Armenian Chant (Sharakan)

Sharakan is both a genre and a book. The word names the hymns proper to the Armenian Apostolic office, and it also names the collection, the Sharaknots, in which they are gathered and assigned to the days of the year. The repertory is sung unaccompanied, in unison, in Classical Armenian, and it belongs to the canonical hours as much as to the eucharistic liturgy, which is why an Armenian congregation meets it across the whole week rather than only on a Sunday.

Its growth can be followed through named authors, which is unusual for a chant tradition of this age. The earliest hymns are assigned to Mesrop Mashtots and his circle in the fifth century, the generation that gave Armenian its alphabet and its written liturgy. Later strata carry the names of Catholicos Komitas in the seventh century, Grigor Narekatsi in the tenth and Nerses Shnorhali in the twelfth, whose contribution is large enough that some manuscripts organise sections of the book around him. By the fourteenth century the collection was treated as closed, and hymns written after that point sit outside it.

Because the hymns are keyed to the calendar rather than composed as free standing pieces, a sharakan is not usually sung on its own. It attaches to a canticle, a feast or a saint's commemoration, and its text takes for granted the reading it accompanies. That dependence is part of what makes the corpus hard to hear outside the office, and it is why concert performance of Armenian chant, common since the twentieth century, presents the material in an order the book itself never uses.

Armenian scribes began writing chant signs, called khaz, above the text from about the ninth century, and the system grew steadily more elaborate until the manuscripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries carry dozens of distinct signs. What those signs told a singer to do is no longer known. The notation was not a staff and did not fix pitch. It appears to have cued melodic gestures and ornaments a singer already carried in the ear, and when the oral chain that supplied that knowledge was broken, the signs stopped being readable.

The nineteenth century produced a replacement rather than a decipherment. Hambardzum Limonjian devised a new Armenian notation in the 1810s, borrowing shapes from the khaz signs but assigning them fresh and explicit meanings, and the chant as it was then sung at Constantinople and Etchmiadzin was written down in that system. Nearly all printed Armenian chant descends from those transcriptions, so what is sung today is a nineteenth century record of a living practice rather than a reading of the medieval books.

Komitas Vardapet, the priest and musicologist who did more than anyone to collect and publish Armenian sacred and folk music before 1915, worked on khaz for years and did not solve it. The problem has been taken up repeatedly since, most systematically by Robert At'ayan, without producing an agreed reading. It remains one of the open problems of Eastern Christian musicology, and the atlas records it as open rather than repeating any of the proposed solutions as settled.