Notația alfabetică și Antologhionul lui Petros Manouil Ephesios
Alphabetic Notation and the Antologhion of Petros Manouil Ephesios

Summary/Abstract: In the Library of the Romanian Academy in Bucharest there is an unpublished print from the first half of the nineteenth century, containing Greek‑language Byzantine musical repertories notated with a semiographic system alternative to the Chrysanthine one. The psaltic anthology is a collection of chants for Vespers, Matins, and the Divine Liturgy, printed in 1832 in Bucharest by Petros Manouil Ephesios (†1840) using his own musical notation, developed on the basis of an alphabetic system capable of accurately rendering the parameters of vocal performance: melody, dynamics, agogics, and ornamentation. This article examines several aspects: first, it explores the particularities of the alphabetic notation developed by the Constantinopolitan master; then it investigates the collection of chants from the perspective of hymn ordering and the possibilities for deciphering the musical material. Although Petros Ephesios’s system was never adopted on a large scale—being perceived as an unsuitable innovation for rendering the traditional music of the Orthodox Church—his semiographic model successfully records various orally transmitted decoding variants of the most common musical formulas.

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