Axion Estin offers Byzantine Music course at St. Vladimir’s Seminary
YONKERS, NY [SVOTS Communications] – December 2014
In collaboration with The Axion Estin Foundation of New Rochelle, NY, Saint Vladimir’s Seminary here will be offering a public Continuing Education course on Byzantine Chant during the spring 2015 semester. The course will be offered under the expert instruction of Eleftherios Eleftheriadis, the Foundation’s inaugural Artist in Residence and the highly regarded Protopsaltis of Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox Shrine, Flushing, NY. He previously had served on the faculty of the Music School of Thessaloniki, Greece.
The course—open to the general public as well as seminarians—will be held Tuesday evenings, beginning February 3, 2015, on the seminary campus. The Beginner Class will meet from 6:45 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., while the Advanced Class will meet from 8:10 p.m. to 9:25 p.m. Classes will be conducted in Greek, with translation, and course materials include original music texts in Byzantine notation and the Greek language. A certificate will be awarded upon course completion.
“More than one-third of our alumni are in jurisdictions that use Byzantine music,” noted Archpriest Dr. Chad Hatfield, Saint Vladimir’s Chancellor/CEO. “In order to serve the Church and prepare our students for service in these ecclesial settings, we are not only continuing, but also amplifying, our Byzantine music course offerings for the 2014–2015 Academic Year. At the same time, we are offering superb continuing education for our alumni and friends.”
Students enrolled in the spring course may attend the “Looking East from Byzantium” concert at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium on Saturday, March 14, at 7:00 p.m. For information visit http://www.metmuseum.org/tickets.
For queries or to register for the course, contact Dr. Nicholas Reeves, Assistant Professor of Liturgical Music, at 914-961-8313 x 353 or byzantine@svots.edu .
In related news, Mr. Eleftheriadis will direct a “Byzantine Holiday Pop-Up” concert at The Metropolitan Museum’s Medieval Sculpture Hall at 2:00, 4:00 and 6:00 p.m. on Friday, December 19, 2014. The concert, which is free with museum admission, is being presented by the museum’s Department of Concerts and Lectures in cooperation with the Foundation.
Dr. Nicholas Reeves, who was recently recognized for his efforts by the Consul General of Greece in New York, Ambassador Georgios Iliopoulos, at a reception at the Greek Consulate, helped organize the concert. The pop-up concert was recently praised in The New Yorker and New York magazines, the latter of which called it “Brilliant.”
