Summary
The Orthodox church chant from South Transylvania is a variant of the Byzantine chant. It was transmitted almost exclusively orally until 1890, when priest Dimitrie Cunțan published a volume in Western notation containing the most used pieces. The volume was used as a handbook for the cantors ever since, but oral tradition has continued to play a very important role even today.
In this paper, I present the main issues to be investigated in order to achieve a theory of modes for the South Transylvania chant, pointing to a few particular aspects of this music. Research has to take into account both written sources and audio recordings. For the latter, one can use the database including recordings from about 100 cantors (age 29 to 87) made in 2002–2005 by Rev. Vasile Grăjdian and his assistants.
The theory of modes should not confine only to the description of scales, dominant degrees, cadences, unstable degrees etc. It would be useful for such a theory to also list the formulas of every mode and reveal the rules of concatenating the formulas in a performance, and to describe the significant variations of tempo that are embedded in these formulas and modes as well.
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