Mystirion Xenon (Greek for "Strange Mystery") is a setting of the Eastern Orthodox nativity chant by the same title.
One of the most beautiful texts of the Greek Orthodox sacred literature, Mystirion Xenon has been steadily invading my mind since the first year of my life and has become one of my favourite chants – I sang it with relish every Christmas Eve, at church and at home. The first phrase of the chant repeats twice in the tenors, over bass drones, before the entire chant is heard. When this happens, the tenors and the altos sing the chant in canon at the interval of a fifth, producing an austere and organum-like quality. This austerity is then mellowed by a child-like refrain in the sopranos, on the English words "Christ is born. Amen.", creating a cultural-linguistic counterpoint with the age-old chant and suggesting a contemporary universality which is already hinted at by the cosmic grandeur of the Greek texts.
This sense of universality is further amplified by the optional digital audio, which consists of mildly processed saghroutah (Middle-Eastern ululations) and Tibetan overtone singing. There is an esoteric Christian tradition that has Jesus as a young man studying under important teachers in Persia, Egypt and as far away as India, from the time of his Bar Mitzvah ceremony in Jerusalem until his ministry began roughly 18 years later in Galilee (perhaps the magi who visited him during his birth were among the Master's teachers). These pre-recorded sounds comment discreetly on the music of the chant and help to emphasize the import of an event that transcends the particulars of a system of organized religion. They hint at a universality which is difficult to describe with words, or even with musical sounds, although the latter gets closer to its essence than the former.
