The Antiochian Archdiocese in North America uses both Byzantine chant and four-part choral harmony, mostly in English.
Most of what you’ll hear is in English, though some parishes keep Arabic for certain hymns. Practice varies: many parishes sing without instruments, and some use an organ. What developed here is something distinctly Antiochian-American: Byzantine chant sung in English, alongside four-part choral settings of Byzantine and Russian melodies that choirs can read from standard notation.
Walk into most Antiochian parishes and you’ll hear a choir singing the responses to the Divine Liturgy in English, using melodies that might be Russian one moment and Byzantine the next. The chanter, often standing at the front, might use Arabic for certain hymns, but even that’s becoming rare. What you’re hearing is the product of decades of work by people who had to figure out how to worship in a language their children actually spoke.
How We Got Here
In the mid-20th century, Antiochian parishes faced a problem. Arabic was fading as the community’s primary language. The second generation didn’t speak it well enough to pray in it. So the Archdiocese started holding conventions where they’d standardize English settings of the liturgy. Choir festivals became laboratories for this work. People would bring their parish’s version of a hymn, they’d compare notes, and eventually certain settings became standard across the jurisdiction.
The 1990s brought more standardization. The Standing Conference of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of America (SCOBA) agreed on a common English translation of the Divine Liturgy in 1993, and in 1995 the music was set to melodies from Antiochian, Greek, and OCA traditions, though SCOBA soon went on hiatus and that project did not go forward. The Archdiocese computerized its music library around the same time, making it easier for parishes to access the same repertoire.
What emerged is two traditions used side by side. One is four-part choral music in English, much of it harmonized from Byzantine and Russian melodies, that sounds familiar to American ears while remaining distinctly Eastern in flavor. The other is Byzantine chant in English: Basil Kazan’s Byzantine Project standardized the chants across the Archdiocese and led to the formation of Byzantine choirs.
What It Sounds Like in Practice
On a Sunday morning at an Antiochian parish you may hear a choir singing four-part harmony from Western notation, Byzantine chant, or both. The Cherubic Hymn might use a Russian melody one week and a Byzantine one the next. The Entrance Hymn, often the setting by Archpriest Dmitri Razumovsky, has become nearly universal. Communion hymns vary more widely, with some parishes favoring simpler Byzantine melodies and others using more elaborate Russian-style settings.
The chanter handles the verses of psalms and certain variable hymns. Some chanters learn Byzantine notation and the eight-tone system that structures Orthodox hymnody. The Archdiocese’s Sacred Music Institute holds classes in both Byzantine chant and choral music. Other chanters work from Byzantine tones set to English in Western notation.
Many parishes sing without instruments, treating singing as prayer rather than musical performance. The theology matters here: we’re not entertaining anyone or creating atmosphere. We’re praying. The music serves the text, making the words of the liturgy more memorable and the prayer more fervent.
Why It Works for Converts
If you grew up Baptist or Methodist in Southeast Texas, Antiochian music might be your easiest entry point into Orthodox worship. You can read the notation if you’ve sung in any church choir. The four-part harmony sounds churchy without being totally foreign. And it’s in English, so you can actually understand what’s being sung.
That’s not accidental. The people who developed this repertoire knew they were creating music for a Church that would include lots of converts. They wanted something that was authentically Orthodox but accessible to American ears. The result isn’t a compromise, it’s an inculturation. The Orthodox Church has always worshiped in the local language, from Greek to Slavonic to Arabic. English is just the latest chapter.
You can find the Archdiocese’s Sacred Music Library on antiochian.org, with scores for everything from festal hymns to funeral services. It’s worth exploring if you’re curious about what you’ll be singing once you’re chrismated. Or just show up for Vespers on a Saturday evening and listen. The music will start making sense in your body before it makes sense in your head.
