 Cover and artwork by Anne Glynnis
Fawkes [HIDDEN TRACK! Venus by
The Shocking Blue, played by ancient orchestra with lyrics adapted to
Inanna, Astarte and Aphrodite Ourania/Wanassa] [YOU MAY ALSO LIKE: Mortisa Chasiklou.
This is an instrumental
version of an old Greek rembetiko song by Markos Bambakaris, rendered with
"moog-zouki orchestra". The original was about a girl who was born
in the hashish dens of Piraeus]. On this
page are sample MP3s from a new CD which contains six new impressions of
ancient Hellenic music, excerpts from Clouds, two
tracks from Libation Bearers, and all the audio
examples for my paper "Hearing
Greek Microtones". Though it offers a retrospective of early—
sometimes crude—experiments, its main purpose is to present more recent and
polished efforts. These were developed for a concert-lecture entitled "Realizations in Ancient Greek
Music: Beyond the Fragments" for the 2006 meeting of the
International Study Group on Music Archaeology at the Ethnology Museum in
Berlin. A paper detailing the methods, and several of the tracks, will be
published in volume 6 of the DAI's Serie Studien zur Musikarch_ologie.
Tuning an Egyptian boat harp |
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The Cyprosyrian Girl: This CD
is an affectionate goof on—and sincere contribution to—the recent spate of
ancient Greek music 'recreations', (re)fueled by P_hlmann and West's Documents
of Ancient Greek Music (Oxford 2001). Please email me if you would like to buy a
copy. 2) The Cyprosyrian Girl. This is largely a
cover, performed on ancient instruments, of the rembetiko classic
Frankosyriani by Markos Bambakaris. Rembetiko was born from the fusion of
Athenian working-class music and that of Ionian Greeks expelled by the Turks
in 1922 after the Greco-Turkish War. The situation is paralleled in antiquity
by the Persian conquest of Ionia, which spurred an Ionian exodus and
consequently an Ionian fashion in Athens, the most conspicuous leader of
which was Anacreon. Similarly, at the end of the Late Bronze Age, Mycenaeans
seem to have emigrated in large numbers to Cyprus, where they eventually took
on characteristics of the indigenous population. My realization takes that
situation as its background, and transposes the place names of Bambakaris to
12th century Cyprus, Cilicia and Ugarit. The distortion on the voice is an
allusion to the poor quality of Bambakaris' original recording in the 1920s
The greeting of the singer by a female admirer is a typical feature of early
rembetiko recordings; the jew's harp (cosi detto) is also not unknown. 3) Lysander of Sikyon 1. Lysander is
mentioned in ancient sources as the pioneer of virtuosic solo kithara playing.
He seems to have used a range of showy techniques, including overtones and
microtonal shadings. I recently took a sandouri improvisation from the
brilliant collection Aiolis Lesbos;
made a "MIDI score" of it by using waveform-editing to identify the
precise attacks of each note; inserted corresponding MIDI notes in the
Protools sequencer; compressed this material from a four-octave range to a
seventh, eliminating accidentals and 'rotating' the scale to put the most
frequent notes on scale degree four (= mes_); used the resulting MIDI data to
'drive' a digital sample of a reconstructed kithara which was tuned via the Virtual Lyre to the diatonic of Archytas. It has
thus the living gestures of traditional Greek folk music, with authentically
ancient intervals. The connection with Lesbos is also nice, given the
importance of the island and its kitharodes in the Archaic period. 4) Sappho: Hymn to Aphrodite. No
melody survives for this famous poem. But the ancient rhythm is preserved in
the words' long and short syllables (though I have regularized the
indeterminate positions in the first part of this 'Aeolic' structure). I then
sing the accents according to the tendencies observable in many of the
musical fragments. The pitchset I used forms part of the Mixolydian harmonia
(as recorded by Aristides Quintilianus), to acknowledge to tradition reported
in a fragment of Aristoxenus, that Sappho was its 'first inventor' (I mean,
what the hell right?). The whole thing is set to a Rai or Bollywood
accompaniment, suggesting either the Near Eastern dimension of ancient Greek
music and/or its Indo-European heritage (LOL). 5) Athenaios: Paian. Second century B.C.E.
Inscribed on Athenian treasury at Delphi. This remarkable piece begins in an
archaizing style which harks back to the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., as
known from Aristoxenus' discussion (in Pseudo Plutarch De musica) of the
traditional libation music which was associated by fourth century musicians
with the legendary aulete Olympus. There follows a section of the fully
developed Hellenistic art music which grew from innovations of the late fifth
century (the so-called New Music). In this track I have aimed for a
reasonable degree of historical plausibility. The lyre tunings in the opening
sections incorporate the enharmonic of Archytas. 6) Lysander of Sikyon 2. Same technique as #3, but this
time with the mixolydian recorded in Aristides Quintilianus. A.Q. presents
this in terms of quarter-tones, but some of these I have adjusted to lesser
resonant relations (for the concept, see "Hearing Greek Microtones").
This follows the observation made by Winnington-Ingram ("The Intervals
of Greek Music") in relation to Aristoxenus, i.e. that A's tone
fractions actually conceal such relations as 5:4, 6:5, 7:6 etc. as known
already to Archytas. 7) Euripides Orestes Fragment (Dance Remix) Part One 8) Euripides Orestes Fragment (Dance Remix)
Part Two The aulos melody of
track 7 is one of the earliest extant fragments. I have set it to a sort of
trip-hop beat. This piece I used as a prelude to the Choephori, and to accompany a
phallic procession sequence in Clouds.While the melody is probably to be taken as
enharmonic, I have opted for the chromatic version as having been made
popular by Paniagua and Atrium Musicae. Track 8 is an extended improvisation
on the theme, which I used as an Outro for both productions. |
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