“Style” or “yphos” in Psaltic Art?

Abstract

The term style is used in the philosophy of culture, in aesthetics, art theory and art criticism, in literary languages, in the plastic and monumental arts, in the way of life and behavior of people to characterize cultures, eras, creative individuals or works, so as we learn from philosophy dictionaries. If in Greek there is this duality of the terms style and yphos, the Romanian language uses only the former, while yphos appears to be used with completely different meanings, over time. Unlike the meanings in Greek, in the current dictionaries of the Romanian language the word yphos has a more pejorative meaning, suffering over time semantic changes. However, it seems that the old meaning of the term yphos reveals much deeper and richer valences than the term style and helps us to understand in a better way the conditions of an authentic musical-spiritual interpretation, in the "right spirit".