PERIPLUS | Deambulações luso-gregas (Crónica)

PERIPLUS | Deambulações luso-gregas (Crónica)

Amélia Muge | Michales Loukovikas

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ ΠΕΡΙΠΛΟΥΣ | Ελληνοπορτογαλικές περιηγήσεις (Χρονικό)
/ENGLISH/ PERIPLUS | Luso-Hellenic Wanderings (Chronicle)

O Periplus não é um cruzeiro. É uma tentativa de construção de
pontes interculturais e de pesquisar o passado a bem do futuro.
A viagem continua… (Michales Loukovikas)

A. DAS AUSÊNCIAS
1. Uma pena que me coube
2. Όσο βαρούν τα σίδερα | Pesado como ferro

Periplus, edição portuguesa

Periplus levanta âncora da “Terra das Ausências” com (quem sabe) a “Menina Lisboa” cantando uma composição de Amélia Muge dedicada à Grécia, um país julgado in absentia que quanto mais se contacta mais falta nos faz. São “Penas de Ausência”, semelhantes às da viúva de “Pesado como ferro”. Musicalmente, a viagem começa com o acompanhamento “característico” das canções portuguesas – quando um “estranho” som emerge: o clarino (clarinete tradicional) tocado por Manos Achalinotópoulos com a técnica peculiar, tradicional, usada pelos músicos dos Balcãs e da Ásia Menor, combinado com a guitarra portuguesa de Ricardo Parreira. ● Manos, que gravou em Atenas, fez dois improvisos que editei usando ambas as gravações.

As “Deambulações luso-gregas” tornam-se mais evidentes na segunda canção de origem cretense marcada por uma forte influência da Ásia Menor. No nosso período de pesquisa, enquanto trocávamos materais relacionados com as nossas músicas tradicionais, enviei esta canção como um exemplo excelente da canção cretense urbana. O que aconteceu a seguir foi qualquer coisa de extraordinário: Amélia respondeu com um… mp3, interpretando esta canção da forma como “se apropriou dela”, adaptando a letra para português e a música como se fosse um tema medieval, ocidental. Fiquei espantado! Era como se me tivesse ouvido a cantar a canção nalguma corte medieval e depois, ao regressar a casa, tentasse recriá-la; mas de facto, o que fez foi expressá-la à sua maneira, criando uma variação. Foi praticamente deste modo que a música se desenvolveu durante milénios, até começarem a ser usadas as partituras e os registos fonográficos. E foi esta a razão porque fiz o arranjo da canção mantendo estas duas variações.

1. Amélia Muge | Arranjo: F. Raposo
2. Tradicional, versão de Creta | Adaptação para português e para música antiga ocidental: A. Muge; arranjo: M. Loukovikas

B. DOS CAMINHOS
3. Caminhos de seda
4. Caminhos pentatónicos africanos
5. Caminhos pentatónicos epiróticos

Quando Amélia compôs esta espécie de morna desafiou-me: “Agora continua até à Grécia a partir de Cabo Verde!” A minha resposta deu-me a chave para continuar: “Como é que eu vou daqui até à Grécia? Temos a África pelo meio!” Só aí pensei na escala pentatónica que caracteriza alguma da música africana e da região do Épiro, na Grécia. Os dados estavam lançados! Harris Lambrakis deu-me depois “uma mãozinha” com a sua “flauta mágica” (ney)…

Parafraseando, como ponto de partida, algumas das frases quer da melodia quer da lírica do tema de Amélia, o meu trabalho nos “Caminhos pentatónicos” foi mais racional que o resultado da inspiração, baseado num ritmo de 10 tempos, coros e linhas melódicas cíclicas que funcionaram muito bem.

Chegados à Grécia, escolhi combinar esta paisagem sonora com uma canção de emigração do Épiro, “Ξενιτεμένο μου πουλί (Meu pássaro emigrante)”, baseada num ritmo de 4 tempos. Como acrescento pedi a Manos Achalinotópoulos, que não é apenas um excelente tocador de clarino mas também um cantor maravilhoso, para interpretar a canção, dotando-a do seu refinado “toque vocal” tradicional.

3. Amélia Muge | Arranjo: F. Raposo
4. Amélia Muge | Michales Loukovikas | Arranjo: M. Loukovikas e A. Muge
5. Tradicional, versão do Épiro | Arranjo: M. Loukovikas

C. DOS CANTOS
6. Φαίνου | Deixa brilhar (Ἐπιτάφιος | Epitáfio)
7. Canto em periplus

Amélia é amiga de longa data de Hélia Correia, compondo para poemas seus desde os anos 90 – de que é um excelente exemplo “A tentação”. Quando me encontrei pela primeira vez com Hélia estávamos no processo de construção do nosso Periplus. Depois de uma conversa sobre a antiga Hélade, como ela é uma helenista e filelena, ao falarmos do nosso trabalho disse-lhe: “Sabes, Hélia, também vamos ter no Periplus o Epitáfio de Seikilos”. A sua completamente inesperada resposta deixou-me de boca aberta. Sem qualquer comentário, começou a cantar em Grego antigo: “Ὅσον ζῇς φαίνου | μηδὲν ὅλως σὺ λυποῦ· | πρὸς ὀλίγον ἔστι τὸ ζῆν· | τὸ τέλος ὁ χρόνος ἀπαιτεῖ.” (Deixa brilhar a tua vida enquanto dura; não te entregues de nenhum modo à tristeza; a vida é curta e o tempo cobra o que lhe é devido). Foi uma reacção que eu só esperaria vir de um entre mil músicos gregos: os outros não conheceriam esta canção (!) a mais antiga encontrada completa, datada ca. séc. I (algures entre 200 AEC e um pouco depois de 200 EC). Mais tarde, disse à Amélia: “O Seikilos tem de ser cantado pela Hélia!” E de facto ela cantou-o maravilhosamente!

A Amélia encontrou-me na Net em 2009 graças ao meu trabalho baseado na poesia de Ares Alexandrou, Το Χρυσάφι τ’ Ουρανού, editado em Portugal em livro-cd O Ouro do Céu / Ares Alexandrou por Michales Loukovikas. Desapontado com a desatenção e não valorização com que o meu trabalho foi recebido na Grécia, tinha decidido não compor mais nada. A Amélia esforçou-se bastante para me convencer do contrário. Depois de repetidos falhanços teve uma ideia brilhante: fez um poema e compôs uma primeira parte pedindo-me para lhe dar seguimento. Não podia continuar dizer não; seria ingrato da minha parte. ● Quando ouvi o que ela compôs fiquei impressionado pela semelhança com o Epitáfio de Seikilos, que a Amélia, é claro, desconhecia. Assim, quando fiz o arranjo do “Canto em Periplus”, utilizei a composição do Seikilos como introdução (“Deixa brilhar”), bem como uma citação dentro do canto, adaptada para português por Hélia Correia: Ó mortal, deixa brilhar, | a luz da vida no teu rosto; | que a morte vai cobrar imposto | e a todos abate, sem dó por igual.

6. Seikilos | Adaptação para português: H. Correia; arranjo: M. Loukovikas
7. Amélia Muge | Amélia Muge e Michales Loukovikas | Arranjo: M. Loukovikas

D. DAS ILHAS
8. Παράνομο σημείωμα | Nota ilegal
9. Calma / Ἰθάκη | Ítaca

Ares Alexandrou, Constantine Cavafy, Fernando Pessoa

O Ouro do Céu, nosso ponto de encontro, está em destaque no Periplus com três temas arranjados desta vez por Filipe Raposo, para que houvesse um outro tipo de abordagem às minhas composições. Recordo-me como se fosse ontem como fiquei deliciado quando ouvi pela primeira vez a Nota ilegal, adaptada e cantada para português pela Amélia. “Compus um fado!”, fantasiei sorrindo, enquanto assobiava a minha composição com as ornamentações vocais feitas por ela…

Se “Nota ilegal” é uma ilha-pesadelo de exílio, “Calma”, de Fernando Pessoa, composta por Amélia, é uma ilha de sonho, onde inserimos um excerto do poema “Ítaca” de Constantine Cavafy. Há uma probabilidade dos dois grandes poetas se terem encontrado num barco que se dirigia para Londres e que continuaria depois para os Estados Unidos, mesmo antes da Grande Depressão de 1929.

8. Ares Alexandrou | Michales Loukovikas | Adaptação para português: A. Muge; arranjo: F. Raposo
9. Fernando Pessoa e Constantine Cavafy | Amélia Muge | Arranjo: F. Raposo

E. DAS VOZES
10. Cântico do país emerso
11. Palavra dada

Esta composição de Amélia para o poema (excerto) de Natália Correia, estava para ser, quando fiz o seu arranjo, a primeira do Periplus (mais tarde escolhemos “Uma pena que me coube” para uma abertura mais “calma”). Optei por começar com um tributo à colaboração entre Carlos Paredes e Charlie Haden, propondo uma improvisação entre o contrabaixo de Kostas Theodorou e a guitarra portuguesa de Ricardo Parreira com o piano de Filipe Raposo. Além disso, quando Amélia me mostrou a melodia num teclado, encontrei semelhanças com o primeiro Hino délfico feito provavelmente por Ateneu em 138 AEC. Assim, entre os versos de Natália, juntei três Interlúdios, adaptando este hino (no I e III) e a canção “Não sou daqui” de Amélia (no II), do seu álbum homónimo (que considero a sua obra-prima). A utilização deste tema surgiu porque as palavras do seu título são iguais às primeiras palavras do excerto do Cântico de Natália.

“Palavra dada”, a mais complicada em termos de arranjo e edição de todo o Periplus, começa pelo fascínio e interacção da Amélia com um Syrtós cretense. A origem desta dança levou-me a um músico heleno da antiguidade, Mesomedes de Creta (séc. II) e ao seu Ὕμνος εἰς Νέμεσιν (Hino a Némesis), a deusa que exerce represálias contra os que são arrogantes (húbris [ὕβρις]: arrogância perante os deuses). Começando com o ritmo original de 15 tempos, muda-se a meio para os 4 tempos do Syrtos, adoptando a versão adaptada por Ross Daly, combinando-a com as Pragas algarvias. À medida que a música cresce, com o violino de Kyriakos Gouventas, passamos para a tradicional portuguesa Cantiga de rega; quando regressamos a Creta, o finale é apimentado com mais pragas ditas por Teresa Muge (irmã de Amélia) e Margarida Guerreiro.

10. Natália Correia | Amélia Muge | Arranjo: M. Loukovikas > Ateneu (Interlúdios I e III); Amélia Muge (Interlúdio II)
11. Mesomedes (Némesis); Tradicional de Creta (Syrtós, adaptação: R. Daly); Tradicional portuguesa e Amélia Muge (Cantiga de rega); Amélia Muge (Pragas) | Arranjo: M. Loukovikas e A. Muge

F. DOS EMBALOS
12. Νανούρισμα | Canção de embalar
13. Dorme, dorme

Noite estrelada, de Vincent Van Gogh

Outra canção no Periplus com poesia de Ares Alexandrou é a “Canção de embalar”, adaptada para português por Amélia. Na sua forma original (O Ouro do Céu), está dividida em seis partes, à semelhança de um sonho. Na versão do Periplus ouvimos a primeira parte da canção antecedida por excertos de canções tradicionais de embalar e lenga-lengas.

Em ligação com o tema anterior está uma tocante canção de embalar composta por Amélia e arranjada por José Martins e Filipe Raposo. Este “embalo” é cantado a uma menina e não a um menino, como é usual nas canções de embalar tradicionais.

12. Ares Alexandrou | Michales Loukovikas | Αdaptação para português: A. Muge; arranjo: F. Raposo (introdução: A. Muge e M. Loukovikas)
13. Amélia Muge | Arranjo: J. Martins e F. Raposo

G. DOS AMORES
14. Της τριανταφυλλιάς τα φύλλα | A folha da rosa
15. Da folhinha de uma rosa

Uma rosa em Mi sustenido, de Ernie Benton

Quando lhe enviei esta tradicional canção de amor da Ásia Menor e Esmirna, a Amélia reconheceu, espantada, que o poema era idêntico ao de uma canção tradicional galega que tinha gravado anteriormente com o ensemble de Vigo, Camerata Meiga. Não podemos ter a certeza se alguns gregos e iberos tiveram a mesma ideia (“vou vestir-me com a folha [pétala] de uma rosa”), ou se foi uma ideia que viajou de um lugar para o outro. Em Periplus, convidei Ziad Rajab, um músico amigo Sírio-Palestiniano, para tocar o oud. Cantei a primeira parte do tema em grego, enquanto o resto foi adaptado e cantado por Amélia em português.

Aqui a canção da Ásia Menor ecoa na Galiza através de uma “ponte” em Guimarães. Esta “ponte” é uma versão simplificada da canção grega (o ritmo de 9 tempos de uma dança de pares – antikrystós – passa para um ritmo de 4 tempos) adaptada por Amélia para o Outra Voz, um coro local com quem tivemos uma intensa e especial colaboração. Ainda lembro a minha enorme emoção quando os ouvi pela primeira vez cantando esta adaptação, que o grupo acabou por adoptar como parte do seu repertório. Quando se entra na canção galega, juntam-se outras vozes convidadas e a canção termina num improviso onde no fim se entrecruzam novamente os dois temas tradicionais do Ocidente e do Oriente.

14. Tradicional, versão da Asia Menor e de Esmirna | Adaptação para português: A. Muge; arranjo: M. Loukovikas
15. Tradicional grega e galaico-portuguesa | Adaptação musical e poética em português: A. Muge; arranjo: F. Raposo

H. DA ALMA | DE PROFUNDIS
16. Se o lamento apenas fosse
17. Τα ἔνδον ῥήματα | Os meus ditames

Um emocionante e pungente lamento composto por Amélia começando no Épiro, com uma dupla improvisão à moda tradicional feita ao clarino por Manos Achalinotópoulos. Criou-se sobre esta sonoridade a atmosfera da tragédia grega, com o coro da Outra Voz (arranjo de José Martins e Filipe Raposo), usando basicamente o ritmo de um solene zeibékiko. É de facto incrível ela conseguir compor para este peculiar ritmo de 9 tempos logo que se familiarizou com ele, pela sua proximidade à cultura helénica.

“Sejas amigo ou inimigo não o reveles em parte alguma. | Aqui me encontro prisioneiro obedecendo aos meus próprios ditames.” Ares Alexandrou usou este couplet como nota de rodapé (este é o seu título original) ou como post scriptum no seu último livro de poesia, parafraseando Simónides, que compôs para os espartanos caídos na batalha das Termópilas o famoso epitáfio-epigrama: “Ó, estrangeiro, vai dizer aos Lacedemónios que nós aqui | jazemos em obediência aos seus ditames”. No Periplus, a nota de rodapé de Ares tem, musicalmente, um ostinato menor que no meu original (O Ouro do Céu), mas Amélia cria o contraste com as suas vocalizações soando como as das Erínias, estendendo o trágico elemento do “Lamento” a “Os Meus ditames” que adapta e recita em português.

16. Amélia Muge | Arranjo: J. Martins e F. Raposo
17. Ares Alexandrou | Michales Loukovikas | Adaptação para português: A. Muge; arranjo: F. Raposo

I. DAS TASCAS E TAVERNAS
18. Um qualquer quê
19. Abertura da taverna
20. Τα μαγκάκια τής ταβέρνας | Os mangas da taverna

O Fado, de José Malhoa (1910)

Esta sequência acontece como se fosse uma gravação ao vivo da transformação do ambiente de uma tasca de fado no de uma taverna de rebético. É a realização de uma nossa ideia fixa para uma cena fantástica algures numa taverna de um porto durante um tempestuoso mau tempo, e onde as tripulações dos navios imobilizados se reúnem cantando cada uma delas as suas canções até que acontece começarem a cantar em conjunto. Tentámos dar vida a esta cena começando com uma canção de amor da Amélia evocando o fado. Segue-se depois uma necessária “ponte” com um instrumental de cortar a respiração ligando um improviso de fado e rebético com Ricardo Parreira (guitarra portuguesa) e Dimitris Mystakidis (bouzouki), que nos leva ao rebético finale.

Panaiotes Tountas, que se afirma como compositor deste rebético, chamou-lhe “Menor da taverna (Vlamáquia)” (diminutivo de vlames, um sinónimo de mangas). Indirectamente, Tountas refere-se claramente ao instrumental “Menor do tekke” que Iohannes Chalkiás (ou Jack Gregory) gravou nos EUA com um longo e fantástico taqsim (improvisação) no começo. Por isso a melodia parece ser tradicional. Existem várias teorias sobre a etimologia de vlames e mangas. Escolhemos como título “Os mangas da taverna” porque a palavra pode ter vindo do ibérico manga, lembrando que os antigos manges gregos costumavam vestir apenas uma manga do seu casaco. Uma boa combinação com a canção tradicional portuguesa “A mangar” cantada pelos manganões, parecidos com os manges gregos.

Panaiotes Tountas

A sessão de gravação em Lisboa da “Entrada na taverna” é algo que nunca esquecerei. Expliquei ao Ricardo e ao Pedro Pinhal (viola), que deviam tocar criando “ondas”, deixando espaços “abertos”, para o Dimitris, que gravaria mais tarde em Salónica. Por fim fi-los escutar o taqsim de Chalkiás, como fonte de inspiração. O resultado foi magia pura – um dos melhores solos de fado que alguma vez ouvi – ainda por cima em diálogo com um bouzouki! Quando regressei a Salónica, Dimitris juntou-se na perfeição ao duo português. Finalmente transferi o trio para… a taverna do porto de forma a pudermos ouvi-los tocar em conjunto! Esta é a magia chamada edição…

18. Amélia Muge | Arranjo: F. Raposo
19. Improviso instrumental de fado e de rebético por Ricardo Parreira e Dimitris Mystakidis | Arranjo: M. Loukovikas
20. Panaiotis Tountas | Rebético tradicional | Arranjo: M. Loukovikas

J. TÃO LONGE, TÃO PERTO
21. Dolor, ai dolor
22. Το βλέμμα σου πού να τελειώνει; | O teu olhar onde acaba? (Versão grega )
23. O teu olhar onde acaba? | Το βλέμμα σου πού να τελειώνει; (Versão portuguesa)
24. Zum zum

As primeiras três partes da sequência final são de facto uma única e longa canção. Na altura em que Amélia tentava em vão que eu voltasse a compor, mandou-me este poema. Passaram-se meses até que numa noite tive um sonho onde tinha rearranjado a sua canção “Arena” (Não sou daqui) como se fosse um rebético! Enfim, tive de passar horas ao piano para chegar à conclusão que o que se passa num sonho não quer necessariamente dizer que possa acontecer na vida real. No entanto o meu tempo não foi gasto em vão. Gradualmente fui deixando para trás a “Arena”, improvisando num outro aliciante modo musical! Felizmente, gravei este improviso e mandei-o para a Amélia, que por sua vez adaptou o seu poema à minha melodia e musicou a sua versão original (“Dolor, ai, Dolor”). Do meu lado, adaptei o seu poema para grego e convidei Eleni Tsaligopoulou para cantar a versão grega; convidei também Zoe Tiganouria para tocar acordeão. No fim da versão portuguesa Eleni e Amélia cantam “Dolor” em conjunto! Na opinião do compositor e pianista grego, Giorgos Andreou: “Um momento de excepção do ponto de vista emocional (e que considero ser o climax do CD) é a interpretação paralela da canção ‘O teu olhar onde acaba?’ por Eleni Tsaligopoulou em grego e Amélia Muge em português.”

Embora seja um tema composto por Amélia e a mim dedicado como prenda de aniversário, “Zum zum” é mais do que isso. Evoca “Run run se fué pa’l norte” de Violeta Parra, como uma espécie de tributo ao seu trabalho enraizado na canção tradicional chilena, exprimindo a vida e os problemas do seu povo. Zum zum significa em português uma espécie de rumor, passando de boca em boca, de uma pessoa para outra. Acorda, diz, porque “Todas as flores do campo / Todas as aves do céu / Todos os peixes do mar / Vieram à tua porta / P’ra te saudar / P’ra te cantar / Que há um zum zum / Que vem do sul”… É uma espécie de canção ibérico-latino-americana, que se liga com a melodia de “O teu olhar onde acaba?” – usada aqui como introdução. O ritmo de 9 tempos no fim da canção anuncia a chegada do Zum zum à Grécia – algo que também é validado pelas… cigarras!

Anel de prata com uma cigarra em latão, inspirado num antigo anel grego (séc. V AEC)

● Eu e Amélia estávamos em Escópelos, Grécia, de férias. Fomos um dia para uma praia cheia de gente e por isso sentámo-nos à sombra, debaixo de uma árvore, perto do bar da praia. Um altifante, instalado num ramo, tocava sobre as nossas cabeças. “Elas estão a tempo”, disse Amélia. Perante a minha perplexidade, explicou: “As cigarras ‘cantam’ a tempo, não saem do ritmo!” “Nem pensar!”, respondi. Mas rapidamente admiti que ela tinha razão! De facto elas seguiam muito facilmente o ritmo das canções pop. Tinham algum problema em acertar quando o ritmo mudava para alguma canção brasileira mas depressa se adaptavam… Eu estava fascinado! ● De volta a Lisboa tive uma ideia completamente louca enquanto trabalhava no “Zum zum”. Procurei sons de cigarra na net, mas o que encontrei foram “coros” de cigarras. Procurei então por cicadas, cigales, cigalas, mas continuava a não encontrar o que procurava – até que experimentei pela palavra grega τζιτζίκια: apareceu uma enorme abundância de sons e entre eles de cigarras solitárias (o que eu estava à procura), para que pudessem ser “amestradas” (através da “magia da edição”) para “‘cantar’ em conjunto” com o coro, mantendo os ritmos do “Zum zum”! Quando acabei, convidei a Amélia e o José Martins para escutarem o coro das minhas cigarras especialmente “amestradas”. O que nos rimos! É o significado da frase “amostras de cigarras gregas amestradas” mencionada no livrinho do Periplus em referência a mais esta minha contribuição para o trabalho. ● E as cigarras não apareceram apenas no CD: no fim dos nossos concertos do Periplus, a audiência saía dos teatros ouvindo as τζιτζίκια gregas!

21. Amélia Muge | Arranjo: M. Loukovikas
22. Amélia Muge | Michales Loukovikas | Adaptação para grego e arranjo: M. Loukovikas
23. Amélia Muge | Michales Loukovikas – e Amélia Muge (finale) | Adaptação para grego e arranjo: M. Loukovikas
24. Amélia Muge | Amélia Muge – e Michales Loukovikas (introdução) | Arranjo: J. Martins e M. Loukovikas

● Ver também: MARIA DO ROSÁRIO PESTANA sobre “PERIPLUS” | GIORGOS ANDREOU sobre “PERIPLUS”

Periplus, edição internacional

TROUPE MUSICAL do PERIPLUS: Amélia Muge: voz, guitarra braguesa, coros, fala, sons de ambiente. | Michales Loukovikas: voz, coros, fala, amostras de vozes e sons, estalos, percussão, acordeão, palmas.
António Quintino: contrabaixo. | Filipe Raposo: piano, teclados, acordeão. | Harris Lambrakis: ney (flauta oriental), flauta de bisel. | José Martins: percussão, kalimba, sintetizador, sons, palmas. | José Salgueiro: percussão, palmas. | Kyriakos Gouventas: violin, viola, bandolim. | Manos Achalinotopoulos: clarino (clarinete folk), voz, coros. | Ricardo Parreira: guitarra portuguesa.

CONVIDADOS ESPECIAIS: Hélia Correia, escritora: voz. | Eleni Tsaligopoulou, cantora: lengalengas, risos, coros, voz. | Outra Voz, coro dos cidadãos de Guimarães: sons de água, de vento, de mar, de ambiente, coros, lengalengas, respirações, falas.

OUTROS PARTICIPANTES: André Maia: fala. | Catarina Anacleto: violoncelo, coros. | Cristina Benedita: coros. | Dimitris Mystakidis: bouzouki, djurá, guitarra de rebético. | Eduardo Salgueiro: palmas. | Francisco e Sofia Van Epps: lengalengas, risos. | Irene Bakalopoulou: harpa. | José Barros: bandolim, cavaquinho, guitarra braguesa, coros. | José Manuel David: kalimba, voz, trompa, gaita, coros. | Kostas Theodorou: contrabaixo, percussão. | Mariana Abrunheiro: coros. | Margarida Guerreiro: pragas. | Pedro Pinhal: viola de fado. | Rui Vaz: fala, coros. | Teresa Muge: voz, pragas. | Ziad Rajab: oud. | Zoe Tiganouria: acordeão.

AUTORES: Amélia Muge | Ares Alexandrou (1922 – 1979) | Athenaeus (séc. II AEC) | Constantine Cavafy (1863 – 1933) | Fernando Pessoa (1888 – 1935) | Hélia Correia | Mesomedes (início do séc. II EC) | Michales Loukovikas | Natália Correia (1923 – 1993) | Panaiotis Tountas (1886 – 1942) | Seikilos (ca séc. I EC)

As damas do rebético, de A. Tassos (1970)

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PERIPLUS | Luso-Hellenic Wanderings (Chronicle)

PERIPLUS | Luso-Hellenic Wanderings (Chronicle)

Amélia Muge | Michales Loukovikas

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ ΠΕΡΙΠΛΟΥΣ | Ελληνοπορτογαλικές περιηγήσεις (Χρονικό)
/PORTUGUÊS/ PERIPLUS | Deambulações luso-gregas (Crónica)

Periplus is not a cruise. It’s an effort to construct intercultural bridges
and explore the past for the future’s sake. The voyage goes on…

Michales Loukovikas

A. DAS AUSÊNCIAS (ON ABSENCES)
1. Uma pena que me coube (A Pain That Has Fallen to My Lot)
2. Όσο βαρούν τα σίδερα | Pesado como ferro (Heavy as Iron)

Periplus, the Portuguese edition

Periplus sails out from the “Land of Absences” with “Lady Lisbon” singing a composition by Amélia Muge, a Portuguese song dedicated to Greece, a country tried in absentia, a land that the more someone is linked to, the more he misses it. It’s a “Pain of Absences”, like that of a widow’s pain, which is “Heavy as Iron”. Musically, our voyage starts with a “normal” Portuguese accompaniment – though a “strange” sound emerges: the clarino (folk clarinet) played by Manos Achalinotopoulos with the peculiar, traditional technique used by folk musicians in the Balkans and Asia Minor, combined with Ricardo Parreira’s guitarra portuguesa. ● Manos, who recorded in Athens, improvised twice on the song and I finally chose to edit separately both “takes”.

The “Luso-Hellenic Wanderings” become far more obvious in the following Cretan song marked by strong Anatolian influence. In our period of research, when we exchanged traditional material, I sent it to Amélia as an excellent example of a Cretan urban song. What followed was quite extraordinary: she answered with… an mp3, interpreting this song the way she “understood” it, adapting both its music and lyrics into Portuguese as a medieval Occidental song. I was amazed! It was as if she listened to me singing the song in some medieval royal court, and then, back at home, tried to recreate it; but in fact, what she sang was her own impression of the song, creating a variation. That’s how music mostly developed for millennia until it started being published (with sheet music and phonograph records). That’s why I arranged the song keeping these two versions together.

1. Amélia Muge | Arranged by F. Raposo
2. Traditional, version of Crete | Adapted into Portuguese & as an old occidental song by A. Muge; arranged by M. Loukovikas

B. DOS CAMINHOS (ON ROUTES)
3. Caminhos de seda (Silk Routes)
4. Caminhos pentatónicos africanos (African Pentatonic Routes)
5. Caminhos pentatónicos epiróticos (Epirotic Pentatonic Routes)

After Amélia had composed this morna-like song, she challenged me: “Now take it from Cape Verde to Greece!” My answer gave me the key to continue: “But how can I take it to Greece? We have Africa in between!” And then, I thought of the pentatonic scale that mostly characterizes both the African and the Epirotic music. The die was cast! Besides, I had Harris Lambrakis to give me a hand – with his “magic flute” (ney) in hand…

Paraphrasing some of Amélia’s phrases, from either lyrics or music, as a starting point, my work on the “Pentatonic Routes” turned out to be more rational than inspirational, based on a 10-beat rhythm, vocals, and cycling melodic lines, which all worked well.

Entering Greece, I decided to combine this soundscape with the Epirotic migrant song “Ξενιτεμένο μου πουλί (My Migrant Bird)”, based on a 4-beat rhythm. And additionally, I asked Manos Achalinotópoulos, who is not only an excellent clarino player but also a wonderful singer, to interpret the song, endowing it with his fine traditional “touch”.

3. Amélia Muge | Arranged by F. Raposo
4. Amélia Muge | Michales Loukovikas | Arranged by M. Loukovikas & A. Muge
5. Traditional, version of Epirus | Arranged by M. Loukovikas

C. DOS CANTOS (ON SONGS)
6. Φαίνου | Deixa brilhar (Shine) / Ἐπιτάφιος | Epitáfio (Epitaph)
7. Canto em periplus (Song in Periplus)

Amélia is an old friend of Hélia Correia’s, setting lyrics of hers to music since the 90s – an excellent example is “A tentação (Temptation)”. When I first met Hélia, we were in the process of working on our Periplus. After a discussion about ancient Hellas, as she is a Hellenist and a philhellene, we started talking about our work and then I told her: “You know, Hélia, in Periplus we also have Seikilos Epitaph”. Her quite unexpected answer left me with my mouth open. She said nothing at all, but started singing in ancient Hellenic: “Ὅσον ζῇς φαίνου, | μηδὲν ὅλως σὺ λυποῦ· | πρὸς ὀλίγον ἔστι τὸ ζῆν· | τὸ τέλος ὁ χρόνος ἀπαιτεῖ.” (While you live, shine; | have no grief at all; | life exists only for a short while, | and time demands his due). That was an answer I would expect to hear from only one out of one thousand Greek musicians: the rest would know nothing (!) about the oldest extant complete song in the world, dating to ca 1st century (sometime between 200 BCE and a little after 200 CE). Later on, I told Amélia: “Seikilos must be sung by Hélia!” She did sing it wonderfully!

Amélia spotted me in the Net in 2009 thanks to my work based on Ares Alexandrou’s poetry, Το Χρυσάφι τ’ Ουρανού (The Gold in the Sky), issued in Portugal as O Ouro do Céu / Ares Alexandrou por Michales Loukovikas. Disappointed by the lack of feedback and appreciation in Greece, I had decided to compose no more. Amélia tried hard to convince me otherwise. After failing repeatedly, she had a bright idea: she wrote the lyrics and composed the first part of a song, asking me to finish it. I could resist no more; I would be ungrateful. ● When I listened to her part of the composition, I was struck by its resemblance to Seikilos Epitaph. Until then, of course, Amélia also knew nothing about it. So when I arranged our “Song in Periplus”, I used Seikilos’ composition as an intro (“Shine”), as well as a citation within the canto, adapted into Portuguese by Hélia Correia: “Ó mortal, deixa brilhar, | a luz da vida no teu rosto; | que a morte vai cobrar imposto | e a todos abate, sem dó por igual.” (Mortal man, you need to shine, | having the light of life on your face; | death shall levy heavy taxes | and all men will perish without leniency).

6. Seikilos | Adapted into Portuguese by H. Correia; arranged by M. Loukovikas
7. Amélia Muge | Amélia Muge & Michales Loukovikas | Arranged by M. Loukovikas

D. DAS ILHAS (ON ISLANDS)
8. Παράνομο σημείωμα | Nota ilegal (Illegal Note)
9. Calma (Calm) / Ἰθάκη | Ítaca (Ithaca)

Ares Alexandrou, Constantine Cavafy, Fernando Pessoa

Being our meeting point, Ares Alexandrou’s The Gold in the Sky is featured in Periplus with three songs, arranged by Filipe Raposo, for I wished to have some fresh approach to my compositions. I still remember quite vividly how delighted I was when I listened to Amélia for the first time singing her own adaptation into Portuguese: “I composed a fado!”, I fantasized smiling, while whistling my composition with her own ornaments…

If “Illegal Note” is a nightmarish isle of exile, Fernando Pessoa’s “Calm”, set to music by Amélia, is a dreamy island, where she inserted an excerpt from Constantine Cavafy’s “Ithaca”. There’s a chance that the two great poets met on a ship sailing to England and the USA, just before the Great Depression of 1929.

8. Ares Alexandrou | Michales Loukovikas | Adapted into Portuguese by A. Muge; arranged by F. Raposo
9. Fernando Pessoa & Constantine Cavafy | Amélia Muge | Arranged by F. Raposo

E. DAS VOZES (ON VOICES)
10. Cântico do país emerso (Ode to an Emersed Land)
11. Palavra dada (Word of Honour)

This poem (excerpt) of Natália Correia’s, set to music by Amélia, was meant to be the first track of Periplus when I arranged it (later we chose to have a “smoother” start with “A Pain That Has Fallen to My Lot”). I opted to start with a tribute to the collaboration of Carlos Paredes and Charlie Haden, with a free improvisation on Kostas Theodorou’s double bass and Ricardo Parreira’s guitarra portuguesa, adding Filipe Raposo’s piano. Besides, when Amélia played her melody for me on a keyboard, I found similarities with the first Delphic Hymn composed probably by Athenaeus ca 138 BCE. Thence, among Natália’s verses, I added three Interludes, adapting this hymn (in I and III), and Amélia’s song “Não sou daqui (I’m Not From Here”, in Interlude II), from her homonymous album (that I consider to be her masterpiece), because these are exactly the first words in the excerpt from Natália’s Cântico.

“Word of Honour”, the most complex track to arrange and edit in Periplus, began with Amélia’s fascination and experimentation with a Cretan Syrtos. The origin of this dance led me to an ancient Hellene musician, Mesomedes of Crete (2nd century CE), and his composition Ὕμνος εἰς Νέμεσιν (Hymn to Nemesis), the goddess enacting retribution against those who succumb to hubris (ὕβρις: arrogance before the gods). Starting off with the original 15-beat rhythm, we turn in the middle to the four beats of the Syrtos, adopting a version that was adapted by Ross Daly, and also combining it with Algarvian Pragas (Anathemas, Curses). As the music builds up, when Kyriakos Gouventas’ role with his violin is instrumental, we pass to a traditional Portuguese Cantiga de rega (Watering Song); and then we return to Crete for the finale that is peppered with more pragas by Amélia’s sister, Teresa Muge, and Margarida Guerreiro.

10. Natália Correia | Amélia Muge | Arranged by M. Loukovikas > Athenaeus (Interludes I & III); Amélia Muge (Interlude II)
11. Mesomedes (Nemesis); Cretan Traditional (Syrtos, adapted by R. Daly); Portuguese traditional & Amélia Muge (Watering Song); Amélia Muge (Pragas) | Arranged by M. Loukovikas & A. Muge

F. DOS EMBALOS (ON LULLABIES)
12. Νανούρισμα | Canção de embalar (Lullaby)
13. Dorme, dorme (Sleep, Sleep)

Starry Night, by Vincent Van Gogh

Another song on poetry by Ares Alexandrou in Periplus is “Lullaby”, adapted by Amélia into Portuguese. In its original form (The Gold in the Sky), it consisted of six parts, and resembled a dream. Here we listen to the first part of the song with additional lullabies and children’s songs in the beginning.

Connected with it is a lullaby composed by Amélia and arranged by José Martins and Filipe Raposo. The peculiar thing here is that the lullaby is sung to a girl (and not to a boy, as it is “normal” in traditional lullabies).

12. Ares Alexandrou | Michales Loukovikas | Adapted into Portuguese by A. Muge; arranged by F. Raposo (intro: A. Muge & M. Loukovikas)
13. Amélia Muge | Arranged by J. Martins & F. Raposo

G. DOS AMORES (ON LOVES)
14. Της τριανταφυλλιάς τα φύλλα | A folha da rosa (The Leaves of a Rose)
15. Da folhinha de uma rosa (The Foliage of a Rose)

A Rose in E Sharp, by Ernie Benton

When I sent this traditional love song from Asia Minor and Smyrma to Amélia, she was astonished since its lyrics are identical with a traditional Galician song she had recorded before with the local ensemble Camerata Meiga. We can’t be sure if some Greeks and Iberians had the same idea (“I’ll get dressed with the foliage of a rose”), or if it’s an idea that voyaged with sailors from one place to the other. In Periplus, I invited Ziad Rajab, my Syro-Palestinian friend, to play the oud, and sang half the Greek song, while Amélia adapted the rest into Portuguese.

In our case, the Anatolian song echoed in Galicia passing over a “bridge” in Guimarães, Portugal. This “bridge” is a simplified version of the Hellenic song (the 9-beat rhythm of the antikrystós couple dance becomes an easier 4-beat rhythm) adapted by Amélia for Outra Voz, a local choir we had a special and fruitful collaboration. I was overwhelmed with emotion, I remember, when I first listened to them singing this adaptation, which they eventually adopted as part of their repertoire. In the Galician part, guest singers join in chorus, while the Oriental and Occidental traditional themes intersect during the improvisation of the finale.

14. Traditional, version of Asia Minor & Smyrma | Adapted into Portuguese by A. Muge; arranged by M. Loukovikas
15. Traditional of Greece & Galicia | Adapted in music & lyrics by A. Muge; arranged by F. Raposo

H. DA ALMA | DE PROFUNDIS
16. Se o lamento apenas fosse (If the Lament Were Just That)
17. Τα ἔνδον ῥήματα | Os meus ditames (The Inner Dictates)

An enthralling and poignant lament composed by Amélia, starting off in Epirus, with a double traditional improvisation by Manos Achalinotópoulos on the clarino. Moreover, Amélia created the atmosphere of a Greek tragedy, accompanied by a chorus (arranged by José Martins and Filipe Raposo), using mainly the rhythm of a solemn zeibekiko. It is amazing, indeed, that she was able to compose on this peculiar 9-beat rhythm as soon as she was familiarized with it through her exposure to Hellenic culture.

“Be you a friend or an enemy, do not announce it anywhere. | I stand here as a prisoner induced by all my inner dictates.” Ares Alexandrou used this couplet as a footnote (this is its original title) or a post scriptum in his last poetry book, paraphrasing Simonides, who composed a famous epitaph–epigram for the fallen Spartans in the Battle of Thermopylae: “Oh, stranger, tell the Lacedaemonians that here | we lie obedient to their dictates.” In Periplus, Ares’ footnote is less ostinato than my original (The Gold in the Sky), but Amélia made a difference with her Erinyes-like vocalisms, extending the tragic element of the “Lament” to “The Inner Dictates”, which she adapted and recited in Portuguese.

16. Amélia Muge | Arranged by J. Martins & F. Raposo
17. Ares Alexandrou | Michales Loukovikas | Adapted into Portuguese by A. Muge; arranged by F. Raposo

I. DAS TASCAS E TAVERNAS (FADO & REBETIKO TAVERNS)
18. Um qualquer quê (Something Like That)
19. Abertura da taverna (The Entrance to the Tavern)
20. Τα μαγκάκια τής ταβέρνας (The Manges of the Tavern)

This sequence appears as a live recording of the transformation of a fado tasca into a rebetiko tavern. It’s due to our obsession by a fantastic scene in some harbour’s tavern during tempestuous weather, where the crews of stranded ships gather, each singing their own songs in turn, until eventually they all sing in chorus. We tried to revive this scene, beginning with an Amélia’s love song evocating fado. Then a necessary “bridge” followed, with a breathtaking instrumental fado and rebetiko improvisation by Ricardo Parreira (guitarra portuguesa) and Dimitris Mystakidis (bouzouki), introducing us to the rebetiko finale.

Panaiotes Tountas, who signed this rebetiko, entitled it “The Tavern Minor (Vlamákia)” (diminutive of vlames, a synonym of mangas). Indirectly but clearly, Tountas referred to the instrumental “Tekke Minor” that Iohannes Chalkiás (or Jack Gregory) recorded in the USA with a fantastic long taqsim (improvisation) in the beginning. So the tune seems to be traditional. There are several theories on the etymology of vlames and mangas. We have chosen “The Manges of the Tavern” as a title, because the word may come from the Iberian manga (sleeve; the old manges used to wear only one sleeve of their jacket), and it combines well with the traditional Portuguese song “A mangar” sung by the local manganões, who are similar to the Greek manges.

Panaiotes Tountas

The recording session in Lisbon for “The Entrance to the Tavern” has been engraved into my memory. I had explained to Ricardo and the viola (guitar) player, Pedro Pinhal, that they should play “in waves”, so as to leave “free” space for Dimitris, who would record later in Salonica. Then, in order to “charge” them, I obliged them to listen to the taqsim of Chalkiás as a source of inspiration. The result was pure magic: one of the best fado solos I’ve ever listened to – and moreover, in dialogue with a bouzouki! Back to Salonica, Dimitris added himself perfectly on the Portuguese duet. At last, I transferred the “trio” to the… harbour’s tavern, so that we could listen to them playing all together! This is the magic called editing…

18. Amélia Muge | Arranged by F. Raposo
19. Instrumental fado & rebetiko improvisation by Ricardo Parreira & Dimitris Mystakidis | Arranged by M. Loukovikas
20. Panaiotis Tountas | Traditional rebetiko | Arranged by M. Loukovikas

J. TÃO LONGE, TÃO PERTO (SO DISTANT, SO NEAR)
21. Dolor, ai dolor (Dolor, ah, Dolor)
22. Το βλέμμα σου πού να τελειώνει; | O teu olhar onde acaba?
(How Far Can Your Eyes Reach?) / Greek version
23. O teu olhar onde acaba? | Το βλέμμα σου πού να τελειώνει;
(How Far Can Your Eyes Reach?) / Portuguese version
24. Zum zum

The first three parts of the final sequence are in fact one long song. Amélia sent me the lyrics when she tried in vain to “reactivate” me as a composer. Months had passed, until I dreamed one night that I had rearranged her song “Arena” (from her wonderful album Não sou daqui) as a rebetiko! Alas, I had to spend hours on the piano before I realized that what happens in a dream doesn’t necessarily mean it can happen in real life. Yet, my time was not wasted. Gradually, I left “Arena” behind improvising in another mood that was so appealing! Luckily, I recorded it and sent it to Amélia, who in turn adapted the lyrics to my melody, and set to music her original version (“Dolor, ah, Dolor”). On my part, I adapted her lyrics into Greek, inviting Eleni Tsaligopoulou to sing the Greek version, and Zoe Tiganouria to play the accordion, while at the end of the Portuguese version, Eleni and Amélia sang “Dolor” together! According to the Greek composer and pianist, Giorgos Andreou: “A prime moment emotionally for me (which I consider to be the climax of the CD) is the parallel interpretation of the song ‘How Far Can Your Eyes Reach?’ by Eleni Tsaligopoulou in Greek and Amélia Muge in Portuguese.”

Although composed by Amélia as a gift for my birthday, “Zum zum” is more than that. It evokes Violeta Parra’s “Run run se fué pa’l norte”, as a tribute to her work, rooted in Chilean tradition and expressing the people’s lives and problems. Zum zum in Portuguese means a kind of rumour, passing from one person to another, by word of mouth. Wake up, it says, because “All the flowers in the fields | All the birds in the sky | All the fish in the sea | Are gathering at your door | To greet you and sing for you | That there is a zum zum | Coming from the South”… It is a kind of an Iberian-Latin American song, connected with “How Far Can Your Eyes Reach?” through its melody – adapted here as an intro. The conclusion of the song in a 9-beat rhythm announces the arrival of Zum zum in Greece – something that is also validated by the… cicadas!

Silver ring with a brass cicada, inspired by an ancient Greek ring from the 5th century BCE

● Amélia and I were on Skópelos, Greece, for vacation. One day we went to a crowded beach, so we sat under a tree in the shade, next to the beach bar. A loudspeaker played on a branch over our heads. “They are a tempo”, Amélia said. As she saw me puzzled, she explained: “The cicadas sound in time, keeping the rhythm!” “No way!”, I answered. But soon I admitted she was right! In fact, it was quite easy for them to follow rhythms of pop songs. They had a little problem when the stream of sound changed into some Brazilian song but they soon adapted… I was fascinated! ● Back to Lisbon, I had a crazy idea while working on “Zum zum”. I searched for cicada sounds in the Net, but what I found were cicadas in chorus. I then searched for cigarras, cigales, cigalas, but I could still not find what I was looking for – until I searched for Greek τζιτζίκια: there was a plethora of sounds, among them of lone cicadas (what I was looking for), so that they could be “trained” (through the “magic of editing”) to “sound in chorus” with the choir, keeping the rhythms of “Zum zum”! When I finished, I invited Amélia and José Martins to listen to my specially “trained” cicada choir! How we laughed! That’s the meaning of the phrase “samples of trained Greek cicadas”, mentioned in the Periplus booklet, with everything else I contributed to our work. ● And the cicadas sounded not only in the CD: at the end of our Periplus concerts, the audience left the theatre listening to Greek τζιτζίκια!

21. Amélia Muge | Arranged by M. Loukovikas
22. Amélia Muge | Michales Loukovikas | Adapted into Greek & arranged by M. Loukovikas
23. Amélia Muge | Michales Loukovikas – & Amélia Muge (finale) | Adapted into Greek & arranged by M. Loukovikas
24. Amélia Muge | Amélia Muge – & Michales Loukovikas (intro) | Arranged by J. Martins & M. Loukovikas

● See also: GIORGOS ANDREOU on “PERIPLUS” | MARIA DO ROSÁRIO PESTANA on “PERIPLUS”

Periplus, the international edition

PERIPLUS MUSICAL TROUPE: Amélia Muge: voice, vocals, talk, guitarra braguesa, sound-effects. | Michales Loukovikas: voice, vocals, drone, talk, accordion, finger-snaps, hand-claps, percussion, samples of voices and sounds.
Manos Achalinotopoulos: clarino (folk clarinet), voice, vocals. | Kyriakos Gouventas: violin, viola, mandolin. | Harris Lambrakis: ney (oriental flute), recorder. | José Martins: percussion, synthesizer, hand-claps, kalimba, sound-effects. | Ricardo Parreira: guitarra portuguesa. | António Quintino: double bass. | Filipe Raposo: piano, keyboards, accordion. | José Salgueiro: percussion, hand-claps.

SPECIAL GUESTS: Hélia Correia, writer: voice. | Eleni Tsaligopoulou, singer: voice, vocals, children’s songs, laughs. | Outra Voz, a Guimarães citizens’ choir: sounds of the sea, water, wind, space, vocals, children’s songs, respirations, talk.

OTHER PARTICIPANTS: Mariana Abrunheiro: vocals. | Catarina Anacleto: vocals, cello. | Irene Bakalopoulou: harp. | José Barros: vocals, mandolin, cavaquinho, guitarra braguesa. | Cristina Benedita: vocals. | José Manuel David: voice, vocals, drone, kalimba, bagpipe, horn. | Margarida Guerreiro: anathemas. | André Maia: talk. | Teresa Muge: voice, anathemas. | Dimitris Mystakidis: bouzouki, djura, rebetiko guitar. | Pedro Pinhal: fado viola (guitar). | Ziad Rajab: oud. | Eduardo Salgueiro: hand-claps. | Kostas Theodorou: percussion, double bass. | Zoe Tiganouria: accordion. | Francisco & Sofia Van Epps: children’s songs, laughs. | Rui Vaz: vocals, talk.

AUTHORS: Ares Alexandrou (1922 – 1979) | Athenaeus (2nd century BCE) | Constantine Cavafy (1863 – 1933) | Hélia Correia | Natália Correia (1923 – 1993) | Michales Loukovikas | Mesomedes (early 2nd century CE) | Amélia Muge | Fernando Pessoa (1888 – 1935) | Seikilos (ca 1st century CE) | Panaiotis Tountas (1886 – 1942)

The ladies of rebetiko, by A. Tassos (1970)

MARIA GRACIETE BESSE sobre “ARCHiPELAGOS”

MARIA GRACIETE BESSE sobre “ARCHiPELAGOS”

Amélia Muge | Michales Loukovikas

/ENGLISH/ MARIA GRACIETE BESSE on ARCHiPELAGOS
/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Η MARIA GRACIETE BESSE για το ARCHiPELAGOS

Maria Graciete Besse: escritora e poetisa luso-francesa

 
Uma prática da Relação
 

ARCHiPELAGOS / Passagens, de Amélia Muge e Michales Loukovikas, Periplus

Maria Graciete Besse, Professeur émérite, Université de Paris IV – La Sorbonne

mariagraciete7@aol.com

Todo o pensamento arquipélago é pensamento do tremor, da não-presunção, mas também da abertura e da partilha.

Édouard Glissant

 

Autora, cantora e compositora, Amélia Muge é bem conhecida no panorama cultural português, pela beleza dos seus textos e composições musicais. Natural de Moçambique, a artista chegou a Portugal em 1984. O seu primeiro disco, intitulado Mugica, foi divulgado em 1992, seguido de Todos os dias (1994). Ao longo da sua carreira, Amélia Muge tem colaborado regularmente com José Mário Branco, Fausto, entre outros, e obteve em 1995 o prestigioso prémio Zeca Afonso com Maio maduro Maio (partilhado com José Mário Branco e João Afonso). De novo, este prémio foi-lhe atribuído em 1998, pelo álbum Taco a Taco, seguindo-se outros discos (A Monte, 2000; Não sou daqui, 2007) e numerosas participações em festivais nacionais e internacionais. Na actualidade, a autora continua a colaborar com diversos cantores, compondo também para fadistas bem conhecidos como Mísia, Camané, Ana Moura, Cristina Branco, entre muitos outros.

Em 2009, Amélia Muge conheceu Michales Loukovikas, cantor, compositor e instrumentista, originário da Trácia e especialista de música grega contemporânea, em particular do Rebético.¹ Este encontro, sob os auspícios da Internet, revelou-se imediatamente fecundo pois concretizou-se em diversos projectos e na publicação de três discos: um CD-livro em português e em grego (2011), que celebra a obra do poeta Ares Alexandrou, desenvolvendo um trabalho precedente de Michales Loukovikas, intitulado O Ouro do Céu; em seguida surge Periplus / Deambulações luso-gregas (2012), considerado em Portugal como um dos melhores discos do ano; e mais recentemente Archipelagos / Passagens (2018), que inclui um CD e um eBook, onde descobrimos uma aventura musical e poética que se desenrola entre Portugal e a Grécia, mas que se abre também a um mundo mais vasto. Neste trabalho, os dois artistas celebram a temática da viagem através de diferentes culturas e paisagens, num tempo múltiplo e num espaço variado – Portugal, a Grécia, a Macaronésia, a América do Sul, as ilhas da utopia –, para nos propôr um olhar cruzado, dotado de uma sonoridade original que prolonga as fascinantes deambulações luso-gregas de Periplus, de forma a oferecer-nos agora algumas passagens que nos conduzem para além da errância, até novas dimensões do imaginário.

• ¹ Forma popular marcada pela herança musical de Istambul (Constantinopla) e de Esmirna, que se desenvolve sobretudo nos anos 1920, na sequência das vagas de refugiados da Ásia Menor.

Dotado de uma grande qualidade literária e musical, Archipelagos / Passagens é composto por 28 rotas, distribuídas em 10 sequências-ilhas distintas, apresentando-se como uma obra em forma de arquipélago. Este termo, explicitado no eBook (Archipédia) que acompanha o CD (com textos em português, inglês e grego), remete para o sentido que vigorava na Grécia antiga em que o arquipélago designava o mar Egeu, passando mais tarde a significar o conjunto de ilhas do Egeu e finalmente, qualquer agrupamento de ilhas. Mas o conceito de arquipélago apresenta uma grande densidade de conotações poéticas, sendo tributário, no imaginário colectivo ocidental, das utopias dos séculos passados em que a ilha aparecia isolada. Quando falamos de arquipélago, podemos também evocar a cultura antiga e, depois de Hölderlin, toda a riqueza cultural helénica, universal e imortal. Para Saint-John Perse (1887-1975), outro grande poeta fascinado pelo universo insular, por detrás do écran luminoso do espaço mediterrânico, existe um ambiente atmosférico e uma base psicológica, impregnada de história e de civilização antiga. É com esta dimensão encantatória que abre o disco de Amélia Muge e Michales Loukovikas, a partir da adaptação de um poema de Hölderlin.

Édouard Glissant, por Jennifer Dionisio

No centro do universo literário e musical oferecido por este trabalho, podemos facilmente identificar o conceito paradigmático de Relação, desenvolvido pelo poeta, romancista e filósofo francês Édouard Glissant (1928-2011) que propõe uma poética rizomática aberta ao Diverso enquanto travessia entre o lugar e o mundo.² Ao remeter para o entrecruzamento de culturas diversas, a Relação traduz um pensamento arquipélago, em que as ilhas deixam de significar isolamento, para se abrirem à totalidade-mundo, isto é, a uma força que irradia, opondo-se ao conceito totalitário de fechamento e intolerância.³ Apesar das diferenças geográficas e culturais, pensamos que em Archipelagos / Passagens existem efectivamente ecos da obra deste grande poeta das Caraíbas, sobretudo pelo sentido de um trajecto, de um precurso e de um cruzamento que se encontram na base de um pensamento que se opõe à visão de um mundo fechado, unitário, para nos propôr a presença estimulante do Diverso, marcado pela ideia do movimento. Mas, como sublinhou em várias ocasiões Édouard Glissant, a Relação não significa a mistura confusa e desordenada de culturas, na medida em que o Diverso compreende as diferenças que se encontram, se ajustam umas às outras, se harmonizam. Para o poeta, a Relação possui uma dimensão arquipélica aberta à passagem e à totalidade-mundo, noção que permite conceber tanto a política como a identidade, a ética, a língua e as diferentes modalidades do pensamento. Na opinião de Glissant, o esquema do pensamento arquipélago não conduz à noção de território que se define como uma noção continental, porque o arquipélago é discontínuo, descentrado. Nesta perspectiva, o poeta-filósofo distingue:

● o pensamento continental que se identifica com o sistema, arrogante, feito de lógicas causais que podem conduzir à guerra;

● e o pensamento arquipélago que é uma outra forma de pensar, mais intuitiva, mais frágil, rizomática, associada ao imprevisto do caos-mundo, neologismo que caracteriza não a desordem mas o imprevisível.⁴

O Dia de Deus, de Paul Gauguin

• ² Para Édouard Glissant, a Relação é tudo que “relie (relaie), relate”, in Poétique de la Relation. Poétique III, Paris, Gallimard, 1990, p. 187.

• ³ Édouard Glissant, Traité du Tout-monde. Poétique IV, Paris, Gallimard, 1997.

• ⁴ Segundo Édouard Glissant, a noção de “caos-mundo é bem precisa: trata-se da mistura cultural, que não se reduz simplesmente a um melting-pot, graças à qual a totalidade mundo hoje está realizada.”, in Introdução a uma poética da diversidade, trad. Enilce do Carmo A. Rocha, Juiz de Fora, editora UFJF, 2005, p. 98.

Para Glissant, o pensamento arquipélago é também um pensamento do tremor, que condiz com a errância e se abre ao futuro. Assim, o estremecimento ou o tremor é a qualidade do que se opõe ao pensamento brutal, unívoco, do eu sem o outro, escreve o poeta, sublinhando que precisamos de estremecimento, porque sufocamos no meio de pensamentos sistemáticos e arrogantes. Poderíamos acrescentar que precisamos também, cada vez mais, de espaços de epifania, como os que Amélia Muge e Michales Loukovikas nos dão a ouvir neste disco que desenha arquipélagos inéditos, mobiliza culturas misturadas, apelando a uma dinâmica de subjectivações inesperadas que designam um olhar, uma voz, um sopro, uma tradição atravessada por múltiplas passagens, memórias fluídas e estremecentes, para pensar a complexidade do mundo, convidando-nos também a imaginar o Encontro e a alimentar a esperança para além de todas as formas de utopia.

Uma visão surrealista do artista haitiano Vanex Florestant

Para Glissant, como para Amélia Muge e Michales Loukovikas, a paisagem não é apenas um simples cenário, mas uma personagem activa da História. Assim, graças à poética da Relação, uma parte da natureza, vista pelo olhar humano, isto é, a paisagem escolhida em função de parâmetros subjectivos, emotivos e afectivos, não se encontra unicamente numa perspectiva horizontal, mas desenha uma profundidade vertical que nos convida à reflexão. Assim, o primeiro eixo temático do disco propõe-nos uma série de paisagens que remetem para a beleza da Grécia cantada por Hölderlin, postas em relação com fragmentos de Orestes, a tragédia de Eurípides, composta em 408 antes de Cristo, que evoca a dor, cantada em grego antigo por Michales Loukovikas e coro. Identificamos em seguida a presença de dois universos musicais distintos: o hino hurrita a Nikkal, datado de 1400 antes de Cristo – descoberto na Síria nos anos 50, num campo arqueológico (Ugarit) – e o Acordai, poema de José Gomes Ferreira, musicado por Fernando Lopes-Graça nos anos 40. A sequência começa como uma canção de embalar que vem da Antiguidade e chega aos nossos dias para despertar a nossa sensibilidade e inteligência, e se impôr como uma canção de luta. Paralelamente à pesquisa literária deste notável trabalho musical, podemos falar de uma dimensão ética e política no sentido mais nobre do termo.

Orestes matando Egisto e Clitemnestra, baixo relevo num sarcófago (ca 150 EC)

O disco começa com uma voz da sabedoria que recita versos de
Hölderlin (a mãe de Amélia, com 98 anos) e termina com um coro
infantil, desenhando assim um itinerário que se projecta no futuro.

Archipelagos / Passagens convida-nos a viajar através de espaços reais e imaginários, propondo-nos um percurso geográfico, literário e cultural que convoca vozes tão diferentes como as de Safo, Eurípides, Hölderlin, Pessoa, José Gomes Ferreira, Saramago, ou ainda Hélia Correia, que se encontra no centro de todo o CD. É de notar também que o disco começa com uma voz da sabedoria que recita versos de Hölderlin (a mãe de Amélia, com 98 anos) e termina com um coro infantil, desenhando assim um itinerário que se projecta no futuro. O mundo antigo e o espaço do Mediterrâneo, o mar fechado, abrem-se ao Atlântico e confundem-se com o universo da Macaronésia, introduzida através dum canto tradicional das Canárias posto em relação com um canto dos Açores e com ritmos caboverdianos numa belíssima homenagem a Cesária Évora.

Cesária Évora, por Sersun

Podemos ainda observar que todo este trabalho é atravessado por uma interrogação fundamental de Hölderlin, citado por Hélia Correia : “Para que servem os poetas em tempo de indigência?”. Esta pergunta eivada de melancolia, colocada em 1800 pelo poeta do Romantismo alemão, sublinha a desilusão de todos aqueles que viam as luzes da Revolução francesa apagar-se no Terror. Contudo, Hölderlin não se dirige exactamente aos desiludidos da História mas aos “abandonados por Deus”, constatando a queda espiritual, o eclipse da transcendência. Convém no entanto lembrar que, três anos mais tarde, surge a resposta a esta pergunta quando Hölderlin sublinha o papel e a responsabilidade do artista, afirmando que “os poetas fundam tudo o que permanece”. Em meados do século XX, Adorno evoca o crime contra a humanidade e considera que seria bárbaro escrever poesia depois de Auschwitz. Mas a poesia permanece, como sabemos e como o demonstra também o trabalho de Archipelagos / Passagens que celebra as palavras vindas de diversos horizontes culturais, para nos lembrar que a pergunta de Hölderlin se pode colocar novamente nos nossos dias, perante a perda de muitos valores que tocam o mundo contemporâneo.

Estátua de Odisseu descoberta por colectores de esponjas nos destroços
do naufrágio de Anticítera entre outras estátuas, moedas e artefactos (sécs. IV
a I AEC), bem como o mecanismo de Anticítera, o mais antigo computador analógico conhecido.

Archipelagos / Passagens celebra portanto uma paisagem múltipla, cruza memórias, estabelece um diálogo com a tradição escrita e oral, traduz o ritmo das línguas (o português, o grego, o espanhol, o inglês, o crioulo), faz ouvir o sopro que revela a harmonia, a dor e a violência da História – é de notar que numa das sequências mais belas do disco, Amélia Muge mergulha justamente na memória das palavras e canta Safo em grego antigo, convidando-nos a viajar no tempo e a enfrentar a tentação do silêncio, antes de convocar um poema inglês de Fernando Pessoa para insistir na cadência das horas, mostrando-nos que o tempo nos conduz para o que Glissant chamava o caos-mundo, onde encontramos o choque dos contactos, as misturas entre realidades muito diferentes, as identidades e as culturas que entram em relação umas com as outras, sem nada perder da sua originalidade. Este caos-mundo é dominado pelo mar feiticeiro cantado em grego por um outro colaborador do CD, Andreas Karakotas, que convoca um excerto do já evocado hino hurrita a Nikkal e nos conduz até uma Odisseia onde Ulisses vai encontrar o caminho até à sua ilha, depois de uma longa viagem através de terras desconhecidas. Mas “Ítaca já não há”, diz o poema. Ulisses transformou-se num estrangeiro que toma a forma de um mendigo, de um refugiado – poderíamos nós acrescentar hoje –, de um emigrante, que a Europa insulta e deixa morrer nesse imenso cemitério chamado Mediterrâneo. E entramos em seguida num novo eixo temático do disco que vai opôr utopia e distopia, onde se inscreve o imprevisto aberto à errância e por vezes à morte, como a do pescador Nicolas cantado por Michales Loukovikas, esse pescador esperado pela sua mãe que não sabe que o filho se afogou no mar.

A jangada de Medusa, de Théodore Géricault (1818-19). O naufrágio chocou toda a gente porque as vítimas eram europeias; inspirou uma oratória de Hans Werner Henze e um filme
de Iradj Azimi. Agora que estes naufrágios são de não europeus, tornaram-se uma rotina…

O percurso poético e musical abre-se contudo à visão de uma utopia, remetendo para a famosa ilha inventada por Thomas More em 1516, e cujas raízes se encontram em Aristóteles e Platão. A utopia representa, como sabemos, algo de perfeito, indissociável da busca. O sentido político da utopia relaciona-se com um governo imaginário impossível de realizar. A transformação da utopia em distopia revela um tropismo melancólico que diz respeito à nossa representação do tempo e da História marcada pela catástrofe (essa catástrofe de que falava Walter Benjamin, o filósofo judeu alemão, no início dos anos 1930, pressentindo já o horror da Shoah). Assim, o sonho pode-se transformar em pesadelo, onde erram os meninos perdidos, cantados por Amélia Muge numa bela adaptação de um ritmo tradicional da Trácia, com um arranjo de António José Martins e de Michales Loukovikas.

A pergunta colocada por Hölderlin (“Para que servem os poetas em tempo de indigência?”), ganha grande intensidade, como uma litania, quando se exprime na voz de Hélia Correia que evoca a ruína da Grécia, abandonada por todos os deuses (sobretudo os deuses da Finança no momento da crise recente). O pesadelo distópico é transmitido pela música de Beethoven, mais precisamente pelo 2o movimento da Terceira Sinfonia, a Marcha Fúnebre, adaptada por Michales Loukovikas, para exprimir o que Hélia Correia designa como a Terceira Miséria (título de um magnífico livro de poesia).⁵ A “terceira miséria” de que fala Hélia Correia, é “a de quem já não ouve nem pergunta” e que corresponde à desumanização do mundo em que vivemos, povoado de sombras, esse mundo que perdeu todo o sentido da hospitalidade – Falamos de sombras é justamente o título deste tema que pertence a uma das mais belas sequências do CD.

• ⁵ Hélia Correia, A Terceira Miséria, Lisboa, Relógio d’Água, 2012 (com o Partenon na capa).

O terceiro eixo temático deste trabalho aborda por fim a emigração feita da nostalgia que alimenta o cantar do emigrante, onde ouvimos ecos de outros ritmos bem conhecidos, a voz de Violeta Parra, ou os versos de Rosalía de Castro, musicados por José Niza e já cantados por Adriano Correia de Oliveira.

Ao longo do álbum, podemos verificar que a Relação se apresenta como algo de dinâmico que diz o mundo na sua transição entre o interior e o exterior, o subjectivo e o objectivo, o próximo e o distante. Esta Relação é, como afirmava Édouard Glissant, um conhecimento no sentido de um saber acerca de si mesmo e acerca dos outros, quando o artista se abre ao drama do mundo, mas pode também significar um universo onde se inscreve por vezes a Alegria, título de um poema de José Saramago, adaptado por Amélia Muge e António José Martins, baseado numa composição e arranjo de Giorgos Andreou.

A viagem poética e musical converge finalmente numa celebração do mar, espaço do encontro que vai revisitar uma célebre cantiga de amigo de Martim Codax, Ondas do mar de Vigo, cantada em grego por Michales Loukovikas e em português por Amélia Muge, com uma melodia de Rebético de Panaiotis Tountas, música da Relação por excelência. A última sequência de Archipelagos / Passagens projecta-se no futuro pois tal como canta Amélia Muge, “há sempre outro barco a chegar” e “tudo pode acontecer”.

Promenade à Utopia, de Igor Bitman

Para concluir, podemos afirmar que este notável trabalho de Amélia Muge e Michales Loukovikas não pretende apresentar um mundo estático, de conhecimento formal, mas abre-se a um universo de relações e de revelações possíveis. Descobrimos assim o mundo na sua diversidade imprevisível através de uma viagem constituída por múltiplos itinerários que passam pelos lugares que povoam a nossa memória, desenhando um trajecto atento aos dramas da democracia contemporânea, mas também ao milagre sempre renovado da vida, do esplendor da paisagem, do estremecer da esperança. O album trabalha uma Relação constante entre o sujeito, o mundo, a escrita poética e musical, a utopia e a distopia, correspondendo a um percurso emblemático que nos leva a ultrapassar todas as fronteiras, todos os muros, para desenhar uma geopoética da insularidade arquipélica como um colar de ilhas que “estão por nós sempre a chamar” como podemos ouvir na última passagem do disco. Por todas estas razões, pensamos que Archipelagos / Passagens constitui uma bela ilustração do conceito glissantiano de Relação alimentada de mobilidade e de passagens, que incluem o descentramento, o estremecimento, a abertura ao Múltiplo e ao Diverso, mas também um convite à reflexão ética e política, projectando-nos num futuro possível, que deve ter em conta a generosidade da imaginação capaz de transformar o mundo.

● Apresentação de ARCHiPELAGOS / Passagens em Paris, Fondation
Calouste Gulbenkian – Délégation en France, 7 de Novembro de 2018.
● Publicado em Limite, Revista de Estudios Portugueses y de
la Lusofonía, Universidad de Extremadura, vol 12.2 / 2018

ARCHiPELAGOS Autores: Amélia Muge | Anónimo Hurrita | Armando Soares | Eurípides | Fernando Lopes-Graça | Fernando Pessoa | Friedrich Hölderlin | Giorgos Andreou | Giorgos Mitsakis | Hélia Correia | João de Deus | José Gomes Ferreira | José Niza | José Saramago | Ludwig van Beethoven | Manos Achalinotópoulos | Martín Codax | Michales Loukovikas | Panaiotis Tountas | Rosalía de Castro | Safo | Vasilis Tsitsanis | Violeta Parra
Núcleo: Amélia Muge: voz, braguesa, percussão | Michales Loukovikas: voz, percussão, acordeão | António Quintino: contrabaixo | Dimitris Mystakidis: guitarra, bouzouki, baglamás, tzourás | Filipe Raposo: piano, acordeão, teclados | Harris Lambrakis: ney (flauta oriental), flauta de bisel | José Salgueiro: percussão | Kyriakos Gouventas: violino, viola | Manos Achalinotópoulos: clarino (clarinete folk), voz | Maria Monda (Sofia Adriana Portugal, Susana Quaresma e Tânia Cardoso): trio vocal | Ricardo Parreira: guitarra portuguesa
Convidados especiais: Hélia Correia e Maria José Muge: voz falada
Convidados (pro-bono): Ana Dias: harpa | Andreas Karakotas: voz | António José Martins: caixa de música, percussão | Catarina Anacleto: violoncelo, voz | Catarina Moura: voz | José Manuel David: voz | Kosmás Papadópoulos: clarinete | Kostas Hanís: vibrafone | Mariana Abrunheiro: voz | Niovi Benou: palmas | Paló: voz | Pedro Casaes: voz | Rita Maria: voz | Rui Vaz: voz | Teresa Campos: voz | Thomás Natsis: guitarra de flamenco, palmas
Em especial: Cramol, Grupo de Canto Tradicional de Mulheres da Biblioteca Operária Oeirense | Orquestra de Cordas Palhetadas “Thanassis Tsipinakis” do Município de Patras | Coro de Crianças, dir. Catarina Anacleto: Santiago Fantasia, Gabriel Leite, Sophia Van Epps, Ana Pita, Marta Semblano, Patrícia Arens Teixeira

Chronicle 13. PROFESSIONALS OR AMATEURS?

Chronicle 13. PROFESSIONALS OR AMATEURS?

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 13. ΕΠΑΓΓΕΛΜΑΤΙΕΣ Ή ΕΡΑΣΙΤΕΧΝΕΣ;

● “Do Not Maltreat Our Music!” (Β) ● Autodidacts
or Literate? ● Asia Minor Catastrophe and Rebétiko
● Censorship on Music ● Controversy Over Rebétiko
● Entertainment and Edutainment (B)

Michales Loukovikas

“IF I CANNOT CHANGE A SITUATION, I ACCEPT IT,” B.B. King confessed, clarifying the reason why he changed his style of blues.⁽¹⁾ His statement raises openly the problem of accepting every situation or not, whether one can create obeying to the dictates of companies, or of the public – which is already a conditioned element. Certainly, the room for creation becomes more limited. Even those who can cope with adversities would produce an infinitely more important work if they had a free hand. Those who manage not to debase their art under such strict control are really few. That’s why the ethos of music is already a concept unknown to musicians – something so hard to get that we are under the illusion we can find it among amateurs…

• ⁽¹⁾ Thelonious Monk advises exactly the opposite: “I say, play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you’re doing – even if it does take them 15, 20 years”…

Odysseus Overcome by Demodocus’ Song, by Francesco Hayez (1813-15)

Well, professionals or amateurs? We need to elaborate on this issue because, in the field of the arts, the former are burdened with all the sins of the world (the junk that’s for sale), while no one dares to call into question the noble intentions of those enveloped in the halo of an “art lover”; and this mentality has already imbued even professionals! We have arrived to the point where we… boast of our amateurism, considering professionalism to be hubris, in the land of the Homeric epics, i.e. the work of a professional rhapsode, where other, equally professional bards of the Odyssey era (sometime between 1250 and 1170 BCE) are also mentioned, namely Phemius and Demodocus. We are talking about a tradition we know for sure it’s been going on for at least three millennia – let alone that professional musicians existed well before the fall of Troy.

So, what is a professional? Generally speaking on any kind of work, because the situation around music is rather confusing, we can say that he/she is someone who: a) knows well how to do a job – has been specially trained, or skilled as an apprentice of an older artisan – and b) out of this job he/she can at least make a living.

Three Musicians, by Picasso

Anyone who does not meet the above requirements cannot be considered a professional and, moreover, if he/she doesn’t meet the first requirement, it’s (normally) impossible to get a job. Of course, the professionals may be good or bad depending on the degree they can meet such requirements. Thus a good professional is someone who cares for both the material he’s working on, and the material aspect of his profession – his earnings. Otherwise his craftsmanship would be degraded and could be easily replaced. Bertolt Brecht talked about this need in his time, but who listened to him then, and who remembers him now? “When you have something to say, to express,” said Pablo Picasso, “any submission becomes unbearable in the long run. One must have the courage of one’s vocation and the courage to make a living from one’s vocation… without compromise.”

The professional musicians’ denigration may be linked to the Europeanization epidemic that’s been sweeping the Hellenic state already since its establishment. The Ionian and Athenian serenades, operettas, various retros, and European light music in general, constituted the “scope of action par excellence” of the literate Europeanist super-professionals,⁽²⁾ while local traditional music was abandoned in the care of semi-professional, or even amateur, self-taught musicians, who were treated disparagingly by the music establishment. The result was that they felt inferior, as they could not even read music, among many other things.

• ⁽²⁾ It is striking that music which is described as… “lightweight” – superficially sentimental, and of a petty bourgeois character – is found only in the Occident, after the so-called “Commercial Revolution” that commercialized everything, even the arts. The one found in the Mediterranean is imitation! Traditional musicians in Hellas, when they’re playing such pieces, characterize them as “European”, even if they have Greek lyrics or composers… (See also Chronicle 11, Music and Nation).

Here’s the “root of evil”: at best, the state left local music to the mercy of fate; at worst, it was hostile against it. Several posts, public or not (teachers, directors, producers, interpreters of music), were surely occupied by these Europeanists. Under such circumstances, Hellenic music and its practitioners barely survived. They were obliged to do other jobs to survive – of course at the expense of their art that was degraded more and more, along with public taste. This profession “offered” so much insecurity that the locals (throughout the Balkans) handed it over to the “exclusive competence” of the Roma, the gypsies.

The dramatic improvement of the conditions of Hellenic
music came with a… tragedy: the Asia Minor Catastrophe.

Politakia, later Smyrnaic Estudiantina: the first one founded in Smyrna in 1898 by Basileios Sideres and Aristides Peristeres, the Constantinopolitans.

THE SITUATION IMPROVED when and where the Greeks achieved economic prosperity that allowed them to support “full time” musicians. But the dramatic improvement of the conditions of Hellenic music came with a… tragedy: the Asia Minor Catastrophe. History shows again and again how much she can appreciate irony! Those uprooted from their ancestral homes moved in thousands into Greece (around 1.3 million people) and, together with their scanty belongings, carried with them the Anatolian sound and lifestyle – which evolved into a struggle for survival: they brought their songs and feasts, just in case they could alleviate their plight…

The Anatolian musicians were truly professionals, with excellent knowledge of both the Mediterranean and European traditions. But they were also refugees – thus, on the margins. It would take some time until they occupied responsible positions in the newly founded phonographic companies. Until then – as long as their equally marginalized public was still there – they would keep on playing their familiar repertoire of Constantinople, Smyrna and Asia Minor at large, with songs and tunes that enjoyed widespread approval in Anatolia; not in Greece, where they were not universally embraced, had a rather limited scope, for their sound was quite “unfamiliar” – let alone they were so difficult to sing and play, especially when the composers engaged in the art of modulation. These tunes could become the “yeast” to “ferment” a kind of indigenous erudite music. But their fate was similar to that of their creators and they were in turn marginalized. Another historical irony was that the so-called Smyrnaic songs were replaced by those of the hitherto marginalized and far simpler Piraeotic rebétiko.

Censorship on Music (Not Only Lyrics)

Hence the reasons for this preference were commercial – as well as political: these elaborate, demanding songs, as artistic products of an advanced culture, were reminiscent of lost homelands. They ought to be removed from collective memory to – supposedly – “heal” the “trauma” of the Asia Minor Catastrophe. Firm was the conviction that this music was inextricably linked with the Turkish language spoken by several refugees. “National interest” dictated some drastic measures to be taken…

Smyrnaic songs on the margins for commercial and political reasons,
as reminiscent of lost homelands… Censorship on music targeted
minor thirds, a feature of the ancient Hellenic chromatic genus…

Apollo (raising his cithara), Music and Poetry, by Aimé Millet (1860–1869), on Paris Opéra Palais Garnier

This task was later taken over by the Metaxás dictatorship, imposing censorship that was not limited to lyrics, but extended to music, too (see Chronicle 9). The musical censors’ main target was minor third intervals (three semitones), the so-called “bemolli”,⁽³⁾ that is, the distinctive feature of the age-old chromatic genus – one of the three Hellenic genera, together with the diatonic and enharmonic. Even though there are some questions around enharmony, no one has disputed the chromatic genus: we know e.g. it was never used in tragedies – apparently because it did not fit there. Yet, according to Aristides Quintilianus (3rd century CE), Plutarch said that “the cithara, several generations older than tragedy, since its very beginning, used… the sweetest and most plaintive… chroma” (chromatic genus). Besides, the ancient genera can also be found, noticeably remodeled, in the Byzantine music. Yet, the Westerners can appreciate only scales, especially the diatonic, while their chromatic scale has nothing to do with the chromatic genus: Bingo!

• ⁽³⁾ “In 1936, when censorship on the songs was initially imposed, they ‘corrected’ the popular songs’ melodies removing the ‘oriental’ elements in an effort to ‘cleanse’ popular music. They aimed at various external features of the melody, primarily minor thirds or ‘bemolli’,(*) according to the musicians’ popular parlance.” (Giorgos Papadakis, Folk Self-Taught Musicians).

(*) Bemolle, in Italian musical terminology, means flat, “lower in pitch” by one semitone, notated using the symbol ♭. The opposite term is sharp, #, which is a raising of pitch by one semitone.

As Basiles Tsitsanes confessed in an interview with Papadakis: “With censorship at that time… we were taking away the bemolli. [Markos] Bambakares, for instance, wrote: ‘Every evening I ^♭will wait ^♭for you, girl’. We would change that mark and turn it without bemolle so as not to sound oriental… We wrote beautiful serenades at that time…”(!)

Tsitsanes Ouzerí (Tavern), Thessalonica

“How come that no one informed Metaxás on this problem?”, some naïve person may wonder. Well, if someone did, he must have… disappeared imprisoned or exiled later for “anti-state activities”! Under these abnormal conditions rebétiko turned professional. Persecutions affected everyone – both the Anatolians and the locals – for their music styles were first-degree relatives. Due to its tolerant police authority, Thessalonica then turned into an oasis where many persecuted found refuge. Thus, during its early years, rebétiko influenced the city and was influenced by it. Many most beautiful songs were composed then in (and about) Salonica.

Anyway, Hellenism’s painful shrinkage had also its positive effects, concentrating and condensing in Greece sounds of music born in three peninsulas: the Balkans, Asia Minor, and Italy. No country in this region enjoys such a privilege: it is its geography that determines the sound of its music. This little miracle, however, with Hellenism’s three-dimensional face, collided with the mantra “We belong to the West” and was anything but welcome to the rulers who would do everything for the people to lose orientation – and if possible, they would be happy to sign a presidential decree imposing… “occidentation”!

Sounds from three peninsulas (Balkans, Anatolia, Italy) condensed in
Hellas… Rebétiko’s foes covered all political spectrum (Right to Left).

Phoebus Anogeianakis in the Macronesos camp infirmary, drawn by Manos Katrakis (April 1950)

Controversy Over Rebétiko

Nevertheless, rebétiko’s foes covered the entire political spectrum from Right to Left. In late ’46 and early ’47, according to Phoebus Anogeianakis, the musical unions asked the government to intervene and take “appropriate measures” in order to stem the spread of rebétiko:

“This initiative,” he wrote in Rizospastis (Radical), the Communist Party newspaper, on January 28, 1947, “was gradually embraced by our music critics and columnists who, in their discussions and articles, grappled with its ‘moral’ and artistic value, as well as with its effect especially on the younger generation.⁽⁴⁾

• ⁽⁴⁾ Here’s another reincarnation of the Spartan ephori (see the previous Chronicle)!

“Anathemas ‘in the name’ of morality at risk, or an off-hand evaluation of popular rebétiko song as it is presented – mind you – in a cosmopolitan tavern, prevented a critical assessment of rebétiko creating fuss and confusion.

“Just the criteria of our Western music education are certainly not enough to approach and study rebétiko, when indeed they are accompanied by the ‘current’ perception of morality. Many of its aspects naturally seem strange to us. We’ve strayed away so far from its sources following our paths that sometimes we find ourselves with difficulty.

“The tradition of demotic [folk traditional] song and, to a somewhat lesser extent, of Byzantine music, even though some would be surprised, continues in these songs that constitute a genuine form of today’s popular music.”

Piraeus (1933): Markos Bambakares (standing, left) with bouzouki, Giorgos Batis (centre) with guitar.

A week later, on February 4, Rizospastis published a reply letter to Anogeianakis, signed by his co-fighter in the ranks of the National Liberation Front (EAM), namely Alekos Xenos, also a musician. Noting that in the newspaper Ethnos (Nation), the composer Manoles Kalomoires adopted a similar position with Anogeianakis (this concurrence seemed rather… incriminating!), he outlined his diametrically opposite view:

“Rebétiko,” he wrote, “is one of the inherent contradictions of the bourgeoisie in decline. It appears in an embryonic form before the wars. It takes shape from melodic remnants of the Turkish conquerors and those melodies brought here by ship crews coming from Turkish ports. It is sung by the most lumpen strata created by the pauperizing economic tactics of capitalism.⁽⁵⁾ It carries the most reactionary traditions, in the degradation of a segment of the bourgeoisie.

• ⁽⁵⁾ Lumpen (rags in German): a ragamuffin and, by extension, every impoverished element. In Marxist theory, it is combined with the word proletariat to signify the most impoverished segments of the working class having no class consciousness. Proletarius in ancient Rome was someone totally destitute who could not give the state anything but his children (proles = child). Under capitalism, it is the one who cannot give the capitalist anything but his labour power.

“I think that we cannot find ourselves going back to rebetiko but to the few songs of our people’s latest Resistance and those that will be composed about it in the future.”

This fossilized thinking, which the party leadership – unfortunately – espoused, was disputed on the 23rd of the same month by Linos Polites with another letter to Rizospastis. After calling Xenos back to… Marxist order (“how come that the lumpen is a degraded segment of the bourgeoisie?”), he censured the domestic production of tangos, concluding as follows:

“I cannot believe that A. Xenos accepts there is popular tradition and style in the music of the Resistance songs since we know both their composers – he is one of them – and the clearly Western measures in the structures of their compositions.⁽⁶⁾ In addition, we know that during such a short time, individual creation can far easier give its fruits.

• ⁽⁶⁾ The Anthem (“With the golden armour of youth…”) of EPON (United Panhellenic Organization of Youth), on Sophia Mavroeides-Papadakis’ lyrics, was initially performed in the 1st Panthessalian Congress of EPON with music composed by Xenos, while in Athens it was sung with a melody composed by Anogeianakis – just to mention a characteristic example…

“Today, after the great lesson of the Resistance, the gap that separates us in matters of art from the people became more than obvious, and there is a clear need to find a point of contact. This point will be found in contemporary popular activities, if we examine them with less superficiality and more serious characterizations.”

Manos Hadjidakis

The controversy around rebétiko necessarily stopped, since another conflict had broken out – with live ammunition: it was the Civil War… Two years later, with the Left heading for defeat because of their own “mistakes” and betrayals (not because of the superior adversary firepower), another composer, also coming from the ranks of EAM, but disappointed and having turned around, undertook the urban folk song’s defense. It was the highly penetrating Manos Hadjidakis, who gave a lecture about rebétiko, describing also the prevailing atmosphere in the late 40s:

“Our times are hard and our popular song, which is not made by people of the fugue and counterpoint, so as to care for sanitation and makeshift hygienic make-ups, sings the truth and nothing but the truth.

“Our era is neither heroic nor epic and the end of the 2nd World War left almost all problems unresolved and up in the air…

“Furthermore, our homeland follows through with a war, almost uninterruptedly, with perseverance and faith in the final victory, but always – especially today – arduously and painfully. Consider now under these relentless conditions the virginal idiosyncrasy of our people; virginal because just one hundred years of free life could neither make it mature nor leave room for the latest European trends to take root. Imagine all this piled up vitality and beauty at the same time of a people like ours asking for an outlet, expression, contact with the outside world, and facing everything mentioned above as the main features of the era. Moreover, think of the extremely harsh realities in our country. Vitality is burned out, idiosyncrasy falls sick, beauty remains. This is rebétiko. And hence its thematology arises…

“Consider the virginal idiosyncrasy of our people. Imagine all this piled
up vitality and beauty of a people asking for an outlet, expression,
contact with the outside world… Vitality is burned out, idiosyncrasy
falls sick, beauty remains. This is rebétiko”. (Manos Hadjidakis)

The Era of Mélisande takes us to this period
that “is neither heroic nor epic”.

“Rebétiko manages to combine speech, music and motion in an admirable unity. From composition to interpretation, the conditions are instinctively created for this triple expressive coexistence that sometimes, when it reaches the limits of perfection, is morphologically reminiscent of ancient tragedy…

“Zeibekiko is the purest modern Greek rhythm; while hasapiko has assimilated a pure Hellenic peculiarity. Rebétiko is built on these rhythms; observing the melodic line of the song we can clearly discern the influence or, better, the extension of Byzantine chant. Not just examining the scales that are kept intact out of the folk musicians’ instinct, but also observing the cadences, intervals and mode of execution. Everything reveals the source, which is none other than the strict, austere ecclesiastical hymn…

“Who knows what new life the leisurely and pessimistic 9/8 hold for us in the future. But, in the meantime, we would have felt their strength for good. We will listen to them, very naturally and properly, raising their voice in our immediate surroundings and living in order to interpret our inner selves”…

Until the Civil War wounds healed up, many years had passed. The debate on rebétiko was rekindled in the dawn of the 60s because of Mikis Theodorakis’ Epitaph. But it was too late: the debate of the 60s seemed more like a… rebétiko epitaph – meaning it was post mortem – for its creative period, its breath, was already over…

Dinos Christianópoulos

“Persistent were the attacks on rebétiko, even after it was dead for many years,” said Dinos Christianópoulos. “Hostile was the attitude by nationalists and governments (especially by Metaxás, and more moderately by the Tsaldares government, that outlawed and persecuted it), considering it as a stigma of Graeco-Christian culture;⁽⁷⁾ religious organizations and the Church in general, that dealt with it as immoral; fanatic communists (among them even Várnales, although he frequented in taverns), who rejected it as an expression of bourgeois decay and decadence; a part of the bourgeois press, expressing the prejudice and respectability of high society; demotic song fans (mainly schoolteachers and provincial scholars); the conservatories’ people, who faced it with disgust and contempt; university folklorists, who considered it as an abortion of our popular culture; and a lot of little folks, who were emasculated by light songs.”

• ⁽⁷⁾ Unlike “Graeco-Roman world” or “Graeco-Roman culture”, the term “Graeco-Christian culture” or, even worse, “Graeco-Christian civilization”, is a… Hellenic (or, rather, a “Graeco-Christian”) exclusiveness, reminding us of that old… Graeco-fascist slogan “Hellas of Greek Christians”!

Noteworthy is an essay by Costas Takhtsēs on Zeybékiko – written with ypsilon because of a theory “that the etymology of the word comes from Zeus and bekos (bread in Phrygian)”. This incisive text of 1964, rather lengthy to quote it here, deserves to be read in whole, inter alia, for its important reflections, such as:

Costas Takhtsēs

“Contrary to classical Hellenic culture that modern Greeks aspired to resurrect after the War of Independence in mainland Hellas, the Byzantine world was clearly ‘oriental’. The Turks borrowed and imitated this ‘oriental’ civilization, giving to it, over time, a heavier, Turkish character, and exactly this secondary product was what generations of Greeks of servitude experienced, and brought with them when they came, as refugees, to old Hellas.”

“The ELAS (Greek People’s Liberation Army) guerrillas,” he also wrote referring to the years of Resistance, and dissolving the embellished picture Xenos tried to create, “along with some demotic songs, depending on the area, sang Hellenized versions of Russian, and – how tragicomic! – even of… German songs and paeans.”

It is useful and didactic to see in outline the distressing finale of the story about the rebétiko zeybékiko as narrated by Takhtsēs:

“The bourgeois resisted [the zeybékiko songs]; but they soon realized the futility of the effort. Thus, using the well-known method of rationalization or the equally well-known tactic of neutralization through containment, they embraced and adopted them. It’s always the best way to castrate a ‘revolution’ – cheap, safe, and bloodless. They started going on nightly treks to various taverns with bouzouki bands, the menu prices went up, the bouzouki players showed off, were flattered, saw that they had discovered a goldmine, buttoned up, even wore tuxedos, started varying their repertoire ever more with the softer, empty of any message or thought, but more tantalizing, tsifteteli, the prices went up again, the simple people got scared, withdrew to unknown taverns with still unknown bands, the eccentrics and the bourgeois discovered them, they occupied the tables there, as well, until the people, finding no place to sit, were compelled to gather on the outside, staring at the bands, the Americans and the bourgeois, in order to listen to the songs that were born out of them, but were far too expensive for their pockets. Thus a paranoid situation prevailed with the tourists and the bourgeois who went to see the people, and the people who went to see the tourists. Admiring products of economic misery that they were not willing to share except only aesthetically and from afar, the tourists flattered the people, for whom they became both a spectacle and objects of wonder.

“Well: with the collaboration of some well-meaning, and many dishonest or foolish people, an amazing robbery has taken place before our eyes: the people’s right to, at least, lament their fate. The zeybékiko songs have become the status quo, established themselves, lost their edge, their meaning, and have become, in turn, the occupational tangos of our time. More Greek, of course, than the tangos but, mind you, they no longer speak of social injustice, nor about the bitterness of life, they don’t protest, they consent. They speak about bourgeois pseudo-pleasures and pseudo-worries, and now and then about the bitterness of migration, which is absolutely crucial, since migration means not to face reality, but to flee from it – the only kind of flight that is still allowed, when it’s not imposed.

“Let me conclude: Those songs that managed for a while to become the means of expression of a people’s protest against their exploiters of all kinds, are now composed according to ‘plutocratic’ methods of mass production by the exploiters themselves, or they are just financed by them, for consumption by the people, and the people, who do not understand, or pretend not to understand, who have had some food to eat after the war, and, because of this little food, imagined they’ve become rich – sing them!

“I am somehow fit to judge the aesthetic result of all this unprecedented farce; and it’s lamentable”…

After such a text, silence is golden. Even Donn Pohren’s crucial conclusion that “once a minority’s authentic musical expression becomes fashionable, it fades”, pales into insignificance. The same applies to Anogeianakis’ characterization in 1961 that “certain current rebétiko song features correspond to commercial jazz (stylized super production, exaggerated performance through microphones and loudspeakers, showing off of silly virtuosity).”

“Once a minority’s authentic musical expression
becomes fashionable, it fades”. (Donn Pohren)

Medusa, by Caravaggio (1595)

Entertainment and Edutainment

HERE’S THEN WHERE WE HAVE ENDED UP: musicians “executing” every night, all the time, the same repertoire with no substantial changes, and bored as hell, just like their customers. When the musicians do not enjoy their art, when pathos or joys of life have been replaced by bathos or superficial revels, then “merriment” and “happiness” come by artificial means – drinking at best. When the musicians fail to engage creatively and freely in improvisations, having in mind just an outline, a sketch of the repertoire, leaving everything else on the spur of the moment, when they avoid – because they are afraid – to be carried away by their imagination, and prefer to be on sure ground, then at best they may provide entertainment – for the people to forget their troubles, to be fooled away – though they should provide (at least sometimes) edutainment, “soul therapy”.⁽⁸⁾ When the musicians act dictatorially, playing at full volume, and forgetting that music has pianissimo and fortissimo, and a plethora of modes and rhythms, the people go out to blow off some steam, get drunk and break loose, making more noise than the amplifiers and behaving like a horde of barbarians. Then – I’ll say it again – the musicians have lost their best allies: the aficionados, the music lovers.

• ⁽⁸⁾ “Edutainment” (edu-cation + enter-tainment) is so weak and pale compared to the Hellenic ψυχαγωγία (ἀγωγὴ ψυχῆς = soul leading or training, education of the soul) – but what can I do?

When we shoot the piano player without looking in the mirror,
chances are we’ll be finally left without a piano player!

But – you’re bound to ask – aren’t professionals like that? Why should I support them? Well, these are the bad professionals, I would answer – regardless if they make up the majority now. Willy-nilly, they’ve fallen into the trap where other professionals, such as journalists, have also been caught, thinking that they are… coffee men and, consequently, they make coffee according to the customers’ preferences!⁽⁹⁾ They do not seem to bother at all that the order for… “light-sweet” music or news is not given by some “clients” but by their bosses. On the other hand, let’s not forget that if there was no public well-disposed to junk “music” or “news”, the bosses would willy-nilly have second thoughts. Hence, when we… shoot the piano player without looking in the mirror, chances are we’ll be finally left without a piano player!

• ⁽⁹⁾ That was a publisher’s basic argument of defense in the trial of some journalists for violating a draconian Press Law… I wonder why that publisher, employing “coffee men”, has not yet entitled his newspaper as “Cafeteria”!

Music is no joking matter. It’s an art requiring years of study, either with sheet music and books or next to another musician – but always on the instrument. It takes persistent and consistent effort and study to master the technique of a single instrument and, moreover, to decipher the secrets of a single musical “language”. The same applies to a singer: not everything depends on a “divine charisma”. How is it possible to consider this verbiage of “cold” professionals and “sensitive” amateurs as well-grounded? How can a lyricist e.g. pose as a composer when he is musically “illiterate”? What would this rhymer say, indeed, if someone, who had never sat down to work on language and metrics, declared to be a “poet”? You’ll tell me that I forget a very important parameter: in Hellas, you are whatever you declare to be!

Popular songs, they say, are simple. Yes, but they are not simplistic! The great difficulty in their composition lies in this very simplicity. Especially if you have studied theory of music, it is rather easy to compose something complicated. If you attempt to simplify it later, if you leave just the basic melodic line, then the substance, the quality of your inspiration, reveals itself.

Let’s suppose that divine inspiration strikes a musically “illiterate”: he will not be able to elaborate on that because he lacks proper knowledge. If this elaboration is taken over by someone else: the end result will be different from what he had in mind. Even if he “hits it big” and becomes a “star”: he will have capitalized on the erudition of third persons, who will, unfortunately, in most cases, remain unknown. Additionally, if he wishes to sing his creation, as it has become trendy lately: he will fail, as well, because, even if he doesn’t sing out of tune (if…), he has not worked his vocal chords, ignores completely the vocal techniques, he doesn’t know the secrets of breathing, articulating and singing, and much more.

Of course, one may refer as an example to the Beatles, who composed brilliant music being musically “illiterate”. Apart from the fact that they, too, capitalized on the erudition of their outstanding producer, George Martin, I have to stress I don’t mean by any means those musicians who are theoretically “illiterate”: the Beatles were professional musicians, since the time they played – completely unknown – in Hamburg.

Liszt “trembled at the idea of some self-taught virtuoso studying music,
so as to keep the impulsive power of his musical instinct virginal.”

It’s obvious I don’t refer to autodidacts, i.e. to self-taught musicians, who do not have only disadvantages but also advantages against their theoretically erudite colleagues. Let alone that a conservatory may destroy a natural talent. Liszt e.g. admired so much an autodidact virtuoso that “he trembled at the idea of him studying music, so as to keep the impulsive power of his musical instinct virginal and unchanged”, as Sophia Spanoudes wrote in 1952 in her well-known column in favour of Tsitsanes. As to the strong advantages of autodidacts compared to erudite artists, Giorgos Papadakis explained why such musicians have been the salt of the earth:

“A self-taught instrumentalist is obviously required to solve many difficult technical problems alone. He is obliged to improvise solutions to problems already solved, since a teacher or a method would have significantly shortened the time required to do it… That’s why many times he needs to re-invent the wheel. The price can be high, but he may reap a reward that many musicians would envy: a quite personal style derived from personal improvised ways of addressing technical problems. This is evident in the way of playing of those musicians who have learned out of commitment and play with commitment.”

Basiles Tsitsanes on a stamp

The musically “illiterate”, however, are also sly: they declare they are “popular composers”, instead of “popular musicians”, because otherwise the trick would have been exposed at once. So let’s have a brief look at this category, as well:

“A popular composer”, wrote Phoebus Anogeianakis:

“a) is an uneducated person, endowed by nature with musical gifts, someone who has not studied music (whatever knowledge he has is due to his extensive experience as a professional, especially… because of his contact-collaboration with musicians of light music);

“b) ‘composes’ mainly songs or short instrumental pieces (of a dance or free rhythmical type) usually with the help of a popular instrument;

“c) ‘bases’ his work on Greek popular music tradition; but at the same time he is under certain influences (from foreign popular music or also… from local or foreign popular-like art light music).”

It’s obvious that a popular composer according to Anogeianakis also needs to combine the qualities of a self-taught musician according to Papadakis, if he is to acquire a quite personal style – and vice versa: an autodidact must be gifted by nature with musical talents and have extensive experience in order to re-invent the wheel…

When Pan purloined Apollo’s lyre, by David Henry Souter

One more thing: the term “art music”, prevailing in the 60s when Anogeianakis’ text was written, is, of course, completely inappropriate, because it implies that popular music is probably… “artless”! Clearly annoyed and in a sarcastic mood, as well, Tsitsanes once commented that the difference between popular and “art” composers is that between eyewitnesses to a crime and some others who… just heard about it!

And what about the… “illiterate”? Where can we group all those who surely have nothing in common with either Tsitsanes or the Beatles? No need to ask: they are the… perpetrators of the crime!

• >> Chronicle 14. MUSIC MADE OF BODY AND SOUL
• << Chronicle 12. “DO NOT MALTREAT OUR MUSIC!”

Next Chronicle 14. MUSIC MADE OF BODY AND SOUL ● Man: a Musical Being ● Music, Nature and Language ● Singing Neanderthals ● Baby Talk ● Talent ● Art of Soul vs. Art of Beauty ● Ecstasy and Catharsis ● Ritual Music and Dance ● Ethos in Music

Chronicle 3. A CHRONICLE OF THE HUMANS

Chronicle 3. A CHRONICLE OF THE HUMANS

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 3. ΧΡΟΝΙΚΟ ΤΟΥ ΑΝΘΡΩΠΟΥ

● Academic Scholasticism ● Ares Poulianós: Archanthropus and Homo Erectus ● Homo’s Cradle: North Aegean and Macedonia ● DNA Analyses: Minoans, Mycenaeans, Cretans and Hellenes ● Paleolithic Odyssey ● Aegean Stonehenge ● Balkan Writing

Michales Loukovikas

Ain Ghazal Statues, Jordan, considered as one of the earliest large-scale human representations (ca 7250 BCE)

THE NEOLITHIC AGRICULTURAL revolution is the work of women, I said in our previous Chronicle, because, according to the division of labour of that period, they were the ones who gathered fruit, while men hunted. Women, therefore, should have foreseen the prospects of expanding available food by agriculture. It was a logical hypothesis I made in passing, noting that I do not know if any researcher has expressed the same opinion. Nevertheless, I stressed the need not to further engage in such speculations for the time being, and stick to generally accepted ideas – as long as they are not directly related to the issues under our consideration. Such are the assumptions connected to the theories of man’s African origin, and the origins of the inhabitants of Hellas, the Indo-European languages and their speakers, or even the Phoenician origin of the Greek alphabet, among various issues that are relevant, or sufficiently vague. As I’ve said, they are nothing but theories…

The situation prevailing in academic circles is, unfortunately, very sad, while – normally – universities should be temples of free movement of ideas, dialogue, knowledge and learning. So many theories, taken for “granted”, have already been overturned; and so much blood has already spilled, “in the name of” utter idiocies, touted as “divine laws”, whether “the earth moves”, or concerning the nature of the “Holy Trinity”, as if the “holy fathers” had X-rayed its components! A scientist who, instead of pursuing a “true understanding through reason”, as Plato said, yields to doctrine, to dogma (in order to forward his ego, as well), is nothing but a scholastic charlatan.

Archánthropus skull found in the Cave of Petralona in 1960

SΟ SCHOCKED I FELT when I came across the work of the anthropologist Ares Poulianós, who introduced us to the Archánthropus of Petrálona in Chalcidice, having already studied in depth the origin of the Hellenes: he was violently evicted from the cave and the museum which, nota bene, he had founded and funded himself (a period when several of his important findings “vanished”…), and had to spend endless hours in the courtrooms, rather than in excavation sites, in order to be vindicated – having against him even the Greek state, which ought to support him instead. That’s because he dared to overturn “well-established notions”, “divine laws”: that Homo’s cradle is not Africa, but the region of Macedonia and the northern Aegean. And after spreading all over the Mediterranean, the humans moved North and South, East and West. Therefore, the inhabitants of Hellas have been mostly indigenous, and the theories about the descent of the Indo-Europeans, or of any other people, from the North to the South, should be similarly discarded. According to this “Out of the Aegean” theory (it is also a theory), the Chronicle of the Humans is as follows:

Ares Poulianós

● 12-11 million years ago, the oldest Homo erectus (Standing man) appeared on earth. His bones and tools were found by Poulianós at Triglia, also in Chalcidice, not far from Petrálona; thus he called him Homo erectus trigliensis. In the same area, he discovered some nine-million-year-old ancestors of the horse. Hipparia appeared in Spain and Africa 500,000 years later. Homo erectus, in his Asian and African variants, emerged ten million years later(!), two million years ago, while the earliest African tools were made 2.5 (three at most) million years ago.

“Between twenty and seven million years ago, Earth really was the planet of the apes”, the anthropologist David Begun wrote in the New Scientist. “At least 100 species roamed the world before the first humans appeared. They… are more fascinating still for what they tell us about our own origins. Key human traits including big brains, dexterous hands, erect posture and long childhood can be traced back to this period. And the really surprising thing is that these features all evolved in European apes.”

“Earth: a planet of the apes. Key human traits evolved in European apes.” “Homo’s genesis due to great geologic-climatic changes in the Aegean.” (David Begun, Ares Poulianós)

“Apes and humans shared common ancestors in the very distant past”, said Poulianós. “The line of this evolution, however, was broken abruptly around twenty million years ago, with the great geologic and climatic changes taking place in the northern Aegean area. Throughout northern Greece… we encounter the well-known Petrified Forests… (with fossilized trunks over 17 million years old) as a result of volcanic eruptions that testify to the great and abrupt geological disturbances in the area. That epoch… is the beginning of a geological change, which prepared the evolution of the Primates. One of them was this twelve-million-year-old man.”

Graecopithecus (El Graeco)

● “Humans and anthropoids should have co-existed at that time,” remarks Marios Demópoulos, referring to the 10-million-year-old Ouranopithecus macedoniensis who was found in the areas of Chalcidice, Thessaloniki, and the Axiós (or Vardar) river. Anthropoids of the same period were excavated in other regions of Hellas, some quadrupeds, and other bipods, in a “semi-standing” posture.

● Graecopithecus (El Graeco), whose teeth were dug up in Hellas and Bulgaria, lived some 7.2 million years ago. These fossils are solid evidence that evolution of man’s genesis started in the Mediterranean 200,000 years earlier than Africa. “Graecopithecus is not an ape”, said Professor Nikolai Spassov. “He is a member of the tribe of hominins and the direct ancestor of homo”, who stood up and became bipedal to help himself find food with ease in the Balkan open savanna. The magazine New Scientist published a related article entitled Man’s cradle is Greece, not Africa.

● An important find is an elephant at Perdiccas near Ptolemaida, who lived three million years ago. It is the oldest hunting game in Europe, killed and chopped with dozens of sharp tools by a large group of Archanthropi in the Kozani area.

● 1.5 million years ago, man found refuge in caves to protect himself from the glaciers. In the Petrálona cave, the Archanthropus left the world’s oldest traces of fire, which he lit 1.1 million years ago. Similar traces of fire appear somehow later, one million years ago, in South Africa.

● The Archanthropus europaeus petraloniensis, circa 800-700 thousand years old, has been identified either as a Homo erectus, or Neanderthal, or an early form of Homo sapiens. Of course, those who worship orthodoxy speak instead of some archaic hominid unrelated to the above “classical” homos. Two 800,000-year-old skeletons were also found in the cave.

As we can deduce from the Archanthropus’ tools he was right-handed. Indirectly we can arrive to the conclusion that he may have had speech: right-handedness is linked to the left cerebral hemisphere, where the areas of speech are found. If he had speech, he might have had some elementary form of language… Besides, a hyena’s skull was found above its jaw, placed in a cave niche, as if it was some kind of “icon”. Thus man might have had some sense of symbolism since then.

● Moreover, special mention deserve the finds in the Apidima Cave, located on the western shore of Mani Peninsula in the southern Peloponnese. A systematic investigation of the cave has yielded Neanderthal and Homo sapiens fossils from the Palaeolithic era. The oldest skull fossil shows a mixture of modern human and primitive features, and has been dated to be more than 210,000 years old, making it the oldest proof of Homo sapiens living outside Africa. The skull is more than 150,000 years older than previous Homo sapiens finds in Europe… “Our results”, the researchers summarized, “suggest that at least two groups of people lived in the Middle Pleistocene in what is now southern Greece: an early Homo sapiens population, followed [sic] by a Neanderthal population.”

Mycenaeans and Minoans were close relatives, and ancestors
of today’s Greeks, according to an analysis of ancient DNA.

REGARDING THE INHABITANTS OF HELLAS and their origin, I firmly believe that, as a rule, the newcomers to a place are far less numerous than the indigenous and are easily assimilated. Exceptions are rare. This belief is confirmed by a recent analysis of ancient DNA, suggesting that today’s Greeks are indeed the descendants of Mycenaeans, with only a small proportion of DNA from later migrations to Hellas. We know, of course, that the Mycenaeans were Greeks. That’s why I consider even more impressive the finding that, at the same time, they were closely related to the Minoans, an earlier civilization flourishing mainly in Crete from 3000 to 1400 BCE.

The ancient genome came from the teeth of 19 people: ten Minoan Cretans (who lived between 2900 and 1700 BCE), four Mycenaeans from mainland Hellas (between 1700 and 1200 BCE), and also five Neolithic era or Bronze Age farmers from Greece and southwestern Asia Minor (between 5400 and 1340 BCE). By comparing this material to that of 334 other ancient people from several parts of the world and 30 modern Hellenes, the researchers drew their conclusions.

Minoan Linear A writing
(2nd millennium BCE)

For more than a century, the origin of the Bronze Age Minoans and Mycenaeans was an archaeological puzzle. The latter received from the former the symbols of their script, Linear A, and adapted them to the needs of their own language. This new script, Linear B, was deciphered by Michael Ventris in 1952; then we realized that the Mycenaean was an archaic Greek dialect. However, we have not yet been able to read the Linear A texts, obviously because the Minoan tongue was completely different. We have also come to the conclusion that the same should have been true as regards the two peoples.

Yet, it turned out that they were most closely related to each other, as they both got 3/4 of their DNA from the early Neolithic farmers of western Anatolia and the Aegean, and most of the remainder from some ancient populations related to those of Caucasia and Iran, according to the findings of the research team, reported in the scientific journal, Nature. It seems there was an early migration of people from the Orient to western Anatolia and the Aegean, after those early farmers had settled there, but before the Minoans split from the Mycenaeans.

Nevertheless, if the two peoples were not “brothers”, but “cousins”, it is because the Mycenaeans did have an important difference: some of their DNA (4-16%) came from Northern hunter-gatherers, who originated from Eastern Europe or Siberia. This suggests that a second wave of people from the Eurasian steppe came to mainland Hellas by way of Eastern Europe or Armenia, but didn’t reach Crete, according to Joseph Lazarides, a geneticist at Harvard University, who co-led the study.

Saffron gatherer: fresco replica from
Acrotiri, Thera (17th century BCE)

It is no wonder that the Minoans and Mycenaeans looked alike, with brown hair and eyes. This is exactly how artists in both cultures presented them on frescoes and pottery, although they spoke and wrote different languages. There were even more differences: the Mycenaeans, Lazarides observed, were militaristic, and their art was replete with war scenes, in contrast to Minoan art. Note that, because the Minoans used hieroglyphics in earlier times, some archaeologists, such as Arthur Evans, thought they were partly of Egyptian origin – which turns out to be wrong.

When the researchers compared the DNA of modern Greeks to that of ancient Mycenaeans, they found a lot of genetic overlap. Living Hellenes share similar proportions of DNA from the same ancestral sources as Mycenaeans, although they have inherited a little less DNA from ancient Anatolian farmers and a bit more from later migrations to Greece.

The continuity between the ancient and living Hellenes is “particularly striking given that the Aegean has been a crossroads of civilizations for thousands of years”, said George Stamatoyannopoulos of the University of Washington in Seattle, a co-author of the study. It seems that the major components of the Greeks’ ancestry were already in place in the Bronze Age, after the migration of the earliest farmers from Anatolia set the template for the genetic makeup of the Hellenes and, in fact, of most Europeans. “Our results support the idea of continuity but not isolation in the history of populations of the Aegean, before and after the time of its earliest civilizations,” the researchers added.

The results also show it is possible to get ancient DNA from the hot, dry lands of the eastern Mediterranean, says archaeologist Colin Renfrew of the University of Cambridge in Britain, who was not involved in this research. Scientists now hope they can get DNA from other ancient cultures, such as the mysterious Hittites, who came to ancient Anatolia sometime before 2000 BCE, and who may have been the source of Caucasian ancestry in Mycenaeans and speakers of early Indo-European languages in the region. His colleague, Kristian Kristiansen of the University of Göteborg, Sweden, who was also not involved in the work, agrees: “The results have now opened up the next chapter in the genetic history of western Eurasia – that of the Bronze Age Mediterranean.”

Minoan civilization: autochthonous and self-luminous…

Prince of the Lilies, Knossos (ca 1550 BCE)

ANOTHER RELATED RESEARCH, led by Stamatoyannopoulos, and focused on the Minoans, analyzed samples of DNA from some skeletons found in a cave on the Lasithi plateau and compared them with samples from 135 ancient and modern human populations. What the researchers told Nature is that Minoan civilization was created by the descendants of early colonists who sailed to the island from Anatolia 9000 years ago (?) and were genetically similar with the Neolithic inhabitants of the wider region. Thus there is no basis for any theories that the Minoans originated from Africa, as descendants of the ancient Egyptians or the Berbers. On the contrary, genetic similarities have been found with ancient and more recent European populations. The analysis also suggests that the Minoans are most closely related to the modern population of Crete, and also of Greece in general.

This genetic analysis confirmed the findings of Poulianós, after he had studied 1200 Cretans (including 200 women), that the majority of the population of the island is made up of indigenous people, at least since the Neolithic era. There have been, of course, migratory influences, but without significant alterations as a result. The human type still prevailing is the same, the so-called Caucasian-Mediterranean type (from Caucasia down to Crete), where the inhabitants of the Aegean islands south of Lesbos also belong. On the basis of the above data, the theory of the Semitic origin of the Minoans was also discarded. Not only the inhabitants of Crete, Poulianós points out, but also of Hellas in general, come mostly from a period before the arrival of the Achaeans. The findings of his research were made public in his book, The Origin of the Cretans, published in 1970 and reissued in 1996.

“What has been solved for us in the past years,” he writes in his preface, “is that Crete was inhabited not since the Mesolithic era, as we previously said, but since the Lower Paleolithic, that is, some million years ago. This is testified mainly by the stone tools of the first people who lived all over the Aegean even since the Upper Miocene. There are also bones of the inhabitants of Crete that date back to the Middle Paleolithic era. Crete has never been completely deserted by inhabitants. Not even during the great disaster caused by the eruption of the volcano of Santorini. Excavations unearthed human skeletons of all eras and ages… The key to understand these developments has been the Minoan Microcephalus, which was accidentally found in the basement of the Archaeological Museum of Heraclion. Except Minoan endogamy, the Microcephalus testifies to the biological evolution of the human species that began hundreds of thousands of years ago.⁽¹⁾ But it primarily proves that the Aegean Type, which is of the same age with the Continental one, is autochthonous. The same applies to the language of the Cretans that has always been Greek. Of course, there may have been variations of Hellenic created by long-term isolation in a place, even differences of pronunciation. But Greek was the dominant language throughout the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean, at least since the Middle Paleolithic.”⁽²⁾

Candia (Crete), by Abraham Ortelius (1584)

• ⁽¹⁾ According to the Anthropological Society of Greece (ASG), founded by Poulianós, “the skull of a microcephalus was discovered in the Minoan excavations at Zakros. It belonged to a 20-year-old man, most probably of the Minoan dynasty, whose brain’s volume did not exceed the 530 cubic centimetres. This genetic aberration was due to the long isolation and endogamy of the Minoans. Thus neither the Cretans, nor the Minoan dynasty, emigrated from somewhere else, but it was a product of local evolution. The skull was sent away to Vienna in 1971, under the pretext of a study, a fact that was considered as unscientific and illegal by the ASG. Confronted by the indifference of the Ministry of Culture for many years to repatriate it, there was no other way but the recourse to Hellenic Justice. This was finally done in the spring of 1997, and since then it is housed at the National Archaeological Museum.”

• ⁽²⁾ As the French archaeologist Paul Faure writes in his book, Life in Minoan Crete: “Ancient writers never considered Minoan monarchies completely different from those of the Homeric world. Even more, they always considered Minos, Rhadamanthys and Sarpedon [Zeus and Europa’s children] as Greek rulers and their successors as consanguineous heirs, who ascended to the throne without conflict or interruption.”

Paleolithic Odyssey: most ancient navigators in the Mediterranean

I DO NOT KNOW IF THE CRETANS’ LANGUAGE has always been Hellenic, as Poulianós claims, but his bold expansion of their history into the distant past is already verified by archaeological finds: hundreds of stone tools dug out in the area of Plakiás, on the southern shores of Crete, which date back to 130-190 thousand years or even more! Quite impressive is that Crete has been an island for more than 5 million years; which means that the artisans who made all those tools arrived there by sea! The Minoan Thalassocracy during the Bronze Age is no wonder with such historical precedents.

The Mediterranean

In the summer of 2008, a Greek-U.S. team was searching in Crete for samples of life of its Neolithic inhabitants – nothing older than 11,000 years. The research team was headed by Eleni Panagopoulou, an archaeologist at the Directorate of Paleoanthropology and Speleology of Southern Hellas, and Thomas Strasser, an associate professor of art history at Providence College in Rhode Island. They were assisted by geologists and archaeologists, such as Curtis Runnels of Boston University. None of them could ever imagine how rewarding Fortune would be. “The idea of finding tools from this very early time period on Crete was about as believable as finding an iPod in King Tut[ankhamun]’s tomb”, remarked Runnels in jest…⁽³⁾

• ^(c) The first human presence in Crete was discovered accidentally, too, when fossilized footprints aged to 5,700,000 years old, predating other discovered tracks by 2,000,000 years, were found close to Tráchilos, Chaniá, in 2002, implying the possibility of hominin evolution outside Africa!

The plethora of findings excludes the possibility of some accidental stranding in this area. Everything points to the direction of an organized colonization. As Strasser stressed: “These early people were intentional seafarers; not individuals lost at sea.” Experts on early nautical history and archaeologists think that these ancient sea dogs had craft sturdier and more reliable than rafts. They must also have had the cognitive ability and knowledge to conceive and carry out water crossings over such great distances repeatedly in order to establish sustainable populations in Crete. “The fact that we have several hundred stone tools in nine different locations suggests that a large enough number of people came in order to sustain the populations and leave a visible archaeological trace”, Runnels said. “That means they didn’t just raft over once.”

“The results of the survey”, the Greek Culture Ministry said in a statement, “not only provide evidence of sea voyages in the Mediterranean tens of thousands of years earlier than we were aware of so far, but also change our understanding of early hominids’ cognitive abilities.” The research offers new perspectives on how our early ancestors migrated and expanded throughout the world, upturns the timetable of technological development, and pushes the history of navigation in the Mediterranean back more than 100,000 years. If early humans were crossing mare nostrum, Runnels said, then they certainly could have also crossed other water barriers, such as the Red Sea or the Gulf of Aden. “And that means that the assumptions that we have had – that the peopling of Eurasia was done by early hominins moving overland through the Near East, into India and down – will have to be revisited.”

Stone Age fishing and navigation

The research, which continued in 2009, reached the top ten discoveries of 2010. No wonder, because until then we believed that ancient humans reached Crete, Cyprus, a few other Greek islands, and possibly Sardinia, no earlier than 12,000 years ago. Orthodoxy claimed that the capability to construct and victual crafts, and navigate them to distant coasts, arrived only with the advent of agriculture and animal domestication. We thought that the earliest rafts were logs with sails made of animal skins lashed to a tree limb to catch the wind. We imagined that on such rafts the obsidian found in the Franchthi cave in Argolis was somehow transferred from Melos. The increased use of this most precious volcanic rock 13,000 years ago shows that the people of Argolis or Melos were accomplished seafarers. The earliest known boat, found in the Netherlands, dates back only 10,000 years; convincing evidence of sails only show up in Egypt around 2500 BCE. Although wooden boats don’t normally survive the ages, we know that one of the earliest members of the human family, Homo erectus, was able to cross several kilometers of deep water more than a million years ago to reach Flores and Sulawesi islands of Indonesia. Much later Homo sapiens braved treacherous waters to colonize Australia by 65,000 years ago.

Who were the artisans of the Cretan tools? We can only speculate on that based on their technology. The artifacts are very similar to tools used by Homo erectus more than a million years ago, and by Neanderthals, as well, until about 130,000 years ago. Even more intriguing, the archaeologists who found them noted that the style of the hand axes suggested that they could be up to 700,000 years old! These tools may testify to sea-borne migrations of Neanderthals from the Near East to Europe, argued Strasser; which means that they were navigating in the Mediterranean. Others prefer Homo heidelbergensis,⁽⁴⁾ in the role of a Paleolithic Odysseus. Whatever the case, it seems that early humans were capable of long-distance navigation, sailing at will in the open sea and using sea routes. Most probably, the urge to go to sea, and the cognitive and technological means to do so, predates Homo sapiens, remarked Alan Simmons, an archaeologist at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. “The orthodoxy until pretty recently was that you don’t have seafarers until the early Bronze Age,” adds archaeologist John Cherry of Brown University, an initial skeptic regarding these finds. “Now we are talking about seafaring Neanderthals. It’s a pretty stunning change.”

• ⁽⁴⁾ The first Neanderthal was found in the Neander valley of Rhineland. Heidelberg gave its name to Homo heidelbergensis. Early Homos theorized to be Africans turned out to be… Germans?(!)

The last of the Neanderthals…

How long took the voyage to Crete? It depends on the starting point and the time of voyage. Even when the Mediterranean reached its lowest known point, plummeting some 150 metres below current sea level, those leaving from Asia Minor or Hellas would have had to make three separate water crossings ranging from 20 to 40 kilometres each to reach Crete. If, on the other hand, the seafarers departed from Africa, they should have been prepared to cross 200 kilometres of open sea water. “We can’t say the toolmakers came from Libya,” commented Strasser. “If you’re on a raft, that’s a long voyage, but they might have come from the European mainland by way of shorter crossings through Greek islands.” And why did they go there? Crete, according to the researchers, was an attractive place to hunt for food, with a variety of wildlife – such as deer, but also dwarf elephants and hippopotami, equal in size to cows and pigs respectively (due to the insular conditions that gave birth to the microcephalus) – as well as many edible plants. At the heart of it all, though, there was something fundamental to all human beings, Panagopoulou suspects: “I think they were mainly motivated by curiosity and the desire for exploration.”

The surprise discovery prompted researchers to go to other islands in search of their… Fortune. A Hellenic-Canadian team uncovered hundreds of tools that were embedded in the soil of a quarry on Naxos. The island was likely accessible only by watercraft even in glacial times, when sea levels were lower. The hand axes and blades resemble those the Neanderthals and modern humans made from about 200,000 until 50,000 years ago. They require a more sophisticated technology than those found in Crete. Similar tools, attributed to Neanderthals, have turned up on a number of other Aegean islands. Paleolithic artifacts have also been recovered on the Ionian Sea isles of Cephallenia and Zacynthus. The plethora not only of tools, but also of sites where they were found, adds weight to the idea of purposeful settlement. “People are going back and forth to islands much earlier than we thought”, Simmons said. Earlier even than these findings in Crete suggest. The discovery of human remains and stone tools in Spain, dating to over a million years ago, may indicate that, long ago, some ancient hominins were finally able to cross the 15 kilometers of the hazardous Strait of Gibraltar from Morocco. On condition they were Africans. What if their starting point was the Aegean? And the sea they crossed was the Mediterranean, not the Strait?

Neolithic farmers from the Aegean built Stonehenge!

STONEHENGE GIVES CLUES that confirm Poulianós’ theories, after a DNA analysis of 67 Neolithic and six Mesolithic Britons, who lived in the period between 8500 and 2500 BCE, according to the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. It is striking that the Neolithic Britons were descended from Aegean and West Anatolian farmers, who followed the Mediterranean route of dispersal: they journeyed westward to Iberia and travelled north through France to Britain, which was then sparsely populated by Mesolithic hunters. This happened about 4,000 BCE, while the massive expansion of people out of the Aegean and Asia Minor had started in 6,000 BCE – thus spreading the Neolithic revolution into Europe.^(e)

• ⁽⁵⁾ Another ancient DNA related study showed how Mediterranean grain (specifically wheat) came to Britain through trade around 6,500 BCE, before the Neolithic farmers’ arrival there.

There are dozens of archaeological studies detailing the spread of farming and new cultural practices across Europe. But scientists weren’t sure whether those new traditions arrived with new people, or reflected the spread of ideas. These migrant newcomers, who introduced agriculture to Britain, brought new farming techniques, pottery, and new religious cultures and beliefs, such as the tradition of building monuments using megaliths. Stonehenge, in Wiltshire, was part of this culture, as a temple aligned with the movement of the Sun (see Chronicle 18, Introduction). The main part of the monument was built around 3000 BCE.

DNA suggests that most European hunter-gatherers of the time had dark skin combined with blue eyes. Genetic analysis shows that the Neolithic farmers, by contrast, were paler-skinned with brown eyes and black or dark-brown hair.

Towards the end of the Neolithic, around 2450 BCE, the descendants of the first farmers, who had almost completely replaced the older hunter-gatherers, were themselves almost entirely replaced by a new population, called the Bell Beaker culture, that migrated from continental Europe. Thus Britain saw two extreme genetic shifts in the space of a few thousand years.

Reconstructed hut in Dispelió Neolithic lake settlement

Early Balkan writing

WHATEVER HAPPENS regarding the cradle of Homo, which, by “axiom”, is in Africa, is repeated in the case of writing, whose cradle is found in 4th-millennium-BCE Sumer, according to conventional archeology. In spite of that, far too many finds in the Balkans, already in the 19th century, are inconsistent with this “axiom” – and probably for this very reason, comments on purpose archaeologist Colleen Anne Coyle, few are aware of these discoveries.

● Turdaș, Romania; Vinča, Serbia: a cache of artifacts with previously unknown inscriptions was excavated in Romania in 1875. Then, a similar cache was found in Vinča, a suburb of Belgrade, Serbia, some 245 km from Turdaș, in 1908. Later, more such fragments were recovered in Banjica, in another part of the Serbian capital. Since, over 150 sites have been identified in Serbia alone, but many have not been fully excavated. Thus, the culture of the whole area is called the Vinča culture with the homonymous symbols of the Danube, Old European, Balkan, or Vinča-Turdaș script, used in the Neolithic during 6th to 5th millennia BCE.

Balkan (Danube Valley, Old European) script:
the oldest writing in the world?

● Sitovo, Bulgaria: an inscription was found in 1928 on the wall of a rock shelter close to Plovdiv. The Sitovo inscription may be the only one containing so many symbols (around 50), where we possibly have a complete text. The archaeologist Alexander Peev, who discovered it, sent a copy of the text to Soviet colleagues in the hope that they could help in deciphering it. But, as he was an active anti-fascist, he was executed 1943, on suspicion of sending a coded message to the USSR… The inscription was published in 1950.

● Tărtăria, Romania; Gradeshnitsa, Bulgaria: more tablets with inscriptions with the Vinča symbols were discovered in 1961, inside a grave, in the area of Alba Iulia, Romania. Several scientists suppose that the tablets may date to around 5500-5300 BCE. If indeed the symbols are a form of writing, then the Danubian culture would far predate the earliest Sumerian script. They would thus be the world’s earliest known form of writing. Such a controversial claim would surely provoke reactions. There were scholars who considered certain symbols to be Sumerian – therefore the result of forgery – or, at least, quasi-Sumerian proto-cuneiform. Analyses of the symbols, nevertheless, showed that they have little similarity with Near Eastern writing, resulting in the opinion that these symbols and the Sumerian script probably arose independently. Others had objections related to the stratigraphy of the site… On the other side of the Danube, in the Vratsa Province, north-western Bulgaria, more clay artefacts with incised marks, dated to the 4th millennium BCE, were excavated in 1969. The lack of symmetry, complexity and variability in the patterns proves most historians’ theories of a decorative function to be unreliable; and the same is true about the claims they were property marks, or potters’ “signatures”.

Dispelió tablet: oldest known
(pre-Linear A) written text?

● Youra, Alonnesos; Dispelió, Castoriá, Greece: this Balkan culture was related not only to the Black Sea, but also to the Aegean, with statuettes similar to the Cycladic civilization. On the now uninhabited islet of Youra in the Northern Sporades and inside the “Cyclops Cave”, in 1992, archaeologist Adamantios Sampson located ostraca (potsherds, ceramic fragments) dated to 6th – 5th millennia BCE bearing incisions. “The ostraca bear incised unidentifiable symbols”, he said. “It is possible that they echo evidence on an Aegean Neolithic ‘script’, or ‘proto-script’, – a very fashionable subject of discussion in Greece after similar finds in the Castoriá lake,” the Dispelió tablet. Equivalent symbols were also discovered at other Neolithic sites in Hellas (e.g. Euboea, Mykonos, and Nisyros), having several similarities with incised symbols on ceramics of the early Bronze Age in the Cyclades, and directly connected with the Balkan script that was discovered in Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria.

The Dispelió tablet (or script, or disc) is the most important archaeological find at the Castoriá lake settlement discovered accidentally in 1932. But excavations started 60 years later, in 1992, by George Hourmouziades. The tablet was found the next year; it is wooden and carbon 14-dated to ca 5260 BCE; the settlement was inhabited from 5600 to 3000 BCE. The tablet bears charagmata, i.e. inscribed markings, said the archaeologist, “a Neolithic man’s attempt at communication that we hope we’ll be able to interpret one day.” It appears to be a form of proto-writing, 2,000 years older than the proto-Sumerian pictographic script, or 4,000 years older than the Cretan or Mycenaean linear types of writing. Except the tablet, many other ostraca were also found bearing the same type of writing. It is important that the symbols did not resemble the human figures, the sun and moon, or other figures ideograms usually depict. They actually showed signs of advanced aphaeresis (abstraction) that indicates they are the result of cognitive processes.

Dispelió flutes

In February 2004, Hourmouziades commented that the text with the markings could not be easily publicized, because it would ultimately change the current historical background concerning the origins of writing and articulate speech, depicted with letters, instead of ideograms, within the borders of the ancient Greek world – and by extension, the whole of Europe… A number of items in the settlement attest to its economic and agricultural activities, animal breeding and diet preferences, as well as ceramics, wooden structural elements, seeds, bones, figurines, personal ornaments, or bone flutes: one of them, dating back to the 6th millennium BCE, is the oldest found in Europe – if we assume that the Divje Babe flute in Slovenia (43,100 years old) is not man-made.

● Vinča, the largest Neolithic settlement on European soil, was a metropolis with a thriving culture in the period 4500–3500 BCE. The settlements in the area were much larger than all the other European cultures of the same period. Some of them were more extended than the prehistoric settlements of the Aegean and the Near East that were built a millennium later. Vinča, in particular, became the largest market in southeastern Europe, not only for the exceptional value of its products, but also for the rare materials or other goods imported from either Transylvania or the Aegean and the Adriatic coasts. Impressive is the thematic variety of the figurines (naked or dressed, standing, kneeling or sitting, female, male and hermaphrodite, or masked, and especially the figures with the mother and child in her arms), but also the stylistic evolution from the naturalistic, to the realistic, and eventually the abstract.

Proto-cuneiform tablet (c. 3100–2900 BCE): account of barley distribution with cylinder seal (impression of
a man, hunting dogs and boars)

● Around 7,000 known languages are spoken nowadays; there were even more in the past. However, written languages have been rather few: in the course of human history fewer than 100 major scripts have appeared. Scripts, presumably, have developed only wherever there is a need, a reason, for them. The cuneiform script in Mesopotamia emerged from counting and accounting – until the third millennium BCE, when the Sumerian metaphysical concern for the afterlife paved the way for something more than a “shorthand” and used initially for funerary inscriptions. Such a need for record-keeping did not exist in the Balkans at the time, say the dissenters. But this is another “axiom”, as others argue, if we take into account that e.g. Chinese characters were first used for ritual purposes, in association with the royal “sacred power”. Thus needs vary from place to place.

Tang dynasty Chinese calligraphy

Throughout the Balkans, the same symbols have been repeatedly found in times and places separated by great distances. Hence they were understood by many individuals who lived in different areas and eras, a fact that lends support to the notion that they were indeed examples of proto-writing,⁽⁶⁾ if not a rudimentary writing system. A theory is that the symbols were used for religious purposes in a traditional agricultural society. Nevertheless, some scholars have pointed out that more than a quarter of the inscriptions are located on the bottom of a pot – an ostensibly unlikely place for a religious inscription. Such symbols on various artefacts are widespread and highly standardized denoting the existence of an inventory used by scribes. Consequently, outstanding scientists support the view that the Balkan script is the oldest writing in the world. Have in mind that there are approximately 700 different characters, around the same number of symbols used in Egyptian hieroglyphs.

• ⁽⁶⁾ A question is certainly brought up: what is writing? The difference between proto-writing and writing is that while the former encodes information, the latter encodes language.

Hieroglyphs on stele (c. 1321 BCE)

The repetition of certain symbols of the Balkan script in the Linear A tablets points to the Minoan civilization as being among the inheritors of this writing system that migrated south, towards the Aegean and Crete – unless this course was the reverse. The same applies to the Hellenic language and writing. Scholars tend to “forget” about the Mycenaean Linear B and think that ancient Hellenes learned to write around 800 BCE from the Phoenicians. Still, a crucial question emerges: How is it possible for the Greek language to have 800,000 word entries, ranking first among all known languages in the world, with the second next having only 250,000 word entries? And how is it possible for the Homeric epics to have been created at about 800 BCE – that is, just when the Hellenes learned to write?(!) It would be impossible for the ancient Greeks to write these poetic works without having had a history of writing of at least 10,000 years back, according to a US linguistic research. Note, in conclusion, that while ancient Eastern civilizations used ideograms to express themselves, the ancient Greeks were using syllables and letters, in a similar manner to today’s scripts.

Göbekli Tepe: a sort of totem pole with humanoid figures

● If indeed the Balkan script is the oldest, it does not mean that it fell from the sky! As it is rightly pointed out, the study of symbols carved and painted in caves by our “primitive” ancestors may eventually persuade archaeologists to look back beyond the Balkans and Sumer. This universal system of symbols in cave art may have been carried around the world during human migration from homo’s cradle – wherever that was. The symbols are also found outside caves, e.g. on rocks, or in ornaments. The use of abstract symbols in communication is a critical turning point in the mental skills of our ancestors. Deciphering their underlying meaning is extremely complicated. Some prehistorians argue that in the caves, “we are nearly always associated with animal figures and thus cannot be said to be the first steps toward symbolism.” Conversely, scientists from other disciplines, e.g. linguistics, suggest that both signs and animals were meant to convey ideas in the same manner as a written language. Cognitive mechanisms necessary for the development of cave and rock art are likely to be analogous to those employed in the expression of symbolic thinking required for language.

Of course, the path from primitive symbols to the Balkan and Sumerian scripts is far too long. There must have been many intermediate stages of development. One is probably located at Göbekli Tepe, in SE Anatolia, in North (Turkish) Kurdistan, very close to Şanlıurfa. It was founded before the 10th millennium BCE, and was abandoned in the 8th. There are circles of massive ‘T’-shaped stone pillars – the world’s oldest known megaliths. Prior to this great discovery, Sumer was assumed to be the beginning of everything: the first organized society, having invented the wheel. Most probably, such breakthroughs should be transferred to Göbekli Tepe, where we are also confronted with what appears to be the earliest yet discovery of writing. About 20 symbols – at least – seem to have been in use. This in itself does not portend to a complete language but it is possible that other findings may occur as, so far, only a third of the site has been excavated. Obviously, the history of writing will be enriched with the Anatolian symbols, which take us back to at least 10,000 BCE.

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Human evolution

Chronicle 7. INDO-IBERIAN ARC (Duende)

Chronicle 7. INDO-IBERIAN ARC (Duende)

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 7. ΙΝΔΟΪΒΗΡΙΚΟ ΤΟΞΟ (Duende)

● Lorca and Duende ● Pohren and Flamenco:
Dance and Guitar ● Cithara and Pandura

Michales Loukovikas

FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA gave lectures not only on cante jondo, but also on the Theory and Play of Duende (1930) – a keyword in order to get to the bottom of the essence of flamenco, of music in general, and penetrate the core of all the arts, especially the so-called performing arts. According to the dictionaries, duende means “fairy, demon, ghost, devil, goblin, spirit – holy or evil.” Dictionaries rarely clarify concepts related to music and culture. And why should we let ourselves in the mercy of lexicographers when we have Lorca as a guide? Let’s listen to him with due attention as we are introduced to the magic and mystical duende:

“All that has dark sounds has duende.” (Manuel Torre)

“All through Andalusia… people constantly talk about duende and recognize it every time it appears with a fine instinct… The old Gypsy bailaora [dancer] La Malena once heard Brailowsky play a piece of Bach, and exclaimed: ‘Olé! That has duende!’, but was bored by Gluck, Brahms and Milhaud. And [the Gypsy singer] Manuel Torre, a great artist of the Andalusian people, a man who has more culture in his veins than anyone I’ve known, on hearing Falla play his own Nocturno del Generalife, spoke this splendid phrase: ‘All that has dark sounds has duende’… – agreeing with Goethe who hit on a definition of duende, in speaking of Paganini: ‘A mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained.’⁽¹⁾

• ⁽¹⁾ Lorca’s English texts on Cante jondo and Duende are based on A. S. Kline’s translations.

“I heard an old maestro of the guitar say: ‘Duende is not in the throat: duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet.’ Meaning, it’s not a question of skill, but of a style that’s truly alive; meaning, it’s in the veins; meaning, it’s of the most ancient culture of immediate creation. It is, in sum, the spirit of the earth, the same duende that scorched Nietzche’s heart as he searched for its outer form on the Rialto Bridge and in Bizet’s music, without finding it, and without seeing that the duende he pursued had leapt from the Greek mysteries to the dancers of Cádiz and the headless Dionysiac scream of Silverio’s siguiriya.”

Alhambra with Generalife by night

The “Dionysiac” and “mystic” Hellenes are here again in full force. Their theatre of action is Cádiz, the ancient Gádeira (Gadir), or Roman Gades.⁽²⁾ To this port of Andalusia outside the Mediterranean, on the Atlantic Ocean, beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, or the Pillars of Heracles, we will shortly return. For the moment, we continue listening to García Lorca spellbound:

• ⁽²⁾ The ancient root is retained in the adjective gaditano: of/from Cádiz, its native/inhabitant.

Sea Melodies, by Herbert James Draper (1904)

“For every man, every artist called Nietzsche or Cézanne, every step that he climbs in the tower of his perfection is at the expense of the struggle that he undergoes with his duende, not with an angel, as is often said, nor with his Muse… Angel and Muse come from outside us: the angel brings light, the Muse form (Hesiod learnt from her)… While duende has to be roused from the furthest habitations of the blood. Reject the angel, and give the Muse a kick… The true struggle is with duende.

“The great artists of southern Spain, Gypsy or flamenco, singers, dancers, musicians, know that emotion is impossible without the arrival of duende. They might deceive people into thinking they can communicate the sense of duende without possessing it, as authors, painters, and literary fashion-makers deceive us every day, possessing no duende: but we only have to attend a little, and not be full of indifference, to discover the fraud, and chase off that clumsy artifice.

“Emotion is impossible without duende.” (García Lorca)

Pastora Pavón, la Niña de los Peines

“Once the Andalusian flamenco singer Pastora Pavon, La Niña de Los Peines [The Girl of the Combs], sombre Spanish genius, equal in power of fancy to Goya… was singing in a little tavern in Cádiz. She played with her voice of shadows, with her voice of beaten tin, with her mossy voice, she tangled it in her hair, or soaked it in manzanilla or abandoned it to dark distant briars. But, there was nothing there: it was useless. The audience remained silent… Pastora Pavón finished her song in silence. Only, a little man… sarcastically, in a very soft voice, said: ‘Viva, Paris!’ as if to say: ‘Here ability is not important, nor technique, nor skill. What matters here is something else.’

“Then La Niña de Los Peines got up like a madwoman, trembling like a medieval mourner, and drank, in one gulp, a huge glass of fiery spirits, and began to sing with a scorched throat, without voice, breath, colour, but… with duende. She managed to tear down the scaffolding of the song, but allow through a furious, burning duende, friend to those winds heavy with sand, that make listeners tear at their clothes with the same rhythm as the Negroes of the Antilles in their rite… La Niña de Los Peines had to tear apart her voice, because she knew experts were listening, who demanded not form but the marrow of form, pure music with a body lean enough to float on air. She had to rob herself of skill and safety: that is to say, banish her Muse, and be helpless, so her duende might come, and deign to struggle with her at close quarters. And how she sang! Her voice no longer at play, her voice a jet of blood, worthy of her pain and her sincerity”…

Donn Pohren and Baile Flamenco

WHAT AN EVENING, INDEED! I’D LOVE TO BE THERE! Well, here we are back to Cádiz with the captivating description of duende by Lorca. It’s where we meet again Donn Pohren, who will lead us to the ancient city of Gadir via… India!

Donn Pohren

“Today”, Pohren writes in his Biographical History, Lives and Legends of Flamenco, the second book of his flamenco trilogy, “nearly all theoreticians of the dance agree that the baile flamenco is directly descended from the ancient religious dances of the Indian Hindus… What in all likelihood has taken place is that the highly-civilized Brahmanic temple dances were adopted by a lesser-developed people, shorn of many subtleties, and returned to a more natural and primitive art form concerned only with the expression of oneself and one’s emotions.

“Let us attempt to construct a brief history of the development of these Indian dances within Spain. First of all, how did they reach Spain? Traditionally performed only in the temples during Brahmanic religious rites, these dances eventually began to be danced more popularly outside the shrines in India. It was then that they were first introduced into other lands by way of early Mediterranean trading vessels and overland caravans. The point of entrance into Spain was most certainly Gadir, later called Gades, today called Cádiz, the oldest city in Spain, founded by the Phoenicians around 1100 BC. Gadir was an extremely important city, and it is likely that professional Indian dancers were brought in to entertain the city’s royalty, probably during the time of the Greeks, c. 500–250 BC, less likely during the reign of the Romans, c. 250 BC – 475 AD. (Hindu musicians and singers surely accompanied the dancers, and thus also introduced their art forms into Spain during this same period. This would partly explain the strong similarities that still exist between certain types of Hindu singing and music, and flamenco).”

● Although we have just heard Lorca telling us that “duende had leapt from the Greek mysteries to the dancers of Cádiz”, there was probably no Hellenic period then in Gadir. From the Phoenicians and the Punics (whom Pohren seems to ignore), the city passed into the hands of the Romans in 206 BCE. Irrespective of the error, what’s important is not who the master of the city was at the time, but the fact that Gadir functioned as a gateway for the Indian dance and music influence into Andalusia. Whatever the case, we know that in their symposia, the Hellenes, both in mainland Greece and also in the colonies, used to enjoy the art of foreign singers and musicians, mostly women, who (according to the symposiasts’ “tastes”) appeared dressed or nude, as we are told by Athenaeus (“Deipnosophistae”, 3rd century CE) and Suda (“Lexicon”, 10th century).

Symposium scene with an aulos playing girl [modestly dressed up, not nude], by Nicias painter

“These civilizations,” Pohren goes on, “with their emphasis on culture, undoubtedly introduced this religious dancing into their own temples, so that by the arrival of the Visigoths in Andalusia (c. 450–700), this type of religious dancing had already become so traditional as to be carried over into the primitive Spanish Church, encouraged and even performed by early Christian priests. (El Baile Andaluz, by Caballero Bonald: ‘It is now known that the fathers of the primitive Church openly admitted, and even fomented with their examples, the adoption by the Christian cult of certain elements of the sacred oriental dances, frequently danced by the very priests themselves’). The Visigoths accepted Catholicism and merged with the Hispano-Roman population,⁽³⁾ and religious dancing continued throughout their reign.

• ⁽³⁾ Pohren, just like Mascarenhas Barreto in the Chronicle 5, put the cart before the horse, speaking about Catholicism before the Schism. Although this doubling of the error makes me wonder: may Catholicism be synonymous with Christianism, and Orthodoxy is a… heresy? Terra incognita: religious affairs have never been my forte!

“It is postulated that during the reign of the Moors (c. 711–1492) these sacred dances were danced more and more popularly outside the confines of the church, possibly even by Spain’s first gypsies, who were thought to have come as camp-followers of the Moorish armies (after having arrived in North Africa from their homeground, India, by way of Pakistan, Persia, and Arabia). As both the gypsies and the Moors already cultivated a type of dance largely derived from the Brahmanic religious dances, their arrival most certainly gave the existing Andalusian dances a shot in the arm…

“Another historical event in the development of the flamenco dance was the arrival of the second migration of gypsies to Spain around 1450, shortly before the Moors were expelled from their last footholds in Andalusia. The gypsies arrived from India by the northern route (Persia, Russia, etc.), bringing with them their interpretations of Indian dances and songs, and adding fresh fuel to the Andalusian folklore…

“After the Moors were forced out, all religious connotations in the dance ceased. The dances were not only banned from the Church because of their increasing sensuality and ‘sinful movements’, but at one time persecutions were carried out against interpreters of certain dances regardless of where they were danced. It was then that the dance, together with the cante, went underground, becoming an art of the ‘lawless elements’ of society. This happened more or less simultaneously with the 16th century edicts ordering the expulsion of the Moors, gypsies, and Jews, and can probably be cited as the beginning of the formation of flamenco as we know it today.”

Cithara/Kithara > Guitarra

This panorama on the evolution of dance from the Indian Brahmanic temples to the Andalusian gypsy camps, with all intermediate stages, has a negative side: it is one-dimensional, presenting India as the matrix of the art of dance – and even more – leading to wrong conclusions. But if, instead of the dance, we trace the evolution of the guitar, the entire mosaic of exchange becomes balanced and three-dimensional. Our guide, Pohren, as a guitarist, moves now into far more familiar waters:

Ancient Hellenic cithara/kithara

“The Spanish guitar”, he remarks in the chapter of the same book (Lives and Legends of Flamenco) dealing with his instrument, “is the direct offspring of, principally, the guitarra latina (Latin guitar) and, secondarily, the guitarra morisca (Moorish guitar), both of which are generally believed to have descended from the ancient kithara asiria (Oriental zither).⁽⁴⁾

• ⁽⁴⁾ Note how terminology differs in the phases of the guitar’s development: cithara or kithara > guitarra. It refers to the time when the ancient cithara ceased to have the form of a large ancient lyre and acquired a “neck” or “arm”.

“First let us attempt to trace the kithara asiria [Assyrian]. José de Azpiazu, in his book La Guitarra y Los Guitarristas, makes the observation that we must look to Egypt and Babylonia for the earliest string instruments, including the zither, from whence they passed on to Syria, Persia, India, and the Middle and Far East in general. He bases this assumption on diverse archaeological finds, principally in Egypt, singling out in particular a bas-relief, dated at 3500 BC, discovered in the tomb of one of the Kings of Thebes. This bas-relief, now in the museum of Leyden (Holland), includes an instrument somewhat resembling today’s Spanish guitar. Azpiazu also states that around the time 1000–800 BC the Egyptians possessed an instrument greatly resembling the modern guitar. This instrument could easily have been the previously mentioned guitarra morisca, or one of its predecessors in its development from the kithara asiria.

Egyptian 3500 years ago playing a guitar-like instrument

“However, in view of continued archaeological discoveries, no date or place can be irrevocably pinpointed concerning the origin of any of the ancient stringed instruments. The discovery by an English archaeologist, Kathleen Kenyon, determining that the city of Jericho was teeming with life as far back as 6800 BC, makes the first Egyptian dynasty (3400 BC) seem relatively modern. In truth, the family tree of string instruments, in all of its rich variety, is as vague as civilization’s early history. Perhaps the only data available to sustain the belief that the guitar is descended from the ancient kithara asiria is the similarity and progression of the zither-guitar terminology in various languages, and the corresponding similarity and development of the instruments represented by the terms, as follows: qitâra (Chaldea – an ancient region in Southeast Asia, on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers), quitar (Arabic), sitar (Hindi), kithara (Greek), cítara (Spanish) and guitarra (Spanish).

Vihuela: the bygone “aristocrat” cousin of the “folk” guitar, with six double strings, is the mother of the violas portuguesas, one of which accompanies the guitarra portuguesa, the lead instrument of fado.

“If we wish to follow the popular theory that the guitar was derived from the kithara (there is no good reason not to), the guitar’s development in Spain can be traced in rough outline. It is generally agreed that the kithara asiria (then called the kithara romana) was introduced into Spain during the time of the Romans, sometime before the birth of Christ.⁽⁵⁾ The kithara flourished in Spain until the fall of the Spanish Roman Empire (5th century), at which time it fell largely into disuse until the invading Visigoths were firmly established on the peninsula. The Visigoths set about reviving the old Roman culture, and the kithara again emerged. In the 7th century San Isidro wrote of wandering minstrels singing and accompanying themselves on the kithara… It was around this period that the guitarra latina, an instrument containing four sets of double strings and which resembled a small version of the present Spanish guitar, was developed in Spain, presumably, as we have stated, from the kithara romana.

• ⁽⁵⁾ “In my opinion”, footnotes Pohren, “it is more likely that visiting Hindu musicians introduced the kithara asiria, or similar instruments, into Cádiz before the coming of the Romans, probably during the reign of the Greeks”…

● Well, in my opinion, it is far more likely that the Greeks themselves introduced into Iberia their own version of this instrument: the cithara helénica!

A woman playing a lyre (an instrument that shows the
cithara to guitarra transition), by Cesare Saccaggi

“Meanwhile, in the Middle East the kithara asiria had long ago inspired the family of the guitarra morisca, an oval-shaped, three-stringed instrument introduced into Spain with the 8th century Moorish invasion. It is thought that the only significant characteristic that the Latin guitar borrowed from the Moorish guitar, in its development into Spanish guitar, was the idea of the single strings in place of the formerly-used sets of double strings.

“So by the 9th century there existed in Spain guitars not unlike those we play today, but until the troubadour period (the 11th through the 13th centuries) the guitar was not widely introduced to the general populace. Little structural change of any significance took place in this guitar until the 16th century, when Vicente Espinel began using a fifth string. (This was not Espinel’s invention, as guitars had existed previously with five strings. Espinel merely made the fifth string fashionable. Many musicologists express the belief that the famous Ziryab himself first innovated the use of the fifth string in the 9th century). With this development the Spaniards finally seemed to feel that the guitar was their instrument, and it was then that the guitarra latina was rechristened the ‘Spanish guitar’.⁽⁶⁾ Two centuries later the final radical development was made, which was the addition of the sixth string by fray Miguel García, a monk also known as Padre Basilio, an excellent classical guitarist and the guitar instructor of King Carlos IV, Queen María Luisa, and the famous concert guitarist, Dionisio Aguado. Thus, except for its growth in size and quality, by the latter third of the 18th century the Spanish guitar was as we know it today.

• ⁽⁶⁾ Except the guitarra española, there is also a guitarra portuguesa, which resembles more a lute than a guitar. It descends from a medieval “guitar”, the citole, and is now the solo instrument of fado. It is accompanied by a “normal” guitar, which is called viola to be distinguished from the guitarra portuguesa; the word viola probably comes from another old guitar, vihuela, or viola de mão. In the 15th century, some musicians played it with a bow, and that’s how the viol, or viola da gamba, was born; it was later replaced by the violin family, especially the cello.

Bayad plays the oud to the Lady (from the Arabic tale Bayad
and Riyad) – or Ziryab’s Garden (Andalusia, 13th century)

“Now that we know something of the development of the guitar, let us look into the development of the music. According to Lévi-Provençal (La Civilización Árabe en España), the great tradition of Andalusian music was molded together and developed in the Cordovan conservatory of music established and directed by the Mesopotamian musician, Ziryab, in the 9th century. (Ziryab arrived in Córdoba in 822, in his early thirties, and remained there the rest of his life). What he must have done was gather, and become proficient in, the Andalusian folklore of that period, which was, of course, highly Oriental in nature, and conserve and teach it to attending minstrels and nobility in his conservatory. As he had spent years in the courts of Baghdad, and was the supreme musician of his time, he undoubtedly added to, and purified, what he found. Ziryab, in fact, is credited with having played the major musical role in making Andalusia the outstanding cultural center of the world at that time.”

“Ziryab played the major role in making Andalusia the outstanding
cultural center of the world in the 9th century.” (Donn Pohren)

Chelys: lyre made with a tortoise shell

IN THIS MONUMENTAL MURAL, created mainly by Lorca and Pohren, with all the others contributing, we only need to apply some extra brushstrokes to… exonerate the Assyrians, who became notorious in history mainly for their cruelty, but also to show that in social processes, parthenogenesis is out of the question in all places and all times – even in the case of the ancient “Hellenic miracle” that has been feasible due to borrowing intellectual achievements and know-how from the Orient.

The cithara was an instrument of the professionals, while its little sister, the lyre, of the amateurs. According to the Encyclopedia of Ancient Hellenic Music by Solon Michaelides (the source of much valuable information throughout our Chronicles), the cithara was called Ἀσιάς (Asian). Plutarch (1st–2nd century CE) claimed that “it was called Asian because it was used by the Lesbian citharodes [or citharoedes, or citharedes (cithara + ode), i.e. cithara players who also sang] dwelling close to Asia”. This is, of course, a pretext – even if Lesbos is actually close to Asia Minor. The truth is found in the writings of Hesychius of Alexandria (5th century CE), who explained that the cithara was defined as such “for it was invented in Asia”. The adjectives Ἀσιάς and Ἀσιᾶτις (Asian, Asiatic) were used not only in relation to the cithara, but also to music in general; as Strabo points out: “… καὶ ἡ μουσικὴ πᾶσα Θρᾳκία καὶ Ἀσιᾶτις νενόμισται”; “… all music is thought to be Thracian and Asian” (see the Chronicle 11. “Music Is Thracian and Asian”). Ancient Thrace, mind you, was not a part of ancient Hellas.

A Konso girl playing a krar lyre (southern Ethiopia)

These instruments of the cithara and lyre family have been extinct for centuries now because they were left behind in the development of music, becoming inadequate and thus unable to satisfy the needs of the people – musicians and listeners. They are now rarely found still in use among primitive tribes, primarily in northeastern Africa – and this is indeed a pleasant surprise! Certain German ethnomusicologists recorded, among others, the sound of a lyre played by a cattleman, member of the Hamar tribe in Ethiopia, and put his photo on the cover of the album. Isn’t it impressive? The symbol of so many “serious” music institutions, the “musical instrument par excellence” of the ancient Greeks, the celebrated chelys of Hermes, who offered it to Apollo (to atone for stealing his oxen!), to be “degraded” in the hands of primitive Africans, and also been made with a tortoise shell? It can’t be, these Germans should have been related in some way to… Fallmerayer!⁽⁷⁾

• ⁽⁷⁾ Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer (1790 – 1861) was a German Tyrolean traveller, journalist, politician, and historian, best known for his controversial discontinuity theory concerning the racial origins of the Greeks.

In conclusion, if we assume that the guitar descended from the ancient cithara, the latter must have been combined with some kind of lute – that is, with an instrument having a “neck” – as the guitar belongs to this lute family. The only similar instrument in ancient Greece was the so-called tríchordon (three-string), or pandura, pandurís, pánduros, and phánduros. In the Hellenistic era there was already a whole family of such instruments that became later even larger with the additions of the erudite thambura (tambur of Constantinople), folk tanbur-saz or bağlama, and also bouzouki (see Chronicle 9. The Celebrated Tríchordon).

Bow harp (ennanga from Uganda): descendant of the musical bow and precursor of the string instruments

Pollux (2nd century CE), writing about the origin of the instrument, is very clear: “Tríchordon, which the Assyrians called pandura; it was also their own invention.” Therefore, etymologically and organologically, the pandura was Assyrian. We can assume, as a result, that the cithara asiria, which Pohren referred to, should have been related to the pandura. The term tríchordon that the Hellenes used for the pandura means that it was a three-string instrument. Let us not forget that the guitarra morisca, descending from the cithara asiria, was also a tríchordon.⁽⁸⁾

• ^(h) Cithara probably means tríchordon, three-string. The Indian sitar (of a common etymological origin), though it’s multi-stringed now (about 20 strings; 6-7 melodic and the rest sympathetic, “sympathizing”, i.e. vibrating, with the melodic ones) should have been three-string and Persian in origin (seh-tar in Farsi means “three-string”); besides, in Iran there is still in use a kind of three-string (already four-string) tanbur called setar.

It’s so thrilling to imagine that the starting point of all these instruments was the primitive hunter’s bow; that in time of rest could become a musical bow…

• >> Chronicle 8. A HYBRID’S HYBRIS…
• << Chronicle 6. INDO-IBERIAN ARC (Jondo)

Next Chronicle 8. A HYBRID’S HYBRIS… ● “Mosaic” of Andalusia ● Cultural “Crossroads” and “Purity” ● Natural and Artificial Hybrids ● “Creative” Commercialization ● Paco de Lucía

Musical bow

ARCHiPELAGOS • VIII. EM TEMPO DE INDIGÊNCIA

AMÉLIA MUGE & MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

ARCHiPELAGOS / Passagens

 

VIII. EM TEMPO DE INDIGÊNCIA

.

● Sem deuses ● Nós ● Feitiço
● As ilhas do Egeu ● A ruína da Grécia
● Falamos de sombras (Democracia)
● Um início

.

/ENGLISH/ ARCHiPELAGOS • VIII. IN TIMES OF INDIGENCE

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ ΑΡΧΙΠΕΛΑΓΟΣ • VIII. ΣΤΗΝ ΕΠΟΧΗ ΤΗΣ ΕΝΔΕΙΑΣ

ARCHiPELAGOS / Passagens: AMÉLIA MUGE & MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

Hélia Correia: A Terceira Miséria & Indignação (excertos)

17. Sem deuses

– Hélia Correia / Amélia Muge
• Arranjo: A. Muge, António José Martins, Michales Loukovikas

Para quê, […] para que servem
Os poetas em tempo de indigência?

[…] sem deuses, sem o sentimento
Sequer da sua falta, nós nascemos,
E incapazes de lembrar, secando,
Sugando tudo, até aquilo que não
Nos serve de alimento, o que circula
Nas entranhas da terra, a sua linfa,
Essa que os argonautas ainda viram
Exsudar, como um sangue, dos rochedos
Quando tudo cantava e era ferido.

• Canto e voz ritmada: A. Muge / Coro: Maria Monda, A. Muge •
Contrabaixo: António Quintino / Percussão: José Salgueiro / Violino: Kyriakos Gouventas

Argo, de Konstantinos Volanakis

● Hélia Correia (nascida a 1949 em Lisboa) é uma escritora de romances, contos, sendo também dramaturga e poeta. Reinterpreta mitos helénicos dando destaque a heroínas como Antígona, Helena, e Medeia. Ganhou o Prémio Camões (2015), a distinção mais prestigiada do mundo Lusófono, que dedicou à Grécia, de onde vem a poesia, sem a qual não seríamos nem teríamos nada, como disse na entrega do prémio, concluindo com a exclamação Viva a Grécia! Além disso, é uma dupla pena que ninguém se tivesse interessado em publicar A Terceira Miséria na Grécia. Bem, é a quarta miséria que nos cabe! ● Argonautas: heróis da mitologia helénica que nos anos anteriores à Guerra de Troia (c. 1300 a.C.) acompanharam Jasão de Tessália na viagem a Cólquida, na costa do Mar Negro (actual Abkházia na Geórgia ocidental), em busca do Velo de ouro; o termo argonautas significa, literalmente, os marinheiros do Argo, nome dado ao navio em que viajam, em honra do seu construtor – Argos. Numa das suas aventuras, vão dar ao Monte Díndimo, lugar seco e rochoso, situado na Frígia (Ásia Menor); aí, por engano, acabam por matar os seus aliados e protegidos de Cibele (ou Reia) – deusa daquele lugar, da terra, da fertilidade, da montanha, a mãe de todos os deuses e de todos os seres, a Senhora de muitos nomes…; em sua homenagem e a título de pedido de perdão pelo erro, oferecem-lhe sacrifícios e a deusa, em reconhecimento, faz nascer do rochedo uma fonte de água cristalina (Fonte ou Nascente de Jasão) e à volta dela brotam ervas, flores e muitas outras plantas.

18. Nós

– Hélia Correia / Michales Loukovikas
• Arranjo: M. Loukovikas

Nós, os abandonados, os que não
Sabem sequer como aplacar
E a quem,
Nós, os emudecidos,
Irmanados com os sem-terra, nós,
Os futuramente esfomeados,
Bárbaros com os pés no alcatrão,
Bebedores de petróleo, como pode

De novo a praça,
A Ágora, juntar-nos?

• Canto: Amélia Muge / Coro: Maria Monda, A. Muge • Contrabaixo: António Quintino
Guitarra: Dimitris Mystakidis / Percussão: José Salgueiro / Piano: Filipe Raposo

● Ágora: praça central na antiga pólis helénica; literalmente significa assembleia ou ponto de encontro; começa por ser o centro da vida política, artística, espiritual e atlética da cidade; mais tarde, também funciona como pólo económico: um mercado com tendas ou lojas, atraindo artesãos que, à sua volta, constroem as suas oficinas. Desta dupla função da ágora – espaço político-económico – derivam dois verbos gregos: ἀγορεύω (agoreúō), falar em público, e ἀγοράζω (agorázō), comprar, ir às compras. É também origem da palavra agorafobia (receio mórbido de espaços largos, como ruas e praças, em especial de sítios públicos).

Uma representação imaginária da Ágora ateniense na época de Péricles

19. Feitiço

– Hélia Correia / Amélia Muge
• Arranjo: António José Martins, Filipe Raposo

Esses – que não existem
E nos deixaram assustados, sós,
Sem as ferramentas adequadas,
Sem pensamento,
Sem esses deuses temperamentais
Que tomavam partido nos combates.

Transformados em porcos, por feitiço,
Pela malevolência,
Exactamente
Como na Odisseia,
Não sabemos
– e os Gregos esqueceram –
Como é que tal feitiço
Se desfaz?

Circe Invidiosa, de John William Waterhouse

Experimentos
– Amélia Muge

Orelha de porco
Gato sapato
Olho de rato,
Um ramo torto
Metade do bico da cotovia

Rosmano mocho
Bago romã
Unha de coxo
Perna de rã
Língua da avó mas que seja torta

Pingo de cuspo
Pico do cacto
Escama de peixe
Pêlo de gato
Asas de mosca atadas num feixe

Uma nota preta
Um cheque careca
Moeda furada
Um arroto de banqueiro
O suor de um ano inteiro

• Canto, efeitos vocais, voz falada: A. Muge
• Percussão: José Salgueiro, A.J. Martins
Sintetizadores: F. Raposo

● Odisseia: ver Homero, em ARCHiPELAGOS • VII. ILHAS IMAGINÁRIAS.

●

20. As ilhas do Egeu

– Hélia Correia / Manos Achalinotópoulos, Amélia Muge
– Livre improviso:
Harris Lambrakis, M. Achalinotópoulos, A. Muge, Kyriakos Gouventas
• Arranjo: Michales Loukovikas

[…] Só mais tarde […]
O que desconhecia a mansidão […]
Se apercebeu do uivo que soltavam
As ilhas todas, com as suas praias
E os seus bosques vazios. […]

[…] Sim, foi essa
A primeira miséria, a deserção
Dos deuses. A segunda, a sua morte,
Já na morte de Pã anunciada
Pelo lamento dos bosques, o clamor
Lutuoso das ilhas do Egeu. […]

Para quê, […] para que servem
Os poetas em tempo de indigência?

• Voz falada: H. Correia / Canto: A. Muge / Improviso vocal: M. Achalinotópoulos, A. Muge
• Improviso instrumental: H. Lambrakis, ney; M. Achalinotópoulos, clarino; K. Gouventas, violino
Pedal: K. Gouventas, viola; António Quintino, contrabaixo; Catarina Anacleto, violoncelo

Pã e Syrinx (ou Sírinx e Siringe), de Jean François de Troy.

● Ilhas do Egeu: ver ARCHiPELAGOS • I. REVISITANDO O ARQUIPÉLAGO. ● Pã: nome originário do grego πάειν (páein, pasto), é o deus da natureza selvagem, de pastores e da música pastoral, de rebanhos e montanhas, companheiro das ninfas, ligado à fertilidade e à primavera; é também o deus da crítica teatral; temido pelos que atravessam florestas durante a noite, atribuem os pavores súbitos que os acometem, quando ouvem sons estranhos, de animais, a Pã (pânico); inventa um instrumento musical chamado Siringe, nome de uma ninfa que para fugir dos ataques amorosoa de Pã se transforma num canavial, a partir do qual ele cria a sua flauta, conhecida como siringe ou flauta de Pã; em versão egípcia, é a constelação do Capricórnio; com pernas e chifres de bode, Pã é uma figura significativa no movimento romântico nos séculos XVII a XIX, bem como nos movimentos neopagãos do século XX.

●

21. A ruína da Grécia

– Hélia Correia / Michales Loukovikas
• Arranjo: M. Loukovikas

Nós, os ateus, nós, os monoteístas,
Nós, os que reduzimos a beleza
A pequenas tarefas, nós, os pobres
Adornados, os pobres confortáveis,
Os que a si mesmos se vigarizavam
Olhando para cima, para as torres,
Supondo que as podiam habitar,
Glória das águias que nem águias tem,
Sofremos, sim, de idêntica indigência,
Da ruína da Grécia.

● Ateísmo: ausência e rejeição da crença na existência de divindades – de qualquer divindade; tem por oposição o teísmo, que acredita na existência de pelo menos um deus. A raiz etimológica da palavra ateísmo tem origem (séc. V a.C.) no grego ἄθεος (atheos), que significa sem deus(es). O termo actual aparece no séc. XVI. ● Monoteísmo: crença na existência de um único deus criador do mundo, onipotente, onisciente e onipresente; uma distinção pode ser feita entre o monoteísmo exclusivo e o monoteísmo inclusivo ou panenteísta que, apesar de reconhecer vários deuses distintos, postula alguma unidade subjacente. Distingue-se do henoteísmo em que, apesar de o crente adorar uma só divindade, admite a existência de outras com a mesma validade e adoração igualmente monolátrica.

• Canto: Amélia Muge / Coro: Maria Monda, A. Muge • Clarino: Manos Achalinotópoulos
Contrabaixo: António Quintino / Guitarra: Dimitris Mystakidis / Ney: Harris Lambrakis
Percussão: José Salgueiro / Piano: Filipe Raposo / Violino: Kyriakos Gouventas

22. Falamos de sombras (Democracia)

– Hélia Correia / Ludwig van Beethoven
• Adaptação / Arranjo: Michales Loukovikas

A Terceira Sinfonia (Eroica), Segundo Movimento, primeira parte
Marcia funebre, Adagio assai, Sotto voce (1804)

Sim, falamos de sombras. Vendo bem,
Incendiámos tudo: Alexandria
E os sábios, as mulheres, […]
O grande coração. Temos aos ombros
O apetrecho dos destruidores, […]:
Essa arrogância
Pela qual o ocidente se perdeu.

A terceira miséria é esta, […].
A de quem já não ouve nem pergunta.
[…] não recorda. E, ao contrário
Do orgulhoso Péricles, se torna
Num entre […] os que se entregam,
[…] que vão misturar-se como um líquido
Num líquido maior, perdida a forma,
Desfeita em pó a estátua.

Estão as praças,
Como ágoras de outrora, estonteadas
Pela concentração dos organismos,
Pelo uso da palavra, a fervilhante
Palavra própria da democracia […]

Monumento a Beethoven, de Francesco Jerace (1895)

• Canto: Amélia Muge / Coro: Maria Monda, A. Muge, Rui Vaz, José Manuel David, Pedro Casaes
• Clarinete: Kosmás Papadópoulos / Contrabaixo: António Quintino
Ney: Harris Lambrakis / Percussão: José Salgueiro / Piano: Filipe Raposo
Violino, viola: Kyriakos Gouventas / Violoncelo: Catarina Anacleto

● Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): compositor e pianista alemão na transição entre o classicismo e o romantismo na música ocidental, e um dos mais famosos e influentes compositores do mundo. ● Sua Terceira Sinfonia (1804) foi inicialmente dedicada a (Napoleão) Buonaparte (título original da obra), por acreditar que incorpora os ideais democráticos e anti-monárquicos da Revolução Francesa; mas quando se auto-proclama imperador, retira-lhe a dedicatória; publicada em 1806, a partitura já se intitula Sinfonia Eroica, composta per festeggiare il sovvenire di un grande Uomo; informado da morte de Napoleão (1821), Beethoven diz: Compus para este acontecimento há 17 anos, referindo-se ao Segundo movimento: Marcia funebre (marcha fúnebre); Adagio assai (muito lento); Sotto voce (em voz baixa, sussurrado).

Hipátia, de Charles William Mitchell (1885)

● Alexandria: fundada por Alexandre o Grande por volta de 331 a.C., torna-se um importante centro da civilização helenística; é famosa pelo Farol (ilha de Faros), uma das Sete maravilhas da Antiguidade, e pela Grande Biblioteca, a maior da sua época, incendiada à vez por romanos, bizantinos e árabes embora não haja certezas quanto a estes últimos; os títulos, conservados sobretudo em rolos de papiro, seriam entre 40.000 e 400.000 na altura do seu apogeu, pelo que os sucessivos incêndios fazem dela símbolo de destruição do conhecimento intelectual e artístico; a Biblioteca fazia parte do Museu, instituição dedicada à investigação, onde estudaram muitos dos mais importantes pensadores da antiguidade como Arquimedes, Aristarco, Ctesíbio, Eratóstenes, Euclides, Heron ou Hiparco; depois da Biblioteca principal ter sido destruída, os estudiosos passam a usar uma biblioteca filha, noutro local da cidade: a biblioteca do templo Serapeu, dedicado a Serápis, protector de Alexandria. ● Em 391 d.C. o Serapeu e o remanescente da Grande Biblioteca são de novo pilhados e queimados, agora por soldados e por fanáticos cristãos, por ordem de um decreto do Imperador Teodósio e de outro do patriarca Teófilo. ● O “Grande Terror” em Alexandria atinge o seu climax em 415, com o brutal assassinato da filósofa, matemática e astrónoma Hipátia, instigado por “Santo” Cirilo, sobrinho e sucessor de Teófilo. Sócrates de Constantinopla, um historiador cristão contemporâneo, atesta, na sua História Eclesiástica, que Cirilo incitou uma multidão de 500 monges possuídos “de um ardor feroz e intolerante [… Eles] atacaram-na de surpresa [Hipátia] quando regressava a casa, arrastando-a da carruagem, levaram-na para uma igreja chamada Caesareum [o quartel-general de Cirilo], onde a despiram e assassinaram com óstraca [cacos de barro, fragmentos de cerâmica]. Depois de terem dilacerado e feito em pedaços o seu corpo, levaram os seus restos mortais para um lugar chamado Cinaron, onde os queimaram.”

Clístenes

● A democracia (δημοκρατία, poder do povo) foi concebida na Grécia clássica como um sistema de governo onde os cidadãos exerciam directamente o poder e não através de representantes. A primeira democracia do mundo foi estabelecida em Atenas em 508 a.C. sob a liderança de Clístenes, como um sistema directo e participativo, no qual era o colectivo de cidadãos (Eclésia) que votava na legislação e contas públicas, enquanto que os que eram escolhidos para o exercício de cargos faziam-no de forma colectiva. Esta selecção era feita por sorteio, não por eleição, para não favorecer os ricos, nobres, famosos, com escolarização , eloquentes ou bem parecidos. De facto, o sorteio era olhado como o meio mais democrático de impedir a compra corrupta de votos e dar aos cidadãos uma forma única de igualdade política. Dessa maneira, eram maior o envolvimento dos cidadãos na política, governando e sendo por sua vez governados, como escreveu Aristóteles. Como excepção à regra havia a eleição (não por sorteio) de dez generais – devido à sua experiência necessária em questões políticas e de guerra – e também daqueles que, provenientes das classes mais altas, lidavam com grandes somas de dinheiro: qualquer desfalque poderia ser recuperado de suas propriedades. O desprezo que os primeiros democratas sentem pelos que pensam apenas em privado nos seus assuntos é evidenciado pela palavra idiota, do grego ἰδιώτης – pessoa que não participa activamente na política. Péricles declara que nós não dizemos que um homem que não se interesse de todo por política é um homem que se mete apenas nos seus próprios assuntos; dizemos é que ele não tem aqui assuntos nenhuns a tratar. ● Péricles (c. 495-429 a.C.): estadista proeminente e influente, orador e general (estratega) entre as guerras persas e peloponense, cujo nome está ligado à Era de Ouro de Atenas; promove as artes e a literatura e estimula a evolução da democracia ateniense; num excerto da sua Oração Fúnebre, registada por Tucídedes (História da Guerra do Peloponeso), diz: A nossa politeia não copia as leis dos Estados vizinhos; somos nós que servimos mais como um modelo para os outros do que somos imitadores. Chama-se democracia, porque não são os poucos mas os muitos que governam. Se consultarmos nossas leis, elas prescrevem uma justiça igual para todos a despeito de suas diferenças individuais.

Oração Fúnebre de Péricles, de Philipp Foltz (1852)

23. Um início

– Hélia Correia / Amélia Muge
• Arranjo: António José Martins, Filipe Raposo

De que armas disporemos, se não destas
Que estão dentro do corpo: o pensamento,
A ideia de polis, resgatada
De um grande abuso, uma noção de casa
E de hospitalidade e de barulho
Atrás do qual vem o poema, atrás
Do qual virá a colecção dos feitos
E defeitos humanos, um início.

• Canto: A. Muge / Coro: Maria Monda • Contrabaixo: António Quintino / Ney: Harris Lambrakis
Percussão: José Salgueiro / Piano: F. Raposo / Violino, viola: Kyriakos Gouventas
Violoncelo: Catarina Anacleto

● Pólis, quer dizer, literalmente, cidade em grego, mas referindo-se mais ao conjunto dos cidadãos do que à área geográfica que ocupa; também pode significar cidadania. O termo helénico que se refere especificamente à totalidade dos espaços e edifícios urbanos é ἄστυ (ásty). Antes da Batalha de Salamina p.ex., os persas conseguiram ocupar a ásty de Atenas, mas não a pólis, porque os cidadãos embarcaram nos barcos da frota ateniense e partiram. Na historiografia moderna, usa-se o termo pólis para indicar uma cidade-estado grega, embora o termo seja inadequado. As poleis gregas não eram como as cidades-estado fenícias que eram governadas por um rei ou uma pequena oligarquia, sendo os seus habitantes meros súbditos. Assim, o termo pólis acabou por significar estado; derivado de pólis, politeia (πολιτεία) em helénico significa cidade, mas indicando também todos os procedimentos relativos à pólis o que, por extensão, poderia significar tanto cidade-estado como república, administração, governo, governação, comunidade, colectividade; já politeuma significa regime; para não mencionar a etimologia de política…

A Biblioteca de Alexandria durante o seu apogeu

• >> ARCHiPELAGOS • IX. JÁ SE DÃO AS VOLTAS TODAS
• << ARCHiPELAGOS • VII. ILHAS IMAGINÁRIAS

ARCHiPELAGOS • VII. ILHAS IMAGINÁRIAS

AMÉLIA MUGE & MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

ARCHiPELAGOS / Passagens

 

VII. ILHAS IMAGINÁRIAS

 

● Uma ilha, Utopia ● Penélope de Ítaca
● Meninos perdidos

.

/ENGLISH/ ARCHiPELAGOS • VII. IMAGINARY ISLANDS

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ ΑΡΧΙΠΕΛΑΓΟΣ • VII. ΝΗΣΙΑ ΤΗΣ ΦΑΝΤΑΣΙΑΣ

ARCHiPELAGOS / Passagens: AMÉLIA MUGE & MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

14. Uma ilha, Utopia
Dedicado a Ares Alexandrou

– Amélia Muge
• Arranjo: António José Martins, Filipe Raposo

Nesse nome sem lugar / sem saber onde existir
está além sempre a mudar / a chamar e a fugir
tem qualquer coisa de achado / que nunca é encontrado.

Qualquer coisa de perfeito / entre o avesso e o direito
doce, amarga, quente e fria, / uma ilha…

Qualquer coisa que liberta, / que amarra, que magoa,
que escraviza, que alivia, / uma ilha com o nome de Utopia.

No mais absurdo desejo, / no mais escuro do escuro,
ou numa caixa vazia, / há uma ilha…

Que nos fala de uma casa / e do estranho em casa alheia
odisseia da ideia que criou a fantasia
dessa ilha com o nome de Utopia.

Eternizando horizontes / para lá dos horizontes
seja noite ou seja dia / há ao longe um nevoeiro
uma visão imprecisa / onde a própria miopia
é uma ilha com o nome de Utopia.

• Canto: A. Muge / Voz falada: Michales Loukovikas • Contrabaixo: António Quintino
Harpa: Ana Dias / Ney: Harris Lambrakis

●

Campos Elísios (Elíseos), de Carlos Schwabe (1903)

● Utopia: título do livro de Thomas More (1516) em que, numa ilha imaginária, cria um reino com um governo benigno, onde os problemas fundamentais da vida humana em sociedade estão resolvidos e onde impera a alegria, o bem-estar e a felicidade; o grego τόπος (lugar), conjugado com οὐ (não), é Utopia – não-lugar; com εὖ (bem), é Eutopia – bom lugar; em inglês, Utopia e Eutopia são palavras homófonas, pelo que o significado de Utopia se veio a colar a uma ideia positiva, distanciando-se do sentido inicial; o autor ainda refere Udepotia – lugar do nunca; já modernamente, aparece a palavra Distopia, com δυσ- (mau) – mau lugar ou anti-utopia. Seja ela sátira ao estado social da Europa do século XVI, ou idealização de um Estado e de um Governo, o que esta obra consegue é criar uma linguagem e uma disciplina reflexiva plasmada nas temáticas que aborda e na articulação entre elas; o recurso à alegoria e à construção simultaneamente narrativa e dialógica do texto, suporta o questionamento das relações com os outros e com o mundo; o bónus, é o nome para esses exercícios de reflexão sobre o humano, assente em três grandes questões: a igualdade absoluta; o amor à paz e à tranquilidade; o desprezo pelo ouro e a prata. É legítimo afirmar que o pensamento utópico é um dos motores mais poderosos de desenvolvimento das sociedades, mesmo antes de a palavra ter sido inventada, dita e escrita; a natureza da Utopia faz com que se desdobre em duas eternidades: a da procura e a da não-existência. Rafael Hitlodeu, aventureiro português, é o narrador desta Utopia. ● Thomas More, Thomas Morus ou Tomás Moro (1478- 1535): diplomata e homem de estado, advogado e homem de leis, filósofo e escritor, é considerado como um dos grandes humanistas do Renascimento; na sua obra literária – Utopia – não só encontra a palavra para um conceito que faz eco em todas as culturas letradas do mundo, como define os contornos de um disciplinado exercício de reflexão sobre o ser humano e as suas formas de organização social, a valer mais do que as propostas concretas que avança, naturalmente marcadas por ideias e contingências próprias da sua época.

● Ares Alexandrou (1922-1979): nasce em Petrogrado e morre em Paris; filho de pai grego e mãe russa, que lhe dão o nome de Aristoteles Vasiliades, é pelo de Ares Alexandrou que se torna conhecido como tradutor, poeta e romancista; em 1928 a família muda-se para a Grécia; durante a ocupação nazi, adere a um grupo de resistência da juventude comunista, que abandona pouco depois, por divergência não com os ideais, mas com as práticas; após a “libertação” da Grécia é detido pelos britânicos que o deportam com o pai para um campo de concentração na Líbia; mais tarde, apesar de não ter participado da Guerra Civil grega (1946-1949), mas por se ter recusado a negar as suas convicções políticas, é preso e enviado para as ilhas do exílio (no Egeu), sendo finalmente libertado em 1958. Por causa da ditadura que se instala na Grécia em 1967, decide mudar-se para Paris, afirmando-se sempre de uma esquerda não convencional (Eu pertenço ao não existente partido dos poetas). Trabalha toda a sua vida como tradutor: em primeiro lugar de russo, sua língua materna (torna-se um especialista em Dostoiévski) mas também de francês, inglês e outras línguas. É tudo menos um copioso escritor: quatro colecções de poemas posteriormente agrupadas num único volume; um livro – Sem papas na língua – com ensaios, estudos, textos críticos, peças, guiões para filmes e textos similares; alguns trabalhos dispersos publicados, como o relato histórico A revolta de Kronstadt; apenas um romance – A Caixa – a sua obra-prima, que se considera estar entre as mais prestigiadas dos modernos clássicos gregos. Os versos escritos nessas áridas ilhas do exílio, condensam o aspecto trágico da sua vida e obra: um comunista para os carcereiros (era como se denominava quando interrogado), um traidor para os companheiros de prisão. Mas como versejou, O cérebro não é uma barba. / Não deixes os padres / os governantes / os controleiros / fazer-ta. Apenas dois compositores trabalharam musicalmente os seus poemas: Michales Gregoriou (Cartas não entregues, 1977) e Michales Loukovikas (O ouro do céu, 2008). Este poeta foi cantado no trabalho conjunto de Amélia Muge e Michales Loucovikas, Periplus (2012): Nota ilegal, Canção de embalar, Os meus ditames.

Idade do Ouro, de Lucas Cranach o velho

15. Penélope de Ítaca

– Amélia Muge
• Arranjo: António José Martins, Filipe Raposo

Em surdina vai urdindo / malícias tão requintadas
que parada vai fugindo / desfaz as horas em nadas

Ao tear tece os seus dias / na trama das suas penas
ao tear desfaz as noites / no tecido dos seus ais

Se Ulisses tem o espaço / ela viaja no tempo
no ar dos seus movimentos / lançadareira por volante

A bordo desse navio / que é o seu tear errante
lá vai de fio a pavio / para trás e p’ra diante

É nos fios desta teia / onde o tecido é a ideia
de uma história aonde a espera / se tece andando no mar
mas ao leme de um tear

Avançar e estar parado / trabalhar sem se passar
deste ponto desta trama / dias, meses, muitos anos
estar sempre a recomeçar

Foi o tempo como um pano / tecido desta maneira
em Penélope esperando / viajou tanta canseira

Tanta determinação / que aqui estará a diferença
entre esperar por Ulisses / ou por D. Sebastião

• Canto: A. Muge • Contrabaixo: António Quintino / Ney: Harris Lambrakis
Percussão: José Salgueiro / Piano: F. Raposo / Violoncelo: Catarina Anacleto

●

Homero

● Homero (Ὅμηρος, segunda metade do séc. VIII – início do séc. VII a.C.): personagem lendária, possivelmente um bardo cego da Jónia (Ásia Menor), poeta de génio e um não menos genioso compilador de rapsódias de tradição oral, recolhidas junto dos aedos e do próprio povo do período heroico grego, anonimamente transformadas ao longo do tempo até chegar às suas mãos. É autor da Ilíada (alguns meses do último ano da Guerra de Trοia) e da Odisseia (sobre os dez agitados anos do nostos – regresso a casa – de Odisseu, após outros dez de envolvimento na guerra). Esses poemas épicos são centrais da literatura, cultura e educação gregas, com notável influência na civilização ocidental, inspirando muitos trabalhos de escritores, músicos e artistas plásticos. ● Odisseu (Ὀδυσσεύς), conhecido por Ulisses entre os romanos, bem como entre os portugueses (lenda da fundação de Lisboa): lendário rei de Ítaca e herói da Odisseia de Homero, desempenha um papel fundamental no épico homérico anterior (Ilíada) e ainda noutras obras do Ciclo Épico. Cônjuge de Penélope a Fiel, é-lhe atribuído o epíteto Odisseu o Astuto (μῆτις, inteligência astuta), pelo brilhantismo intelectual, astúcia e versatilidade (πολύτροπος). ● Por causa de tão longa ausência, em Ítaca presume-se que morreu e a sua esposa, Penélope, tem de lidar com um grupo de insolentes e importunos candidatos a novo casamento; estabelece então a condição de, antes de casar, terminar de tecer um sudário para o sogro; mas durante o dia tece o que à noite, sozinha, desmancha; traída por uma das servas, arranja outro estratagema: sabendo da dureza do arco do seu marido, põe a condição de só casar com aquele que o conseguisse encordoar; de todos, o único capaz de o fazer, foi um humilde camponês, que logo se apresentou, revelando ser o tão esperado Odisseu. ● D. Sebastião, rei de Portugal (1554-1578): nasce 18 dias depois da morte do pai, único príncipe herdeiro do trono; por contrato de casamento de sua tia paterna com Filipe II de Espanha, Portugal passaria a ser regido por Espanha (ideia desde sempre rejeitada pelos portugueses) caso não houvesse um sucessor; assim, já é o Desejado, mesmo antes de nascer, assegurando em simultâneo a independência do seu reino. Quando aos catorze anos assume o governo, empenha-se em resolver o problema da defesa das costas portuguesas, revivificando a ‘Reconquista’ do período do Al-Andaluz (722-1492); ao pedido de ajuda do quarto sultão de Marrocos para recuperar o trono e travar o crescimento do império otomano, responde planeando uma cruzada, para o que monta um esforço militar naquele território; ser dado como desaparecido em combate na desastrosa Batalha de Alcácer-Quibir (1578), gera uma crise dinástica que culmina na perda da independência para Espanha (1580-1640); a derrota e o desaparecimento do ‘menino-rei’, em quem o reino tanta esperança deposita, acrescentam-lhe os cognomes de Encoberto e Adormecido e dão lugar ao mito do Sebastianismo: lenda, crença ou movimento profético (finais do séc. XVI) que se refere ao regresso de D. Sebastião, numa manhã de nevoeiro, para cumprir a tarefa iniciada com o seu nascimento, ou seja, salvar a nação; esta espera é marcada por uma espécie de esperança passiva, paciente e resignada às suas próprias exigências, que de certo modo caracteriza, mais do que uma das formas de ser e estar dos portugueses, uma atitude que se pode manifestar noutras culturas, ou integrar outros mitos.

Penélope e os pretendentes, de John William Waterhouse (1912)

16. Meninos perdidos

– Amélia Muge / Tradicional da Trácia, A. Muge
• Arranjo: António José Martins, Michales Loukovikas

Meninos o tanas, / já somos crescidos
o tempo engana / nestes paraísos
a idade confusa / vê-nos pequeninos
e a gente refila, / nada agradecidos

Perdidos, é certo, / nós continuamos
mas antes perdidos / que cheios de tretas
e dessas certezas / que nos põem todos
cegos e manetas, / surdos e pernetas

Nunca obedecemos / ao teu “tem de ser”!
nem dormimos cedo
damos cambalhotas / a espantar o medo

Nunca nunca nunca
nunca digas sim, / nunca digas não
sem saber porquê, / só por distração

Ele há cada cara / de nariz emproado
não olha de frente, / só olha de lado
se aquilo que dizes / nada tem de meu
vai perder teu tempo / noutro que não eu

• Canto: A. Muge / Coro: Maria Monda, A. Muge • Acordeão: Filipe Raposo
Clarino: Manos Achalinotópoulos / Contrabaixo: António Quintino / Ney: Harris Lambrakis
Percussão: José Salgueiro / Violino: Kyriakos Gouventas

●

● Meninos Perdidos: personagens da Terra do Nunca de J. M. Barrie; essa terra é uma ilha fictícia, um local fantástico que parece misturar as características de três lugares: de não-lugar (Utopia), de bom-lugar (Eutopia), de lugar do nunca (Udepotia). Peter Pan e os Meninos Perdidos recusam-se a crescer e a Terra do Nunca, no seu conjunto, é uma metáfora da eterna infância (manter a capacidade de ser curioso, de se maravilhar), da imortalidade (fugir à morte), do escapismo (escapar ao sofrimento); mas ali, igualdade, fraternidade e liberdade são valores gémeos da imaginação, da fantasia e da criatividade. ● James Mathew Barrie (1860-1937): escritor e dramaturgo escocês, escreve numerosos livros de histórias e peças de teatro; a sua criação mais célebre é Peter Pan, o menino que as fadas criaram, personagem principal da obra Neverland (Terra do Nunca) ou The boy who wouldn’t grow up, ou ainda Terra do nunca nunca, escrita para teatro e mais tarde publicada em livro. Os Meninos Perdidos são outras das personagens desta história, tal como Sininho, Wendy ou o Capitão Gancho. Ainda em vida, doa os direitos de autor desta obra ao Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, de Londres.

• >> ARCHiPELAGOS • VIII. EM TEMPO DE INDIGÊNCIA
• << ARCHiPELAGOS • VI. NA TAVERNA DO PORTO

ARCHiPELAGOS • II. CANTOS DA ARGILA

AMÉLIA MUGE & MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

ARCHiPELAGOS / Passagens

 

II. CANTOS DA ARGILA
 

● Embalar meninos, acordar adultos
● Mágissa Thálassa: Mar feiticeiro
(Novos Povos do Mar)

 

/ENGLISH/ ARCHiPELAGOS • II. SONGS OF CLAY

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ ΑΡΧΙΠΕΛΑΓΟΣ • II. ΤΡΑΓΟΥΔΙΑ ΑΠΟ ΠΗΛΟ

ARCHiPELAGOS / Passagens: AMÉLIA MUGE & MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

03. Embalar meninos, acordar adultos

– Amélia Muge / Anónimo: Hino Hurrita a Nikkal (fragmento) &
José Gomes Ferreira / Fernando Lopes-Graça (excerto de Acordai!)
• Adaptação: A. Muge / Arranjo: António José Martins

Dorme, dorme / dorme tempo,
que és menino / sempre novo,
mais antigo / do que o mundo,
mundo que já veio / de outro mundo,
nem sabemos / como começou.

Dorme, dorme / dorme tempo,
de um estar / tão profundo
que até confunde / alto e baixo,
o ar com a terra / e o mar.
Dorme tempo / neste canto
que transita / na garganta / se agiganta
ah ah ah ah ah / navegando, embalando.

Ah ah ah ah ah,
Acordai / que o dia
ressuscita / a palavra
feita ilha / de sentidos
já vividos / já vivendo
e que ainda hão de vir
e tornar a crescer / e a morrer
entre o ser e o não ser.

“Acordai / homens que dormis
a embalar a dor / dos silêncios vis
vinde incendiar / de astros e canções
as pedras do mar / o mundo e os corações.”

Acordai
que a palavra se transforma
em plantio, em colheita
que é da terra, que é do mar / são as ilhas
ah ah ah ah ah / navegando, acordando.
Acordai!

• Canto: A. Muge • Clarinete: Kosmás Papadópoulos / Contrabaixo: António Quintino
Ney: Harris Lambrakis / Violino: Kyriakos Gouventas

●

Epitáfio de Seikilos: a canção foi encontrada gravada em uma lápide (estela) em Trales, perto de Éfeso (Anatólia). A melodia é gravada acima das letras na notação musical grega antiga.

● Hino hurrita : datado c. 1400 a.C., este hino à deusa Nikkal, descoberto nos anos 50, é, de momento, o quase completo registo musical mais antigo do mundo (antecede quase um milénio e meio o Epitáfio de Seikilos, c. 200 a.C. – 200 d.C., a canção mais antiga completa, até agora descoberta, presente no nosso trabalho anterior, Periplus, e cantada por Hélia Correia). ● Nikkal: deusa da fruta ou da lua, filha do deus do verão, o seu nome completo (Nikkal-wa-Ib) significa fruta ou também brilhante; é a versão ocidental da deusa suméria (pré-babilônica) Ningal, a Grande Senhora, esposa da lua, mãe da mais famosa deusa do amor (Inana-Istar) e do deus do sol. O Hino hurrita a Nikkal parece fazer parte do ritual de casamento dessa deusa com Yarich, o deus da lua. ● Este hino pertence a uma colecção de 36 músicas inscritas em caracteres cuneiformes sobre placas de barro, encontradas em Ugarit, cidade portuária no norte da Síria (ardeu completamente ao ser incendiada, c. 1190 a.C., pelos Povos do Mar – suposta coalizão marítima de invasores originária da Ásia Menor ocidental e do sul da Europa – que contribuiu para o colapso da Idade do Bronze). Os Hurritas, que viveram durante essa época, eram originários do norte da Mesopotâmia e este da Anatólia. Embora existam outros hinos com autoria, este é anónimo e a sua transcrição permanece controversa: há pelo menos cinco decifrações divergentes, cada uma produzindo resultados completamente diferentes. As letras hurritas estão no topo das placas; abaixo fica a notação musical acadiana (mesopotâmica) para acompanhamento com sammûm – tipo de lira ou harpa de nove cordas (outras placas contêm instruções para afinar a harpa). O texto é difícil de decifrar, uma vez que a língua hurrita não é bem conhecida; além disso, parece estar num dialecto ugarítico local, diferindo significativamente de outros dialectos já decifrados. ● Há uma semelhança extraordinária da versão mais aceitável da melodia do hino hurrita com a música portuguesa de Acordai!, composta por Fernando Lopes-Graça antes da publicação deste hino antigo. Embora a notação acadiana se refira a uma escala heptatónica diatónica, existem versões alternativas no género cromático. Assim, enquanto que em Embalar meninos, acordar adultos, o arranjo, a partir desta versão do hino, realça a sua semelhança com Acordai!, em Mar feiticeiro o arranjo combina a) os géneros diatónicos e cromáticos, e b) a versão mais aceitável com uma das outras, aqui sob a forma de introdução e de ponte. ● Fernando Lopes-Graça (1906-1994): compositor, pianista, musicólogo, pedagogo, crítico e ensaísta, com uma extensa obra musical e uma profícua obra literária; de formação humanista, com intensa actividade cultural e política, activista contra o regime de Salazar e membro do Partido Comunista Português, é preso e proibido de leccionar; vive e estuda música em Paris entre 1937 e 1939. Autor de obras literárias de reflexão sobre música, em especial portuguesa – erudita e tradicional – colabora com várias revistas literárias (Vértice e Presença p.exp.); assume especial importância a recolha e a reinterpretação de música popular portuguesa, cujas influências na sua obra são assumidas e evidentes; cria ciclos de canções com textos de grandes poetas portugueses (José Régio, Fernando Pessoa, Luís de Camões, José Gomes Ferreira). ● José Gomes Ferreira (1900-1985): poeta, ficcionista e jornalista português, presente em todos os grandes momentos de sinal democrático e antifascista, vem a ser membro do Partido Comunista; colabora com vários poetas e revistas representativas do modernismo e do neo-realismo português; na poesia, inicia-se com a publicação de Viver sempre também cansa (1931) na revista Presença; com Lopes-Graça, é autor de Acordai!, uma das canções mais emblemáticas do antifascismo português; sub-presidente da Associação Portuguesa de Escritores (1978), é homenageado pelo Município de Lisboa (1985) que atribui o nome do escritor a uma rua da capital.

Hino Hurrita a Nikkal (c. 1400 a.C.)

11. Mágissa Thálassa / Mar feiticeiro
(Novos povos do mar, fragmento)

– Michales Loukovikas / Anónimo: Hino Hurrita a Nikkal
• Adaptação / Arranjo: M. Loukovikas

Quando miro o mar / os meus olhos,
ficam cheios d’água, / nada o pode domar.

Odisseu Aylan, / tua Ítaca já não há.
Foi tão breve a viagem / dessa tua vida.
Todos vêem a tua imagem / tu onde estarás.
Era Europa o novo chão, / sem Penélope ou condão,
o cuidado maternal / também se afogou.
Já o tempo congelou, / dorme em água tão profunda.
É Poseidon que te afunda, / Odisseu…

Quando miro o mar, / d’olhos rasos de água.
Feiticeiro. / Quando miro o mar…

Sempre que daqui / miro o mar,
fico a perguntar / ele onde estará
esse qu’eu perdi / quem o encontrará?

Feiticeiro, mar ó mar.

• Adaptação para português de Amélia Muge

• Canto: Andreas Karakotas • Contrabaixo: António Quintino / Harpa: Ana Dias
Ney, flauta de bisel: Harris Lambrakis / Percussão: José Salgueiro / Violino, viola: Kyriakos Gouventas

Odisseu e as Sirenas, mosaico (séc. II d.C.), Tunísia

●

● Sirenas (Σειρῆνες): figuras híbridas, da mitologia grega, com cabeça de mulher e corpo de pássaro, relacionadas com a água, o amor e a morte; atraíam os marinheiros com o seu canto mágico para que eles naufragassem nos rochedos costeiros das suas ilhas. Transfiguram-se na Idade Média, onde são mais conhecidas por sereias, com corpo de mulher e rabo de peixe, mas com a mesma função de, com o seu canto, levar à perdição os marinheiros e seus navios.

Poseidon de um santuário em Corinto.

● Odisseu e Penélope: ver ARCHiPELAGOS • VII. ILHAS IMAGINÁRIAS ● Aylan (2012 ou 2013-2015 – Alan Kurdi inicialmente referido como Aylan): criança sírio-curda cuja imagem fez primeiras páginas nos média de todo o mundo por se ter afogado no Egeu a 2 de Setembro de 2015, entre Bodrum (antiga Halicarnasso) e a ilha de Kos; fazia parte de uma família de refugiados que tentava chegar à Europa de barco. ● Poseidon: um dos doze deuses olímpicos do panteão grego, o seu domínio são os oceanos, pelo que é chamado de deus dos mares; na Odisseia é conhecido pelo seu ódio a Odisseu (cegou um dos seus filhos, o ciclope Polifemo), criando-lhe diversos obstáculos ao seu nostos (regresso a casa) ao longo de vários anos.

• >> ARCHiPELAGOS • III. MACARONÉSIA
• << ARCHiPELAGOS • I. REVISITANDO O ARQUIPÉLAGO

ARCHiPELAGOS • I. REVISITANDO O ARQUIPÉLAGO

AMÉLIA MUGE & MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

ARCHiPELAGOS / Passagens

 

I. REVISITANDO O ARQUIPÉLAGO
 

● O arquipélago
(Está Jónia em flôr? Onde está Atenas?)
● Katolophýromae (É tão profunda a dor)

 

/ENGLISH/ ARCHiPELAGOS • I. THE ARCHIPELAGO REVISITED

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ ΑΡΧΙΠΕΛΑΓΟΣ • I. ΕΠΙΣΤΡΟΦΗ ΣΤΟ ΑΡΧΙΠΕΛΑΓΟΣ

ARCHiPELAGOS / Passagens: AMÉLIA MUGE & MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

01. O arquipélago
a. Está Jónia em flôr? – b. Onde está Atenas?
(1800-1801, excertos)

– Friedrich Hölderlin (adaptação para português: Amélia Muge)
/ a. Tradicional do Egeu – b. Michales Loukovikas
• Arranjo: M. Loukovikas, António José Martins

Está Jónia em flôr?

Estão as garças de regresso à tua porta? Retomaram
Os barcos seu curso até às tuas costas? Já acalmaram as ondas
Na respiração das brisas por nós tão aguardadas? […]
Está Jónia em flôr? Está na altura? […]

Onde está Atenas?

Diz, onde está Atenas? Talvez por cima das urnas dos mestres
A tua amada cidade
[…] afundou-se por completo por entre as cinzas?
Resta ainda algum sinal dela, para que o marinheiro
De passagem a possa mencionar ou lembrar? […]

O deus délfico silenciou, os caminhos são longos
Desolados e sós […]

• Voz falada: Maria José & A. Muge / Coros: Cramol, Maria Monda, Teresa Campos
• Clarino: Manos Achalinotópoulos / Contrabaixo: António Quintino / Guitarra: Dimitris Mystakidis
Guitarra portuguesa: Ricardo Parreira / Ney: Harris Lambrakis / Piano: Filipe Raposo
Violin, viola: Kyriakos Gouventas / Violoncelo: Catarina Anacleto

●

Friedrich Hölderlin, por Johanna Ebertz (1979)

● Friedrich Hölderlin (1770 – 1843): poeta lírico e romancista alemão, conhecedor e admirador profundo da cultura grega antiga, tradutor exímio de algumas obras de grego para alemão, consegue sintetizar o espírito da Grécia Antiga e o seu panteísmo com uma versão não ortodoxa do cristianismo. A sua obra, largamente desconhecida até bem depois da sua morte, merece hoje destaque mundial, sendo citado por diversas áreas. Pallaksch é um neologismo que Holderlin gostava de repetir, carregado de indizível e de inacessível, próprios da crença no mistério da linguagem que, se devidamente evocada e convocada, mostra uma fração do que o espírito oculta; é essa crença que O arquipélago – o seu poema mais longo (296 versos hexâmetros) escrito em 1800-1801 – também traz à tona. Ali sublinha a sua esperança de que a cultura humana e a natureza divina – harmoniosamente entrelaçadas nas poleis gregas, especialmente em Atenas – dolorosamente esmagadas no presente, voltarão, juntas, a florescer no futuro. ● Egeu: mar localizado entre as penínsulas da Grécia e da Anatólia (Ásia Menor). A origem do seu nome perde-se no tempo; entre outras explicações encontra-se o caso de nele se ter afogado Egeu (rei de Atenas, pai de Teseu), ou Egea (rainha das Amazonas); outra, está numa derivação da palavra grega αἶγες (aiges, cabras), usada como metáfora de ondas, a que se liga a ideia de mar ondulado. Conhecido como o arquipélago (αρχιπέλαγος, o grande mar), o termo acabou por significar as Ilhas do Egeu, dada a notável quantidade de ilhas que o povoam; o seu uso leva a que passe a designar qualquer grupo de ilhas. ● Jónia: antiga região no centro litoral da Ásia Menor (oeste), recebe o nome dos Jónios, uma das quatro maiores tribos helénicas que, entre os séculos XI e IX a.C., ocuparam as costas e as ilhas do mar Egeu. ● Atenas: pólis helénica (cidade-estado), um centro artístico, estudantil e filosófico no período clássico; é vista como o berço da civilização ocidental e o lugar do nascimento da democracia, estabelecida em 508 a.C. ● Délfico: de Delfos, antiga cidade grega e o mais importante local de culto a Apolo (o deus délfico) cujo oráculo era consultado para a tomada de importantes decisões durante o mundo grego antigo.

Ruínas do Santuário de Atena em Delfos

02. Katolophýromae / É tão profunda a dor

– Eurípides • Tragédia “Orestes” (408 a.C., fragmentos)
• Adaptação / Arranjo: Michales Loukovikas

Estrofe

[…] eu a implorar, eu a implorar,
em pleno céu aberto como setas lançais
castigos pelo sangue, castigos pelo crime,
deixem que o pobre filho
de Agamemnon esqueça o seu desatino,
sua loucura, tão obsessiva. Tentando em vão,
ó pobre criatura, rastejar p’lo chão […]

Antístrofe

[…] é tão profunda a dor,
é tão profunda a dor.
Esse materno sangue, põe-te num desvario?
A ventura não vem todo o tempo aos mortais.
Como a vela que está,
num barco tão veloz por um deus sacudido
atormentado, tão agitado por pavores
num furioso mar de desastrosas ondas. […]

• Adaptação para português de Amélia Muge

• Canto: M. Loukovikas / Coro: Amélia Muge, M. Loukovikas, Andreas Karakotas,
Manos Achalinotópoulos • Clarino: M. Achalinotópoulos / Contrabaixo: António Quintino
Ney, flauta de bisel: Harris Lambrakis / Percurssão: José Salgueiro / Piano: Filipe Raposo
Violin, viola: Kyriakos Gouventas

●

Eurípides

● Eurípides (c. 480-c. 406 a.C.): o mais novo dos três grandes trágicos gregos da Atenas clássica, depois de Ésquilo e Sófocles.● Katolophýromae: uma anotação musical que nos chegou fragmentada, para uma passagem da tragédia de Orestes (a antístrofe do primeiro estásimo, linhas 338-344). Foi encontrada num papiro em Hermópolis, Egipto (colecção do arquiduque Rainer Ferdinand da Áustria) e publicado em 1892 (Papiro G 2315 de Viena). É datado como sendo do século III a.C. pelo que se mantém em aberto a questão de saber se o fragmento representa a música original de Eurípides. Algumas evidências indiciam no entanto que a melodia aí registada poderia ter sido composta muito antes: Eurípides é famoso pelo seu espírito inovador e o fragmento está de acordo com a complexidade do seu estilo; outro argumento a favor da sua autenticidade provém da legítima suposição de que os músicos e musicólogos da era helenística poderão ter copiado e reproduzido as obras musicais clássicas, tal como os bibliotecários e os gramáticos fizeram com a literatura. ● De acordo com Plutarco, nos seus relatos sobre Nícias e Lisandro (Vidas Paralelas), foi a música de Eurípides (não a de Ésquilo, Sófocles ou Aristófanes) que salvou muitos atenienses, e a própria Atenas, durante a Guerra do Peloponeso. Depois da Expedição à Sicília, desastrosa para os atenienses (415 – 413 a.C.), muitos deles, feitos prisioneiros, salvaram-se porque sabiam cantar Eurípides; as suas canções vanguardistas eram muito apreciadas pelos Helenos – com excepção, talvez, de Aristófanes!(*) Em 404 a.C., depois da derrota de Atenas, os vitoriosos generais espartanos reuniram para decidir o destino da pólis. Concluíram que devia ser arrasada e os seus habitantes feitos escravos. Porém, durante as celebrações da vitória, alguém cantou uma ode da Electra de Eurípides. Os generais ficaram tão comovidos que mudaram de ideia: Seria uma barbaridade destruir a cidade onde tinham nascido homens de tal calibre… Estes relatos credibilizam argumentos a favor da autenticidade: teria sido natural copiar composições tão apelativas como Katolophýromae. ● Na minha abordagem optei por: a) repetir as notas existentes, nas partes de discurso musical semelhante, mas incompleto, em vez de preencher o vazio com invenções pessoais; b) apresentar não apenas a antístrofe mas também a estrofe; c) criar um balanço entre monofonia e polifonia; e desejando que Eurípides tivesse sorrido e aplaudido, aprovadoramente, apesar das pedradas atiradas por Aristófanes, Platão, e os éforos espartanos!

(*) É de facto significativo que, naquele tempo, a música popular fosse avant-garde! Não é necessário referir que o nível cultural dos cidadãos era altissimo…

Orestes de Eurípides: Katolophyromae, a antístrofe
do primeiro estásimo (Papiro G 2315 de Viena)

● Agamemnon (Ἀγαμέμνων): rei de Micenas, conduz os helenos aos dez anos da Guerra de Troia, ocorrida algures no período entre 1260 e 1180 a.C; é obrigado a sacrificar a filha, Ifigénia, para que a sua frota viaje a salvo; no regresso, é assassinado a mando da esposa Clitemnestra (entre outras razões, para se vingar da morte da filha); por sua vez o filho, Orestes, assassina a mãe para vingar o pai, acto que o leva à loucura, sendo por isso objecto de vários mitos e peças de teatro. Ele encontra afinal a sua irmã viva em Táuris ou Táurica (Crimeia), para onde foi levada por Artemisa, que no último momento intervém, salvando-a. Eurípides escreve duas tragédias relacionadas com esta: Ifigénia em Áulide, onde o sacrifício ocorreu, e Ifigénia em Táuris. ● Tragédia (Τραγῳδία): no grego antigo τραγῳδία (tragodía, tragédia), é composta das palavras τράγος (trágos, bode) e ᾠδή (ode), resultando algo como ode ou canção dos bodes (ou dos sátiros, criaturas masculinas meio homens, meio bodes, parceiros itifálicos de Dioniso e por vezes de Pã); τραγούδι (tragoudi), derivado de tragédia, significa canção no grego moderno. Como forma de drama é marcada pelas características de seriedade, elevação e dignidade dos temas; apesar das suas origens obscuras, existe uma relação entre a tragédia e os ditirambos – cantos e danças em honra de Dioniso (ou Baco). ● Coro (χορός): grupo de artistas que, numa tragédia, dança, canta ou diz as suas falas em uníssono (coro, em grego, também significa dança, tropa, ou um lugar para dançar – em que é sinónimo de orquestra). Os estásimos são cantados pelo coro imóvel (στάσιμον, estático/estacionário), na orquestra; acompanhado de lira ou aulo e mostrando emoções, o coro comenta e analisa a situação dramática, com a função de reflectir a opinião pública sobre os assuntos da peça. ● Nesta passagem, o coro suplica primeiro às Erínias (deusas primitivas, implacáveis, indiferentes a sacrifícios, suplícios, ou outras atenuantes) para parar de atormentar Orestes, interpelando-o a ele de seguida.

O Remorso de Orestes (Orestes Perseguido pelas Erínias ou Fúrias),
de William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1862)

• >> ARCHiPELAGOS • II. CANTOS DA ARGILA

ARCHiPELAGOS • VII. IMAGINARY ISLANDS

AMÉLIA MUGE & MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

ARCHiPELAGOS / Passages

 

VII. IMAGINARY ISLANDS

 

● An Island, Utopia
● Penelope of Ithaca ● Lost Kids

.

/PORTUGUÊS/ ARCHiPELAGOS • VII. ILHAS IMAGINÁRIAS

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ ΑΡΧΙΠΕΛΑΓΟΣ • VII. ΝΗΣΙΑ ΤΗΣ ΦΑΝΤΑΣΙΑΣ

ARCHiPELAGOS / Passages: AMÉLIA MUGE & MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

14. An Island, Utopia
Dedicated to Ares Alexandrou

– Amélia Muge
• Arranged by António José Martins, Filipe Raposo

In that name without a place / without knowing where to be
it’s out there and ever-changing / so inviting but eluding
there’s something we have found / something that no one can reach.

Something we can say it’s perfect / between the recto and reverso
sweet and bitter, warm and chilly, / it’s an island…

Something that can liberate / and confine and cause pain
and enslave, also relieve, / it’s an island whose name is Utopia.

In the more absurd desire, / or in the darkest of darkness,
or in a box that is empty, / it’s an island…

Telling us about a house, / a foreigner away from home;
an Odyssey of the idea that created the illusion
of this island whose name is Utopia.

Eternizing horizons / far away beyond horizons
in the night or in the day / fog is out there in the distance
vision is blurred, imprecise, / where myopia itself
is an island whose name is Utopia.

• Adapted into English by Michales Loukovikas

• Voice: A. Muge / Recitation: Michales Loukovikas • D. Bass: António Quintino
Harp: Ana Dias / Ney: Harris Lambrakis

●

Elysian Fields, by Carlos Schwabe (1903)

● Utopia: an imagined community or society with highly desirable or nearly perfect conditions for its citizens. Utopian ideals place emphasis on egalitarian principles, with the method of implementation varying according to the ideology of each proposal. The term utopia was coined by Thomas More for his book Utopia (1516), describing a fictional island society in the Atlantic. The word comes from the Hellenic οὐ (not) and τόπος (place) and means no-place. Eutopia, from the Greek εὖ (good) and τόπος, meaning good place, is the correct term to describe a positive utopia. Utopia and eutopia in English are homophonous; thus they became synonymous, as well. The opposite of eutopia is dystopia – from the Hellenic δυσ- (bad) and τόπος, i.e. cacotopia, or anti-utopia. ● Plato‘s Republic is sometimes being described as a dystopia. Τhis book, one of the most influential works on philosophy and political theory, is chronologically the first recorded utopian proposal. The citizens are categorized into a rigid class structure of golden, silver, bronze and iron socioeconomic classes with limited social mobility (reminding us of the Indian caste system). The golden citizens are trained in a rigorous 50-year-long educational program to be benign oligarchs, the philosopher kings. The wisdom of these hereditary rulers will supposedly eliminate poverty and deprivation through fairly distributed resources. True knowledge, however, is reserved for the elite, while the lower classes are expected to fulfill their functions to the state loyally until the end of their lives. Censorship is common, to prevent impiety and immorality from corrupting the youth. The Platonic Republic has few laws, practices a form of eugenics to weed out the disabled, and deliberately hires mercenaries to conduct war in the hope that the more warlike populations of surrounding countries will be eliminated (what the Punics did until finally Carthage was razed to the ground). Indeed, who would like to live in such a harsh, unfree utopia, if his/her metal were not noble? In his 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper singled out the Platonic Republic as a totalitarian dystopia, with a government composed only of a distinct hereditary ruling class, while the lower working class is given no role in decision making and treated as human cattle. Undoubtedly, the greatest utopia is to expect solutions from such philosopher kings, even though they are world-famous and have influenced generations upon generations of thinkers.

● Ares Alexandrou; real name, Aristoteles Vasiliades; 1922 – 1979): a Greek novelist, poet and translator. Always on the Left but unconventional (I belong to the non-existent party of poets), he is the author of a single novel (To Kivōtio, Mission Box) which is widely considered to be among the modern Greek classics. He was born in Petrograd to a Greek father and a Russian mother; they all moved to Greece in 1928. During the Nazi occupation, he joined a communist youth resistance group but soon left in disagreement. After the ‘liberation’ of Greece, however, the British arrested and deported him to a camp in Libya. Furthermore, even though he did not participate in the ensuing Civil War (1946-1949), he was arrested due to his refusal to disavow his political beliefs and sent to ‘islands of exile’ and prisons. He was finally discharged in 1958. Because of the dictatorship in 1967, he decided to move to Paris, where he died in 1979 from a heart attack, having lived to see his novel published in French. His poems (1941-1974) were mostly written in exile. Nevertheless, due to his unconventional character, only two composers set his poetry into music: Michales Gregoriou (Undelivered Letters, 1977) and Michales Loukovikas (The Gold in the Sky, 2008). Three songs from the Gold were included in Periplus by Amélia Muge and Loukovikas (2012): Illegal Note, Lullaby, The Inner Dictates.

The Golden Age, by Lucas Cranach the Elder

15. Penelope of Ithaca

– Amélia Muge
• Arranged by António José Martins, Filipe Raposo

Quietly weaving her designs, / a slyness that’s so refined,
to escape while staying there / she turns the hours to zero

On the loom she spins her days / in the web of all her sorrows
on the loom her nights unravel / in the texture of her sighs

If Ulysses runs the space / she’s voyaging in time
in the air of all her movements / her own steering wheel’s the shuttle

Aboard that craft she’s sailing / it’s her looming errant loom
her yarn goes from a to z / back and forth and to and fro

In the threads of this web is / where the fabric’s the idea
of a story where the wait is / done while sailing in the sea
at the rudder of a loom

Going forward, standing still and / working hard without going
past this point, a spider’s web for / days and months and many years
starting over and again

Time was then just like a fabric / interwoven in this manner
in Penelope while waiting / she sailed tired on this endeavour

Such was her determination / that the difference perhaps is this
between waiting for Ulysses / or Sebastian the king

• Adapted into English by Michales Loukovikas

• Voice: A. Muge • Cello: Catarina Anacleto / D. Bass: António Quintino
Ney: Harris Lambrakis / Percussion: José Salgueiro / Piano: F. Raposo

●

Homer

● Homer (Ὅμηρος, late 8th – early 7th centuries BCE): the semi-legendary author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epics originally transmitted orally, which became the central works of Greek literature. He was said to be a blind bard from Ionia, in central coastal Asia Minor. The influence of the Homeric epics on Western civilization has been incalculably vast , inspiring many famous works of literature, music, and visual arts. ● The Odyssey is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad dealing with the Trojan War. It focuses on Odysseus (Ὀδυσσεύς, Ulysses in Latin, ca. 13th – early 12th centuries BCE), king of Ithaca, and his nostos, the ten-year eventful journey home after the fall of Troy. He also plays a key role in the Iliad and other works of the Epic Cycle. Renowned for his brilliance, guile and versatility (πολύτροπος), he is hence known by the epithet cunning (μῆτις, cunning intelligence). ● As it is assumed that he has died, his wife, Penelope, known for her faithfulness to him, must deal with a horde of unruly suitors, the mnesteres. Devising tricks to delay them, she pretends to be weaving a burial shroud for her elderly father-in-law and claims that she will choose a suitor when she has finished. Every night for three years, she undoes part of the shroud, until an unfaithful serving woman discovers her trick and reveals it to the suitors. Obliged to change course, she declares that whoever can string Odysseus’ rigid bow and shoot an arrow through twelve axe heads may have her hand. The only one who can do that is Odysseus himself. There follow the scenes of mnesterophonia (slaying of the suitors) and the hero’s recognition by Penelope. ● Sebastian I (1554 – 1578): King of Portugal who disappeared (probably killed) in the battle of Alcazar in Morocco. Portugal’s defeat led to its integration in the Iberian Union under the Spanish crown for 60 years. Sebastião is often referred to as “the desired”, as the Portuguese longed for his return to end the country’s decline.

Penelope and the Suitors, by John William Waterhouse (1912)

Odysseus’ Recognition by Penelope
Rhapsody 23 (excerpts)

– Homer “Odyssey”
• Edited by Michales Loukovikas

[…] and so much her heart
pondered, if she should stand aloof and question her dear husband,
or go up to him, so as to hold and kiss his head and hands.
After she had entered […]
she sat down over against Odysseus, in the light of fire;
[…] but there he […]
was looking down, and waiting still to see whether his dignified wife
would tell him something the moment that her keen eyes beheld him;
but she sat long in silence; amazement came upon her soul,
while she was looking over him at times steadfastly with her eyes;
other times she knew him not […]

• Adapted into English by Michales Loukovikas

One of the dramatic threads in the account of Odysseus’ return to Ithaca is the gradual revelation of his identity: he is seated before a columned façade representing his palace, Penelope and his son, Telemachus, stand before him, as the old nurse, Eurycleia, washes
his feet and recognizes him from an old scar (terracotta relief, 450 BCE)

16. Lost Kids

– Amélia Muge / Thracian traditional tune, A. Muge
• Arranged by António José Martins, Michales Loukovikas

Little kids, my ass! / we have all grown up
time is misleading / in a paradise
but age is so mixed-up / and thinks we‘re infantile
so everyone retorts, / Thank you, we don’t buy!

Lost and missing, yes, / we may really be,
but rather be lost / than full of baloney
and such certainties / that may turn us all
blind and armless devils, / deaf and also lame

Never we obey / to your every “must”
neither sleep too early
doing somersaults / to chase the fear away

Never never never
never say yes, / never say no,
if you don’t know why, / never be distracted

There are many faces / with a snobbish air
they do not see straight, / only sideways
if what you say has nothing / got to do with me
go and waste your time / with someone else, you bear!

• Adapted into English by Michales Loukovikas

• Voice: A. Muge / Vocals: Maria Monda, A. Muge • Accordion: Filipe Raposo
Clarino: Manos Achalinotópoulos / D. Bass: António Quintino / Ney: Harris Lambrakis
Percussion: José Salgueiro / Violin: Kyriakos Gouventas

●

● Neverland: a fictional location featured in the works of J. M. Barrie, an imaginary faraway place, where Peter Pan, Tinker Bell, the Lost Boys and other mythical creatures live (there are no lost girls because, as Peter explains, girls are far too clever to get lost). Although not all people who go there cease to age, the best known Neverlander famously refused to grow up, and this is often used as a metaphor for eternal childhood (or childishness), immortality, and escapism.

• >> ARCHiPELAGOS • VIII. IN TIMES OF INDIGENCE
• << ARCHiPELAGOS • VI. IN A HARBOUR’S TAVERN

ARCHiPELAGOS • II. SONGS OF CLAY

AMÉLIA MUGE & MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

ARCHiPELAGOS / Passages

 

II. SONGS OF CLAY
 

● Lullabying Children, Waking Up Adults
● Mágissa Thálassa: Sorceress Sea
(New Sea Peoples)

 

/PORTUGUÊS/ ARCHiPELAGOS • II. CANTOS DA ARGILA

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ ΑΡΧΙΠΕΛΑΓΟΣ • II. ΤΡΑΓΟΥΔΙΑ ΑΠΟ ΠΗΛΟ

ARCHiPELAGOS / Passages: AMÉLIA MUGE & MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

03. Lullabying Children, Waking Up Adults

– Amélia Muge / Ancient Hurrian hymn (fragment) &
José Gomes Ferreira / Fernando Lopes-Graça (excerpt from Acordai!)
• Adapted by A. Muge / Arranged by António José Martins

Sleep, oh, sleep, / sleep, time,
you’re a child, / always young,
so much older / than the world,
a world that has come / from another world,
we don’t know / how it has begun.

Sleep, oh, sleep, / sleep, time,
of a being / so profound
that even confuses / high and low,
the air and the earth / and the sea.
Sleep, time, / in this song
that is passing / through the throat
growing bigger / ah ah ah ah ah
sailing on the sea, singing lullabies.

Ah ah ah ah ah,
oh, wake up, / for the day
reawakens / every word
turned to an isle / of the senses
we have lived, / we are living,
and all those yet to come
meant to grow / and to die
between being and non-being.

“Oh, wake up
all of you who sleep
lullabying the pain
of vile silences,
come to set on fire
the stars and our songs,
pebbles of the sea,
the world as well our hearts.”

Oh, wake up,
for the word is transformed
into sowing, into harvest
of the land, of the sea,
it’s the isles / ah ah ah ah ah
sailing on the sea, and awakening
oh, wake up!

• Adapted into English by Michales Loukovikas

• Voice: A. Muge • Clarinet: Kosmás Papadópoulos / D. Bass: António Quintino
Ney: Harris Lambrakis / Violin: Kyriakos Gouventas

●

Seikilos Epitaph: the song was found engraved on a tombstone (stele) from the Hellenistic town of Tralles, not far from Ephesus. Its melody is recorded above its lyrics in the ancient Greek musical notation.

● Dating to circa 1400 BCE, a hymn to goddess Nikkal is now the oldest surviving substantially complete notated work of notated music in the world (preceding by almost 1.5 millennia the oldest extant complete notated song dating to c. 200 BCE -200 CE, the Seikilos Epitaph – performed in our previous work, Periplus, sung by Hélia Correia). The hymn is among a collection of 36 Hurrian songs inscribed in cuneiform on clay tablets, excavated at Ugarit, a port city in northern Syria, which was burned to the ground circa 1190 BCE by the Sea Peoples, a purported seafaring coalition of invaders, originating from western Asia Minor and southern Europe, and contributing to the Bronze Age collapse. The Hurrians were a Bronze Age people of northern Mesopotamia and eastern Anatolia. While some composers’ names are known, this hymn is anonymous, and its transcription remains controversial: there are at least five rival decipherments, each yielding entirely different results. The Hurrian lyrics are at the top of the tablet; below is the Akkadian (Mesopotamian) notation for a song accompanied by a nine-string sammûm, a type of lyre, or harp (other tablets contain instructions for tuning the harp). The text is difficult to grasp, since the Hurrian language is not well understood; in addition, it seems it is a local Ugaritic dialect, differing significantly from other known dialects. ● There is a striking resemblance of the most acceptable version of the hymn’s melody to the emblematic Portuguese song Acordai! (Wake Up!), composed by Fernando Lopes-Graça before the tablet was found. Although the Akkadian notation refers to a heptatonic diatonic scale, there have been alternative variations in the chromatic genus. Lullabying Children, Waking Up Adults brings to the fore this resemblance to Acordai!, while Mágissa Thálassa (Sorceress Sea) combines a) the diatonic and chromatic genera, and b) the most acceptable version with a disputed decipherment used as an instrumental introduction and bridge. ● Fernando Lopes-Graça (1906 – 1994): a Portuguese composer, conductor and musicologist, influenced by his homeland’s popular music. He was a member of the PCP (Portuguese Communist Party) and a strenuous opponent of the Salazar dictatorship. ● José Gomes Ferreira (1900 – 1985): a Portuguese poet and fiction writer, who was also an activist against the dictatorship, becoming a member of the PCP.

The clay tablet with the Hurrian hymn to Nikkal, the oldest surviving substantially complete
work of notated music in the world found in Ugarit (14th – 13th centuries BCE)

11. Mágissa Thálassa / Sorceress Sea
(New Sea Peoples, fragment)

– Michales Loukovikas / Ancient Hurrian hymn
• Adapted / Arranged by M. Loukovikas

Every time I turn / and see the sea,
tears start falling down,
I’ve been unfit to tame the waves.

Odysseus Aylan, / Ithaca was everything.
Yet the voyage of your life / ended too soon.
I see your image everywhere / but you are elsewhere.
Starting off to go to Europe, / you forgot Penelope,
the caresses of your mother / drowned as well.
Time was frozen stiff and still / on the seabed fell asleep.
A Poseidon’s idea, / Odysseus…

When I see the sea / tears start falling down.
Sorceress. / When I see the sea…

Every time I turn / and see the sea,
I keep asking her / where’s this little kid
I’ve lost so I may find / and see him in his grave?

Sorceress Siren Sea.

• Adapted into English by Michales Loukovikas

• Voice: Andreas Karakotas • D. Bass: António Quintino / Harp: Ana Dias
Ney, Recorder: Harris Lambrakis / Percussion: José Salgueiro / Violin, Viola: Kyriakos Gouventas

Odysseus and the Sirens, a mosaic of the 2nd century CE in Tunisia

●

Poseidon holding a trident: from a Corinthian Sanctuary of the sea god.

● Odysseus and Penelope: see ARCHiPELAGOS • VII. ISLANDS OF IMAGINATION ● Aylan: Alan Kurdî (initially reported as Aylan, 2012 or 2013 – 2015) was a three-year-old Syrian Kurd whose image made global headlines after he drowned on September 2, 2015 in the Aegean between Bodrum (ancient Halicarnassus) and the island of Kos. He and his family were refugees trying to reach Europe. ● Poseidon: one of the twelve Olympians in the Greek pantheon. His domain was the ocean, and he was called the God of the Sea. In the Odyssey, he is notable for his hatred of Odysseus who blinded the god’s son, the cyclop Polyphemus. This prevented Odysseus’ nostos for many years. ● Sirens (Σειρῆνες): mythological daemons combining women’s heads and body of birds, and related to water, love and death; they lured sailors with their enchanting music and voices to shipwreck on the rocky coast of their island.

• >> ARCHiPELAGOS • III. MACARONESIA
• << ARCHiPELAGOS • I. THE ARCHIPELAGO REVISITED

ARCHiPELAGOS • I. THE ARCHIPELAGO REVISITED

AMÉLIA MUGE & MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

ARCHiPELAGOS / Passages

 

I. THE ARCHIPELAGO REVISITED
 

● The Archipelago
(Is Ionia in Bloom? Where Is Athens?)
● Katolophýromae (I’m Wailing in Lament)

 

/PORTUGUÊS/ ARCHiPELAGOS • I. REVISITANDO O ARQUIPÉLAGO

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ ΑΡΧΙΠΕΛΑΓΟΣ • I. ΕΠΙΣΤΡΟΦΗ ΣΤΟ ΑΡΧΙΠΕΛΑΓΟΣ

ARCHiPELAGOS / Passages: AMÉLIA MUGE & MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

01. The Archipelago
a. Is Ionia in Bloom? – b. Where Is Athens?
(1800-1801, excerpts)

– Friedrich Hölderlin (adapted into Portuguese by Amélia Muge)
/ a. Aegean traditional tune – b. Michales Loukovikas
• Arranged by M. Loukovikas, António José Martins

Is Ionia in Bloom?

Are the cranes back at your door? Have the ships
Resumed their course to your shores? Do breaths of breezes
We longed for stir the calm waves? […]
Is Ionia in bloom? Is it time? […]

Where Is Athens?

Say, where is Athens? Perhaps above the teachers’ urns
Your most beloved city
[…] has sunk entirely amid the ashes?
Is there still some sign of her, so that a sailor
Passing by would mention and remember her? […]

The Delphic god fell silent, the paths are long
Desolate and lonely […]

• Adapted into English by Michales Loukovikas

• Recitation: Maria José & A. Muge / Vocals: Cramol, Maria Monda, Teresa Campos
• Cello: Catarina Anacleto / Clarino: Manos Achalinotópoulos / D. Bass: António Quintino
Guitar: Dimitris Mystakidis / Ney: Harris Lambrakis / Piano: Filipe Raposo
Portuguese guitar: Ricardo Parreira / Violin, Viola: Kyriakos Gouventas

●

Friedrich Hölderlin, a major philhellene lyric poet, by Johanna Ebertz (1979)

● Friedrich Hölderlin (1770 – 1843): a major German lyric poet associated with Romanticism. He synthesized the spirit of ancient Greece with his pantheism and an unorthodox version of Christianism. Written in 1800-1801, The Archipelago is his longest poem (296 verses). Partly epic and lyrical, partly elegiac and hymnic, it brings to the fore his belief that divine nature and human culture had been harmoniously connected in the Greek poleis, especially Athens, but were painfully crushed in the present, and his hope that they would blossom together again in the future. ● Aegean Sea: located between the Greek and Anatolian peninsulas, it was known as the Archipelago (Αρχιπέλαγος, i.e. chief sea), while later usage of the term shifted to refer to the Aegean Islands, since the sea is remarkable for its large number of isles. Any such island group is now described as an archipelago. Regarding the name of the sea, among several explanations in antiquity, it was said to have been named after Aegeus, a king of Athens, father of Theseus, or Aegea, a queen of the Amazons, who both drowned there. A possible etymology is a derivation from the Greek word αἶγες, aiges, i.e. goats, used metaphorically to mean waves, hence wavy sea. ● Ionia: an ancient region of central coastal Asia Minor, named after the Ionians, one of the four major Hellenic tribes, who settled the shores and islands of the Aegean Sea between the 11th and 9th centuries BCE. ● Athens: a notable Hellenic polis (city-state), a centre for the arts, learning and philosophy in the classical period. It is regarded as the cradle of Western Civilization, and the birthplace of democracy that was established in 508 BCE. ● Delphi: the major site for the worship of Apollo (the Delphic god), as well as the seat of his oracle that was consulted on important decisions throughout the ancient world.

Twilight bathes the ruins of the Tholos of Delphi,
a circular building that adorned the Sanctuary of Athena

02. Katolophýromae / I’m Wailing in Lament

– Euripides • Tragedy “Orestes” (408 BCE, fragments)
• Adapted / Αrranged by Michales Loukovikas

Strophe

[…] oh, I am begging you, yes, I am begging you,
in spacious aether you dart along to exact
a penalty for blood, a murder penalty,
oh, please, allow the son
of Agamemnon to forget his frenzy,
his manic rage, twisting madness. Toils in vain,
that you, poor creature, so strove to drag yourself […]

Antistrophe

[…] I’m wailing in lament,
I’m wailing in lament.
Alas, your mother’s blood, which drives you raving mad?
Great happiness is not in mortals permanent.
But like a sail it is,
that of a rapid boat, shaken by some god,
plunged in a sea of dire troubles in the tempest,
furious and disastrous the waves all around. […]

• Adapted into English by Michales Loukovikas

• Voice: M. Loukovikas / Vocals: Amélia Muge, M. Loukovikas, Andreas Karakotas,
Manos Achalinotópoulos • Clarino: M. Achalinotópoulos / D. Bass: António Quintino
Ney, Recorder: Harris Lambrakis / Percussion: José Salgueiro / Piano: Filipe Raposo
Violin, Viola: Kyriakos Gouventas

●

Euripides

● Euripides (c. 480 – c. 406 BCE): the youngest of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, coming after Aeschylus and Sophocles. ● Katolophýromae (I’m wailing): a notated but mutilated passage of the music from the tragedy Orestes (the antistrophe of the first stasimon, lines 338-344), found on a papyrus from Hermopolis, Egypt, in the collection of Archduke Rainer Ferdinand of Austria, and published in 1892. The Vienna Papyrus G 2315 dates to the 3rd century BCE. Thus the question whether the fragment represents the original music Euripides composed is still open. There is, however, some evidence that the melody recorded there must have been composed much earlier: the tragedian has been famous for his innovative spirit, and the fragment accords with what we know about the complexity of his style. If the Hellenistic era musicians and musicologists imitated and reproduced the classical works of music the same way librarians and grammarians did for literature, this would be another argument in favour of the authenticity. ● According to Plutarch (Parallel Lives, in Nicias and Lysander), it was the music of Euripides (not that of Aeschylus, Sophocles, or even Aristophanes) that saved many Athenians, and Athens itself, during the Peloponnesian War. After the disastrous for the Athenians Sicilian expedition (415 – 413 BCE), many of them held captives saved their lives because they could sing Euripides; his avant-garde songs were much loved by all Hellenes in Greece and in the colonies – except perhaps Aristophanes!(*) And in 404 BCE, after Athens’ defeat, the victorious Spartan generals had a meeting to decide the fate of the city. They concluded that it should be demolished and its citizens enslaved. Then, during the victory celebrations, someone sang an ode from Euripides’ Electra. The generals were so much moved that they changed their minds: They felt it would be a barbarous act to annihilate a polis where such men were born… These episodes also support the arguments in favour of the authenticity: it would be natural to copy again and again compositions with such an enormous appeal, such as Katolophýromae. ● In our approach, we have chosen to: a) repeat the surviving notes in the corresponding missing musical phrases, instead of filling up the gaps with our own inventions; b) present not only the antistrophe, but also the strophe; and c) balance ourselves between monophony and polyphony, hoping that Euripides would smile and applaud approvingly, despite the brickbats thrown by Aristophanes, Plato, and the Spartan ephori.

(*) Indeed, it is very impressive that at that time, the most popular music was avant-garde! It goes without saying that the citizens’ cultural level then was very high…

Euripides’ Orestes: Katolophyromae, the antistrophe
of the first stasimon (Vienna Papyrus G 2315)

● Agamemnon (Ἀγαμέμνων): king of Mycenae, who led the Hellenes in the Trojan War (dated variously from around 1260 to around 1180 BCE). Upon his return from Troy, he was murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover. ● His son, Orestes, is the subject of several myths and plays connected with his madness, after murdering his mother to avenge his father. ● But before passing a verdict, one needs to take into account Clytemnestra’s feelings towards Agamemnon. Most important event: before the war, the king was obliged to sacrifice their daughter, Iphigenia, so his fleet could voyage safely to Troy. Orestes finally found his sister in Tauris or Taurica (Crimea), where she had been taken by Artemis, who intervened the last moment and saved her. Euripides wrote two related tragedies: Iphigenia in Aulis, where the sacrifice took place, and Iphigenia in Tauris. ● Stasimon: a stationary (i.e. στάσιμον) song composed of strophes and antistrophes and performed by the chorus in the orchestra (ὀρχήστρα), the place where the chorus dances. Static but showing emotions, the chorus comments and analyzes the dramatic situation after an episode of a tragedy, accompanied by lyre or aulos (pipe). ● Chorus: a group of performers who comment on the dramatic action, singing or speaking their lines in unison, and dancing (chorus in Greek means also dance, choir, troop, as well as a place for dancing, where it is synonymous with the orchestra). ● In this stasimon, the chorus is initially pleading with the Erinyes (remorses), the demonic spirits protecting matriarchy, to stop tormenting Orestes, and then turns to him…

The Remorse of Orestes (Orestes Pursued by the Erinyes or Furies, 1862),
by William-Adolphe Bouguereau

• >> ARCHiPELAGOS • II. SONGS OF CLAY