Legacies are, by definition, simultaneously ends and beginnings, inheritances and opportunities to build and strike out in new directions. I would argue, however, that it is also extremely important not to minimize the sense of continuity between Byzantium and its successors, dispersed as they were and it is for this reason that I prefer to speak of a “Byzantine legacy”. Indeed, it was during the final period before the Fall of Constantinople that the word “Hellene”, with all its implications of a direct connection with the world of Ancient Greece, rather than Byzantine civilization, came to be revived (see Runciman 1970, pp. 85), have proposed the use of the term “neo-Hellenic”, rather than “neo-Byzantine” or “post-Byzantine”, for the period of musical creation from the 16th century up to 1820, arguing that this phenomenon was part of the more general renaissance of modern Greece and its culture. To look more specifically at music, it is obvious that after the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, the culture of the City would be continued in more remote places of the Empire, by the spread of folk music, and by means of the continuation of Byzantine chant in the ceremonies of the Orthodox Church, generally referred to as “post-Byzantine.” Some writers, such as Dimitri Conomos ( 1988, p. And this is not a simple case of nostalgia it is a phenomenon far more deeply entrenched, etched into the cultural memory of a number of what we now call nations.

The force with which this continuity has manifested itself, and continues to manifest itself, is astonishing. It is that cultural continuity with which I am concerned here it is something visible in literature-one might think of the literary work of Pajsije I, Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church from 1614 to 1647, or the poetry of Ivan Lalić (1931–1996)-and the plastic arts, and audible (though subject, of course, to changing ideas of performance practice and the simple fact that there are no recordings to which we may refer) in music. There was nostalgia for a lost, glorious empire, nostalgia for a lost Orthodox world, and a desire for freedom from enslavement. Thus, the idea of “Byzance après Byzance” (the phrase is the title of a book by the Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga, published in Bucharest in 1935, see Iorga 1971) has always been a potent one in the Balkans, in which area the Byzantines did indeed find refuge, for obvious reasons of cultural continuity and nostalgia. When Byzantium the city disappeared, as it did to all intents and purposes in 1453, when it was conquered by the Turks and vast numbers of its inhabitants had fled, it was natural that there would be not only attempts to reconstitute it politically (and spiritually), but a continuation of its cultural inheritance in places where Byzantines had found refuge.

Byzantine music notation software