the ecclesiastical music that has lost its old and “dignified” style.⁸

Two years after its foundation, it announced the publishing of a periodical of the same name every two months, which would include «the lectures, delivered in the Association and the minutes of its meetings, foreign treatises or translations of anecdotes, ecclesiastical melodies and national [ethnika] and foreign songs with the characters of [our] writing and European music writing, and essays on music».⁹ Unfortunately, this periodical does not seem to have survived until today, so that the content of the lectures is unknown to us. At least we know that until 1867 the association had acquired more than eighty members, a quite rich library, an collectionof instruments, a piano, a sonometer and a tanbur.¹⁰