Icon of St. Kassiane the Hymnographer. Public domainThe Hymn of Kassiane, sung every Tuesday of Holy Week in Orthodox churches around the world, is one of the many hymns composed by one of the few women known to have been writing music during Byzantine times.
Born in 805/810 and passing away before 865, Kassiane (the female form of the male name Cassius) was a Byzantine abbess, poet, composer, and hymnographer.
Her hymn, called the Doxastikon on the Aposticha of the Bridegroom for Orthros, is sung every Tuesday evening during Holy Week as the apex of the service on that day.
St. Kassiane wrote fifty hymns still sung today
She is remarkable for being one of the first medieval composers whose scores are both extant and able to be interpreted by modern scholars and musicians. Approximately fifty of her hymns still survive today and twenty-three of them are included in Orthodox Church liturgical books.
The exact number is difficult to assess, since many of her hymns were ascribed to different authors in different manuscripts and are often identified as anonymous.
