Kassia: Music for Lent by the World’s Earliest Female Composer

cappella Romana
+ john michael boyer

Born in ninth-century Constantinople, Kassia the Nun was a precocious scholar, defender of icons, abbess, poet, and composer. She stands as the preeminent woman hymnographer of the Byzantine tradition. Her hymns — composed three centuries before Hildegard — still resound in Orthodox worship today, her voice especially echoing through Lent and Holy Week.

Her most famous work, known popularly as “The Hymn of Kassianí,” is a hauntingly beautiful lament of the anonymous woman who anointed Jesus’s feet before his crucifixion. Startlingly direct and deeply emotional, it has inspired countless settings over the centuries, which can last over four times the length of the medieval melody!

Her odes for Holy Saturday extol Christ’s descent into hell and liberation of captive souls; these hymns were later suppressed in favor of texts by male poets, restored here by Cappella Romana.

Discover Kassia’s medieval melodies as she herself sang them — before centuries of tradition shaped them into the versions Orthodox faithful know today.

Program

• Kassia the Nun
  • The Hymn of Kassianí
  • Odes for Holy Saturday