John Koukouzelis

Origins and the imperial school

John was born at Dyrrachium on the Adriatic (the modern Durrës in Albania), in the later thirteenth century by the reckoning most scholarship now accepts; his father died while he was a child, and his pious mother, whom the Life remembers tenderly, raised him alone. Sent to Constantinople, the gifted boy entered the imperial school of music in the days of the emperor conventionally identified in the Life's horizon with Andronikos II Palaiologos (1282–1328). His famous surname was a schoolboys' joke that history kept: asked what he had eaten, the boy — whose first tongue was not Greek — answered "κουκιὰ καὶ ζέλια," broad beans and greens, and "Koukouzelis" he remained. His voice carried him to the head of the school and the favour of the emperor: he became the first singer of the court, admired, rewarded, and — the Life says — miserable, for his heart was elsewhere. When a marriage was arranged for him at the court's pleasure, the conflict came to a head.

Flight to Athos

Meeting a party of Athonite monks in the capital, John learned of the Holy Mountain and resolved on flight. He came to the Great Lavra of Athanasius on Athos in a poor man's clothes, gave no hint of who he was, and asked for the humblest of obediences; the monastery set him to herd its goats. In the wilderness, alone with the flock, he allowed himself at last to sing — and the Life gives Athos one of its loveliest scenes: a hermit, drawn by a sweetness of song that seemed more than human, found the goatherd singing with the animals standing still around him. Pressed, John confessed himself the vanished singer of the imperial court, and begged that his secret be kept; but it reached the abbot, and in time the emperor himself, who — the tradition says — grieved to lose him and consented to leave him to God. Freed from concealment, John lived thereafter in a kellion dedicated to the Archangels, keeping his goats no longer but the rule of an ascetic, and on Sundays and feasts he took his place in the right choir of the Lavra's church and sang.

The vision of the Theotokos

Once, after he had stood the vigil of the Akathist and sung the hymn before the icon of the Mother of God, John dozed in his stall, and the Theotokos appeared to him: "Rejoice, John, my child," she said. "Sing, and I will not forsake thee." And she placed in his hand a gold coin. He woke with the nomisma in his palm; it was hung upon her icon, and icon and coin alike became a wonder-working treasure of the Lavra — the icon is venerated there to this day under the name Koukouzelissa. The Life adds a second visitation: when long standing at vigil had rotted the flesh of his leg, the Mother of God appeared again and healed him with the words "Be whole henceforth." He foresaw his death, took leave of the brethren, and was buried, as he had asked, in the church of the Archangels that he had built; the day of his memory is October 1. A fellow singer of the Lavra, Gregory the Domestikos, who kept the same feast and of whom a like gift of a gold coin from the Theotokos is recorded, is commemorated with him.

The maistor of music

In the history of Byzantine chant John Koukouzelis stands second only to John of Damascus, and the tradition made the comparison itself, calling him a second beginning of church song. He was the great master — maistor, μαΐστωρ, the title the manuscripts give him — of the kalophonic ("beautified") style that crowned the last Byzantine centuries: the florid, melismatic elaboration of the chant in which a single verse of a psalm may blossom for many minutes, with inserted teretismata (syllables of pure melody) and anagrammatismoi (rewoven texts). He revised and ordered the chant repertory and its notation; his didactic composition the Mega Ison, setting the names of the notational signs to their own melodies, remained the singer's primer for centuries, and the mnemonic diagram of the modes transmitted with his method — the "wheel" (trochos) of Koukouzelis — passed into every corner of the Orthodox musical world. His settings and teaching pieces fill the Athonite musical codices from the fourteenth century onward; one fifteenth-century codex of the Great Lavra carries his portrait, and copies of his diagrams were still being made at Iviron in 1670. Through the psaltic art the whole Orthodox world — Greek, Slavic, Romanian, Albanian — claims a share in him, and with Romanus the Melodist, whose feast he shares, he is honoured as a patron of church singers.