The nativity of Christ is the easiest Christian holiday for people to relate to since, after all, we were all born. The music dedicated to Christmas and created over the centuries has as many themes as the Gospel narratives. There is the good news from the angels, the gifts of the Magi, the joy of the coming of the Savior into the world.

In what way is music a language, if it cannot be translated to other languages? After all, every attempt to paraphrase music or our impressions from it seems to make its beauty and the uniqueness of its effect on us collapse and fall flat. Such is the case with poetry as well. A work of art is not paraphrasable, yet one constantly feels an urge to paraphrase it, to talk about it in order to enter a dialogue with it, and to convey one’s own impressions from it.

Translated by Sergei Brun

We will probably never know where Dante drew the line in his Divine Comedy between his own belief and fiction (in the modern sense of the word). It is quite possible that, for him, such a distinction would not have made any sense. In any case, we can be sure he was, at the same time, totally serious and totally free in his writing.

The 1930s saw the beginning of a deeply creative ecclesial movement in France known as the Église catholique orthodoxe de France (ECOF). Born of the encounter between the new Russian immigrants to France and a group of French Catholics who sought a return to the tradition of the undivided church of the early Roman empire, this group, little known to most contemporary Orthodox, brought forth a liturgically rich movement that left a significant imprint on French liturgical music.

Before I was a teacher, a mother, or much of anything, really, I was a pianist. My initial piano lessons were the result of a Greek mother’s pragmatism: my older brother wanted piano lessons, and if she was driving one of us, she was driving us both. But I fell in love, and begged my father to continue when my brother’s interests quickly waned.

A few years ago, Vladimir Morosan composed an unusual piece of music based on the pentatonic scale, a version of the Paschal Troparion in what might be called an “Appalachian” style. A simple enough story—but as always, there is a backstory.

My first experience with an Orthodox choir was in my senior year of college in New Britain, Connecticut. I had walked into another world. The atmosphere was a haze of incense. The light was dim as it filtered through the enormous stained glass windows on both sides, but a glow came from the countless candles lit by the worshippers as they entered the church. Then I heard the choir, and my life changed. I would search for that sound again and again for a very long time.

Translated by Manana Matiashvili
Edited by Elizabeth Scott Tervo

Often, telluric points are linked to a person’s passage on earth. Places where a person lived, loved, and suffered can tell a great deal about her. Marie Struve was born in Nice, a few steps from its Russian cathedral, where her father, Alexander Eltchaninoff, served as a priest for the large Russian immigrant community. She learned to speak Niçois, Russian, and French at the same time. Later in life, she acquired a lemon tree that helped her remember the Mediterranean town of her childhood.

To “transcend the textual and plunge into the rich sensorial realm of the past culture of Byzantium”: this is the alluring promise of the recent album by the vocal ensemble Cappella Romana. The recording presents a series of chants for the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross selected to demonstrate the stylistic breadth of sacred music sung throughout the Byzantine Empire’s thousand-year history.

Originally published in 1959, Transfiguring Time, one of the early works of the French Orthodox theologian Olivier Clément, finally appears in Jeremy Ingpen’s lucid and lovely translation. Ingpen also provides a useful introduction, which helps the reader become acquainted both with the author’s person and with the style and outlook of his writings—a welcome addition, as Clément’s prose is notoriously dense and challenging.