Kràtema is a musical composition comprising, instead of a text, meaningless syllables such as te-ri-rem, to-ro-ro and ne-ne-na. The absence of a text leaves the composer at liberty to create an exquisite score of pure music. The 17th-century scholar and Metropolitan of Philadelphia, Yerasimos Vlachos the Cretan, wrote that, ‘according to symbolic theology the te-re-re signifies nothing other than the incomprehensibility of the Theotokos, the Mother of God’. Michalis Adamis observes that the kràtema is the ultimate form of Byzantine music expressed in consummate compositions complete in themselves.
