Bringing Women's Voices Into an Iasi Cathedral Choir

Gavriil Musicescu spent nearly the whole of his working life in Iasi, teaching at its Conservatory from 1872 until his death in 1903, becoming the Conservatory's director in his final two years, and directing the choir of the city's Metropolitan Cathedral from 1876 onward. That cathedral appointment is where Ca pe Imparatul, his setting of the Cherubic Hymn sung at the Great Entrance of the Divine Liturgy, took shape, one of the compositions he wrote for the choir he was actively reforming at the time. The reform itself was not a small administrative change, Musicescu introduced female voices into the choir, the first time this had been done in a Romanian church choir, a decision that reshaped what a Romanian Orthodox cathedral choir could sound like going forward.

His compositional voice grew out of a genuine double education. Musicescu studied in Saint Petersburg before settling in Iasi, absorbing the Russian choral harmonic language that was then the dominant model for Orthodox Slavic church music, but he did not simply transplant it. His settings, this Cherubic Hymn among them, fold that Russian influenced harmony around the older melodic contours of Romanian psaltic chant, the Byzantine derived chanting tradition Romanian Orthodox worship had carried for centuries before any Western harmonic vocabulary reached it, producing a choral sound that is neither purely Russian nor purely Byzantine but distinctly his own version of Romanian church music.