Censorship and Orthodox Church Music

The paper presents the idea of censorship as it has affected the music sung during the services of the Orthodox Church. It begins with an examination of what censorship has historically been in this regard, concentrating specifically on the context of its canonical basis and its application to the tradition of Byzantine chant, and progressing thereafter to specific examples that illustrate the way censorship of various kinds has influenced and shaped a number of traditions of Orthodox church music. Then it looks at other traditions of Orthodox sacred chant in the Balkans, namely those of Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia, and in particular the way in which the mere fact of the existence of sacred music was dealt with after the advent of communism. The last section deals with Russia, where the legal battle over the publication of Tchaikovsky’s setting of the Divine Liturgy became emblematic of the whole question of censorship in sacred music, and later attitudes in the Soviet Union towards the inconvenient existence of liturgical compositions as part of Russian cultural history.