The Byzantine Girls, Mary and Nancy, present to you on Myspace what we sing every Sunday at our church, St. Nicholas Antiochian Orthodox Church - the ancient hymns of our faith. It has been our ministry to offer our voices for the glory of God, and we hope that these selected hymns might bring you closer to Him. We, along with several other families in the Shreveport area, founded St. Nicholas Orthodox Church so that the beautiful Greek Orthodox faith could be presented to Americans in their native language - and so we could understand our prayers as well. The hymns presented on this page are just a sampling of the vast number of hymns the Orthodox Church uses throughout the liturgical year. We are not professionally trained musicians; we sing with our hearts as much as with our mouths. We ask forgiveness for any mistakes we may have made and hope you enjoy experiencing the sound of Byzantine chant.
Influences
The singing group, Eikona, who are three sisters...their work and angelic voices heavily influence our choices of music, and we do a lot of their settings at Pascha (Easter). We also love Anonymous 4 and their seamless harmony. MARY: "The St. Vladimir Seminary Octets have provided me with inspiration and nurtured my love of Orthodox hymnography. Also, I fell in love with the holy sounds of chanting I heard in monasteries in Greece, especially on the islands of Patmos and Aegina." NANCY: "The ethereal and spiritual sound of the chant in the Churches I visited in the Holy Land stirred my soul and initiated my desire to learn this music in the hope of serving the Lord. My husband knows all the Byzantine tones (he often chants in the shower!) and has been my greatest critic; his cousin is the psalter in their ancient Orthodox Church in Galilee." We are also members of and deeply love the St. Romanos Chorale, directed by Dr. William Attra based in Houston, Tx. It is a pan-Orthodox group of talented men and women who perform all types of Orthodox music in several languages from Arabic to Russian!
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This page was started as a way for us to share the beloved ancient hymns of the Orthodox Church with others. Although our name is "Byzantine Girls", our style could probably be called Byzantine with an American flair. While true Byzantine chanters throughout Greece and the Middle East learn their craft by studying under an accomplished psalter (or chanter) and sing from memory adding their own personal interpretation to the hymn, we use sheet music. The Antiochian Archdiocese of North America undertook and completed what they call "The Byzantine Project", which was done by a wonderful man named Basil Kazan. He essentially put volumes of Byzantine chants to Western musical notation so the art of Byzantine chanting could be carried to the new mission churches in the US, as well as established churches that wanted to rediscover that style of music.
We have also done several hymns with Russian settings, meaning Western harmonies instead of the Byzantine 1-line melody and an "ison", which is a sustaining note sung to give the chanter a reference point...the ison in our chants move occasionally, which is a relatively recent development in Byzantine chant.
We hope you enjoy our hymns...we are working on several other ones as well, which will be added to our page at a later date.
The Byzantine Girls
...the stroll upon the mystical and magical landscapes of the Moon continues... The video has been filmed with a digital camera in slow motion; the authors of the video came up with a special mechanism and technique which rotate the box, the central location of the video. Thus capturing the motion, and giving the inanimate an animate feature inside of the video. The camera is rotated simultaneously with the box, and the image stays static... The Dvojnica Video... on YouTube... SOON!
Dear friends, Έχω uploaod τρία νέα κομμάτια του επόμενου CD μου I've uploaod three new pieces of my next CD J'ai téléchargé trois pièces de mon nouveau CD à paraître bientôt... Cordialement, Frédéric
I love your page, your voices and your music. WOW. How much I have missed this. Thank you so much for adding my page! AGAPI SE OLLOUS! Sophoula... The Gypsy Poet.. :)
