Memorie orientali nella tradizione liturgico-musicale della Chiesa ravennate nei secoli XI-XII

Abstract

With the advent of Charlemagne’s ecclesiastical policy, a process of reducing the multiple rites of local liturgies and their respective melic traditions began. Although ritual diffraction continued to exist and be accepted, the liturgy of the Western Churches progressively aligned around the Roman-French rite and chant. This process was not without difficulties and resistance, especially within those liturgies which, as in the case of the Church of Ravenna, bore a strong historical debt to the East. The present article reconstructs the link between the Church of Ravenna and the other side of the Adriatic Sea, starting from the myths of its origin; it retraces the history of religious buildings linked to oriental worship, introduced mainly by the particular devotions of the imperial family; it records the presence of saints of oriental tradition in the calendar of liturgical-musical manuscripts starting from the 9th century as well as the presence of oriental rites from the 11th century; it also proposes, as traces of this permanence, the texts in Greek, and some in Latin, intoned for
the celebrations of Easter and Holy Week. Through the collation of sources of Western and Eastern Frankish tradition, finally, the present article points out for the first time some peculiarities of the “Greek” pieces present in the Ravenna witnesses and attests how in the 12th century the relationship between the Eastern Church and the Church of Ravenna was still alive in the musical tradition.