Poetic and Musical Structure
The Biblical odes are not identical in meter, and so although all the music is performed in the same mode each ode must comprise an individual composition. However, in the original Greek compositions, the irmos and troparia would by design be of the same meter and so could use the same melody. Acrostics would often be present as well, read down a canon's troparia, and sometimes involving the irmos as well if it was composed at the same time. The meter and acrostic would be given along with the canon's title.
This structure is now generally lacking in more recently composed canons, especially when the canons are composed in languages other than Greek to some setting other than Byzantine chant, and since it is now expected that large portions of the canon will be read rather than sung. Although some newer canons also contain acrostics, they are less frequent than they once were.
Read more about this topic: Canon (hymnography)
Famous quotes containing the words poetic and, poetic, musical and/or structure:
“There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers’ battle with the heavens that cover them. Snow, rain, and mist highlight, drench, or conceal the vast towers, but those towers, hostile to mystery and blind to any sort of play, shear off the rain’s tresses and shine their three thousand swords through the soft swan of the fog.”
—Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)
“His mind was strong and clear, his will was unwavering, his convictions were uncompromising, his imagination was powerful enough to invest all plans of national policy with a poetic charm.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“Sometimes a musical phrase would perfectly sum up
The mood of a moment. One of those lovelorn sonatas
For wind instruments was riding past on a solemn white horse.
Everybody wondered who the new arrival was.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“I’m a Sunday School teacher, and I’ve always known that the structure of law is founded on the Christian ethic that you shall love the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself—a very high and perfect standard. We all know the fallibility of man, and the contentions in society, as described by Reinhold Niebuhr and many others, don’t permit us to achieve perfection.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)