A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography

Egon Wellesz was a musicologist, and this Clarendon Press book is his foundational mid twentieth century academic study of Byzantine liturgical music and hymnography, and it remains, decades later, a standard reference for the field. Its strength is that Wellesz combined musicological training with close engagement with the Byzantine chant manuscript tradition, at a time when this repertoire was far less studied in Western scholarship than it is now. Its limit, already noted on the source record itself, is age, later musicological scholarship has refined some of Wellesz's technical readings of the notation and repertoire, so a claim about the current state of Byzantine musicology on a specific technical point is safer checked against more recent research alongside this still foundational study.