Survival among the Old Believers

Znamenny chant's dominant position in Russian Orthodox worship was broken by the liturgical reforms Patriarch Nikon introduced in the mid seventeenth century, part of a wider program to align Russian church practice more closely with contemporary Greek norms, which among other changes encouraged the adoption of Western style polyphonic singing and staff notation in place of the older unison, znamenny tradition in much of mainstream Russian church life.

A substantial portion of the Russian church rejected Nikon's reforms and split away as the Old Believers, a schism, the Raskol, that produced lasting and often severely persecuted communities who deliberately preserved pre reform liturgical practice, znamenny chant included, as a central marker of their distinct identity and continuity with the older Russian church. Because of this history, znamenny chant today survives most directly and continuously not in the mainstream Russian Orthodox Church, where polyphonic and other later chant styles came to predominate, but among Old Believer communities who never abandoned it, alongside a separate strand of scholarly and monastic revival interest that has grown within mainstream Russian Orthodoxy in more recent generations as musicologists and some monastic communities have worked to recover and perform the older repertoire. The chant's continued Old Believer use makes it, unlike many of the historical chant systems described in this section, a genuinely unbroken living tradition rather than one reconstructed entirely from manuscripts and scholarship.