Paper short abstract:

The music of early Byzantine liturgies was not representative, but an embodied practice which shaped the experience of church members. This paper explores the meshwork of affordances out of which the experience of Christian religious music emerged.

Paper long abstract:

Neither materiality and representation are straightforwardly useful concepts for Byzantine religion; a tradition in which allegorical understandings of the world are placed front and centre, and one in which the divine is numinous, unknowable and immaterial. This paper explores the intersections between the new materiality and the immaterial nature of the Byzantine spiritual world (cf Buchli 2016). Through enquiring into the nature of Byzantine liturgical music I am questioning how phenomenology fits within the posthuman turn. Exploring human experience does not necessarily require us to privilege human agency, the relationships between architecture, feeling, allegory and the divine existed prior to the middle Byzantine moments in which they were experienced. I will discuss whether or not there is any such thing as a posthumanist phenomenology, or whether those terms are inherently self-contradictory, through considering the archaeology of song in Byzantine church spaces.