Orphic Hymns

Orphism was a Mediterranean mystery religion dating from circa the 5th century BCE and spanning about a thousand years. As with other sacred mystery schools in which initiates were sworn to secrecy, there is plenty we may never know about Orphism, but there are some surviving artworks and texts.

Orphic initiates believed in their own agency in co-creating their fates with the cosmos. They devoted themselves to remembering and realizing the divine immortality of the soul. Initiates of this tradition were buried with gold leaves inscribed with Greek prayers and directions for the afterlife, including the beautiful words, "I am a child of the Earth and starry Sky, but I belong to the family of the Heavens."

Orpheus was renowned for his ability to enchant people, nature, and deities with his music. He was said to move stones and charm gods through the power of his songs, as he sang and played on Apollo’s lyre. Even after his death, when he was torn apart by the Dionysian maenads, Orpheus’s head continued to sing as it floated to the sea and eventually found its final resting place in Lesbos. The island was believed to have been blessed with his musical inspiration. His bones were buried by the Muses below Mount Olympus, and the nightingales sang over his grave, while his lyre was immortalized as the constellation Lyra.

The Orphic hymns, a collection of 87 ritual texts dating from ca. 450-200 BCE, were designed to be sung--likely in an improvised style accompanied by a plucked-string instrument. I suspect that the musical tradition originally associated with these hymns drew from the principles found in contemporary practices including oral tradition, memory palaces, epic poetry, Pythagorean tuning, and the music of the spheres. The Pythagoreans flourished at the same time and place as the Orphics, and maintained similar beliefs. What we now call Pythagorean tuning is a golden thread connecting music across more than a thousand years.

Medieval music, whose modal pitches were based on the seven-stringed lyre of Apollo, upheld the tradition of ancient Pythagorean tuning. The earliest body of Western music whose notation is available to us, medieval music found its roots in ancient tuning and theoretical principles that valued the study of numbers and ratio: physics in music and the sonority of perfect intervals in Pythagorean tuning. Music's place was in the study of numbers as one fourth of the quadrivium (along with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy). Medieval theorists also considered music's place in relation to celestial movements (musica universalis), just as the Pythagorean and Platonic schools had before them.

My motivation for setting these texts to music was a desire to sing the "magic words" myself, in my mother tongue. I wanted the songs to feel intentional, accessible, and sacred, and I also wanted to pursue a musical style that draws on the heritage of chant, improvisation, and oral tradition. I hoped to experience the ways I might myself be changed through my interpretation, reflection, and time investment singing these ancient words: how I might initiate a further awakening to the memory of my human inheritance, in the Orphic tradition, as a child of Earth and starry Sky. The modern translations by Kristin Mathis are committed to depth and accessibility, honoring the multiple meanings of the original Greek.

—Katina Mitchell