ARCHiPELAGOS | Passagens (Crónica)

ARCHiPELAGOS | Passagens (Crónica)

Amélia Muge | Michales Loukovikas

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ ΑΡΧΙΠΕΛΑΓΟΣ | Δίαυλοι (Χρονικό)
/ENGLISH/ ARCHiPELAGOS | Passages (Chronicle)

Sobre as ilhas do Egeu | – vem cá fora e vê! –
os anjos batem as asas | espalhando rosas…

Michales Loukovikas

I. REVISITANDO O ARQUIPÉLAGO
1. O arquipélago
(a. Está a Jónia em flor? / b. Onde está Atenas?)
2. Κατολοφύρομαι (Katolophýromae: É tão profunda a dor)

Hélia Correia está nos nossos corações; e no coração deste Archipelagos. A nossa sequência mais longa é quase toda baseada no seu extenso poema A Terceira Miséria, que começa com uma citação de Friedrich Hölderlin do seu poema Pão e Vinho: Para que servem os poetas em tempos de indigência? Seguindo os passos de Hélia, o nosso ponto de partida foi O arquipélago, também deste poeta. Durante uma viagem ao norte de Portugal, onde vivia sua mãe, Maria José, já com 96 anos, Amélia Muge convenceu-a a recitar com ela alguns excertos deste poema. José Martins lá estava para as gravar. Começámos bem… Agora que penso nisso, sinto que foi uma pena que a filha de Amélia, Cristiana, não tivesse participado também: teríamos três gerações a recitar em conjunto!

O arquipélago, como nos lembrou Hölderlin, era originalmente o Mar Egeu e as suas ilhas. Como introdução, acho que não podíamos encontrar melhor melodia para evocar a música do Egeu do que a desta bela canção tradicional, em versão instrumental, mas cuja primeira estância se pode ler acima. Faltava o “toque” português: ao lado do violino de Kyriakos Gouventas, convocámos a guitarra portuguesa de Ricardo Parreira. Excelente combinação!

Depois havia que resolver o problema do mar. Inicialmente, adicionei sons do mar (ondas, gaivotas, etc.), mas Amélia reagiu: Demasiado realista, disse. Então teve uma ideia fantástica: E se fossem vozes em vez de ondas? Eu e José respondemos em coro: Vamos a isso! Esse coral das ondas, concebido pelo José e cantado em coro por Maria Monda (Sofia, Susana, Tânia), Cramol e Teresa Campos, fez-me sentir que não são apenas ondas do mar, mas também esses anjos voando sobre o Egeu espalhando rosas…

Eurípides

Este foi o primeiro, brilhante, florido excerto do poema (Está a Jónia em flor?). Para o segundo, escuro e sombrio (Onde está Atenas?), fiz novo arranjo de uma antiga composição minha (no Ouro do Céu, para poesia de Ares Alexandrou), que abre caminho a Eurípides e à sua tragédia, Orestes. O stasimon Katolophýromae, introduzido por Harris Lambrakis no ney e flauta de bisel, é cantado em grego antigo por um coro composto por Amélia, Andreas Karakotas, Manos Achalinotópoulos, e eu próprio no papel de corifeu. (Escrevemos sobre Eurípides e Orestes na nossa Arquipédia, uma das secções do eBook que acompanha o CD, onde se pode encontrar muita informação complementar sobre o ARCHiPELAGOS. Muito desta informação é também apresentada aqui no nosso blog, se seguirem os links que estão nos títulos de cada sequência).

1. Friedrich Hölderlin (Der Archipelagus, 1800-1801, excertos, adaptação para português: Amélia Muge) | a. Tradicional do Egeu / b. Michales Loukovikas | Arranjo: M. Loukovikas, A. J. Martins
2. Eurípides (Orestes, 408 AEC, fragmentos: estrofe e antístrofe) | Adaptação-Arranjo: M. Loukovikas

II. CANTOS DA ARGILA
3. Embalar meninos, acordar adultos
11. Μάγισσα Θάλασσα (Νέοι Λαοί τής Θάλασσας) | Mar feiticeiro (Novos Povos do Mar)

Hino hurrita a Nikkal, Ugarit (séc. XIII AEC)

Num navio do tempo /espaço, viajámos um milénio para trás, de Atenas do séc. V AEC. até Ugarit, Síria, c. 1400, para ouvir um Hino hurrita. Na verdade, depois de Eurípides, não fiquei assim tão fascinado quando o ouvi; mas Amélia quedou-se espantada, pela semelhança com um outro hino, anti-fascista, Acordai!, de José Gomes Ferreira e Fernando Lopes-Graça, escrito por volta de 1946, uma década antes da publicação do hino hurrita. O meu coração oriental, por outro lado, foi sendo tocado por algumas versões do hino no género cromático. O problema era que as mesmas o afastavam de Acordai. Por isso, fizémos duas variações: uma, diatónica, próxima de Acordai (Canção de embalar meninos e acordar adultos), e outra, como lamento diatónico-cromático sobre a tragédia dos refugiados (Mar feiticeiro).

Cabeça de mulher chorando com lenço (1937, possivelmente um estudo para Guernica),
de Pablo Picasso

Foi para mim um choque tremendo ver, na orla de uma praia, a foto do corpo de uma criança que se afogou quando a família tentava passar da Turquia para a Grécia. Os meus versos começam com uma frase que ouvi a outro refugiado, em Marrocos, que não conseguiu atravessar o Estreito de Gibraltar para a Espanha: Quando miro o mar, os meus olhos ficam cheios d’água… Que tocante é a interpretação do meu amigo Andreas Karakotas, tele-dirigido por mim: eu em Lisboa, ele em Salónica! Ana Dias, na harpa, criou o pano de fundo apropriado tanto aqui como no tema Utopia (Ilhas Imaginárias).

3. Amélia Muge / José Gomes Ferreira (Acordai!, excerto) | Anónimo (Hino hurrita antigo, fragmento) / Fernando Lopes-Graça (Acordai!, excerto) | Adaptação: A. Muge. Αrranjo: A. J. Martins
11. Michales Loukovikas | Anónimo (Hino hurrita antigo, fragmento) | Adaptação-Αrranjo: M. Loukovikas

III. MACARONÉSIA (Macárōn Nẽsoe: Ilhas Afortunadas)
4. Ali no meio do mar
5. Dança do trigo
6. Um gingado lamento

Cesária Évora

A Macaronésia é composta por quatro arquipélagos no Atlântico norte: Açores e Madeira (Portugal), Canárias (Espanha) e Cabo Verde. O nome deriva do termo grego Μακάρων Νῆσοι (Macárōn Nẽsoe, Ilhas Afortunadas ou Ilhas dos bem aventurados), usado pelos geógrafos para as ilhas Elísias, ilhas a oeste dos Pilares de Hércules (Estreito de Gibraltar), um paraíso terrestre sem inverno. De acordo com Hesíodo, eram os Campos Elísios, habitados por heróis. Estrabão identificou-as com as ilhas das Hespérides.

Gingado Lamento, de Amélia, dedicado a Cesária Évora, tem este toque mágico. Encantou-me, desde a primeira vez que o ouvi. Assim, como o finale da saga da Macaronésia, que é ainda melhor! Nesta sequência são solistas Amélia e Rita Maria (que canta a Dança do Trigo em castelhano) sendo os coros feitos por Maria Monda e por mim.

4. Amélia Muge / Tradicional (Canárias, Açores) | Arranjo: A. J . Martins, A. Muge
5. Amélia Muge / Tradicional (Canárias) | Arranjo: A. J. Martins, A. Muge
6. Amélia Muge | Arranjo: M. Loukovikas, A. J. Martins

IV. PENAS DE AMOR O QUE SÃO?
7. A tentação
8. Δέδυκε ἀ σελάννα / Lua desceu, mergulhou
(a. A lua mergulhou / b. Sentidos divididos / c. Eros)

Safo de Ereso, cópia romana de
um original grego (séc. V AEC)

A Tentação, é, a meu ver, uma das melhores composições de Amélia, feita para este poema de Hélia. Disse-lhe muitas vezes ser uma pena não estar num dos seus álbuns. Pronto, aqui está ela! E em boa companhia: a de Safo.

Graças a Amélia, que teve a ideia de a incluir, pesquisei bastante, lendo a poesia Sáfica; para compor, acabei por combinar três fragmentos:(*) A Lua baixou, Sentidos divididos, e Eros. Além do mais convenci Amélia que conseguiria cantar em helénico antigo – experiência que descreveu depois como… um salto sobre o abismo! Neste “salto” é acompanhada por Rita Maria, Catarina Anacleto e Maria Monda.

(*) Embora a sua poesia fosse bem conhecida e grandemente admirada na antiguidade, quase toda chegou até nós em fragmentos, principalmente por a Igreja cristã desaprovar a sua moral e as autoridades eclesiásticas adorarem queimar as suas antologias…

7. Hélia Correia | Amélia Muge | Arranjo: F. Raposo
8. Safo (em grego antigo e português – adaptação: Amélia Muge) | Michales Loukovikas | Adaptação-Arranjo: M. Loukovikas

V. CANSAÇO DE SER
9. Sono de ser
10. The Hours (As horas)

Fernando Pessoa

Esta sequência é dedicada a Fernando Pessoa. Começa com Sono de ser, outro dos meus temas favoritos, que já tinha sido editado, com outro ambiente musical, no seu CD A Monte. Aqui, o canto de Amélia cria um daqueles raros momentos. É excelentemente acompanhada por Filipe Raposo.

The Hours, um dos Poemas Ingleses de Pessoa, destaca-se também. Compus o tema para Sofia Vitória (CD Echoes, dedicado aos poemas ingleses de Pessoa). Como acabou por não entrar no seu trabalho pude, felizmente, tê-lo aqui com o meu arranjo… heavy metal, reforçado pelo vibrafone de Kostas Hanís e o contrabaixo de António Quintino! Amélia e eu sincronizámos as nossas vozes e o coro (Maria Monda) sintonizou-se connosco.

O modo como compus esta canção foi, para Amélia, fascinante. Durante um dos meus passeios de fim da tarde pela vizinhança, com o The Hours sem me sair da cabeça, lembrei-me do Time dos Pink Floyd com os relógios a tocar logo que a música começa. Decidi então ter um clique de relógios marcando os segundos, os minutos, As horas… Fui acelerando o passo, murmurando as palavras de Fernando e, de repente, a linha do baixo apareceu! Continuei a repetir esta linha até chegar a casa, pois não tinha nada aonde apontar e iria esquecer. Ao chegar, Fernando também me ofertou a linha melódica básica! Trabalhei furiosamente durante… Horas; Só parei quando até o arranjo ficou pronto. Mandei-o imediatamente, felicíssimo, para Amélia…

9. Fernando Pessoa | Amélia Muge | Arranjo: F. Raposo
10. Fernando Pessoa | Michales Loukovikas | Arranjo: M. Loukovikas

VI. NA TAVERNA DO PORTO
12. Versos quaisquer (Pedidos com instância)
13. Ο Νικόλας ο ψαράς (Nicolas, o Pescador)

É a sequência do… fadobetiko (termo cunhado por Amélia). O seu tema, à la fado corrido, é baseado num poema satírico de João de Deus, um dos maiores poetas portugueses do séc. XIX. A introdução, feita por Kyriakos Gouventas, tem um sabor a norte dos Balcãs, em acordo com a referência poética à Transilvânia.

Giorgos Mitsakis (E) and Vasilis Tsitsanis (D)

O trágico Nicolas, o pescador, combina dois dos maiores compositores de rebético: Vasilis Tsitsanis, um dos fundadores do rebético moderno (abrindo o caminho a grandes compositores como Manos Hadjidakis e Mikis Theodorakis); e Giorgos Mitsakis, um hábil compositor e letrista, apelidado de o mestre como tocador de bouzouki.

Muito emocionado (desfiz-me em lágrimas ao cantá-la no estúdio; Amélia e o engenheiro de som, Christos Megas, pensavam que eu me estava a rir…), descrevo a trágica figura de uma mãe vestida de negro que durante meses, de pé, em frente ao mar, aguardava a chegada da pesca de seu filho, Nicolas, sem que ninguém tivesse coragem de dizer-lhe que se tinha afogado… Esta canção também comoveu os portugueses. Falaram-me de outras mulheres vestidas de negro que ainda permanecem de pé, à beira-mar, fixando o longe de olhos vazios…

12. João de Deus | Amélia Muge | Arranjo: A. J. Martins
13. Giorgos Mitsakis | Vasilis Tsitsanis | Arranjo: M. Loukovikas

VII. ILHAS IMAGINÁRIAS
14. Uma ilha, Utopia
15. Penélope de Ítaca
16. Meninos perdidos

Ulisses entre os Feácios, de Jean Broc. Odisseu mostra seu areté físico ao vencer o concurso de arremesso de disco depois de ser desafiado por um atleta Feácio. Muito antes de Platão, Homero
é o primeiro a descrever a Utopia, ou até a Atlântida, que ele chama Esquéria, a terra dos Feácios.

O nosso fascínio pelos lugares míticos e imaginários. Fico contente que acabe musicalmente na Trácia, onde nasci, com esta dança lendária, zonarádikos, onde se destacam Amélia e Maria Monda (vozes), Manos Achalinotópoulos (clarino/clarinete folk) e Harris Lambrakis (ney). Viajamos antes disso pela Utopia de Thomas More (onde Amélia evoca a Caixa vazia de Ares Alexandrou) e ainda por Ítaca de Penélope e Ulisses, para, finalmente, encalharmos na Terra do Nunca, de J. M. Barrie, encontrando não Peter Pan ou Sininho, mas uns muito especiais Meninos Perdidos.

14. Amélia Muge | Arranjo: A. J. Martins, F. Raposo | Dedicado a Ares Alexandrou
15. Amélia Muge | Arranjo: A. J. Martins, F. Raposo
16. Amélia Muge | Tradicional da Trácia, A. Muge | Arranjo: A. J. Martins, M. Loukovikas

VIII. EM TEMPO DE INDIGÊNCIA
17. Sem Deuses
18. Nós
19. Feitiço / Experimentos
20. As ilhas do Egeu
21. A ruína da Grécia
22. Falamos de sombras (Democracia)
23. Um início

Esta sequência tem por base excertos dos poemas de Hélia: Indignação (Nós e Feitiço) e A Terceira Miséria (restantes excertos). N’A Terceira Miséria, poema dedicado à Grécia,(*) começa por citar, como já foi dito no início, Hölderlin: Para quê, para que servem os poetas em tempo de indigência? O poeta alemão é referido várias outras vezes, especialmente quando ela fala de Atenas. Senti-me lisonjeado quando vi o Partenon na capa do livro. Ficou Amélia sem palavras, quando leu o poema. Por tudo isto, esta é a nossa sequência principal.

(*) Como expliquei ao falar de Periplus, nosso trabalho anterior, Hélia é uma entusiástica helenista e filelena, reinterpretando os mitos helénicos e dando destaque a heroínas como Antígona, Helena, e Medeia. Tanto no seu poema maior, A Terceira Miséria, como também na Indignação, ela refere-se aos Argonautas de Jasão, à antiga Ágora das poleis helénicas, à Odisseia de Homero, às Ilhas do Egeu e Ruína da Grécia, aos deuses antigos, Pã e Alexandria, a Péricles e à democracia. Quando foi galardoada com o Prémio Camões (2015), a mais prestigiada distinção do mundo Lusófono, dedicou-o à Grécia, de onde vem a poesia, sem a qual não seríamos nada, nem teríamos nada, como disse na cerimónia de entrega do prémio, exclamando no final: Viva a Grécia! Por tudo isto, é uma tristeza que ninguém tenha publicado A Terceira Miséria na Grécia. Enfim, é a quarta miséria da parte da Grécia moderna…

Friedrich Hölderlin, o poeta fileleno, por Johanna Ebertz (1979)

A citação de Hölderlin em Sem Deuses é repetida em Ilhas do Egeu, numa paisagem sonora completamente diferente. Aqui, depois de muitas experiências, usei como modelo a introdução a Eco, composição de Manos Achalinotópoulos, desenvolvendo-a mais no sentido uma improvisação livre. Como Manos está na nossa equipa, foi possível trabalhar com ele esta ideia, que também teve improvisos de Harris Lambrakis, Amélia e Kyriakos Gouventas. Que prazer, ter aqui Hélia recitando a sua própria poesia!

Nós e A Ruína da Grécia são duas canções gêmeas; os poemas da Hélia são aqui gémeos também! Lembro-me de ouvir dentro de mim a melodia da Ruína desde a primeira vez que li Nós, os ateus, nós, os monoteístas… Depois, mudando o compasso de cinco para seis tempos, rearranjei-a para os versos de Nós.

Para ser sincero, não conhecia quase nada sobre Hölderlin. Tentando saber mais, leio na ficha de informação básica da Wikipedia: “Nascimento – 20 de Março…” (Oh, pensei, no mesmo dia que eu!); “… 1770” (Ena! No mesmo ano de Ludwig!!) Imediatamente a seguir tive uma ideia completamente louca: Bem, e depois? Terceira miséria… Terceira sinfonia! Deixa-me ver… Na verdade, não tinha grandes expectativas. Comecei a entoar a Miséria com a melodia da Marcia funebre de Beethoven no Segundo movimento da Eroica. Principiei com a 25ª parte do poema, “Sim, falamos de sombras”… que me pareceu mais adequada. Fiquei espantado! Mas havia mais melodia. Então, agora vamos voltar atrás e tentar a 23ª parte, “A terceira miséria é esta”… Impressionante! Um pouco mais e terminamos a primeira parte da Marcia, pensei. Esse pouco mais foi encontrado na 32ª parte da Miséria: “Estão as praças como ágoras de outrora”… E o mais fantástico de tudo isto: a melodia de Ludwig acabava com a frase de Hélia: “fervilhante palavra própria da democracia” – Inacreditável!!! UM MILAGRE!..

Procurei a partitura de Beethoven. Tinha adaptado de memória a mesma melodia no meu trabalho O Ouro do Céu; mas desta vez queria ser rigoroso. Meticulosamente rearranjei a partitura, atribuindo as linhas melódicas a outros instrumentos, sem deixar nada de fora (espero). O confronto final veio quando apresentei a minha loucura à Amélia. Como não falo português, só então percebi que várias palavras ou frases estavam fora do lugar, não muito bem adaptadas à música. A ajuda dela neste aspecto foi crucial. Depois, foi a minha vez de a convencer de que não queria aqui uma voz operática – talvez até nem Ludwig a quisesse, ou então, porque teria ele acrescentado Sotto voce sob o título? Queria ter a voz dela habitual. Feito! E estou muito orgulhoso do resultado – mesmo que alguns puristas se possam vir a queixar…

Posso dizer aqui o que disse anteriormente a propósito de Eurípides: Se Ludwig nos pudesse ouvir, espero sinceramente que tivesse sorrido e aplaudido aprovadoramente, apesar das pedradas dos puristas! Participaram também, para lá de Maria Monda, Rui Vaz, José Manuel David e Pedro Casaes no coro, Filipe Raposo ao piano, bem como o meu amigo Kosmás Papadópoulos no clarinete.

O que é que alguém poderia compor depois de tal música? Acho que a Amélia nem sequer pensou nisso – e fez ela muito bem; apresentou uma melodia tão primorosa para Um início, que a coloco ao lado de Ludwig! Considero esta sua composição como a melhor do nosso Archipelagos.

17. Hélia Correia | Amélia Muge | Arranjo: A. Muge, A. J. Martins, M. Loukovikas
18. Hélia Correia | Michales Loukovikas | Arranjo: M. Loukovikas
19. Hélia Correia / A. Muge | Amélia Muge | Arranjo: A. J. Martins, F. Raposo
20. Hélia Correia | Manos Achalinotópoulos, Amélia Muge | Arranjo: M. Loukovikas
Improvisos: H. Lambrakis, M. Achalanitópoulos, A. Muge, K. Gouventas
21. Hélia Correia | Michales Loukovikas | Arranjo: M. Loukovikas
22. Hélia Correia | Ludwig van Beethoven (Terceira Sinfonia, Eroica, 1804, Segundo movimento, primeira parte: Marcia funebre, Adagio assai, Sotto voce) | Adaptação-Arranjo: M. Loukovikas
23. Hélia Correia | Amélia Muge | Arranjo: A. J. Martins, F. Raposo

IX. JÁ SE DÃO AS VOLTAS TODAS
24. Νοσταλγία: Το παράπονο του μετανάστη | Nostalgia: A queixa do emigrante
25. Nostalgia: Cantar de emigração
(a. Sodade / b. Run-Run se fue pa’l norte / c. Cantar de emigração / d. A queixa do emigrante)
26. Alegria

Rosalía de Castro (E) and Violeta Parra (D)

É a nossa sequência sobre migrações e regressos a casa (nostalgia e nostos). Abraçando várias ideias da Amélia, combinei um rebético de Vasilis Tsitsanis (também conhecido pelo título de Como um banido, à deriva), com Cantar de emigração de Rosalía de Castro e José Niza, Run-Run se fue pa´l norte de Violeta Parra e Sodade de Armando Soares. Amélia tinha-me escutado, tempos atrás, a cantar o referido rebético e enviou-me uma adaptação que me lembrou o fado, também aqui incluída como instrumental. Além disso, estou muito feliz por ter connosco representantes dos quatro coros femininos que Amélia convidou para o projeto De Viva Voz (emocionei-me tanto neste concerto!): Cramol, Maria Monda, Catarina Moura (Segue-me à Capela) e Teresa Campos (Sopa de Pedra). Ainda Rita, Rui, David, e Pedro, Paló e Mariana Abrunheiro, Amélia e eu próprio – começando esta aventura Como um banido, à deriva…

José Saramago, por Carlos Botelho

A sequência termina com outra adaptação de Amélia, onde combina a Alegria de José Saramago com uma excelente melodia do nosso amigo Giorgos Andreou, que aqui também dirige a Orquestra de Cordas Palhetadas de Patras.

24. Vasilis Tsitsanis | Arranjo: M. Loukovikas
25. a. Armando Soares (adaptação: M. Loukovikas) / b. Violeta Parra / c. Rosalía de Castro (adaptação para português: J. Niza) | José Niza / d. Vasilis Tsitsanis (adaptação: A. Muge) | Arranjo: M. Loukovikas, A. Muge
26. José Saramago | Giorgos Andreou | Adaptação: A. Muge, A.J. Martins. Arranjo: G. Andreou

X. O QUE AS ONDAS CONTAM
27. Κύματα μύρια τού πελάγου / Ondas do mar de Vigo
28. Contas do mar (Bulería de Sines)

Exuberância, de Penny Warden

A nossa última sequência começa com outra adaptação de Amélia, combinando uma Cantiga de amigo de Martín Codax, com um rebético de Esmirna de Panaiotis Tountas e que cantamos aqui nas duas línguas. Como na altura estava a trabalhar nas canções de Tountas, Retratos de Mulheres do Rebético, “pintados” com a sua excelente Arte de Modulação, costumava enviar cópias do meu trabalho para a Amélia; no dia dos meus anos, agradeceu-me desta forma, com esta excelente adaptação em forma de presente de aniversário.

O finale é uma peculiar Bulería que compus em Sines, em 2012, quando lá fomos preparar o nosso concerto de apresentação de Periplus, no Festival Músicas do Mundo. Nesse concerto, tocámos esta bulería na sua forma inicial. Daí para a frente mudámos a canção tradicional portuguesa interposta; a que temos agora é mais adaptada à bulería, com um certo sabor espanhol. Eu chamo-lhe pan-ibérica, daí ter combinado a guitarra portuguesa de Ricardo Parreira com a guitarra flamenca de Thomás Natsis. E que bem cantada por Catarina Moura e Teresa Campos, juntamente com Maria Monda, Amélia e, por fim, um coro de crianças. Como Maria Graciete Besse acertadamente comentou analisando o ARCHiPELAGOS:

“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.”

Desfrutem!

27. Martín Codax (adaptação em grego: Michales Loukovikas) | Panaiotis Tountas | Adaptação: A. Muge. Arranjo: M. Loukovikas (Cantiga de amigo de um dos melhores trovadores medievais combinada com a melodia do maior compositor do rebético de Esmirna)
28. Amélia Muge | Michales Loukovikas, Tradicional Português | Arranjo: M. Loukovikas, A. Muge

Outubro 2017

● Ver também: PERIPLUS | Luso-Hellenic Wanderings (Chronicle) | GIORGOS ANDREOU on ARCHiPELAGOS
| MARIA GRACIETE BESSE on ARCHiPELAGOS | MARIA DO ROSÁRIO PESTANA on ARCHiPELAGOS

ARCHiPELAGOS
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, Tânia Cardoso) | Ricardo Parreira: guitarra portuguesa
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
Hélia Correia: voz falada | Maria José Muge: voz falada | 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. C. Anacleto: Santiago Fantasia, Gabriel Leite, Sophia Van Epps, Ana Pita, Marta Semblano, Patrícia Arens Teixeira
Autores
Amélia Muge | Anónimo Hurrita: (c 1400 AEC) | Armando Soares (1920-2007) | Euripides (c 480-406 AEC) | Fernando Lopes-Graça (1904-1994) | Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) | Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) | Giorgos Andreou | Giorgos Mitsakis (1921-1993) | Hélia Correia | João de Deus (1830-1896) | José Gomes Ferreira (1900-1985) | José Niza (1938-2011) | José Saramago (1922-2010) | Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) | Manos Achalinotópoulos | Martín Codax (séc. XIII-XIV) | Michales Loukovikas | Panaiotis Tountas (1886-1942) | Rosalía de Castro (1837-1885) | Safo (c 630-570 AEC) | Vasilis Tsitsanis (1915-1984) | Violeta Parra (1917-1967)

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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)

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)

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 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 • IX. JÁ SE DÃO AS VOLTAS TODAS

AMÉLIA MUGE & MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

ARCHiPELAGOS / Passagens

 

IX. JÁ SE DÃO AS VOLTAS TODAS

 

● Nostalgia: A queixa do imigrante
● Cantar de emigração ● Alegria

.

/ENGLISH/ ARCHiPELAGOS • IX. NOSTALGIA AND NOSTOS
/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ ΑΡΧΙΠΕΛΑΓΟΣ• IX. ΝΟΣΤΑΛΓΙΑ ΚΑΙ ΝΟΣΤΟΣ

ARCHiPELAGOS / Passagens: AMÉLIA MUGE & MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

24. Nostalgia: To parápono tou metanásti
(A queixa do imigrante, excerto)

– Vasilis Tsitsanis
• Arranjo: Michales Loukovikas

Sem nada banido por todos
em terra estrangeira e hostil
viver sózinho sem ninguém, não é viver
aqui tão longe de um abraço de mãe.

Choram aves se lhes falta céu
seca a planta se água não tem
choro eu também, meu lindo amor, por não te ver
são tantos anos sem nunca te esquecer.

• Adaptação para português de Amélia Muge

• Canto, coro: M. Loukovikas • Acordeão: M. Loukovikas / Bouzouki: Dimitris Mystakidis
Contrabaixo: António Quintino / Flauta de bisel: Harris Lambrakis / Guitarra portuguesa: Ricardo Parreira
Piano: Filipe Raposo / Violino: Kyriakos Gouventas / Violoncelo: Catarina Anacleto

25. Nostalgia: Cantar de emigração

a. Run-Run se fue pa’l norte (excerto)
– Violeta Parra

b. To parápono tou metanásti
– Vasilis Tsitsanis
• Adaptação: Amélia Muge

c. Cantar de emigração (excerto)
– Rosalía de Castro (Adaptação para português de José Niza) / J. Niza

Citações: Sodade (Armando Soares) & provérbio português
• Arranjo: Michales Loukovikas, A. Muge

Sodade / Run-Run se fue…
Sodade / Este parte…
Sodade dess nha terra… / todos se vão…

Quem parte saudades leva, / Quem fica saudades tem.

Este parte, aquele parte, / e todos, todos se vão.
Galiza, ficas sem homens / que possam cortar teu pão.

Sodade / Run-Run se fue…
Sodade / pa’l Norte… / saudade!
Sodade dess nha terra, sodade!
No sé cuándo vendrá / saudade!
Vendrá para el cumpleaños
de nuestra soledad.

• Canto: Paló, Mariana Abrunheiro, Rita Maria, A. Muge, Catarina Moura, Teresa Campos,
M. Loukovikas / Coro: Maria Monda, Cramol, Rui Vaz, José Manuel David, Pedro Casaes
• Acordeão: M. Loukovikas / Contrabaixo: António Quintino / Flauta de bisel, ney: Harris Lambrakis
Guitarra: Dimitris Mystakidis / Guitarra portuguesa: Ricardo Parreira / Percussão: José Salgueiro
Piano: Filipe Raposo / Violino: Kyriakos Gouventas / Violoncelo: Catarina Anacleto

●

● Vasilis Tsitsanis, Rebético, Bouzouki: ver ARCHiPELAGOS • VI. NA TAVERNA DO PORTO. ● Violeta Parra (1917-1967): nome incontornável da música popular Chilena, mas também de toda a américa latina, desenvolve uma intensa actividade como cantautora, etnomusicologista e folclorista, a que acrescenta a de artista plástica, também inspirada em temas e modos de expressão tradicionais; pioneira da Nova Canção Chilena, recolhe, cataloga, renova e reinventa a tradição musical do seu país, cuja influência se alastra e amplia para além do Chile; compõe ainda temas de cariz combativo e comprometido com a defesa dos oprimidos e explorados (La carta, Rin del Angelito); conjuga um sentido de vida individual e de responsabilidade social solidária, com uma capacidade de expressão poética e musical muito raras (Gracias a la vida, Volver a los 17, Run Run se fue pa’l norte); é chamada por muitos de Mãe do Povo latino-americano mas é, de facto, uma referência para todo o mundo. ● Rosalía de Castro (1837-1885): poeta e escritora galega, é considerada a fundadora da literatura galega moderna; a sua primeira obra – Cantares Galegos, 1863 – escrita na sua própria língua (quando estava banida como língua escrita) marca o começo de uma nova era para a poesia de expressão galega, sendo a base do Rexurdimento (Ressurgimento) da sua nova literatura; o feriado local de 17 de Maio (data em que Rosalía assina e dedica essa obra ao município espanhol de Fernán Caballero) constituiu-se, em 1963, como Dia das Letras Galegas. Muitos dos poemas do seu primeiro livro são glosas de cantigas populares, que denunciam a miséria, a pobreza e a emigração massiva a que os galegos (à semelhança dos portugueses) são obrigados a recorrer. A sua obra, por mostrar um lado consciente de si no seu contexto e simultaneamente um outro, desafiador das fronteiras do ser, enquadra-se no movimento romântico. Seu marido, Manuel Murguía, crítico literário, investigador e jornalista, foi determinante na divulgação da obra de Rosalia (chegando a editá-la sem seu conhecimento). Foi também o impulsionador da criação do primeiro dicionário galego bem como da criação da Real Academia Galega de que Rosalia vem a fazer parte, já depois de ter falecido, como o primeiro membro de honra. Em 1949 a Câmara Municipal de Lisboa homenageou a escritora dando o seu nome a uma rua. O Cantar de emigração (de que aqui se canta um excerto) corresponde à última parte do seu longo poema ¡Pra a Habana!, traduzido e adaptado para português pelo autor da música, José Niza. ● Original do excerto inserido em Nostalgia – Cantar de Emigração: ¡Pra a Habana! (Para Havana!) – Éste vaise i aquél vaise, / e todos, todos se van./ Galicia, sin homes quedas / que te poidan traballar. ● José Niza (1938-2011): compositor, médico e político socialista português, deputado da Assembleia da República em várias legislaturas, promove e colabora em diversas iniciativas e diplomas legislativos relacionados com Direitos de Autor, Protecção da Música Portuguesa, Redução do Imposto sobre Importação de Instrumentos musicais, entre outros. É autor da letra da canção E depois do adeus, (uma das senhas desencadeadoras das operações militares do 25 Abril de 1974, que levaram ao final da ditadura em Portugal). ● Armando Soares (1920-2007): comerciante da Praia Branca, na ilha de São Nicolau (Cabo Verde), é autor do tema Sodade, composto nos anos 50 do século XX, na despedida de uns amigos que iam embarcar para São Tomé e Príncipe, como contratados a prazo, para roças de cacau e de café, onde por norma eram tratados como escravos; o dilema quero ficar – tenho de partir, de todos os emigrantes, da pobreza e da esperança, é descrito de modo simples e emotivo em Sodade; após a interpretação de Cesária Évora, passou a ter o valor de representação das gentes e da cultura de Cabo-Verde, com peso de Hino não-oficial deste arquipélago.

Rosalía de Castro, mural

26. Alegria

– José Saramago / Giorgos Andreou
• Adaptação: Amelia Muge, António José Martins / Arranjo: G. Andreou

Já ouço gritos ao longe / Já diz a voz do amor
A alegria do corpo / O esquecimento da dor

Já os ventos recolheram / Já o verão se nos oferece
Quantos frutos quantas fontes / Mais o sol que nos aquece

Já colho jasmins e nardos / Já tenho colares de rosas
E danço no meio da estrada / As danças prodigiosas

Alegria!

Já os sorrisos se dão / Já se dão as voltas todas
Ó certeza das certezas / Ó alegria das bodas

• Canto, coro: A. Muge • Guitarra portuguesa: Ricardo Parreira
Orquestra de cordas palhetadas ‘Thanassis Tsipinakis’ do município de Patras

●

● José Saramago (1922-2010): escritor português; Prémio Camões (1995), o mais importante prémio literário da língua portuguesa, e Prémio Nobel de Literatura (1998); com um estilo comunicativo e vivaz, familiar dos contos populares da tradição oral, entende que a melhoria da condição humana passa pela generosidade e a abertura aos sentimentos do amor; profundamente crítico de instituições como a Igreja Católica, a União Europeia ou o Fundo Monetário Internacional; defensor intransigente dos Direitos Humanos, a sua vida é marcada por polémicas, uma das quais o leva a ir viver para fora de Portugal (em 1992, o governo português de Cavaco Silva ordena a remoção do Evangelho segundo Jesus Cristo da candidatura ao Prémio Europeu de Literatura Aristeion, alegando ser religiosamente ofensivo); escolhe Lanzarote, uma das ilhas do Arquipélago das Canárias (Espanha), onde mora até à sua morte. ● Giorgos Andreou (1961): compositor e letrista grego, e também técnico de som; explorou a relação da música grega com as linguagens musicais do ocidente e do oriente; os numerosos ciclos de canções que gravou, são ‘fruto’ dessas pesquisas musicais, em que tanto utiliza os seus próprios textos, como os de importantes poetas e letristas gregos. Colabora com frequência com a Orquestra de Cordas Palhetadas ‘Thanasis Tsipinakis’ do município de Patras. Desde 2000, actua como diretor artístico pro bono do Festival Astypalaia. Compõe música para cinema e teatro. No verão de 2016, apresenta ‘Diário de bordo III’, um trabalho sinfônico com letras tiradas do trabalho, com o mesmo nome, do laureado com o Nobel de Literatura, Giórgos Seféris.

• >> ARCHiPELAGOS • X. O QUE AS ONDAS CONTAM
• << ARCHiPELAGOS • VIII. EM TEMPO DE INDIGÊNCIA

ARCHiPELAGOS • VI. NA TAVERNA DO PORTO

AMÉLIA MUGE & MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

ARCHiPELAGOS / Passagens

 

VI. NA TAVERNA DO PORTO

 

● Versos quaisquer (Pedidos com instância)
● O Nicólas o psarás (Nicolas, o pescador)

.

/ENGLISH/ ARCHiPELAGOS • VI. IN A HARBOUR’S TAVERN

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ ΑΡΧΙΠΕΛΑΓΟΣ • VI. Η ΤΑΒΕΡΝΑ ΣΤΟ ΛΙΜΑΝΙ

ARCHiPELAGOS / Passagens: AMÉLIA MUGE & MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

12. Versos quaisquer
(Pedidos com instância, excerto)

– João de Deus / Amélia Muge
• Arranjo: António José Martins

Havia na Transilvânia, / Ao pé de Casco de rolhas
Um rei chamado Dencolhas, / Imperador da Circânia;
Tinha por cetro a catânea / Com que cortava o presunto,
E não gostava de assunto / Que não fosse de manérea
Que aquela cabeça aérea / Se risse e sorrisse muito.

Pescava às vezes nos mares / Com anzóis de caparrosa,
E tinha sempre uma cousa / No pensamento elevádeo:
Era que o imenso rádio / Que o sol descreve nas márcheas
Exerce sobre as enxárcias / Influência tamanha,
Que só cabeça tacanha / Ainda põe em problêmea
Se acaso banhos de sêmea / Curam sezões na Alemanha.

Ele tinha o cabelo aúreo / A modo de flor sulfúrea,
Cor um pouco, um tanto espúria / Mas de beleza nevrálgica.
E como na fronte mágica / Lhe brilhava a estrela fausta,
Um dia uma dama causta / De encontros superfinórios
Pôs-se com tais avelórios / A cativar-lhe os dois lúzios,
Que foram como dois búzios / À busca de promontórios.

No Cabo da Boa Esperança / Se acaso a esperança tem cábeo,
É que ele viu no astrolábio, / Sua coragem hercúlea;
Mas com a face cerúlea / Tinha não sei que fatídico
Na mesma cerúlea fácea, / Agarrado à Musa Engrácia
Partiu no vapor Magnífico.

Nunca mais voltou das plagas / A que aportou […]

• Canto: A. Muge • Acordeão: Filipe Raposo / Bouzouki, guitarra: Dimitris Mystakidis
Contrabaixo: António Quintino / Guitarra portuguesa: Ricardo Parreira / Violino: Kyriakos Gouventas

João de Deus

●

● João de Deus (1830-1896): poeta e pedagogo português (Algarve), o bardo, que diz ser, intuitivo e observador da sociedade do seu tempo, leva uma vida de privações, sem procurar nem encontrar um modo estável de ganhar o seu sustento; sempre rodeado de grandes amigos, no final do curso de direito e no então agitado ambiente estudantil de Coimbra, escreve sátiras no mesmo estilo que marca o seu lirismo: uma poética de inspiração popular e tradicional, muito à maneira do que ainda hoje se encontra entre os poetas populares e repentistas do barrocal algarvio. Os Versos quaisquer (Pedidos com instância), talvez escritos nesta altura, foram aqui submetidos a uma interpretação livre; o jogo com os sons das palavras, de populismos casados com academismos, ou com o ‘latinário’ da evocação de Virgílio, têm um sabor muito próprio a troça estudantil. Segundo o poeta e ensaísta Theófilo Braga, isso que é bello porque não é exclusivamente individual, essa vibração que fascina e inspira, é uma orientação tradicional que depois de Camões os poetas portuguezes perderam, e que João de Deus por um tino genial soube tornar a achar (em As melhores ideias na literatura portuguesa). ● Versos quaisquer – chaves de uma leitura livre do texto: quiçá dedicado a um colega, figura de tipologia perene, novo-rico extravagante que não distingue jóia verdadeira de falsa, confuso de ideias, aflito pregador de crendices muito científicas (muito actual portanto), vítima do esplendor que em si mesmo vê e acrescenta, mas sem malignidade que estrague a dignidade de ser lembrado pelos colegas, eis alguns dos termos arrebanhados para a narrativa da história: Dencolhas – de + encolhas, retraimento, covardia / Circânia – as redondezas / catânea – catana, faca de cortar mato / anzóis de caparrosa – caparrosa é um sulfato de ferro e os anzóis feitos deste material eram os mais caros do mercado / márcheas – marchas (do sol) / sêmea – farinha fina, ‘flor de farinha’ / sezões – febres altas, paludismo / estrela fausta – ‘estrela do luxo’ / causta – misto de casta (pura) e de cáustica (perigosa, ardente, que queima) / avelórios – bijuterias/ promontórios – sítios elevados onde se chega trepando; cábeo – cabo, como em final, que se acaba e como em cabimento ou razão de ser / cerúlea – cianosada, da cor dos afogados / musa Engrácia – musa com graça, engraçada, por quem se engraçou / vapor Magnífico – barco idêntico àquele onde todos um dia embarcaremos, mas de luxo. (Teresa Muge)

África do Sul

● Transilvânia: uma região histórica, localizada onde hoje é a zona central da Roménia. É conhecida pela beleza cénica dos seus Cárpatos e pela sua rica história. No Ocidente, tem sido associada aos vampiros devido ao famoso livro Drácula, de Bram Stoker e às suas várias adaptações cinematográficas.● Cabo da Boa Esperança: promontório rochoso na costa atlântica da África do Sul (150 km do Cabo das Agulhas, que divide o Atlântico do Índico). A primeira dobragem moderna do Cabo é feita por Bartolomeu Dias em 1488; inicialmente chamado de Cabo das Tormentas, devido ao mar muito agitado que Bartolomeu apanhou na viagem de ida, foi depois baptizado, provavelmente por D. João II, como o da Boa Esperança, por constituir um marco histórico nas tentativas portuguesas em descobrir uma ligação por mar com os mercados do oriente. Permanece na memória como um lugar inóspito e remoto, apenas ao alcance de corajosos e intrépidos navegadores; coisas de heróis como Hércules (a quem existiu um forte culto na Península Ibérica), capazes de vencer o monstro Adamastor das crenças lusitanas, herdado da mitologia greco-romana e referido em Os Lusíadas de Luís Vaz de Camões. ● De acordo com Heródoto, os Fenícios podem ter realizado um périplo da África c. 600 a.C. a partir do Mar Vermelho. Eudoxo de Cízico (408-355 a.C.), navegador grego da dinastia helenística ptolemaica no Egipto, encontrou, nas águas do Índico, um navio afundado que parecia ter vindo de Gades (actual Cádis, Andaluzia). A partir deste mesmo local tentou então, por duas vezes, circum-navegar o continente africano sem sucesso. Perdeu-se nas viagens e muito provavelmente, na segunda, perdeu também a vida.

Bartolomeu Dias numa nota de 2000 escudos de Portugal (1992)

13. O Nicólas o psarás / Nicolas, o pescador

– Giorgos Mitsakis / Vasilis Tsitsanis
• Arranjo: Michales Loukovikas

P’la madrugada regressaram
todos os barcos mais velozes,
só o Nicolas pescador – pescador,
ninguém ainda avistou – avistou.

Em frente ao mar quem está de pé
uma mulher toda de negro
ali parada e assustada – assustada
é a mãe de Nicolas pescador.

Nenhum lhe queria falar
explicar o que se passou
que o seu Nicolas se’afogou – se’afogou
e que do mar nunca mais vai regressar.

Passaram meses muitos meses
lá continua em frente ao mar
só vive a esperança no seu peito – no seu peito
de ver seu Nicolas chegar, regressar.

• Adaptação para português de Amélia Muge

• Canto, coro: M. Loukovikas • Acordeão: M. Loukovikas
Baglamás, bouzouki, guitarra: Dimitris Mystakidis / Contrabaixo: António Quintino
Guitarra portuguesa: Ricardo Parreira / Ney: Harris Lambrakis / Violin: Kyriakos Gouventas

Giorgos Mitsakis (esq.) e Vasilis Tsitsanis (dir.)

●

● Giorgos Mitsakis (1921 – 1993): nascido em Constantinopla, vem com a família para a Grécia em 1923; cedo atraído e interessado pela música popular, começa a estudar música contra a vontade da família que queria que se fizesse pescador; aos 16 anos foge para Tessalónica onde conhece Vasilis Tsitsanis e toca com vários outros músicos; prolífico compositor e letrista de muitas canções rebético e laïkó, foi apelidado de mestre como tocador de bouzouki. ● Vasilis Tsitsanis (1915-1984): extraordinário escritor de canções e tocador de bouzouki, ganhou proeminência entre os mais importantes compositores gregos do seu tempo; é considerado como um dos fundadores da música popular urbana da modernidade (rebético e laïkó), preparando e abrindo caminho a outros grandes compositores como Manos Hadjidakis e Mikis Theodorakis ● Rebético: música popular urbana grega, que reflecte sobretudo os ambientes de vida dos mais pobres e marginalizados, que foi evoluindo desde o final do séc. XIX até à década 50 do séc. XX. Do ponto de vista musical, resulta de uma síntese de música grega (continente e ilhas), canto eclesiástico bizantino, tradições modais da arte oriental, música do tipo café-amán e ainda de vários elementos da música europeia. Apesar de as melodias da maioria das músicas do rebético seguirem um ou mais modos musicais, são harmonizadas de uma maneira que não corresponde à harmonia nem da música europeia convencional, nem da música oriental monofônica. Existem duas escolas de rebético: a de Esmirna (a mais antiga, onde se inclui a música de Constantinopla e de outras cidades otomanas, em que tocavam instrumentos como a lira ou o violino, o qanun ou o santur), e a do Pireu (que abrange também a música de Atenas, de Salónica e de outras cidades gregas), tendo o bouzouki como instrumento central e comum a todas elas. A laïkó é um tipo de canção popular grega que aparece no seguimento da comercialização do rebético nos anos 50 do séc. XX. ● Bouzouki: instrumento de cordas da família do alaúde, de caixa de madeira achatada à frente, bojuda atrás e um braço longo, com larga tradição na Grécia, Líbano e Síria; o bouzouki árabe possui trastes móveis, que permitem a produção de intervalos microtonais; na Grécia, é modificado em conformidade com o bandolim napolitano (passa a ter trastes fixos, que produzem intervalos temperados) e rapidamente se torna no instrumento central do rebético. O seu nome pode vir dos termos persas tanbur e bozorg (amplo/grande); é semelhante ao tambur, à thaboura e à antiga pandura, possívelmente originária da Assíria. Num baixo relevo em mármore de 330–320 a.C. aparece uma musa grega tocando pandura. O tzourás e baglamás são versões mais pequenas do bouzouki. O bouzouki irlandês, com a parte de trás mais achatada e diferente afinação, é um desenvolvimento recente, devido à sua introdução na música irlandesa por volta de 1965.

Musa a tocar pandura. Detalhe de um baixo relevo de Mantineia (c 330-320 a.C.). É a mais antiga imagem de pandura conhecida.

• >> ARCHiPELAGOS • VII. ILHAS IMAGINÁRIAS
• << ARCHiPELAGOS • V. CANSAÇO DE SER

ARCHiPELAGOS • IX. NOSTALGIA AND NOSTOS

AMÉLIA MUGE & MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

ARCHiPELAGOS / Passages

 

IX. NOSTALGIA AND NOSTOS

 

● Nostalgia: A Migrant’s Yearning
● Nostalgia: Singing of Emigration
● Jubilation (Alegria)

.

/PORTUGUÊS/ ARCHiPELAGOS • IX. JÁ SE DÃO AS VOLTAS TODAS
/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ ΑΡΧΙΠΕΛΑΓΟΣ• IX. ΝΟΣΤΑΛΓΙΑ ΚΑΙ ΝΟΣΤΟΣ

ARCHiPELAGOS / Passages: AMÉLIA MUGE & MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

24. Nostalgia: To Parápono tou Metanásti
(A Migrant’s Yearning, excerpt)

– Vasilis Tsitsanis
• Arranged by Michales Loukovikas

Like an outcast I’m drifting about
in this evil, hostile foreign land,
wandering all around, blue, so unhappy
so far away I’m from my mother’s hug.

Birds cry in despair for air
and trees for water so they’ll grow,
I also cry, sweetheart, the blues for your eyes,
I haven’t seen them for many years.

• Adapted into English by Michales Loukovikas

• Voice, vocals: M. Loukovikas • Accordion: M. Loukovikas / Bouzouki: Dimitris Mystakidis
Cello: Catarina Anacleto / D. Bass: António Quintino / Piano: Filipe Raposo
Portuguese guitar: Ricardo Parreira / Recorder: Harris Lambrakis / Violin: Kyriakos Gouventas

25. Nostalgia: Singing of Emigration

a. Run-Run se Fue pa´l Norte (excerpt)
– Violeta Parra

b. To Parápono tou Metanásti
– Vasilis Tsitsanis
• Adapted by Amélia Muge

c. Cantar de emigração (excerpt)
– Rosalía de Castro (adapted into Portuguese by José Niza) / J. Niza

Citations: Sodade (Armando Soares) & a Portuguese proverb
• Arranged by Michales Loukovikas, A. Muge

I long – They say he’s gone…
I long – The other goes…
I long for my homeland…
Everyone goes…

Departing or staying back home,
The pain is there in your heart.

This one goes, the other goes
and everyone goes abroad,
Galicia, you’re left with no souls
to work and toil your soil.

I long – They say he’s gone…
I long – … gone up North…
I long for my homeland, oh, I long!
… I ignore when he’ll be back.
He’ll be for the day of birth
of our own solitude.

• Adapted into English by Michales Loukovikas

• Voices: Paló, Mariana Abrunheiro, Rita Maria, A. Muge, Catarina Moura, Teresa Campos,
M. Loukovikas / Vocals: Maria Monda, Cramol, Rui Vaz, José Manuel David, Pedro Casaes
• Accordion: M. Loukovikas / Cello: Catarina Anacleto / D. Bass: António Quintino
Guitar: Dimitris Mystakidis / Ney, Recorder: Harris Lambrakis / Percussion: José Salgueiro
Piano: Filipe Raposo / Portuguese guitar: Ricardo Parreira / Violin: Kyriakos Gouventas

●

● Vasilis Tsitsanis, Rebetiko, Bouzouki: see ARCHiPELAGOS • VI. IN A HARBOUR’S TAVERN. ● Violeta Parra (1917 – 1967): a Chilean songwriter, ethnomusicologist, folklorist, and visual artist, who pioneered the Chilean New Song (Nueva canción chilena), a renewal and reinvention of local folk music that extended its sphere of influence well beyond Chile, being acknowledged as the Mother of Latin American folk. ● Rosalía de Castro (1837 – 1885): a prominent Galician poet and writer, an important figure of the local Romantic movement, known as the Rexurdimento (Renaissance). Her poetry, in Galician, is marked by saudade, an almost ineffable combination of nostalgia, longing and melancholy. Our excerpt is from her poem ¡Pra a Habana! (To Havana!); the original in Galician is as follows: Éste vaise i aquél vaise, / e todos, todos se van, / Galicia, sin homes quedas / que te poidan traballar. ● José Niza (1938 – 2011): a Portuguese composer, doctor, and socialist politician. ● Armando Soares (1920 – 2007): a Cape Verdean composer, author of the famous song Sodade, which refers to the migration of a group of contract laborers from Cape Verde to São Tomé, where they were treated as slaves, during the Salazar dictatorship.

Rosalía de Castro, mural

26. Jubilation / Alegria

– José Saramago / Giorgos Andreou
• Adapted by Amelia Muge, António José Martins / Arranged by G. Andreou

I can hear shouts in the distance
Speaking the voice of love
How jubilant is the body
Leaving behind all pain

Winds have fled to their shelters
Summer is offering itself
So many fruits also fountains
Plus the sun that’s warming us

I gather jasmins and spikenards
Necklaces made up of roses
And I dance in streets and alleys
All of the prodigious dances

Jubilation! Alegria!

Already smiles have been given
All the turns by now have been taken
Oh certainty of all certainties
Oh jubilation of weddings

• Adapted into English by Michales Loukovikas

• Voice, vocals: A. Muge • Plucked Strings Orchestra of Patras Municipality
Portuguese guitar: Ricardo Parreira

●

● José Saramago (1922 – 2010): a Portuguese novelist, poet, playwright, screenwriter and journalist. His work, often allegoric, in an articulate and vivid style similar to oral tradition, presents subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the human factor. A libertarian communist and atheist, he criticized the Catholic Church, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, defending human rights, and also love as an instrument to improve the human condition. In 1992, when Aníbal Cavaco Silva was Prime Minister of Portugal, his government ordered the removal of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ from the Aristeion Prize’s competition, claiming it was religiously offensive. Dismayed by this political censorship of his work, Saramago went into exile on the Spanish island of Lanzarote, in the Canaries, where he lived the rest of his life… I wonder how these censoring politicians felt three years later, when Saramago was awarded the Camões Prize (1995), and after three more years the Nobel Prize in Literature (1998)! ● Giorgos Andreou: a Greek composer, lyricist, and sound engineer, who explored the relation of Greek music to Western and Eastern musical idioms. He composed numerous song cycles, based on other Greek poets and lyricists, as well. He also wrote music for the theatre and the cinema. In 2016 he presented his Logbook III, a symphonic work with lyrics taken from the Nobelist Giorgos Seferis’ homonymous poetic work. He worked with the Plucked Strings Orchestra of the Municipality of Patras several times. Since 2000 he serves as the pro bono artistic director of the Festival of Asypalaea, an Aegean island in the Dodecanese.

• >> ARCHiPELAGOS • X. SEA WAVES TELLING TALES
• << ARCHiPELAGOS • VIII. IN TIMES OF INDIGENCE

ARCHiPELAGOS • VI. IN A HARBOUR’S TAVERN

AMÉLIA MUGE & MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

ARCHiPELAGOS / Passages

 

VI. IN A HARBOUR’S TAVERN

 

● Verses Whatever (Insistent Requests)
● O Nicólas o Psarás
(Nicolas, the Fisherman)

.

/PORTUGUÊS/ ARCHiPELAGOS • VI. NA TAVERNA DO PORTO

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ ΑΡΧΙΠΕΛΑΓΟΣ • VI. Η ΤΑΒΕΡΝΑ ΣΤΟ ΛΙΜΑΝΙ

ARCHiPELAGOS / Passages: AMÉLIA MUGE & MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

12. Verses Whatever
(Insistent Requests, excerpt)

– João de Deus / Amélia Muge
• Arranged by António José Martins

There was in Transylvania / Nearby Far Away Land
A king known as Shrinkand, / Emperor of Circusania;
He had as sceptre a katanea / That he used to cut prosciutto,
You know, he liked no subjeutto / If not discussed in a manneread
Which had this majestic airhead / Smiling and laughing muchutto.

Sometimes he fished in the seas / Using hooks of copper-ass
Had always one thing to pass / Through his mind thoroughly higho:
It was that colossal radio / The sun described in his marches
Exerted over those shroudches / Influence utterly strongany,
Only a narrow headongany / Would still put deep into problemsome
If baths in seeds helped one really come / To cure one’s fever in Germany.

The colour of his hair was aureate / Just like a sulfurous flowerous
A colour slightly, somewhat spurious / But beautifully neuralgic.
And as his forehead was magic / Made his lucky star brilliant,
One day, a chastic lady-ant / Of supercunning conclavities
Started with such trivialities / To captivate his two eye bulbs,
They went just like two sea shellbs / In search of promontorities.

Down to the Cape of Good Hope / If by chance hope has a cape, babe,
Was where he saw in the astrolabe / That his courage was Herculean;
But his face rather cerulean / I don’t know what was so fateful
About this cerulean faceia, / Clinging to the Muse Engratia
He left on the steamboat Magnificul.

Never was he seen back from lands / Where he had been […]

• Adapted into English by Michales Loukovikas

João de Deus

• Voice: A. Muge • Accordion: Filipe Raposo / Bouzouki, Guitar: Dimitris Mystakidis
D. Bass: António Quintino / Portuguese guitar: Ricardo Parreira / Violin: Kyriakos Gouventas

●

● João de Deus (1830 – 1896): one of the greatest Portuguese poets of his generation. ● Due to insistent requests, João set out to write a satyric drama à la Euripides’ Cyclops, featuring Silenus and his satyrs, Odysseus and the Cyclops; eventually what he wrote were Verses Whatever with satiric misspellings… Before the tragic Nicolas, the Fisherman, our… dilogy starts in Transylvania, with King Shrinkand, Emperor of Circusania. (Instead of a tetralogy or trilogy, we have a… dilogy, which means not only a series of two related works, but also ambiguous or equivocal speech). Once upon a time, our hero felt the irresistible urge to act like Odysseus with Herculean, albeit cerulean, vigour in search of promontorities. He was last seen at the Cape of Good Hope – if by chance good hopes have capes (what about bad hopes, if there are any?) – and is deemed as the desired by the Transylvanians…
● Satyrs (σάτυροι) in Greek mythology: ithyphallic companions of Dionysus with goat-like (tragic) features and often permanent erection. The Roman equivalent of a satyr was a faun or faunus. The satyrs loved wine and women, and were ready for every physical pleasure. They roamed to the music of pipes and bagpipes, cymbals and crotals, chased maenads (bacchants), or danced with nymphs. Their chief was Silenus, a minor deity of fertility. ● The satyr play, one of the three forms of drama together with tragedy and comedy, was a short, lighthearted tailpiece of the tetralogy each tragedian presented in the Dionysian festivals, performed after each trilogy of tragedies. The only complete surviving satyric drama is Cyclops. ▪ Tragic (< tragos, “male goat”): I) relating to or resembling a goat; IIa) relating to tragedy; b) tragic, majestic, solemn; c) (negative meaning) boastful, pompous. ▪ Tragedy (τραγῳδία) means goat ode (τράγων ῳδή); tragoudi (τραγούδι), deriving from tragedy, means song in modern Greek, because the Hellenes used to sing the best arias of the old tragedies. Goats don’t sing, of course; thus we presume that, before the differentiation of the dramatic forms, actors and chorus members were dressed with goat skins, resembling satyrs, for the show was given in honour of Dionysus. Later tragedy was enriched with splendid garments; consequently the term tragic was enriched; as tragic speech degraded becoming bombastic, negative connotations were also added.

Two satyrs and a maenad in a Dionysiac procession

● Transylvania: a historical region located in what is today the central part of Romania. It is known for the scenic beauty of its Carpathian landscape and its rich history. It has been associated in the West with vampires, due to Bram Stoker‘s famous novel Dracula and its many film adaptations. ● Katana (katanea): a traditional Japanese sword used by the samurai. It is characterized by its curved, single-edged blade with a long grip to accommodate two hands. ● Copperas (copper-ass): ferrous sulphate. ● Cape of Good Hope: a rocky promontory on the Atlantic coast of South Africa. There is a misconception that it is the southern tip of Africa, the dividing point between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The southernmost point, in fact, is Cape Agulhas, about 150 km to the southeast. However, when following the western side of the African coastline from the equator southwards, the Cape of Good Hope marks the point where a ship begins to travel more eastward than southward. The first modern rounding of the cape in 1488 by the explorer Bartolomeu Dias was a milestone in the Portuguese attempts to establish direct trade relations with the East. Cape of Good Hope is a euphemism adopted later, as Dias called it Cabo das Tormentas (Cape of Storms), due to the high seas he encountered. The Portuguese were not the first to round the Cape. According to Herodotus, the Phoenicians may have carried out a clockwise periplus of Africa circa 600 BCE. Eudoxus of Cyzicus (fl. ca. 130 BCE), a Greek navigator for the Hellenistic Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt, found the wreck of a ship in the Indian Ocean that appeared to have come from Gades (today’s Cádiz in Spain). He attempted twice to circumnavigate anti-clockwise the continent, setting sail also from Gades, but he didn’t make it and was lost (most probably lost his life).

Portuguese banknote of 2000 escudos with Bartolomeu Dias (1992)

13. O Nicólas o Psarás / Nicolas, the Fisherman

– Giorgos Mitsakis / Vasilis Tsitsanis
• Arranged by Michales Loukovikas

By daybreak they have all returned
sailing their boats into the dock,
but Nicolas, the fisherman – fisherman,
has not yet shown up back on land – back on land.

On the seashore a woman stands,
a mother all dressed up in black,
she is the one who is concerned – so concerned,
the mother of poor Nicolas, the fisherman.

They hesitate who’ll talk to her,
inform her about her son’s fate,
tell her that Nicolas has drowned – he has drowned
and he will not return to land anymore.

Many months have already passed,
Nicolas’ mother is still there,
nothing but hope in her heart – in her heart,
she’s still expecting he’ll be back – back on land.

• Adapted into English by Michales Loukovikas

• Voice, vocals: M. Loukovikas • Accordion: M. Loukovikas
Bouzouki, Baglamá, Guitar: Dimitris Mystakidis / D. Bass: António Quintino
Ney: Harris Lambrakis / Portuguese guitar: Ricardo Parreira / Violin: Kyriakos Gouventas

Giorgos Mitsakis (left) and Vasilis Tsitsanis (right)

●

● Giorgos Mitsakis (1921 – 1993): a skillful Greek composer and lyricist of many rebetiko and laïko (popular) songs. As a bouzouki player, he was nicknamed the master. ● Vasilis Tsitsanis (1915 – 1984): an extraordinary songwriter and bouzouki player who rose to prominence as one of the leading Greek composers of his time. He is regarded as one of the founders of modern rebetiko and laïko songs, paving the way for great composers such as Manos Hadjidakis and Mikis Theodorakis. ● Rebetiko: the urban popular song of the Greeks, especially the poorest and marginalized, from the late 19th century to the 1950s. Musically speaking, it is a synthesis of the music of the Greek mainland and islands, Byzantine ecclesiastical chant, the modal traditions of Oriental art and café music, plus several elements of European music. Thus the melodies of most rebetiko songs follow one or more musical modes, but have been harmonized in a manner which corresponds neither with conventional European harmony, nor with the monophonic Oriental art music. There are two schools of rebetiko: that of Smyrna, the older one, including also the music of Constantinople and other Ottoman cities, played on instruments such as lyra or violin, qanun or santur; and the new one, that of Piraeus, encompassing also the music of Athens, Thessaloniki, and other Greek cities, with bouzouki being the central instrument. ● Laïkó: Greek popular song, especially what followed after the commercialization of rebetiko in the 1950s. ● Bouzouki: a plucked musical instrument of the lute family, played in Greece, Lebanon, Syria, and lately Ireland. The Arab buzuq has movable frets tied to the neck and can produce the microtonal intervals used in several musical modes. In Greece it was modified according to the Neapolitan mandolin, acquiring stable metallic frets that produce the tempered intervals, and quickly became the central instrument of rebetiko. Its name may come from the Persian tanbur e bozorg, a large tanbur-style lute. The bouzouki is similar to the tanbur, thaboura, and ancient pandura that possibly originated in Assyria. A marble relief, dating from 330–320 BCE, shows a Greek muse playing a pandura. The tzourás and baglamás are smaller versions of the bouzouki. The Irish bouzouki, with a flatter back and different tuning, is a recent development, when the Greek instrument was introduced into Irish music around 1965.

Muse playing a pandura. Detail of a bas relief from Mantineia (c. 330-320 BCE). It is the oldest image
of a pandoura currently known.

• >> ARCHiPELAGOS • VII. IMAGINARY ISLANDS
• << ARCHiPELAGOS • V. WEARINESS OF BEING

Chronicle 11. “MUSIC IS THRACIAN AND ASIAN”

Chronicle 11. “MUSIC IS THRACIAN AND ASIAN”

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 11. “ΘΡᾼΚΙΑ ΚΑΙ ΑΣΙΑΤΙΣ Η ΜΟΥΣΙΚΗ”

● “Barbarian” Contribution to Hellenic Instrument Making and Playing ● Antiquarianism and Ancestor Worship ● Multi-String Instruments, Psalteries ● Diapason, Harmony, Polyphony
● Music, Poetry, Nation ● Folk
and Erudite Music ● Hydraulis
● Crusades ● Strabo on Music

Michales Loukovikas

“… and all music is considered to be Thracian and Asian.” (Strabo)

SUCH AN APOPHTHEGM by Strabo, the famous historian and geographer, on the prevailing opinion in his time (64 BCE – 24 CE) about the Thracian and Asian origin of all music – hence also of its instruments – recurs again and again like a leitmotiv, but also as a reminder to all Hellenes who start from the Thracian Orpheus’ lyre, and end up to General Makryiannes’ tambourás.

“In Tsakoniá one comes upon the most ancient Tsakonian dance that is characterized by its Apollonian paeonic rhythm of five beats, the snake-like cycling, circling, folding and unfolding of the dance company, with their coryphaeus [leader] dancing around them and sometimes opposite the second dancer, reminding us of a Pythic nomos [Pythian ‘law’ or canon] of dance and music (Apollo’s battle against Python),⁽¹⁾ and not of Theseus and Ariadne’s imaginary thread, as it is usually proclaimed thoughtlessly and irresponsibly by Athenian dance companies.”

• ⁽¹⁾ Nomos was the most important type of musical composition and interpretation in ancient Hellas. The Pythian or Pythic nomos, played on the homonymous aulos, was created by Sakadas and won him the first prize of auletic art in the Pythian Games in 586 BCE. Its purpose was to describe the battle between Apollo and Python. Thus, it has been the first known example of the so-called program music – the one describing a theme, in contrast with the absolute or abstract or pure music (see also Chronicle 16, footnote 9, and Chronicle 21, footnote 5, with the text above).

Simon Karás

As long as one is preoccupied with “antiquarianism”, that is, as long as he is just a… carrier of the “virus”, there is no big problem. What happens, however, if he becomes symptomatic and possessed by “ancestor worship”? The result is more than obvious in the above citation from a record with Songs of the Peloponnese, issued by the Society for the Dissemination of National Music – a text written by Simon Karás himself, despite his contribution on this domain that has certainly been immense and invaluable.

Such were the fantasies put forward in all seriousness from both sides, as if it mattered much whether the Tsakonian dance reminds us of a Pythic nomos, or if, on the contrary, it reenacts, faithfully or not, the escape from the Labyrinth, when we know that the… Minotaur is anything but dead, and Karás pointed his finger at him immediately afterwards:

“In the once resounding with musical instruments Peloponnese”, he complained, “we have a problem if we try to find musical instruments worthy of their names. Much labour and effort was needed on our part in order to find a clarino [folk clarinet], a violin, or a laouto [folk lute] in entire prefectures, and on many occasions to transport musicians many kilometres away so that they could match with others and form a company.”

Qanun (psaltery)

This “Pythic nomos” mentality made Karás claim that almost all folk instruments played today, or allegedly used in the past, in Greece are Hellenic in origin. In a similar text on a record with Songs of Constantinople and the Sea of Marmara, he wrote:

“The psaltery qanun together with the ancient Greek and Byzantine thambura [the tambur], thanks to the former’s many latches [or mandals] and the latter’s many tied frets, were the instruments used in teaching the theory of musical modes (echoe) and intervals in the past.”

The term psaltery was general in ancient Hellas and not related to the religious Byzantine psalms, as it referred to all string instruments that were played directly with the fingers without a plectrum. This category included, among others, the nabla, simicium and trígonon (harp). They were multi-string instruments as a rule, some of them not “psalteries”, played with a plectrum. The most impressive of the latter was most probably the sambuca (sambycē), more than one metre high and looking like a homonymous siege engine.

Harpist (Trígonon player) of Keros

In any case, it seems that the numerous instruments of this family, especially the ones with many strings, did not differ much – at least for the non-connoisseurs who naturally confused them. Some of them were played upright evolving into the harp, while others were placed horizontally and ended up as the qanun and santur. These instruments were known and in use in Greece before it became… Greece, i.e. since the (pre-Hellenic) early Bronze Age of the 3rd millennium BCE. The best example is the Harpist (Trígonon player) of Keros, a beautiful Cycladic figurine dating back to 2800-2300 BCE. The Cycladic islanders were very fond of the trígonon, as more such figurines of harpists have been recovered.

Despite the long history of these instruments in Greece, Plato, as well as other philosophers, criticized them as unmanly, while Aristotle‘s student, Aristoxenus of Tarentum, the so-called Musician, (a most important figure in ancient Hellas in the area of music theory, one of the pioneers of musicology as we would now say), described them as ἔκφυλα, that is alien – in the word’s literal sense and not the metaphorical that’s been left to the modern Greeks (i.e. degenerate).

What’s interesting here, οf course, is not a moral evaluation but the origin of the instruments. There is enough evidence, albeit unclear, that seems to point to an Asian or Thracian origin (what Strabo has said). Much more convincing are the archeological finds with a plethora of depicted harpists excavated in the Near East – mainly in Egypt and Mesopotamia. The Harpist of Keros is unique, but only as an exquisite work of visual art.

The name of a similar instrument called phoenix, originating most probably in Phoenicia, points to the same direction. But the mentality peculiar to a good number of modern Greeks was also widespread in ancient Hellas. So, the Delian historian Semus, having in mind the well-known saying and established notion “there’s no place like home”, claimed that the phoenix was thus named because its arms were constructed of Delian “phoenix” (palm tree in Greek). What we get, indeed, out of this claim is that in his time Delos was not only inhabited and not barren as it is today, but it was covered instead with vegetation – or, at least, there were several palm trees!

Epigonion

Based on this “logic”, it was argued that the epigónion, another multi-string instrument, was named after its inventor, Epigonus of Ambracia, a musician of the 6th century BCE. It took an expert on musicology such as Curt Sachs to bring forth the apparent etymology of the word (ἐπὶ = on + γόνυ = knee), describing the way a musician placed the instrument on his/her knee(s).

Qanun, on the other hand, was the name of the monochord, an instrument with just one string, used mostly by music theorists to determine the mathematical relations of sounds (from κανών = rule in Greek). It was called Pythagorean qanun, because its invention was attributed to Pythagoras. The great Samian philosopher, mathematician and music theorist of the 6th century BCE, however, before going to the Occident to set up his school in Crotone, Magna Graecia, had travelled around a lot in the Orient and became familiar with the Egyptian and Assyro–Babylonian achievements in every domain.

Pollux, who instructed us about the origin of the tríchordon (pandura), wrote about the monochord that this simple instrument was invented by Arabs. On his part, Nicomachus of Gerasa, a Pythagorean mathematician and music theorist of the 2nd century CE, said that the monochord was very often called phánduros, i.e. pandura. In this way we have come full circle back to the tríchordon, the ancestor of the thambura, tanbur, and the rest of the long-necked lutes we have already seen (in Chronicle 9. The Celebrated Tríchordon).

Sailor playing laouto

“The santur, a multi-string pectis, is structured on tempered semitones”, Karas goes on… bombarding us while he presents the instruments accompanying the Songs of Constantinople and the Sea of Marmara. “The oud, a fretless medieval guitar, with its tuning based on the ‘sýstēma ametábolon’ of antiquity (a tone and three or four synēmména tetrachords), shows its Hellenic origin. The laouto, an ancient Grecian and Byzantine mágadis (its double strings conform to ‘diapason’), is tuned in fifths.”

The fact that the (“100-string”)⁽²⁾ santur is performed with tempered intervals in Hellas, as in the rest of Europe – i.e. with “alien” and artificial intervals that meet the requirements of European polyphony and not of Greek “national music” – would be expected to at least frustrate Karás. But he just passed by… Note that in the instrument’s cradle, Iran, the santur is tuned according to the intervals of the relative modes the musician is going to perform.

• ⁽²⁾ The san-tur (cent, hundred, and tar, string): supposedly a 100-string instrument – although the classical Persian santur has “only” 72 strings.

Santur

The pectís and mágadis, which Karás identified with the santur and the laouto respectively, were two similar multi-string psalteries of Lydian or Thracian origin. If we trust Aristoxenus, “they were one and the same instrument”. The Lesbian Sappho (around 630-570 BCE) was said to be the first musician to use the pectís. Living in the 4th century BCE, in the same culture that had brought forth these instruments, Aristoxenus had not only reliable information but also a “legitimate right” to identify these instruments. Where did Karás of the 20th century CE find this right (in his effort to defend the so-called Hellenic “national interest”)?

For the same reasons – i.e. in order to demonstrate the “unbroken continuity” between ancient and modern Greece – he identified the oud with the medieval guitar. The Asian (Assyrian) cithara (kithara) is already familiar to us, as well as its genealogical tree (see Chronicle 7). The sad truth is that, in the sense that Karás wished for, neither the cithara (guitar), nor the oud or laouto were Hellenic. In fact, the last two, etymologically and organologically, come from the Arabic oud (al oud > laúd) – which in turn also originates in Persia.⁽³⁾

• ⁽³⁾ The most typical instrument of the Arabs, the oud, originates in Persia, where it is called barbat or barbud. The same is likely true of the most typical instrument of the Indians, the sitar (see last footnote in Chronicle 7). And as it turns out, the world’s first bowed string instrument also appeared in Iran c. 10th century CE. In addition, Persian classical music is, to me, the superb of its kind in the Orient. I once remarked in jest: “Iranians are the only ones who can look in the eye Ludwig” (van Beethoven)!

Claiming that this instrument had a Greek character (and thus denying that this character was Arabo-Persian), Karás invoked its “tuning based on the ‘sýstēma ametábolon’ [with] synēmména tetrachords” –⁽⁴⁾ i.e. presenting the reader with something impressively grandiose and sufficiently incomprehensible! Personally, I think that these systems confuse, rather than enlighten, the average music lovers. Therefore, I suggest that we pass them by. But the same does not apply to diapasōn.

• ⁽⁴⁾ The tetrachords of the sýstēma téleion ametábolon can be either synēmmena (attached) or diezeugmena (“divorced”, detached).

Mágadis-pectís

The mágadis, as well as other multi-string instruments, had its strings in double courses tuned in octaves (e.g. D-d) that the ancients called “διὰ πασῶν” (dià pasōn). The verb “μαγαδίζειν” (to perform mágadis style) denoted a technique of producing a melody in octaves. This is how the Arabs play the qanun nowadays. According to several writers, the term mágadis (which also defined a kind of aulos) came from the word magás, meaning the “bridge” of a string instrument. However, the historian Duris attributed it to a Thracian musician called Magdis.

The ancient Hellenic musical term diapasōn is just one of those the Westerners adopted to give prestige and develop their music. Once the most delightful daughter of the Muses, the Greek Μουσική, became… cosmopolitan, passing to so many languages of the world, it was natural that she would be accompanied by her terminology – but with the original meaning of the terms altered more or less. A well-known “victim” of this adoption is ἁρμονία (harmony). Consulting a musical dictionary you are about to read:

“Harmony: two or more notes sounding together;⁽⁵⁾ the vertical dimension of music. It appears around the 9th century CE, when we have the first polyphonic compositions. Until then music is monophonic, that is, based on a melody with no harmony at all…”!

• ⁽⁵⁾ It should have been “three or more notes”, because if only two notes sound together, there’s “no [Occidental] harmony at all”! The human beings e.g. have always sung “mágadis style”, in octaves, because men’s voices sound in a lower register than those of women and children. Even if it is monophony, it’s still “two notes sounding together” (heterophony). The same happens if we add a drone or ison to the main melody. Note that the traditional polyphony worldwide is much more ancient than the erudite West European.

Dance of the Muses on Mount Helicon to Apollo’s accompaniment, by Bertel Thorvaldsen (1807)

How come, you wonder, that the ancient Hellenes invented a term for something they did not have?(!) Searching for some answer, you conclude that harmony for them was any of the various arrangements of notes within an octave, in a system where its parts were connected in such a way as to form a perfect whole (hence harmony) – i.e. it was the mode, echos, “route”, maqam, dastgāh, raga. Therefore, harmony in modal music is not about notes sounding together, but refers to the relationship of any note with those that have preceded and the others that follow, in a system structured dynamically and horizontally, rather than statically and vertically.

Harmony: any arrangement of notes of an octave; the relationship
of any note with those that preceded and the others that follow.
Polyphony appears whenever there is no space for microtones.

Women musicians, Al-Andalus (Andalusia)

Not even polyphony originated in the Occident. We have seen that polyphony is not only one. Just think of how many kinds of polyphony are still practiced in the area centered on the Balkans, e.g. in Epirus or Albania, in Thrace (of Greece, Bulgaria, or Turkey), on the Caucasus (the area around Georgia), or in Corsica and Sardinia, and many other places. Polyphony appears whenever there is no space for microtones. It’s inconceivable in Anatolian music due to the diversity of its intervals, but natural in Epirotic music, and any other based on the pentatonic – the most ancient of the scales, with five degrees (instead of seven) and whole tones without semitones.

Diapasōn, as a term, is related to harmony and derives from the phrase “ἡ διὰ πασῶν τῶν χορδῶν συμφωνία” (the concord through all the notes). Thus, it was the eighth, “ἡ καλλίστη συμφωνία” (the best concord), according to Aristoxenus. Later on, the term diapasōn replaced that of harmony. For the Byzantines it was “ἡ διαοκτὼ ἤ δι’ ὀγδόης ἁρμονία” (the harmony through the octave). Diapasōn nowadays is also a tuning fork, or any standard pitch used for tuning. A full, rich outpouring of harmonious sound is another, more general, meaning.

Nevertheless, it’s true that not even the concept of music remained unchanged – indeed, this development took place in ancient times. In the 5th century BCE, the term music appeared for the first time in Pindar’s Olympian Victory Odes and Hymns, and later in Herodotus’ and Thucydides’ Histories. For a long time this term denoted the combined spiritual and mental performance especially in art and literature. As Plato says in the Republic, the body needs exercise while the soul requires music. A “narrower” definition of the term was lyric poetry, that is, poetry with music, melos (melody). Besides, at that time poetry without music was unthinkable, inconceivable.

Women musicians, Egypt

The two arts became independent in the 4th century BCE. It was then that the two terms acquired their current meanings. Previously, poetry denoted creation, construction (ποιεῖν = to create, to make). With the special meaning of artistic creation, it was first used by Simonides of Ceos (6th – 5th century); a poet was thought to be a composer of music. The word music was perhaps invented by Lasus of Hermione (6th century), one of the first artists that combined qualities of a musician and a musicologist, dealing with both the art and science of music.

As for the perception of music, there were two schools: the Pythagorean and the Aristoxenian. Pythagoras disapproved of the appraisal of music through the senses (hearing). The virtue of this art, he used to say, is that we can perceive it through the intellect (mind). Aristoxenus, on his part, supported a dual scientific principle: on the one hand, he based himself on the sense of hearing to perceive and appraise the pitch, intervals, etc.; and on the other hand, he relied on the intellect in order to distinguish the mechanisms of sounds.

Cümbüş

After all these “digressions” (which were, in part, the… purpose of this Chronicle), let’s see some of the instruments that Karás rejected outright. Surprisingly, he turned against the cümbüş, or “djimbisi”, as he “Hellenized” it,⁽⁶⁾ describing it as a “mixobarbarian [i.e. half-barbarian] combination of an Occidental banjo, laouto and oud”, and complaining because “it’s been replacing the oud (the medieval, ancient-style guitar)”… Yet, the single Occidental feature on the cümbüş is its soundboard (the metallic soundboard of the banjo). But why should we bother about how the sound of an instrument is amplified? Its basic part is the “neck” and the intervals produced by the fingerboard – and the cümbüş is normally fretless: that is, even subtle variations in pitch are possible, as if we play an oud, or a violin. So, why such fury?

• ⁽⁶⁾ The word cümbüş, according to some (far-fetched) claims, comes from the word symposium!

Not to mention the way Karás filled up the table of contents on a record with Songs of Thasos, Lemnos and Samothrace, renaming the (distasteful to him) bouzouki as… tambourás. Ironically, the producers of a disc with Cretan songs have done exactly the opposite for commercial reasons, renaming Stelios Foustalieris’ tambourás, his bulgarí, as… bouzouki! Why this masquerade? Can we safeguard any “Greekness” with such… “transvestite” disguises?

Since the cümbüş, according to Karás, is “mixobarbarian” (half-barbarian), I can’t help but remember that in ancient Hellas, only one out of the four basic modes, or “harmonies”, was Greek in origin: it was the Dorian. Two of them, the Lydian and the Phrygian, were “barbarian” by birth (originating in Lydia and Phrygia), while the fourth was… “mixobarbarian”: the Mixolydian – a creation, according to Aristoxenus, of Sappho, from whom the tragedians received it, as the pathos of this harmony was appropriate to their plays. As Plutarch commented: “the mixolydian is pathetic, in harmony with the tragedies”.

In Hellas only one out of the four basic modes was Greek in origin: the Dorian. The Lydian and Phrygian were “barbarian” by birth, while the
fourth was… “mixobarbarian” (half-barbarian): it was the Mixolydian.

Psaltery

Anyway, all the above are “details” when speaking of Karás, whom I was lucky to enjoy at work during the third and (unfortunately) last musicological symposium at Delphi in 1988. I assure you, he was an excellent teacher; a real master, not at all… yalancı (fake), like those of “tambourás”, who might have been his students (see Chronicle 9). That’s why I insist on my criticism, targeting them rather than him. Indeed, he’s been a “nestor” in the field of the Greek traditional music – which, however, has never been “national”, as he declared in the title of his society (and I don’t think he meant… ethnic music!). So, let’s have a look in brief at the relationship between music and nation.

Music and Nation

MUSIC IS AS OLD AS WE ARE: it’s innate in humans. The birth of nations, on the other hand, is a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of mankind. Their purpose is not to satisfy some human needs, as music does, but rather to serve economic and political aims. Of course, I refer to nation states and not to ethnicities that are something different, derived since ancient times from various clans and tribes. Thus: there are no national characteristics in music. In essence, there is no Greek, Bulgarian, Turkish etc. music. Using national attributes, we simply mean that a piece has e.g. Hellenic lyrics, if it is a song, or that its composer is Greek. In fact, far too many “Hellenic” songs have actually nothing to do with local traditional music (they can be described as rock, tango, mambo, pop, etc.), no matter if they have Greek lyrics or composers.

There’s no national music. Folk music is ethnic, not national.
Erudite music is multinational (but never international).

Indian itinerary musician, by Shagufta Mehdi

Folk music is born as an idiom in areas smaller than the present nation states, under conditions of agricultural natural economy – regions which are generally divided now among neighbouring nation states (Thrace is divided into three). The pace of its development, or the inflow of foreign elements, is determined by the geography of each area. That’s how separate musical idioms are articulated. A “problem” arises due to the lack of racial “purity” in these places, as they are inhabited by people of various ethnicities, each one with its own peculiarities. All these special characteristics are gradually digested, forming a common idiom, though they keep their autonomy to a certain degree. And as we have seen (in Chronicle 6), the more the ethnicities, the richer the idiom. As a result, folk music is ethnic, not national.

Erudite music, on the other hand, has been a collective effort of élite musicians streaming into the metropolises of multinational empires. The involvement of artists from several ethnicities or nationalities, each with another background, makes this music multinational (or transnational, but never international). This also applies to the European classical music, though broadly speaking, national borders had been already drawn there before the period of its great acme. How can we define e.g. Händel’s music? Is it German or English? Or Beethoven’s? Is it German or Austrian? Or Chopin’s? Polish or French? Or when Bach transcribes Vivaldi? Is the transcription German or Italian music? Or even Kurt Weill’s music? Is it German, American, or… Jewish?

“National schools”, in addition, appear much later, employing ethnic sound colours, but also erudite music forms. Therefore, there is no national character even there. A good example is Modest Mussorgsky’s celebrated suite Pictures at an Exhibition, one of the masterpieces of Russian “national school”: the suite was orchestrated in an exemplary fashion by Maurice Ravel, one of the pioneers of French “national school”, and in this version it became a favourite all over the world. Moreover, the half-Basque Ravel, born in a town near Spain, composed many works based on Spanish “national school” – as did composers from other, even faraway, countries, as well, such as Russia, or the USA.

In the final analysis, why should we care about the alleged national character or origin of music, or even its instruments? Such thoughts distract our attention from the essence of the matter, which is music itself. After all, who can trace its evolution? Who indeed was the first human who noticed that a tense bowstring produces a sound? Or that the sound (pitch) changes depending on where he touches the string? Or that it is amplified if we use something hollow to function as a soundboard? Such findings came one after the other…

These discoveries are as old as man; which means they should have taken place in Africa, the alleged cradle of human race (see another approach in Chronicle 3). What does this mean? That music and its instruments are African-born? Not at all! It just means that in various periods of time, in several areas of the world, very similar instruments have emerged, based on the same natural laws.

In various times and spaces, very similar instruments
have emerged, based on the same natural laws.

All such “national” claims have ulterior motives, because music is also older than ownership, not only nations. Besides, things are very simple, provided that we’ve got rid of the blinders of “ancestor worship”, and common sense has prevailed:

Reconstructed silver lyre of Ur, Mesopotamia

“We say that a musical instrument belongs to the folk tradition of a country only when its people have sung with this instrument their aspirations and sorrows, especially in times-watersheds in their history,” writes Phoebus Anogeianakis with simplicity and clarity, cutting the… “Gordian Knot”, and bringing us down to earth from the nebulae of “antiquarianism”, while he gives us the key to go deeper into the subject.

“Musicology classifies an instrument as part of the folk tradition of a country based on this criterion. What we are mainly interested in is if this musical instrument has been loved and used widely by the people of this country, and also made by local craftsmen or by the local folk musicians themselves – no matter if this instrument has come from outside, from another country, nearby or distant.”

Hydraulis (Pipe Organ)

ONLY BASED ON THE ABOVE APPROACH, we can say that the lyre and cithara, or bárbitos and phorminx, were Grecian instruments. Because, in truth, all instruments used in ancient Hellas were imported from the Orient – except one: an instrument we know for sure that was invented by the Greeks, not in Classical times, but during the Hellenistic period and, moreover, outside Greece, in Alexandria, Egypt, the largest centre of Hellenism in the post-classical era. Ironically, this unique instrument with a Greek patent is not played in Hellas anymore and has since been glorified in the hands of some Westerners – prominently those of Johann Sebastian Bach…

All instruments in Hellas were from the Orient – except the hydraulis.

Hydraulis, Dion (1st century BCE)

This instrument was the hydraulis, the water organ, today’s pipe organ, in its embryonic form. It was invented by the Alexandrian engineer Ctesibius, in the 3rd century BCE. Some attribute the invention to his contemporary, Archimedes; his contribution though should have been indirect, through the achievements of his ingenious mind, as he was the most renowned figure in the realm of science in the ancient world. Quite rightly, these Greek scientists are thought of as the spiritual fathers of Leonardo da Vinci, and many other inventive minds of Europe from the Renaissance onwards.

Ctesibius apparently based himself on the Syracusan’s hydraulic inventions and applications, mainly on hydraulic clocks – a device that is also attributed to both. Along with hydraulics, Ctesibius studied pneumatics – the science dealing with pneuma, that is, the air, and its several applications.⁽⁷⁾ In fact, he is considered as the “pneumatic” (spiritual) father of this science, as he studied in depth an earlier observation: that invisible air, gas, is something material.

• ⁽⁷⁾ Hydraulics and pneumatics are sister sciences, dealing with liquids and gases respectively.

Let me say en passant that the rapid decline of the Greek language, due to the decline of Hellenism, in parallel with the imposition of Christianism, has brought about a decline also in the semantics of ancient terms such as pneuma (breath), where only connotations contrasting with matter (i.e. mind, intellect, spirit) have survived. The ancient spirit (pneuma), you see, was lost as soon as it turned into… “Holy Spirit” (Ghost)! Despite all the treatises on pneumatics by the Alexandrians, there is no such entry in Modern Greek dictionaries.⁽⁸⁾

• ⁽⁸⁾ Although Hellenic is the world’s oldest recorded living language, the original meaning of the word pneumatic (of or relating to air, breath) was lost in Modern Greek, except in the case of the pneumatic tools (using air pressure). Note that e.g. in Romance languages we can find the same word (Italian pneumatico, French and Portuguese pneu, Spanish neumático) meaning pneumatic tire. In Modern Greek, on the other hand, the relevant term inner tube is called sambrela, which is a loan from French (chambre à air). Thus, for the same thing more or less, some “barbarians” use a Hellenic word; the Greeks have a “barbarian” (French) loan instead!

A hydraulis excavated at Aquincum (modern Budapest) in 1931

Well, what pneumatics anyway? After all, no work of Ctesibius has survived. The opposite is true of a later engineer whose work is partly extant – although he remains similarly inconspicuous among the Hellenes. He was an Alexandrian, as well, called Hero(n), and most probably lived in the 1st century CE. Apart from his numerous wonderful inventions – his aeolipile or steam engine, a windwheel, and also gates that opened automatically – he perfected Ctesibius’ water organ based on the principles of pneumatics. But if the Modern Greeks hear his name by chance and wish to learn more about his work, they are obliged to consult foreign publications, since his treatises have never been published in Hellas…

The Alexandrian engineers could not go unnoticed in Rome or Constantinople that were great powers. Byzantine scientists admired mainly Hero’s “automata” and perfected them. There were several such mechanisms in the palaces (golden plane trees with singing birds, lions and other wild animals roaring while turning their necks, griffins flapping their wings, etc.) in order to impress foreign visitors.

The hydraulis was equally impressive; thus the musical instrument ended up as… diplomatic. In the 8th century, the Byzantine emperor Constantine V, the so-called… Copronymus,⁽⁹⁾ offered an organ to the Frankish king Pepin the… Short, and what followed is common knowledge more or less (the instrument is now known all over the world by the Greek term organ, meaning instrument among other things). We can see the potential impact of gifts exchanged between “blue bloods” on history, especially that of music. No matter if diplomacy has never promoted culture, politics has an impact on civilization – mostly negative now…

• ⁽⁹⁾ Copronymus, meaning dung-christened! Obviously, he was… “rewarded” with this epithet by ecclesiastical circles because he was an iconoclast. They said that he supposedly… stooled in the font when he was baptized! The usual Christian venom…

Church (pipe) organ

The Crusades

THIS IS OBVIOUS in the political history. Despite the gifts to the Europeans, the underlying Schism among Christians was formalized, the “Holy See” declared a “holy war” against all the “infidels” (under the sound of… pipe organs most probably!), and that’s how the Crusades began,⁽¹⁰⁾ leading to the first fall of Constantinople, as soon as the Orthodox Christians were included among the “infidels” – or else among the “heretics”, who are always… worse than the “infidels”! The control of the Orient necessitated the overthrow of “Romanía” (the Byzantine Empire), and the division of the booty between the crusaders.

• ⁽¹⁰⁾ How is it possible a ballyhooed “religion of love” to be plagued by an avalanche of schisms and (“holy” or “unholy”) wars? As usual, Christianism emerges as the champion in this field, as well, followed by the other monotheistic religions, Judaism and Islam.

● The Crusades, initiated by the popes, aimed at violently imposing Catholicism all over Europe and western Asia during the early 2nd millennium CE. (On the violent imposition of Christianism during the 1st millennium CE, see Chronicles 23-24: The Genocide of the Hellenes, and The Triumph of Cretinism). They were directed against either Muslims and Orthodox Christians in the Orient, or “pagans”, “heretics”, and “excommunicated” people in the Occident, for various politico-economic and/or religious reasons. Prominent among them were the Northern or Baltic, the Albigensian or Cathar, and the Aragonese Crusades, as well as the Iberian Reconquista. The Northern Crusades (13th century) were colonization campaigns of Christianization mainly against the pagan Baltic, Finnic and West Slavic peoples of the Baltic Sea, but also against Orthodox Christian East Slavs. The Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229) was a 20-year campaign to eliminate Catharism in southern France. The Cathars were a Christian sect thriving in Southern Europe between the 12th and 14th centuries. The Aragonese Crusade had no religious pretense whatsoever. It was undertaken in 1284-1285, because Aragon conquered Sicily, defying the “Holy See”. The Reconquista spanned 780 years, from the Arab conquest of Iberia in 711, to the fall of the last Muslim kingdom of Granada in 1492.

● There were far more “holy wars” declared by the “Holy See”: in the 13th century, pope Gregory IV declared war on… black cats, describing them as “instruments of Satan”! So, he ordered their extermination all over Europe. But the “Cat Crusade” backfired, as it resulted in an increase in the population of plague-carrying rats…

The Crusades (1096-1204): 1st (purple route), 2nd (green), 3rd (red) and 4th Crusade (orange): it started from Venice and ended in Constantinople, the ultimate goal of Venetians and Franks.

That crucial turning point was the beginning of the end, leaving its indelible stamp on the history of not only the Mediterranean, or even Europe, but also of the whole world, because since then everything changed. It was the end of the era that began in the Near East during the Neolithic period, with the birth of civilization, and the Mediterranean as the epicentre of historic developments. Mare nostrum was de facto marginalized. Its fortunes would since be governed by non-Mediterranean powers.

As is normal in their routine, the perpetrators made sure of their “absolution” through their propaganda that even their victims reproduce – perhaps because perpetrators and victims are now “allies”, “partners”. Whitewashing first became grotesque (with all those highly hypocritical… “crusades for peace”), and then macabre – as soon as bombs started falling in the first… “humanitarian war” in history, even without the United Nations’ consent!

Crusaders: “liberators” of Jerusalem, “conquerors” of Constantinople!
Whitewashing became grotesque (with all those “crusades for peace”),
then macabre – as bombs started falling in the first “humanitarian war”!

Let’s open our dictionaries again: the Crusaders were “medieval warriors who took part in the campaigns of Western Christians against people of another faith mainly for the liberation of the Holy Land”! And who from? Who else but the “infidels”, the Muslims. The lexicographers et al. don’t seem to bother at all that these lands are equally holy for Islam, or that the “infidels” are perhaps more religious than the Christians. Sincerely, I cannot comprehend how come that Greek historians portray the Crusaders as “liberators” of Jerusalem in 1099, and at the same time as “conquerors” of Constantinople in 1204.

The Capture of Constantinople in 1204, by Domenico Robusti Tintoretto

WE MAY HAVE DEVIATED FROM OUR PATH but essentially our subject was not so much the Thracian and Asian origin of all music, as the futility of antiquarianism or “ancestor worship” that are nothing but empty words. See, e.g., the hydraulis we were lucky to excavate at Dion:⁽¹¹⁾ It was initially announced that the instrument was polyphonic. Doesn’t this mean, too, that the music of late antiquity was polyphonic? Was there a thorough research in advance, or such a conclusion was reported lightheartedly? Was their aim to restore the instrument or to revamp it in the font of European polyphony?

• ⁽¹¹⁾ A tomb stele with a depiction of nabla was also found at Dion.

A diaulos player in a symposium, by Euaion painter

Can we possibly assume that those ancient musicians we see so often depicted with diaulos (double aulos) played in… thirds?⁽¹²⁾ Or that perhaps the multi-reed syrinx (Pan pipe) is another polyphonic instrument? I cannot conceive of the hydraulis as being suitable for… Bach’s Toccata and Fugue, the same way as a performance of modal music pieces on the pipe organ is equally impossible. Each instrument is made based on the specifications of the music genre which is prescribed for.

• ⁽¹²⁾ The now dominant two-note consonance, the third, was considered as dissonance and also a cacophony by ancient Hellenes and Byzantines alike.

“Big deal”, is the cynics’ answer. There are some… Jurassic Park enthusiasts who wish to make up for the water organ’s lost time, mastering the repertoire of the pipe organ, and also composing new music especially for the hydraulis. And we applaud and give the… cloners a big “hurrah”!

Music according to Strabo

Bronze head of Orpheus (460 BCE)

Ἀπὸ δὲ τοῦ μέλους καὶ τοῦ ῥυθμοῦ καὶ
τῶν οργάνων, καὶ ἡ μουσικὴ πᾶσα Θρᾳκία
καὶ Ἀσιᾶτις νενόμισται δῆλον δὲ ἔκ τε τῶν τόπων, ἐν οἷς αἱ Μοῦσαι τετίμηνται…

From its melody and rhythm and instruments, all music has been considered to be Thracian and Asian. And this is clear, first, from the places where the Muses have been worshipped, for Pieria and Olympus and Pimpleia and Leibethra were in ancient times Thracian places and mountains,⁽¹³⁾ though they are now held by the Macedonians; and again, Helicon was consecrated to the Muses by the Thracians who settled in Boeotia, the same who consecrated the cave of the nymphs called Leibethrides. And again, those who devoted their attention to the music of early times are called Thracians; I mean Orpheus, and Musaeus, and Thamyris; and Eumolpus, too, got his name from there. And those writers who have consecrated the whole of Asia, as far as India, to Dionysus,⁽¹⁴⁾ derive the greater part of music from there. And one writer says, “striking the Asiatic cithara”; another calls the aulos as “Berecyntian” and “Phrygian”;⁽¹⁵⁾ and some of the instruments have been called by barbarian names, “nabla” [nevel], “sambycē” [sambuca], “bárbitos”, “mágadis”, and several others…

• ⁽¹³⁾ Pimpleia was a small town nearby Dion. It was famous in antiquity as Orpheus’ place of birth. Others insisted the great musician was born and buried by the Muses in the adjacent Leibethra. His tomb, where birds used to sing, was later destroyed by a flood. Still others say that Orpheus lived in Leibethra only temporarily.

• ⁽¹⁴⁾ See e.g. the Dionysiaca (5th century CE), Nonnus’ Hellenic epic poem in 48 books, the longest surviving poem from Graeco-Roman antiquity. In Homeric dialect and dactylic hexameters, its main subject is the life of Dionysus, his expedition to India and his triumphant return.

• ⁽¹⁵⁾ Berecyntian, from Berecyntus, a mountain on the banks of the Sangarius river, in Phrygia, that was sacred to (Berecyntian) Cybele.

• >> Chronicle 12. “DO NOT MALTREAT OUR MUSIC!”
• << Chronicle 10. THE… “SUN LANGUAGE”

Next Chronicle 12. “DO NOT MALTREAT OUR MUSIC!” ● “Golden Age” and “Decline” ● Modernists and Conservatives ● Script and Notation ● Musical Accent ● Odeon and Conservatory ● Folklore ● Collective and Individual Creation ● Democracy and Art

GIORGOS ANDREOU sobre “PERIPLUS”

GIORGOS ANDREOU sobre “PERIPLUS”

Amélia Muge | Michales Loukovikas

/ENGLISH/ GIORGOS ANDREOU on “PERIPLUS”
/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Ο ΓΙΩΡΓΟΣ ΑΝΔΡΕΟΥ για τον “ΠΕΡΙΠΛΟΥ”

Giorgos Andreou, um importante compositor e pianista grego

O que torna “Periplus” particularmente interessante é o facto de não ser um registo de música tradicional, seja de Portugal ou da Grécia. Quer dizer, não é um álbum que tenta simplemente agregar, de algum modo, uma parte da tradição e a sua sonoridade. Em qualquer caso, isso seria mais uma questão de folclore e não de criação. É claro que faz uso de elementos de ambas as tradições em quantidade considerável.

Mas o característico do “Periplus” é o seu dinamismo emanado destes dois cantoautores, Amélia Muge e Michales Loukovikas, que compuseram música original e trabalharam a sua matéria musical usando vários recursos na linguagem poética da canção: versos de poetas quer gregos quer portugueses, versos da antiga literatura helénica, ou da sua própria linguagem moderna, ou ainda, em menor grau, algumas canções populares de cada tradição, portuguesa ou grega, sem grandes alterações, onde, é claro, o objectivo é demonstrar as analogias que existem nesta grande bacia chamada Mediterrâneo.

Nesta grande bacia chamada Mediterrâneo, o grande viajante – infelizmente para os portugueses e para o resto dos povos do planeta – foi um grego antigo (mas também moderno no meu ponto de vista) chamado Odisseu (Ulisses). Neste caso, Odisseu é um arquétipo universal. Fundou, entre outras coisas, Lisboa, como o embaixador de Portugal acabou de dizer. Assim, ele até foi capaz de realizar este feito, para lá do seu envolvimento com os Lestrigões, os Ciclopes, Circe, Nausícaa, etc.

Ludwig van Beethoven de Francesco Jerace (1895)

Contudo, o que é importante quer na tradição portuguesa quer na grega – e gostaria de o dizer muito seriamente – é o facto de ela ter emergido como música popular urbana precisamente porque não houve como antecendente um profundo desenvolvimento de uma música clássica, “académica”. É claro que há importantes compositores de música académica na Grécia; é claro que os há em Portugal; mas nem a Grécia nem Portugal têm Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Vivaldi, Corelli, Scarlatti, Bellini, Puccini, etc. Constatou-se que onde, por várias razões históricas e culturais, não houve um desenvolvimento da linguagem académica musical, o que chamamos música clássica, há espaço para uma maior energética memória da tradição e ainda mais espaço para o desenvolvimento e apropriação desta tradição na sua transição para um meio urbano. É assim o fado, o rebétiko e é assim o blues, o tango… E todo o tipo de música que agora consideramos como emanação da tradição, e que é essencialmente popular, cresceu sobretudo num ambiente onde o peso da grande música sinfónica académica era inexistente.

Guitarra portuguesa, o instrumento preponderante do fado, acompanhado por uma espécie de guitarra espanhola, a que os portugueses chamam de “viola”…

Existem, é claro, grandes diferenças entre o fado e o rebétiko, como também um grande número de analogias. As analogias são exactamente as implícitas pelo ambiente geográfico e cultural que mencionei anteriormente, denominado Mediterrâneo, que determina uma atitude face á vida, uma postura existencial, á gente de culturas vivendo à volta dele. E o que é isso? É, no meu ponto de vista, a possibilidade de valorizar e dar uma grande importância à dôr individual.

Bouzouki: um instrumento com nome turco, que os turcos não tocam; apenas os gregos, os libaneses e ainda os irlandeses!

Se concordamos, como os nossos amigos portugueses, que existe na nossa música algo que nos liga, isso está na forma como lidamos com o âmago emocional da música; quer nas palavras – a aventura individual, existencial, de cada um – quer na música. Quer dizer a nossa faculdade musical, isto é, a nossa forma de entender o que é a canção. Porque falamos do fado como uma canção, falamos da nossa música de tradição popular como uma canção. E a canção necessita de um herói e de um companheiro do herói. O herói é o cantor e o companheiro, o instrumento que o acompanha. A guitarra portuguesa, no caso de Portugal, o bouzouki no nosso caso, têm este papel. É um duo, um duo de silêncio, um duo longe das grandes formas sinfónicas ‘fechadas’, um duo convincente, um duo de profunda e comovente emoção.

Eu gosto do “Periplus” porque é o esforço, a atenção, o testemunho dinâmico de dois autores, um português outro grego, que compõem originais, tendo em conta ao mesmo tempo de onde vêm e para onde vão. Para mim isto é a quintessência da criação, de toda a criação musical: respeitar as origens, de onde se vem, e ao mesmo tempo ser-se capaz de entrar em diálogo com elas e redefini-las. Porque uma tradição que não é redefinida e que não progride, morre e transforma-se numa mera atitude passadista e pitoresca.

Epitáfio de Seikilos (depois de 200 AC), a composição completa mais antiga do mundo (incluída no “Periplus”)

Outra coisa que me impressionou no trabalho da Amélia e do Michales: a existencia de alguns títulos, algumas sequências. O carácter destas sequências não é tanto investigativo, musicológico ou classificativo, mas antes emotivo e artístico. Sinto-me compelido a mencioná-las porque elas mesmas fazem nascer pensamentos e sentimentos. A primeira é “Das Ausências” e a segunda “Dos Caminhos”. É de notar que para nós, gregos, o sentido de “caminho” aplica-se também ás escalas musicais populares.

A terceira sequencia é “Dos Cantos”. A palavra “canto” em grego (tragoudi) deriva da antiga tragédia helénica; é melos, que é melodia; é a selecção de uma parte de um todo maior, mas uma parte de grande importância emotiva, ética, conceptual e musical. Segue-se “Das Ilhas”. A ilha transporta um especial simbolismo. É uma parte de terra rodeada por uma parte do mar. É uma parte da razão rodeada pelo mar do subconsciente.

Depois temos “Das Vozes”. A voz, como disse anteriormente, é o instrumento da canção. Não é por acaso que nesta sequência estão canções com antigos textos gregos, poesia grega antiga, em conjunto com alguns elementos tradicionais. Temos, portanto, tradições que se relacionam. Depois vem a sequencia “Dos Embalos”. Uma canção de embalar é o que dedicamos ao pilar que se segue na existência humana quando alguém não lembra nem sente, o sono-morte. Há muita literatura e discursos filosóficos na civilização helénica antiga sobre a conexão entre o sono e a morte.

A sequencia que se segue é “Dos Amores” com a variação de uma nossa deslumbrante canção tradicional “A folha da rosa” que foi encontrada também na música portuguesa numa similar, quase idêntica forma e atitude emotiva. A sequencia seguinte “De Profundis”, é, evidentemente, uma confissão em matéria de existencia, amor, emoção. O excelente “Os meus ditames” está aqui incluído, com versos de Ares Alexandrou e música de Michales Loukovikas, do seu trabalho prévio, “O Ouro do Céu”, dedicado ao grande pensador, poeta e autor grego.

Panaiotes (Panos) Tountas

 
Segue-se “Das Tascas e Tavernas”, com a supra-citada similitude na atitude dos povos de ambas as culturas. Evidentemente, que, uma vez que estamos a falar da relação da tradição com a criação pessoal, a canção que Michales e Amélia escolheram, “Os mangas da taverna”, não é de um grego desconhecido, mas do grande compositor Panaiotes Tountas. Tountas, um dos mais eruditos e importantes compositores de canções populares, tendo estudado música, foi, durante seu período esmirnaico, quase um músico académico e, ao mesmo tempo, popular.

Eleni Tsaligopoulou

Finalmente, há a sequência “Tão longe tão perto”, um registo poético de semelhanças e diferenças, com o momento alto e, quanto a mim, o ponto mais alto do CD, na paralela interpretação da mesma canção com Eleni Tsaligopoulou em grego e Amélia Muge em português. É, emocionalmente, um momento muito importante, eu considero-o um climax; na verdade fiquei sem fala. O CD acaba com a canção que se justifica ter alguma subjectividade por parte da Amélia, uma canção dedicada a uma prévia importante presença, a de Violeta Parra, de quem uma composição foi de algum modo referência e fonte de inspiração para a Amélia.

Gostava de concluir dizendo que há composições muito importantes em “Periplus”, quer de Amélia Muge quer de Michales Loukovikas, e este é para mim, o mérito do CD. Para lá das conexões, para lá das analogias entre culturas, para lá da intenção de mostrar, demonstrar de novo e redefinir fronteiras e contactos de muitos géneros, o que é importante, para mim, é se se consegue produzir uma obra de arte. Quando, em qualquer situação, é produzida uma obra de arte, todas as intenções prévias se justificam. Se não houver obra de arte, tudo o resto são apenas slogans que não se concretizaram.

Muito bem, meus amigos, e continuem!

Discurso durante a apresentação do “Periplus” na
livraria “Jano” em Atenas a 23 de Outubro de 2012

● Ver também MARIA DO ROSÁRIO PESTANA sobre “PERIPLUS”

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: Eleni Tsaligopoulou, cantora: lengalengas, risos, coros, voz. | Hélia Correia, escritora: 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.

Comentários sobre o “PERIPLUS” na imprensa

Comentários sobre o “PERIPLUS” na imprensa

/ENGLISH/ Critical remarks on “PERIPLUS” in the Press
/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Σχόλια για τον “ΠΕΡΙΠΛΟΥ” στον πορτογαλικό Τύπο

 

A GRÉCIA JÁ CÁ CANTA

Nuno Pacheco, “Público” – 20 Fevereiro 2012

Amélia e Michales completaram a primeira viagem intermusical da era moderna entre Portugal e a Grécia, fazendo o que até aqui ninguém tinha feito: estreitando laços, entrelaçando notas (as musicais, que as outras rareiam), compondo novos itinerários a partir de antigas rotas…
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CIRCUM-NAVEGAÇÃO ÀS RAÍZES DO FUTURO

Maria Ramos Silva, “i” – 21 Fevereiro 2012

Um entendimento inato em afinidades musicais, generosidade e contagiante sentido de humor. Amélia e Michales, um Portugal-Grécia na liderança do campeonato das pontes entre os povos…

Um caldeirão de sons onde se cozinham afinidades culturais além-fronteiras da crise…
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EPOPEIA LUSO-GREGA

Nuno Pacheco, “Público/Ípsilon” – 24 Fevereiro 2012

Amélia Muge fez com Michales Loukovikas o disco que ainda ninguém tinha feito. Une Portugal e a Grécia, Ocidente e Oriente, passado e futuro…

Amélia Muge e Michales Loukovikas, num tempo em que a crise varre Portugal e a Grécia, põem em “Periplus” a força das antigas epopeias, propondo uma viagem musical luso-grega que abarca, na mesma aventura, outras culturas vizinhas, da Ásia à África…

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“Periplus”, uma ideia cara a Amélia Muge, era desde o início uma aposta arriscada. Unir culturas do Mediterrâneo às vizinhas do Atlântico e do Índico, misturando Ocidente e Oriente sem cair em “pastiches” multiculturais de duvidoso gosto, exigia uma enorme dose de dedicação, empenho e sabedoria. A pedra de toque encontrou-a Amélia na ligação entre Portugal e a Grécia, ao trabalhar com Michales Loukovikas (excelente descoberta) e dividir com ele e mais um lote de músicos de grande talento, portugueses e gregos, tal aventura. O resultado é um diamante polido até quase à perfeição…

Isto numa abordagem contemporânea onde as linhas melódicas e rítmicas dos dois países se aproximam, interligam e desafiam de forma natural e fluída, como se sempre tivessem sido vizinhas e conversado assim…
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SOMOS TODOS GREGOS

João Lisboa, “Expresso/Atual” – 25 Fevereiro 2012

Uma cimeira de poetas e músicos portugueses e gregos, presidida por Amélia Muge e Michales Loukovikas, para confirmar a ideia de que muito daquilo que somos também existe do outro lado…

Mediterrâneo, portanto. Que teve como porto de partida para a sua exploração o interesse pela obra do poeta grego Ares Alexandrou… e se prolongou através de uma busca intuitiva de pontos de contacto e traços de identidade comuns que… basta descobrir…
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PORTUGAL E GRÉCIA UNIDOS POR UMA NOITE EM LISBOA

João Moço, “Diário de Notícias” – 25 Fevereiro 2012

“Periplus”… muito mais do que um mero conjunto de canções, é uma viagem musical pelas tradições portuguesas e gregas, evocando-se também as antigas epopeias enquanto se olha para o futuro…

Este encontro musical entre Portugal e Grécia ganha também um redobrado simbolismo numa altura em que ambos os países enfrentam intensos problemas sociais…
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DÉDALOS E OUTRAS CONTAS

Nuno Rogeiro, “Sábado” – 1 Março 2012

Sigo com interesse, há décadas, o caminho singular de Amélia Muge, entre a tradição mítica e os temas “sociais”. Mas “Periplus, deambulações luso-gregas” é ainda mais belo. Músicos e instrumentos de cá, e da península arquipelágica helénica, a Odisseia em sons, o Mediterrâneo real e imaginário, o Ocidente onde Portugal repousa, sonha e sofre, com duas grandes baladas: “Pesado como ferro” e “Zum Zum”.
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AMÉLIA MUGE + MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

João Miguel Tavares, “Time Out” – 21 Março 2012

… Há uma imensa ironia no facto de “Periplus”, que tem como subtítulo “deambulações luso-gregas”, celebrar essa espécie de cordão umbilical mediterrânico que une a Grécia a Portugal pelo menos desde o mito da fundação de Lisboa, atribuída a Ulisses. Irmãos na falência económica, eis que os dois países se unem aqui para celebrar a sua riqueza cultural ao abrigo de qualquer austeridade – os discos de Amélia Muge são uma luxuosa filigrana de sons, instrumentos e versos, e “Periplus” não foge à regra.

Mais do que isso: são sempre tudo menos óbvios. Se ela aqui se une ao músico e compositor grego Michales Loukovikas, não é para criar um europudim, com guitarra braguesa e bouzouki. Sim, há uma guitarra braguesa, e sim, há bouzouki, tal como há traços de rebétiko e de fado, há versos de Pessoa e hinos délficos. Mas nada é abordado de uma forma convencional – bem pelo contrário, cada faixa é um acumular de surpresas, seja em “Deixa Brilhar”,^(*) onde Hélia Correia canta (sim, canta) em grego, seja por exemplo, em “Da folhinha de uma Rosa”, um tema magnífico que resume na perfeição a forma como é possível fazer um patchwork luso-galaico-grego sem deixar uma única costura à mostra…

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^(*) É o “Epitáfio” composto por Seikilos, algures depois do 2º século AC; um epigrama gravado numa pedra tumular cilíndrica contendo o texto e a música (nos símbolos da antiga notação grega): temos portanto uma canção, a canção completa mais antiga que existe. A pedra tumular foi encontrada em Aydin, a antiga Trales, na Ásia Menor, perto de Éfeso. O nosso título decorre da primeira frase (segundo adaptação de Hélia Correia): Ó mortal, deixa brilhar…

Quando um dia nos encontrámos com a Hélia, dissémos-lhe, entre outras coisas, que o “Epitáfio” iria ser incluído no “Periplus”. Para nossa grande surpresa, ela não só conhecia a composição de Seikilos (coisa que grande parte dos gregos ignora), como começou imediatamente a cantá-la em grego antigo! Quem melhor do que ela poderia cantá-la no disco? E assim surgiu o convite…

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Critical remarks on “PERIPLUS” in the Press

Critical remarks on “PERIPLUS” in the Press

/PORTUGUÊS/ Comentários sobre o “PERIPLUS” na imprensa
/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Σχόλια για τον “ΠΕΡΙΠΛΟΥ” στον πορτογαλικό Τύπο

 

GREECE IS HERE TO SING

Nuno Pacheco, “Público” – February 20, 2012

Amélia and Michales have completed the first intermusical voyage of the modern era between Portugal and Greece, doing what no-one else has done until now: strengthening links, interconnecting notes (the musical ones, because the others are rare), creating new itineraries with ancient routes as starting points…
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CIRCUM-NAVIGATION TOWARDS THE ROOTS OF THE FUTURE

Maria Ramos Silva, “i” – February 21, 2012

An innate understanding of musical affinities, generosity and contagious sense of humour. Amélia and Michales, a Portugal-Greece in the leadership of the championship of building bridges among peoples…

A cauldron of sounds where cultural affinities are cooked beyond the frontiers of crisis…
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LUSO-HELLENIC EPIC

Nuno Pacheco, “Público/Ípsilon” – February 24, 2012

Amélia Muge has made, together with Michales Loukovikas, the disc that no-one else has produced yet, uniting Portugal and Greece, Occident and Orient, past and future…

Amélia Muge and Michales Loukovikas, in a time that the crisis sweeps Portugal and Greece, put in “Periplus” the vigour of the ancient epics, proposing a Luso-Hellenic musical voyage that encompasses, within the same adventure, other neighbouring cultures, from Asia to Africa…

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“Periplus”, an idea so dear to Amélia Muge, has been a risky bet since the beginning. Uniting cultures of the Mediterranean with neighbouring ones of the Atlantic and of the Indian oceans, mixing the Occident and the Orient without giving in to multicultural “pastiches” of dubious taste, demands an enormous dose of dedication, determination and knowledge. The touchstone came across Amélia in the link of Portugal and Greece, working with Michales Loukovikas (an excellent discovery) and sharing with him and a lot of musicians of great talent, Portuguese and Greeks, such an adventure. The result is a diamond polished to the point of almost perfection…

All this in a contemporary approach where the melodic and rhythmic lines of the two countries approximate, interconnect and challenge each other in a natural and fluid form, as if they have always been neighbours and conversed like that…
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WE ARE ALL GREEKS

João Lisboa, “Expresso/Atual” – February 25, 2012

A summit of Portuguese and Greek poets and musicians, presided by Amélia Muge and Michales Loukovikas, in order to confirm the idea that much of what we are exists on the other side, as well…

Mediterranean, of course. Which had as a port of departure for its exploration the interest about the work of the Greek poet Ares Alexandrou… and was prolonged through an intuitive search of points of contact and common identity features that… one needs only to discover…
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PORTUGAL AND GREECE UNITED FOR ONE NIGHT IN LISBON

João Moço, “Diário de Notícias” – February 25, 2012

“Periplus”… much more than a mere collection of songs, is a musical voyage through Portuguese and Greek traditions, evoking also the ancient epics while the future is being gazed on…

This musical meeting between Portugal and Greece gains a double symbolism, as well, in a moment that both countries face intense social problems…
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DAEDALUS AND OTHER ACCOUNTS

Nuno Rogeiro, “Sábado” – March 1, 2012

For decades now, I have been following with interest the singular path of Amélia Muge between a mythical tradition and the “social” themes. But “Periplus, Luso-Hellenic Wanderings” is even more beautiful. Musicians and instruments, from here and from the Hellenic archipelagic peninsula, an Odyssey in sounds, the Mediterranean, real and imaginary, the Occident where Portugal reposes, dreams and suffers, with two grand ballads: “Heavy as Iron” and “Zum Zum”.
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AMÉLIA MUGE + MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

João Miguel Tavares, “Time Out” – March 21, 2012

… There is an immense irony in the fact that “Periplus”, which has as a subtitle “Luso-Hellenic Wanderings”, celebrates that sort of Mediterranean umbilical cord linking Greece with Portugal at least since the myth of the foundation of Lisbon, that is attributed to Ulysses. Brothers in the economic bankruptcy, the two countries join forces here to celebrate their cultural wealth on the face of any austerity – Amélia Muge’s discs are a luxurious filigree of sounds, instruments and verses, and “Periplus” is no exception.

More than that: they are always anything but obvious. If she joins here forces with the Greek musician and composer Michales Loukovikas, it is not to create an euro-pudding with a braguesa guitar and a bouzouki. Yes, there is a braguesa guitar, and yes, there is a bouzouki, as there are traces of rebetiko and fado, there are Pessoa’s verses and Delphic hymns. But nothing is approached in a conventional way – quite the contrary, each track is an accumulation of surprises, as in “Shine”,^(*) where Hélia Correia sings (yes, sings) in Greek, as for example in “The Foliage of a Rose”, a magnificent theme that sums up perfectly how it is possible to make a Luso-Galician-Greek patchwork without leaving a single seam on display…

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^(*) It is the “Epitaph” composed by Seikilos sometime after the 2nd century BC; an epigram engraved on a cylindrical tombstone with lyrics and music (the symbols of the ancient Greek notation): that is, we have a song, the oldest extant complete song in the world. The tombstone was found in Aydin, ancient Tralles, nearby Ephesus, in Asia Minor. Our title derives from the first verse: While you live, shine…

One day we met Hélia Correia and, among other things, we told her that this “Epitaph” will be included in “Periplus”. To our great surprise, Hélia not only knew Seikilos’ composition (which most Greek musicians ignore), but she immediately began to sing it in ancient Greek! We then decided that Hélia was entitled to sing the “Epitaph” in the disc, as well…

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>> “PERIPLUS”: an interview to a Hellenic newspaper

GIORGOS ANDREOU on “PERIPLUS”

GIORGOS ANDREOU on “PERIPLUS”

Amélia Muge | Michales Loukovikas

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Ο ΓΙΩΡΓΟΣ ΑΝΔΡΕΟΥ για τον “ΠΕΡΙΠΛΟΥ”
/PORTUGUÊS/ GIORGOS ANDREOU sobre “PERIPLUS”

Giorgos Andreou, a distinguished
Greek composer and pianist

THE CD “PERIPLUS” is a very interesting endeavour because it’s not just a recording of traditional music of either Portugal or Greece; that is, it is not a disc that simply attempts to somehow compose in part the traditions and sounds of the two cultures. Because, in such a case, it would be more a project of folklore and not of artistic creation. Of course, elements of both these related traditions are used in a considerable extent; but this is not the central “theme” of the disc.

The characteristic of “Periplus” is its dynamism emanating from two songwriters, Amélia Muge and Michales Loukovikas, who have composed original music and worked on their musical material using several sources in the poetic language of song: verses of poets (Greeks or Portuguese), lyrics from the ancient Hellenic literature, or of their own modern language, even quoting some folk or popular songs of the Greek or Portuguese traditions. A noble purpose and essential pursuit was to demonstrate the analogies that exist in this great womb called the Mediterranean.

The most famous voyager in this great womb called the Mediterranean has been an ancient (as well as modern – in my view) Hellene, called Odysseus, representing a universal archetype. Apart from all other things, as they say, he also founded Lisbon, the capital of Portugal.

Ludwig van Beethoven, by Francesco Jerace (1895)

What is important in the tradition of either Portugal or Hellas is that it has sprung out as a Folk and (gradually) Urban music precisely because it doesn’t have behind it to a great extent a background of Classical, academic music. There are certainly important composers of academic music in both countries – but neither Greece nor Portugal has produced anyone like Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Vivaldi, Corelli, Scarlatti, Bellini, Puccini, and so forth. It’s been observed that where, for various historical and cultural reasons, the academic language of music, what we call Classical music, has not developed, the active memory of Tradition survives, and more space is created to develop and take over this Tradition in its transition to an urban environment. This is Fado, this is Rebetiko, this is the Blues,