Клара Мечкова: „Трифонията в тетрафоничната музикална система и в живота на византийското осмогласие"
Klara Mechkova: “Triphony and Triphonic Musical System in the Life of the Byzantine Octoechos“

Summary/Abstract: Klara Mechkova: “Triphony and Triphonic Musical System in the Life of the Byzantine Octoechos“ Plovdiv: Astarta, 2018, 291 p. (ISBN 978-954-350-265-3) In Klara Mechkova’s new monograph the topic of triphony has for the first time ever become an object of independent research. Triphony has been set forth as a subsystem within the system of tetraphony, which is a basic structural unit of the Byzantine musical system. Triphony creates new points of sound support, reevaluates functional relationships and provides unlimited opportunities for unfolding the melos in the narrow tonal range of tetraphonic voice organization. The musical sources employed in the study of triphony include the manuscript books, rendered in Middle Byzantine notation of the sticherarion type from the 13th and 14th centuries, and kept in Bulgarian repositories – the Centre for SlavoByzantine Studies “Prof. Ivan Dujčev” and the Central Historical and Archaeological Institute. The eighth-mode “Tearchio neumati” sticheron has been analyzed thoroughly on the basis of nine manuscript samples from the 12th-14th centuries. The subject of triphony gets examined on two levels – structural and functional. The terminology is based on source texts, but the author enhances it with terms of her own coinage, such as monophony, complex (compound) triphony, and triphonic martirii. The emblematic forms of triphony, such as nana, nenano and legetos, have been explicated through the phenomenon of “uneven fourths”. Two didactic handbooks, namely “rhomboid graphic” by John Plusiadinoss (15th c.) and the diagram by John Laskaris (15th c.), have been deciphered for the very first time.

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