Interaction with the Eastern Orthodox Church

In nineteenth-century Ingria and Finnish Karelia, the Lutherans lived alongside the Eastern Orthodox population. The Eastern Orthodox Church was also the state church of the Russian Empire, with a strong position in state and local life. It is therefore worth asking whether the proximity of the Eastern Orthodox Church also influenced the Lutheran liturgy and congregational singing.

In Eastern Orthodox worship, music plays a very important role, as almost all texts are performed by reciting, i.e. singing. The practice was inherited from the fourth century, when liturgical singing among groups of singers was arranged hierarchi-cally to reflect both ecclesial status and musical gifts: while trained and ordained members of the lower clergy sang the major part of the liturgy, groups of less mu-sically skilled singers, including sometimes the entire congregation, sang only short responses or refrains (Lingas 2008, 917). The Orthodox do not accept the use of musical instruments in services for two reasons. Firstly, according to Orthodox be-lief, the human voice is a perfect source of musical sound created by God, intimately connected to language and efficient in prayer, and its way to enhance audition and affective experience is unique. Secondly, musical instruments as human creations cannot bring forth ideas crystallised into words and are associated with pagan ritual and such worldly pursuits as dance and work (Engelhardt 2016, 658).

In Ingria, the question was not just about denominations but also ethnic groups.

In the mid-nineteenth century, more than 80,000 Ingrian Finns belonged to the Lutheran Church, while just over 15,000 Izhorians and 5,000 Votes were Eastern Orthodox. The numbers of these latter groups decreased further towards the end

of the century, while the number of Lutherans in Ingria and Saint Petersburg in-creased to almost 150,000 as a result of the migration from Finland. In contrast, the spread of the Russian population to Ingria strengthened the position of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and by the end of the century, Ingrian Finns clearly became a minority in some areas (Murtorinne 2011, 226).

It was typical in rural Ingria for different national groups to live mostly in their own villages, which also kept Lutheranism and Eastern Orthodoxy apart from one an-other, and little was known about any kind of movement similar to the present-day ecumenism. There were at least two reasons for this: the poor Russian language skills of Ingrian Finns and legislation on religions. It was forbidden to move from the Eastern Orthodox Church to another denomination (Murtorinne 2011, 226).

According to the 1832 Russian Lutheran Church Law, missionary and converting work was forbidden to the Lutheran Church, and all children born in mixed mar-riages were to be baptised to be members of the Orthodox Church (Russian Luther-an Church Law 1832, § 4, 5, 254 Luther-and 255). Despite the high hurdles, these denom-inations also influenced each other to some extent in Ingria (see Murtorinne 2011, 228–232). Nevertheless, the only reference to any impact on congregational singing was the favouring of four-part singing in the 1832 Imperial Agenda, which was influenced by the Orthodox Church Music of the Saint Petersburg Court Chapel.

However, the effect was not direct, but as mentioned, toured via Prussia.

In Finland, the majority of the Orthodox population lived in Karelia; their share of the total population of the region was over ten per cent, while elsewhere in Finland it reached a maximum of two per cent. The population of some municipalities in Ladoga Karelia was almost exclusively Orthodox, but there were many Orthodox parishes in North Karelia and the Karelian Isthmus as well (Kansanaho 1986, 218–219). In the nineteenth century, also the Finnish Orthodox parishes were members of the imperial Russian Orthodox Church. In this church, the seventeenth-and-eighteenth-century de-velopment of composed choral music for liturgy led to the gradual exclusion of congre-gational singing. In the late nineteenth century, a counter movement was raised, and the rise of congregational singing started to be seen as quintessential to the spiritual growth of the ordinary people. A liturgical renewal movement in the Russian Orthodox Church focused on the concept of соборность [sobornost’] (communality or conciliarity), assem-bly of the faithful, whose goal was the democratisation of the church (Kostyuk 2015, 334–335; Takala-Roszczenko 2017, 166).

The highest church administration was in Saint Petersburg, and Russian religious magazines and newspapers were widely read in Finnish Orthodox parishes. These papers often reported on the Divine Services where congregational singing had been witnessed, as well as included writings by clergy and scholars about the aim to

‘return to the ancient practices of chanting’ (Kostyuk 2015). These thoughts were embraced among the Finnish Orthodox (Takala-Roszczenko 2018).

The need for Finnish-language church music began to emerge in the late nineteenth century. Divine Services had long been delivered in Church Slavonic, also in those parishes where the population predominantly spoke Finnish. This practice continued at least until the 1880s, despite the fact that as early as 1865, the Synod had ordered that Divine Services be delivered in Finnish in Finnish churches. One of the reasons for the situation was apparently the poor linguistic quality of the Finnish transla-tions of the worship texts. As for the liturgy, an improvement was made in 1881, when a Finnish translation of the Handbook of the Liturgy by Priest Sergei Okulov (1853–1944) was published (Solntsev 1903, 41, 43–44; Harri 2013, 33). There was a need for musical settings in Finnish as well; the melodies of the four-part liturgies, first published in Finnish in 1894, were mainly based on the liturgical melodies of the Saint Petersburg Court Chapel (Harri 2013, 35). Some of these melodies and four-part arrangements had been adopted in Prussian Union Agendas in the 1820s (Herbst 1968, 180–186; Feder 1975 [1964], 377). The proximity to the Saint Peters-burg Court Chapel certainly contributed to the fact that the four-part singing gained such a strong position in the 1832 Russian Lutheran Imperial Agenda, and through it, to some extent, in Old Finland. However, these four-part versions were hardly heard in the Finnish Orthodox Churches, as there were choirs only in the largest town parishes, whereas in the Karelian countryside, only the priest and churchwar-den participated in the liturgical singing (Takala-Roszczenko 2019b, 54).

According to Maria Takala-Roszczenko (2018), there was one characteristic contex-tual feature that distinguished the Finnish Orthodox from the Russian Church; the daily co-existence of the Orthodox with the Lutherans. In Finland, congregation-al singing was first and foremost associated with the Lutheran Church, which put the Orthodox enthusiasts for congregational singing in a challenging situation; how to promote something that many people considered an imitation of the Lutheran practice? A poet, writer and a Karelian culture activist, Iivo Härkönen (1882–1941;

1899, 83) wrote in Aamun Koitto magazine that many people longed for, and how beautiful it would have been if in the Orthodox churches there could also be con-gregational singing. According to Härkönen, it was permissible but hardly known;

people thought it was not permitted. Thus, Härkönen suggested: ‘Let all the hon-ourable deans take as their most important task to announce and explain to their congregation – precisely at church – that it is not forbidden to sing in the churches of the Greek faith, either.’¹²³ Härkönen considered congregational singing an ulti-mate source of spiritual gratification because ‘singing is a human’s holier language and with it, he can best express such feelings to God.’ Singing together would also have had practical benefits; it would have increased the motivation of an individual believer to attend services. When singing, ‘people would start to forget about ev-erything else; they would not look around or run around – they would go to church willingly,’ wrote Härkönen.

Loyalty to one’s own church was a key concern in the late nineteenth-century Finn-ish Orthodox Church. In many areas where the Orthodox population was a minori-ty, the well-organised Lutheran services with hymns sung by the congregation some-times drew participants from the Orthodox community as well. From an Orthodox perspective, this was considered a threat to church integrity. A report published in the Russian newspaper Финляндская Газета [Finlyandskaya gazeta] (16 September 1905) stated out the desirability of congregational singing in this respect by spec-ifying that where the congregation sang at the Divine Services, there always were more people present. In addition, due to the lack of opportunities to sing, people went to a neighbouring Lutheran church, which was, according to this report, high-ly undesirable. Thus, the urge to organise congregational singing in the Orthodox Church in the Finnish context arose from the Lutheran influence, or rather, from an attempt to resist it by offering the churchgoers a chance to sing in their own church.

Lutheran Hymnal had also found its way into the devotional life of many Eastern Orthodox homes in Finland, and a new Orthodox Prayer Book, published in 1893, was supposed to replace it (Takala-Roszczenko 2019a, 214).

123 ‘Siksi kaikki ne kunn. kirkkoherrat […] ottakoot tärkeimmäksi työkseen ilmoittaa ja selittää seurakuntalaisilleen – oikein kirkossa – että ei ole laulu kreikan-uskoisissa kirkoissakaan kiellet-tyä keltään.’ (Bolding by Härkönen.)

Takala-Roszczenko (2018) claims that in most cases, the concept of congregation-al singing was approached either from a practiccongregation-al or a spiritucongregation-al point of view. The need to organise congregational singing was often justified as having specific prac-tical benefits; it was educational and increased the individuals’ commitment to the church; it functioned as a missionary tool. The spiritual benefits, in turn, were main-ly considered to stem from the uplifting influence of the common prayer on an individual soul, the fulfilment of the individual’s need to pray through singing.

3.12 Conclusion

The standardisation process of congregational singing was put into action in mul-tiple ways in the Lutheran parishes in nineteenth-century Finland and Ingria. It was also supported by many phenomena of music culture. Although the efforts took place mainly locally, a network of translocal and transnational influences was also emerging.

At the local level, people built psalmodikons and harmoniums, churchwardens wrote their hand-written chorale books, singing rehearsals started, et cetera. Towards the end of the century, the General Synod began to take care of the local maintenance of cultural control in congregational singing and the Eastern Orthodox admired hymn-singing in Lutheran churches.

From a translocal perspective, there was an interaction between different towns, and influences spread to the countryside as well; the Hosanna choirs, regional song festivals, new mass movements and voluntary organisations, music publishing and enthusiasm for missionary and diaconal work with new spiritual songs were exam-ples of that. There were flows between Finland and Ingria as well: first, the Russian Imperial Agenda influenced south-eastern Finnish parishes, and there were attempts to sing in four parts; then, Finnish pastors brought psalmodikons to Ingria and started similar singing rehearsals there. Ingrian choirs visited Finnish song festivals, whereas Nordlund’s Chorale Book was in use in Ingria. Finnish music stores sold sheet music and instruments that they had obtained from Saint Petersburg, and Saint Petersburgian organists gave concerts in Finnish towns.

Neither Finland nor Ingria was isolated from Europe; there were many transnational connections. German musicians moved to Finland, the most influential of which were Richard Faltin and Fredrik Pacius. Both the psalmodikon and Vogler’s Hosanna came from Sweden, the first Finnish organ factories were founded by Danish-born J.A. Zach-ariassen and Swedish-born Anders Thulé, harmoniums were imported from Sweden, Germany and even America. Chorale books, collections of liturgical melodies and meth-ods for church-singing were compiled and edited according to Swedish and German examples. The curricula of churchwarden-organist schools as well as the Kolppana and Jyväskylä Seminaries followed the Central European and Baltic models, and the idea of song festivals was adopted from Central Europe and Estonia.

All of the above shows that the standardisation of congregational singing was a multilevel phenomenon. Ordinary parishioners usually encountered it locally; pas-tors, churchwardens, organists and teachers formed a translocal network; musicians, merchants and many members of the upper classes had transnational connections to Central Europe.