Hearing the Church’s Hymns: Music and Meaning in Lent and Holy Week
Discover how sacred poetry and song carry the depths of Scripture
The Lenten Triodion holds some of the Orthodox Church’s most searching and beautiful poetry—the hymns that carry the faithful from before the fast, through Lent, and into Holy Week. They range from the penitential depths of the Great Canon to the festal wonder of the Akathist Hymn, and they do more than fill the services: they teach, interpret Scripture, and were made to be sung.
In this four-week online course, Dn. Harrison Russin opens the hymnography and music of the Triodion as a single art. Through four case studies—the Great Canon, the daily idiomela, the Akathist, and the hymns of Holy Week—you’ll learn how these hymns embed scriptural interpretation and how their music carries theological meaning. Whether you sing in a choir or simply pray these services, you’ll come away listening with new attention.
What You’ll Learn
By the end of the course, you will be able to:
Discover how the hymns embed Scripture and open up its meaning, retelling the story of salvation in song
Hear how the music itself conveys theological meaning, not merely mood
Engage the Triodion’s landmark hymns up close—from the Great Canon to the Akathist
Come away singing and hearing Orthodox hymnography with a new awareness
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Course Format
4 live discussion sessions (~45 min. each)
4 pre-recorded lectures
4 slide presentations to accompany each lecture
Optional reading materials
Access to session recordings and all course materials throughout the access period
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How does a single hymn become a school of repentance? We explore St. Andrew of Crete's Great Canon—the way it weaves scriptural interpretation into its verses, and the bond it forges between text, meter, and music.
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The idiomela—shorter hymns sung twice a day through Lent—quietly echo ancient Scripture readings from the Jerusalem lectionary. We uncover those connections and ask what these hymns reveal about the meaning of the fast itself.
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Fifteen centuries old and of unknown authorship, the Akathist Hymn holds great paradoxes together through poetic repetition and music. We examine its acrostic structure and the artistry that lets it sing the unsayable.
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The hymnography of Holy Week speaks in challenging, confrontational language. Through its "prophetic matrix" we learn to recognize and confess our own betrayal of Christ, closing with the Canon of Holy Thursday and its echoes of Proverbs 9.
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Meet Your Instructor
Rev. Dn. Harrison Basil Russin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Liturgical Music, St. Vladimir’s Seminary
Director of Music, Three Hierarchs Chapel
Dn. Harrison Russin has taught and directed liturgical music at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary since 2016. He earned his M.Div. from St. Vladimir’s in 2013 before pursuing graduate study in historical musicology at Duke University, where he completed his Ph.D. in 2021.
His doctoral research examined musical settings of the Creed in the Mass in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century France and Italy, and he has published and lectured widely on Orthodox liturgical music. As director of music for Three Hierarchs Chapel, he brings both scholarship and the daily practice of the choir into his teaching.