Sometimes in music – as well as life at large – words need not signify something in particular. It is their mere utterance within a given context that makes meaning arise, filling them with a depth hitherto totally unsuspected.

Such is the case with kratema, a type of chant in Byzantine music that uses syllables without specific meaning (e.g. te – ri – rem, a – na – ne, to – to – to). The absence of normal text marks a departure from conventional language and earthly references, thus enabling the composition to expand into more abstract realms.

Moreover, according to a certain theological tradition, it was no other than St. Paul himself who advised the Greeks to sing in this way, as he held kratema to be the “chanting of angels”.

Greek composer Michael Adamis (1929–2013), a champion of Byzantine music as well as a leading 20th-century contemporary composer, considered kratema as the quintessential type of absolute Byzantine music. Inspired by its peculiar form, he composed a piece titled Kratema (1971) for psaltis (chanter), oboe, tuba, and electroacoustic music. In the work’s premiere, the vocal part was performed by Lykourgos Angelopoulos (1941–2014), a prominent chanter who founded the Greek Byzantine Choir and also collaborated with major contemporary Greek composers such as M. Adamis, D. Terzakis and K. Sfetsas.

It is perhaps no coincidence that a similar type of song is found in another ancient musical tradition, that of Indian classical music. According to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians: “Of the several types of composition performed by khayal singers, the most interesting is the tarana. The texts are now essentially a special set of meaningless syllables, such as ‘tom ta na na, u dana dim, dere na, dira dira’. Sometimes a tarana includes a line or two of Persian text, and it seems more than probable that the present genre originated from ecstatic Sufi songs using cryptic expressions in Persian. […] The word tarana itself is merely Persian for ‘song’.”

Thus, the religious context becomes once again apparent, transforming the “meaningless” words in vehicles of transcendental power and divine ecstasy. As Greek Renaissance scholar Gerasimos Vlachos (1607–1685) once put it: “According to symbolic theology, τερερε (“te – re – re”) is only meant to point towards the unfathomable of divinity”. No doubt this holds true not only for Byzantine chant and kratema , but also for highly spiritual compositions in Indian classical vocal music such as tarana.