Byzantine, Znamenny & Greek Music Notation

Byzantine chant is the music of the Greek Orthodox Church and of the Orthodox churches that took their chant from Constantinople, and its notation is not a staff. It writes intervals: each sign tells the chanter how far to move from the note just sung. The ison 𝁆 repeats the note, the oligon 𝁇, oxeia 𝁈 and petasti 𝁉 rise one step, the kentima 𝁏 rises two and the ypsili 𝁐 four (both only in combination with another sign), while the apostrofos 𝁑 falls one step, the elafron 𝁕 two and the chamili 𝁖 four. The kentimata 𝁎 also rise one step but are never sung on their own syllable, and the yporroi 𝁓 is two falling notes in one sign. These are the characters of quantity, the first table in every Byzantine notation chart or cheat sheet.

The second table is the characters of time. Every sign is one beat unless changed: the klasma 𝁿 and the apli 𝂅 add a beat, the dipli 𝂆, tripli 𝂇 and tetrapli 𝂈 add two, three and four, the gorgon 𝂏 fits two notes into one beat and the digorgon 𝂒 and trigorgon 𝂖 three and four, the argon 𝂗 slows a pair of notes, and the leimmata 𝂊 𝂋 𝂌 𝂍 are rests of one to four beats. The agogi marks 𝂚 to 𝂡 set the tempo from very slow to very fast. The characters of quality or ypostaseis are silent: the vareia 𝁘 accents the next note, the psifiston 𝁚 presses on it, the omalon 𝁛 smooths it, the antikenoma 𝁜 lifts it, the tromikon 𝁣 shakes it. Which to use when is a matter of style, and theory books spend their longest chapters on them.

Pitch itself comes from the martyria, the mode signature 𝂢 𝂤 𝂦 𝂨 written at the start and at the end of every phrase, and from the solfège names Pa, Vou, Ga, Di, Ke, Zo, Ni, whose initials 𝃩 𝃪 𝃫 𝃬 𝃭 𝃮 𝃯 are written under it. There are eight modes (the Octoechos): first to fourth and their plagal forms, with the third's plagal called varys, the grave mode 𝂱. A fthora 𝂺 𝂽 𝂿 placed on a note switches the scale from that note, into a soft chromatic 𝃃, hard chromatic 𝃅 or enharmonic genus, and the sharps and flats 𝃐 𝃔 raise or lower a note by twelfths of a tone, because Byzantine theory divides the octave into 72 parts. This whole system is the New Method of 1814, worked out by the Three Teachers, Chrysanthos of Madytos, Gregory the Protopsaltes and Chourmouzios the Archivist, who simplified the older notation and made it printable; the first printed Byzantine chant book came out in Bucharest in 1820.

Older Byzantine signs: ekphonetic and Palaeobyzantine notation

The Unicode block does not stop at the New Method. The last group of the grid holds the signs the reform replaced. The ekphonetic signs 𝀃 𝀅 𝀇 𝀈 𝀌 𝀏 are not melody at all: from about the 9th to the 14th century they were written at the start and end of phrases in Gospel and Epistle books to show the reader how to intone scripture aloud, a cantillation rather than a chant. The three prosodies 𝀀 𝀁 𝀂 at the head of the block are grammatical breathing and accent marks that the Unicode chart itself says are not attested in musical use.

The signs marked archaion (old) in their names, 𝀕 𝀖 𝀚 𝀛 𝀢 𝀦 𝀴, come from the Palaeobyzantine notations of the 10th to 12th centuries and the Middle Byzantine round notation that followed around 1175. Over the 14th century, in the hands of John Koukouzeles and his school, the notation grew a large repertoire of great signs (megala simadia) such as the thematismos 𝁶 𝁷, the thes kai apothes 𝁹, the katavasma 𝁺 and the oyranisma 𝁵, each standing for a whole melodic formula that singers knew by heart. The New Method wrote those formulas out note by note and kept only a few of the great signs as reminders, which is why they sit in the quality group above as well as in the old group. Many Byzantine signs come in an old and a new form, for instance the ison 𝀚 and 𝁆 or the gorgon 𝀖 and 𝂏; use the neo form unless you are quoting a manuscript.

Znamenny notation: Russian kryuki, red pomety and priznaki

Znamenny chant is the unison liturgical chant of the Eastern Slavs, sung in Kyivan Rus' from the 11th century and developed above all in Novgorod and Moscow. Its name comes from znamya, a sign, and its signs are the kryuki, hooks, after the most common of them, the kryuk 𜽐. A sign stands over one syllable and means one note or a short melodic turn; the names are homely pictures of their shapes: stopitsa 𜽖 a little foot, palka 𜽜 a stick, zapyataya 𜽝 a comma, golubchik 𜽞 a little dove, skameytsa 𜽱 a little bench, chashka 𜽯 a cup, strela 𜾒 an arrow, zmeytsa 𜾅 a little snake, kobyla 𜾄 a mare, pauk 𜿃 a spider, oblako 𜿀 a cloud, duda 𜿁 a pipe. The fita 𜾃, named after the Greek letter theta, marks a long melisma that the singer had to know from a separate book.

The kryuki alone do not fix the pitch, and that is what the two sets of small marks are for. Around 1600 the Novgorod master Ivan Shaidur added the pomety, letters written in red cinnabar ink beside each sign: gorazdo nizko 𜼃 very low, nizko 𜼄 low, sredne 𜼅 middle, malo povyshe 𜼆 a little higher, povyshe 𜼇 higher, vysoko 𜼈 high, with a kryzh (cross) or khokhol (crest) for the extra steps, each in a left-hand and a right-hand form. In 1668 a commission under the monk Aleksandr Mezenets added the priznaki, tiny black strokes 𜽂 𜽃 𜽄 that encode the same pitches in black ink alone, so a book could be copied or printed without a second colour. The range of the chant is divided into four registers of three steps, and the marks mrachno 𜼰, svetlo 𜼱 and tresvetlo 𜼲 (dark, light, thrice-light) name them. Related signs for the put' and demestvenny chants, such as the demestvenny klyuch 𜽵, are in the block as well.

After the church reforms of the 1650s and 1660s the Russian Church moved to staff notation (the Kyivan square notes), and in Ukraine the kryuki had already given way to it, but the Old Believers kept singing from kryukovye books and still do, which is why the notation is alive and why the Unicode block exists. It was proposed in 2019 by Aleksandr Andreev and Nikita Simmons of the Ponomar Project and added in Unicode 14.0 in 2021. In Unicode the neumes 𜽐 to 𜿃 are ordinary spacing characters, but every pometa and priznak is a combining mark that attaches to the sign typed before it; on their own in this grid they attach to nothing and may look displaced, so copy a neume first and the mark after it.

Ancient Greek musical notation: vocal and instrumental signs

The Greeks of the classical and Hellenistic world wrote music with letters, and two systems survive in the tables of the theorist Alypius (around the 3rd or 4th century AD) and in some sixty inscriptions and papyri. The vocal notation uses the Ionic alphabet: 𝈀 is the E a singer starts from, 𝈃 F, 𝈆 G, 𝈉 A, 𝈌 B, 𝈏 c, 𝈒 d, 𝈕 e. The instrumental notation, the older of the two and used for lyre and aulos parts, takes signs from an archaic alphabet and shows each one upright, turned on its side and reversed: 𝈝 is instrumental E, 𝈟 F, 𝈡 G, 𝈥 B, 𝈩 d, 𝈬 f. Because the Greek scale was built from pykna, tight groups of three notes, each natural has a first sharp a quarter tone up and a second sharp a semitone up, which is the three-row grid above.

Many of the signs are simply Greek letters, and Unicode did not encode those twice; you write them with the ordinary letters from the Greek Letters collection. That is why the characters here carry numbers with gaps (vocal 1 to 24 and 50 to 54, instrumental 1, 2, 4, 5, 7 and so on) and why some cells of the grid are empty. Rhythm had its own marks: a line over a note held it for two, three, four or five time units, and the triseme 𝉂, tetraseme 𝉃 and pentaseme 𝉄 here are the combining musical forms of marks that also exist as metrical symbols; the leimma 𝉅 is a rest. The most famous complete piece, the Seikilos epitaph of the 1st or 2nd century AD, a short drinking song cut on a tombstone found near Aydın in Turkey, can be typed with exactly these characters, as can the Delphic Hymns of 128 BC. The block was added in Unicode 4.1 in 2005.

How to copy these symbols and which fonts show them

Tap any sign in the grid to copy it, then paste it into a document, a chat or a web page. The Byzantine Musical Symbols block (U+1D000 to U+1D0FF) has been in Unicode since version 3.1 in 2001 and Ancient Greek Musical Notation (U+1D200 to U+1D24F) since 4.1 in 2005, so the characters are stable and travel anywhere Unicode text goes. In Microsoft Word type the code and press Alt+X (1D046 Alt+X gives 𝁆); on a Mac open the Character Viewer with Control+Command+Space and search for byzantine, znamenny or greek vocal; on Linux Ctrl+Shift+U followed by the code works in most apps.

What you see depends on the font, and this is the honest part. No phone or operating system ships a font for these blocks by default. For the Byzantine and ancient Greek signs install the free Noto Music, which covers both blocks together with the Western Music Note Symbols; Symbola covers them too. For Znamenny, Noto Music does not help: use the free Mezenets Unicode, Voskresensky or Smolensky fonts from the Slavonic Computing Initiative (the Ponomar Project), or a recent Symbola. Until a font is installed the signs show as empty boxes, which is a font problem, not a broken character. Chanters should also know that most Byzantine chant typesetting fonts and programs predate this block and use their own layouts, so a score made with them will not paste as these characters, and these characters will not open in them; the Unicode signs are for text about the music, for teaching tables, dictionaries and posts, rather than for engraving a full score.

Two look-alike warnings. The thin horizontal ison 𝁆 and oligon 𝁇 resemble dashes and underscores, and the Byzantine bar lines 𝃚 𝃛 resemble the Western ones 𝄅 𝄀; keep them apart in anything searchable, because they are different characters. And many Znamenny marks and the three Greek duration marks are combining characters, so a bare 𜼇 or 𝉂 pasted into a sentence will climb onto the letter before it. Put a space or a neume in front when you want it to stand alone.