Byzantine chant is the sung prayer of the Orthodox Church. It’s not background music or performance. It’s the liturgy itself lifted into melody.
When you walk into an Orthodox service for the first time, you won’t hear a piano or guitar. You won’t hear four-part harmony like a Baptist choir. You’ll hear voices, sometimes one chanter, sometimes a small choir, singing in unison. The melody moves in ways that might sound unfamiliar at first, almost Middle Eastern to some ears. That’s because it is. Byzantine chant comes from the ancient Christian communities of Constantinople, Jerusalem, and yes, Antioch itself. It carries the musical DNA of Jewish temple worship, early Christian psalmody, and the Greek-speaking world of the Eastern Mediterranean.
The theology matters here. We don’t just say prayers and then sing songs about them. The prayers are sung. The Psalms are chanted. The Gospel readings are intoned. Everything becomes melody because we believe worship is meant to lift us toward heaven, and the angels don’t speak, they sing. St. John Chrysostom, who served as Patriarch of Constantinople, wrote extensively about how chant unites the congregation in a single voice of prayer. It’s not about entertainment. It’s about transformation.
The Eight Tones
Byzantine chant organizes itself around something called the Octoechos, which means “eight tones.” These aren’t keys like C major or D minor. They’re modes, complete musical systems, each with its own scale, melodic patterns, and emotional character. The Church cycles through all eight tones over eight weeks, then starts again. So if you come to Vespers on a Saturday night, you’ll hear the hymns of whatever tone we’re in that week.
Each tone has what’s called an ison, a drone note that one or more chanters hold continuously while others sing the melody over it. If you’ve heard bagpipes, you know what a drone sounds like. It creates a foundation, a kind of sonic anchor. The melodies themselves use intervals smaller than what a piano can play, microtones that give Byzantine chant its distinctive sound. You can’t really play it on Western instruments, which is one reason we don’t use them.
Some hymns are simple, one note per syllable. Others are elaborate, with long melodic runs on a single vowel. The Cherubic Hymn during the Divine Liturgy often gets this treatment, slow, ornate, giving space for the priest to cense the church and prepare the gifts. It’s not showing off. It’s creating a moment where time seems to stop and you remember you’re standing at the threshold of heaven.
What You’ll Hear at St. Michael’s
In our parish, you’ll typically hear a small choir or a few chanters leading the responses. Ideally, Byzantine chant is antiphonal, two groups alternating back and forth, or the chanters singing verses with the congregation responding. That’s how they did it in Antioch in the fourth century. These days most parishes work with whoever shows up and can carry a tune, but the principle remains. Everyone participates. You’re not an audience.
You don’t need to know the melodies right away. Start with the responses you’ll hear every week: “Lord, have mercy,” “Grant this, O Lord,” “To Thee, O Lord.” Listen for a few weeks and you’ll find yourself joining in. The tones repeat. The patterns become familiar. Before long, you’re praying with your voice without thinking about it.
Coming from a Protestant background, you might miss hymnals and four-part harmony. That’s normal. But give Byzantine chant time. It’s doing something different. It’s not trying to create a emotional moment or get a song stuck in your head. It’s forming you, week after week, in the prayers and theology of the Church. The Octoechos means you’re never singing the same thing the same way two weeks in a row, but you’re also never lost, the structure holds you.
Some Antiochian parishes chant everything in English now, which helps newcomers follow along. Others mix English, Arabic, and Greek depending on their community. The melodies themselves cross languages. A tone is a tone whether you’re singing in Beaumont or Beirut.
If you want to hear what Byzantine chant sounds like before you visit, Ancient Faith Radio streams services from various Orthodox parishes. But honestly, you need to be in the room. You need to feel the ison in your chest and hear the voices rising around you. That’s when it stops being strange foreign music and starts being prayer.
