I had a fond idea of using the opportunity of the CD to provide a little education about the eight tones. But I got the education myself, and found out that the tones weren’t as I expected them to be. I think there’s some info that might be worth the read. But first, let’s catch up on what you may not know.

Eight tones? Whassat?
Basically, there’s a musical sequence always in progress at your church and all Orthodox churches. On any given week, the Church has prescribed a certain tone for that week. We were on tone 5 this week; next week we’ll be on tone 6.
.
Wait. That sounds like …
Yep, that’s right. Another cycle the Orthodox Church uses to measure time. So in addition to being somewhere in the daily cycle of worship services (for monastics and other tough guys), weekly cycle of services (for all of us) and the yearly cycle of feasts, the Church keeps an 8-week cycle, rotating through a different tone each week and then starting over again.
.
I’m getting dizzy.
Just look at the horizon and think about holy bread.
.
What the heck is a ‘tone’?
This is a little hard to describe for us Westerners, because we expect to hear that a tone must be a certain song or a certain melody. If only it were that simple. A tone is really more of a set of rules for building an endless number of songs and melodies. It’s as if a song were a toy airplane you bought at a store and a tone was a set of Tinkertoys that allowed you to make planes, trains and automobiles. There are limitations to Tinkertoys — there are certain things you can and can’t do with them — but how you put them together is up to you.
.
What’s the advantage of that?
As with the Tinkertoys, you get the maximum flexibility to make the music fit the words, rather than the other way around. And a chanter can sing in whatever range they sing best.

.
Sounds complicated. Where’d it come from?
Not sure. On one hand, the PSALM archives say that it all sprung out of the Church’s tradition of repeating the entire Pascha service each day of Bright Week, from Sunday to Sunday — eight days. That theory holds that those in the early Church just began varying the sound of the service, and that that grew into the cycle of eight being repeated all year long.

But one chanting instructor I asked said that it’s simply a matter of a Greek tradition that was used by the early Church, in the same way they borrowed some of the elements of Jewish temple worship.

So those are two possibles. Maybe there are more.
.
So what do the Tinkertoys for this week’s tone look like?
It changes depending on whether you’re doing Russian-, Byzantine- or Greek-style music. In the Antiochian Church, it’s a major scale, it parks temporarily on the note that corresponds to ‘do’ on the old do-re-mi scale you might’ve learned in school, but then — like a lot of tones — it always ends on a certain home note that gives it that “all done” sound. There are certain little musical phrases that set it apart. Tone 5 tends to be quick and lilting. If you can think of the song about halfway through Orthros that starts “Blessed art Thou, O Lord. Teach me Thy statutes” (which is called the evlogitaria, BTW), that is classic Tone 5. If that’s too far to cast your mind back, then click on the song link HERE. That’s also Tone 5.
.
I don’t get it. If we were in Tone 5 this week, why didn’t everything sound like this?
Well, changing the set of rules for how the music is made from one week to the next probably sounded like a much better idea in the early centuries of the Church, when the services were all chanted. These days, with both chanters and choirs doing the honors, it isn’t really feasible to do the whole service in one tone (though I’ve heard there are some people out there working on it).

If you only went to Divine Liturgy today, the only way you had of knowing what tone the church was in that week was the hymn that the choir sung at Little Entrance (when the priest carries the Gospel Book to the altar). Unless it’s a special week, that hymn is a short hymn on the theme of the resurrection and it is done in the tone of the week.
.
On the other hand, if you made it to Orthros where more things are chanted, you heard quite a number of songs in Tone 5. The song that starts “God is the Lord”, the long song at the end that begins “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord” and a lot of chanting in-between were all in Tone 5. Next week those will all be in Tone 6.
.
And those songs are always improvised on the spot?
Not always. Slowly but surely, the Church is starting to have more of those hymns written out, transcribed from a chanter who knew what he was doing.
.
So all the chanted music at Orthros this week was done in Tone 5?
Wellll … no. Not all the chanted music ends up in the tone of the week. Sometimes it changes tones. In the Antiochian Church today at Orthros the long chanted portion at the end went from being in Tone 5 to Tone 1 and then 3, 1 and 8. That’s why you may hear your chanter sing a quick little ditty to himself before he starts. He’s using a musical key called an apichima to try to recall the tone before he starts. It doesn’t always work, and that’s why you also see your chanter making faces.
.
Why does the tone change like that?
I’ve never been able to find out. Sometimes the tone changes so that the chant can sound like one of the Church’s particular hymns. But that’s not always the case, so it goes into the Big Orthodox Box of Who-knows.
.
So would a non-chanter be able to hear when the tone changes?
Not always, and this is what I didn’t understand until just recently. I always assumed that the eight tones all sound really distinct from each other and that with practice, anyone could hear the difference between them. But that turns out not to be true. Or at least, the distinctions are sometimes so minute that only a really trained chanting instructor would be able to tell. Tones 2 and 6 are kind of hard to miss, because they’re the most “Byzantine-sounding.” But Tone 4, which gets used a lot, can borrow some of the, um, Tinkertoys from these two tones on occasion, and then of course it sounds all 2- and 6-like. And Tones 3, 5 and 7 almost always sound the same.
.
You’re kidding. Well, so if they end up sounding the same, then what’s the point?
I was afraid someone would ask me that. It is a little hard to put your finger exactly on what’s right about an elaborate and difficult scheme of music that ends up being rather undetectable to the average listener. All I can say is that in my humble opinion, there is something going on that affects the music, even if it is very nuanced. You may not hear the difference between Tone 2 and Tone 6, but that age-old system is at work on the chanter all the same, and it may just allow you to hear something much more important — the words. I’m not saying that it’s not possible for chanters to go wrong both by getting too elaborate or just plain goofing up. But that’s what you might call pilot-error — the system as handed down by the Church is still one of its many jewels.