30. MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS – bio

30. MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS – bio

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ 30. ΜΙΧΑΛΗΣ ΛΟΥΚΟΒΙΚΑΣ – βιογραφικό

BORN INTO A MUSICAL FAMILY of Thrace, I was taught music by my father, with whom I made my first steps as a professional musician (accordion, guitar and voice) at 15, taking later on an interest in various genres: varied world music, rock, music based on poetry, songwriting, theatre and film music, rebetiko, especially the school of Smyrna, and modal music.

Studying in Thessalonica, I directed student musical ensembles, and participated in rebetiko and popular musical groups. As a member of the Eurydice company, I co-wrote and co-produced plays for various genres (theatre, puppetry, shadow plays), where I also composed or selected musical themes. Besides, I contributed to the soundtrack of the film Stories of a Honeycomb, by Nikos Vergitsis (1981), as a composer (theme music), singer and musician.

I graduated in English Language and Literature from the Aristotle University of Salonica and worked as a teacher and translator of English, publisher (Research publishers), and journalist (Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Angeliophoros newspapers, and the ERT3 – Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation – radio stations).

Wishing to delve into the differences between Oriental and Occidental music, I focused on the modal tradition, folk or classical. Turning points in my research were my acquaintance with Ross Daly in 1987 and my participation the next year in the International Musicological Meeting on Mediterranean music at Delphi.

A series of articles on cultural exchange (Mediterranean Periplus, Thessaloniki newspaper) evolved into a homonymous radio program that went on for more than twelve years (1998-2010, 9.58 fm, ERT3). I teamed up with the writer and songwriter Thomás Korovinis, and also worked with Paris Paraschópoulos on the music of the play Alexandria–Athens, on the Parallel Lives of Constantine Cavafy and Kostēs Palamās, two outstanding Greek poets.

My research in modal music led me to The Gold in the Sky (2008), an Occident-to-Orient musical voyage on Ares Alexandrou’s poetry, featuring 35 musicians, where I composed, arranged, produced, played, recited and sang, as well.

My meeting with Amélia Muge in the “Internet Sea” led to a partnership, initially with the Portuguese version of The Gold in the Sky, in the bilingual book-disc O OURO DO CÉU / Ares Alexandrou por Michales Loukovikas (2011). Adapting ancient and traditional songs, as well as composing originals on line, Amélia and I embarked on a PERIPLUS / Luso-Hellenic Wanderings (2012) with the poetess Hélia Correia as a special guest. Our Periplus took us as far as Rio de Janeiro, at the University of Brazil, playing and talking about music and poetry. Later on, we worked on Amália Rodrigues’ verses, in the CD Amélia com versos de Amália (2014). Our latest project, ARCHiPELAGOS / Passages, was out late 2017, with many composers, singers, musicians, poets, sailing together in our archipelagos.

Periplus & Archipelagos covers

In Portugal, except Amélia Muge, and also her partner, José António Martins, I have worked with and/or composed for other musicians, such as José Mário Branco, Maria Monda, Carla Pires, Filipe Raposo, André Santos, Sofia Vitória. While in Greece, I’ve arranged a tribute to Panaiotes Tountas and his Art in Modulation: Portraits of Rebetiko Women.

Periplus goes on….

● For all those who wish to return to our starting point:

• >> At Anchor. BEFORE SAILING OFF
• << 29. BIBLIO – DISCO – GRAPHY

Chronicle 14. MUSIC MADE OF BODY AND SOUL

Chronicle 14. MUSIC MADE OF BODY AND SOUL

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 14. ΜΟΥΣΙΚΗ ΨΥΧῌ ΤΕ ΚΑΙ ΣΩΜΑΤΙ

Venus of Brassempouy: mammoth ivory figurine, one of the oldest human face representations (23.000 BCE)

● Man: a Musical Being ● Nature, Music
and Language ● Singing Neanderthals ●
Baby Talk ● Talent ● Art of Soul vs. Art of
Beauty ● Ecstasy and Catharsis ● Ritual
Music and Dance ● Ethos of Music

Michales Loukovikas

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but
the one most responsive to change”.
(Charles Darwin)

MAN IS BY NATURE A MUSICAL BEING; meaning that song, i.e. music and lyrics combined, together with movement, or dance, has always been a fundamental human characteristic, serving his various needs. Besides, music, speech, and dance, a “Holy Trinity” according to the poet Kostēs Palamās, show how close the relationship between sound, body and soul is.

Music, speech, dance: a “Holy Trinity” (Kōstēs Palamās)

Quite strange is that the ancients, even the primitives, felt the impact of musical sound onto their bodies much more intensely than modern humans. Obviously, Christianism and Occidental mentality are largely responsible for the enormous degradation of our senses. Thus experts of many disciplines are now required to work together in order to fully comprehend this subject in depth.

Hunting scenes in a Lascaux cave painting

Natural sounds played a key role in the genesis of music: the sounds of Nature constituted the raw “materials” that gradually began to take shape. According to Darwin, a primary stimulus was animal cries, especially during breeding season, when an orgasm of sounds and movements prevailed, so rich and varied that man inevitably imitated, responding to that exquisite call of Nature’s Choir. Yet, man, as a species of the animal kingdom, had congenitally his own “repertoire”, which he gradually enriched – initially by imitation, and later by inspiration.

The emergence of art was directly linked to elementary manifestations of magic, even before the latter was systematized as a form of religion. Cave paintings, of a much later period compared to music, are examples of utilitarian art: men tried to exorcise all the animals they depicted so as to have plenty of game, or propitiate their spirits, if they were awe-inspiring beasts, and gain their powers. That is why the cave paintings are usually found not in the “living rooms” of the caves, but deep inside, in the “sanctuaries”, where, according to Iégor Reznikoff, the areas are most resonant: it seems they were their “icons”…

Spirit propitiation had broader applications, especially to natural phenomena that seemed supernatural, or during work time to coordinate movements, or even to master the “spirit” of the stone or wood that man wished to turn into a tool. Music played a key role in such cases though it was lost in the mist of time. Today, millennia later, we can comfortably admire the cavemen’s performances in visual arts. But who has ever listened to their songs?

The question above is rather rhetoric. Still, there’s another one that is crucial to be answered:

What is music? What’s its origin?

MUSIC IS FOUND EVERYWHERE, in every culture or civilization, even the most isolated tribes: it is a feature of the human species – perhaps of other species, as well. Moreover, music is influenced by all aspects of a culture or civilization, including socio-economic organization, lifestyle, climate, technology… Emotions and ideas expressed through music, the circumstances in which it is played, the attitudes toward musicians and composers – all these vary according to space and time.

Indian Ghost Dance in eastern California: the figures form a circle dance.

As we have said, music had probably its origin in Nature’s sounds and rhythms. Men most likely imitated these phenomena using similar patterns with repetition and tonality. There are musicians who deliberately imitate natural sounds: folk fiddlers trill like birds, while Beethoven’s “Pastoral” 6th Symphony recreates the soundscape of a thunderstorm. Onomatopoeia is at times related to shamanistic beliefs or practices.⁽¹⁾ It also serves entertainment and edutainment, or practical purposes (such as lure of animals in hunt).

• ⁽¹⁾ A shaman is a person regarded as having access to the “world of spirits”, entering into a trance state (very different from normal waking consciousness), and acting as a diviner or healer.

● Hugo Riemann, a theorist and composer, in his Catechism of Musical Aesthetics (How do we listen to music?, 1890), [Katechismus der Musik-Ästhetik (Wie hören wir Musik?)], thinks that the song of birds approaches true music and cannot be treated separately from human song, since both are the expressions of a single sensibility; while Louis Lucas, in his New Acoustics (Acoustique Nouvelle, 1840), discusses (what he calls) excellence of the enharmonic genus, and says: “It makes its first appearance naturally, as an imitation of bird song, of animal calls, and of the endless range of sounds made by material things.” Manuel de Falla was greatly influenced by Lucas and his Acoustics in his mature compositions.

Magdalenian horse (15.000-10.000 BCE):
a game, long before it was tamed.

If the imitation of a bird song is considered music, then the bird song itself may also be regarded as music! Indeed, according to a study of zoomusicology,⁽²⁾ bird songs are based on musical principles: those of repetition and transformation. It’s not only birds: whales and dolphins have also exceptional vocal capabilities, while monkeys are unrivaled on drums and percussion as they beat hollow logs, most probably in order to demarcate their territories, creating rhythmic patterns in which some experts detect elements of “dialogue”, “call and response”.

• ⁽²⁾ Zoomusicology is the study of “music” made by non-human animals, or rather the musical aspects of sounds produced or received by them, as a means of their communication. It is described as the “aesthetic use of sound communication among animals.”

In any case, everything depends on our definition of music – that is, whether a “musician” has the intention to stir up the emotions through his sounds, which is probably linked to his ability to reflect about time (past and future). Men became “artists” 130 thousand years ago (though this timeframe is debatable) creating jewelry, other artifacts, and cave paintings, while they started burying their dead with rituals. It was a form of a “cultural revolution”. If we assume that all those new forms of behaviour suggested the emergence of consciousness, then music – as we know it – appeared in the same timeframe. Still, this is a rather narrow conception of music. As it usually happens in Africa until now, in prehistory too the concept of music was broader, including dance and worship. And not only: at that time it also served communication among the members of a group of people helping to coordinate action and strengthen their bonds. Thus its role was crucial to their survival.

Music evokes strong emotions and opens paths to other states of awareness. In general terms, strong emotions are associated with evolution (reproduction and survival). Darwin pointed out the importance of music to sexual selection.⁽³⁾ Both singing and dancing require large energy reserves. Thus a singer or dancer, like a peacock displaying its feathers, is more likely to attract a mate to date. There is a counterargument though: in most species using singing in the selection of mates, it is the female that chooses and the male that sings – as a rule alone. In the human species, nevertheless, music is mostly a team sport where everyone is involved. Man is the only mammal having mixed choirs (with men, women and children). Something similar is found only in certain species of Australian and African songbirds with males and females singing in chorus.

Charles Darwin, by George Richmond

• ⁽³⁾ “When we treat of sexual selection we shall see that primeval man, or rather some early progenitor of man, probably first used his voice in producing true musical cadences, that is in singing, as do some of the gibbon-apes at the present day; and we may conclude from a widely-spread analogy, that this power would have been especially exerted during the courtship of the sexes, – would have expressed various emotions, such as love, jealousy, triumph, – and would have served as a challenge to rivals. It is, therefore, probable that the imitation of musical cries by articulate sounds may have given rise to words expressive of various complex emotions.” (Darwin, The Descent of Man)

The first musical “instrument” was obviously the voice of man who, even before he could master speech, had a vast range of expressive sounds: imitating natural sounds, plus singing, humming, whistling (a gamut of styles), shouting, crying, laughing, coughing, yawning, or producing various sounds through the mouth. (See Darwin’s The Origin of Species on music and speech). Add motion to all of these sounds: not only dance, but also grimaces, gestures and movements of individual body parts (head, arms and legs). In like manner, the first percussion “instruments” were hand claps, finger snaps, stones, wood and whatever could be used to accentuate rhythm. Man-made instruments would appear much later when humans started making tools.

By the way, let me make clear that talking about “humans”, I refer, in fact, to the Hominini. The oldest tools found in Tanzania were made 2.6 million years ago, i.e. before the emergence of the various human species (Homo). We suppose that the first tools were made by Australopithecus, who then transmitted this knowledge to Homo habilis. Our ancestors proceeded to the next phase of tool-making 1.7 million years ago with Homo erectus. (See the Chronicle 3, where this theory is disputed). I maintain, therefore, that sound preceded speech and that music, song, a capella (with no instrumental accompaniment), emerged together with voice as a characteristic of some Hominini, or even Hominids. Besides, we know for sure that music was not born with modern humans (Homo sapiens) – who, as they say, were musically not as talented as the Neanderthals!

The Singing Neanderthals, according to Steven Mithen.
In the beginning was the sound: music precedes speech.

The oldest musical instrument: the Divje Babe flute (Slovenia) possibly made by the Neanderthals

In his study The Singing Neanderthals / The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body, Steven Mithen, an archaeologist and professor of early prehistory at the University of Reading in England, expands mainly two ideas: a) the parallel development of what modern man calls music and language, and b) his original idea that the Neanderthals had a peculiar proto-music/language: it was holistic (not composed of segmented elements), manipulative (influencing emotions and hence behaviour of oneself and others), multimodal (using both sound and movement), musical (temporally controlled, rhythmic, and melodic), and mimetic (utilizing sound symbolism and gesture) – i.e. “a pre-linguistic musical mode of thought and action.” That is why, as Manuel de Falla and Federico García Lorca said, “many suppose that chanting is the earliest form of language”, or that song is older than speech. Prosody (“melos of speech”, according to Aristoxenus), was the “melody” produced during ancient Hellenic speech, which was musical, not dynamic as it is now (see Chronicle 6, footnote 6, and Chronicle 12, footnote 7).

Music as the Mother of Speech

● Music (singing) as the Mother of Speech (language) is an idea shared by Darwin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Wilhelm von Humboldt.⁽⁴⁾ We get an idea when we examine the pronunciation in several languages. Closer to the original source are tonal languages, such as Chinese, where each syllable is uttered with a different note or pitch. Then it’s the pitch accent languages, such as ancient Hellenic, where only the stressed syllable is uttered at a higher note-pitch. According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the interval between the accented and non-accented syllables reached to an anything but negligible fifth interval (e.g. E-B, see Chronicle 12). Additionally, there are dynamic languages such as modern Greek with the stress given through an increased volume of the voice, not a higher pitch. The difference with ancient Hellenic is obvious in poetry where the accents had no effect on the poetic metres, as they would if the stress were dynamic. The poetic rhythm was musical, prosodic (alternating long and short vowels), and not dynamic. Poetry was musical, having melos (the melody of pitch accent) and rhythm (with long and short movements).

• ⁽⁴⁾ Except Rousseau, Herder, Humboldt, Darwin, Falla and Lorca, many other authors have been led to suppose that word and song had once been the same thing – of course, after the word was germinated by the song.

An aggressive Neanderthal woman is rather misleading since, according to National Geographic, the genes linked to modern man’s aggressive behaviour were probably absent in the Neanderthal DNA. This may explain their disappearance…

In her review on this book, Ellen Dissanayake, of the University of Washington in Seattle, initially lists the vast ocean of knowledge such a study like Mithen’s requires: evolutionary theory; human evolution (social lifestyle, environment); palaeoarchaeology (linguistic and musical abilities and their development); anatomy (ear, vocal tract, brain and musical capacities); neurobiology (brain chemistry, musical cognition and emotion, neuroanatomy of music); origin and evolution of language (similarities and differences with music, semantics, syntax, prosody); music-like communication systems in some other animals (non-human primates, whales, birds, etc.) and their relevance to human communication; music psychology and linguistic behaviour in children; ethnomusicology; the art and practice of music; and the findings of music therapy and the psychology of musical emotion. I can also mention biomusicology or evolutionary musicology.

“Singing Neanderthals”, according to Mithen, had a vocal tract and respiratory control that could have enabled speech, but perhaps they lacked the neural network that was necessary for language. This means that in the beginning was the sound: music preceded speech. Moreover, pre-sapiens hominids, such as the Neanderthals, perhaps lacked metaphorical thought – the ability to have in mind at the same time information from several different cognitive domains. Symbolic artifacts have not yet been found in their dwelling sites, indicating absence of symbolic thought and hence symbolic utterance: spoken language. But the harsh realities and challenges faced in such a hostile environment during the Ice Age required complex emotional communication and cooperation. Therefore, they developed a “music-like communication system that was more complex and more sophisticated than that found in any of the previous species of Homo”. Mithen emphasizes the importance of “emotional intelligence” – the ability to express one’s feelings with face, voice, and body, and decode the emotional signals of others.

It’s impressive that singing was preferable to talking. Why were the symbols of spoken words less reliable than an emotional melody? What were the pros and cons of language?

What is language? What’s its origin?

Sleeping antelope, Sahara, southern Algeria

WE READ THE ABOVE QUESTIONS at the gate of a Congress Palace, the venue of a thought-provoking international symposium. Intrigued by this notice, we go inside and there we hear everyone disagreeing with everyone else! But still, there is a recurring theme of almost paramount consent – something that escaped even Darwin’s attention: a prerequisite, they say, for the emergence of language is that there must be trust within the tribe (what we now call “society”)! Meaning that some kind of social transformation generated unprecedented levels of public trust, liberating this way a potential for linguistic creativity, which was dormant until then. Under normal conditions, as the saying goes, “words are cheap”, “double-talk”, i.e. unreliable symbols on which the tribe could not count for survival; in other words, language was not trusted to become an evolutionarily stable strategy.

When a cat purrs, we mostly feel sure that the animal is content. We trust the signal because it just can’t fake that sound. Vocal calls of the primates may not be so trustworthy. Their social intelligence is characterized as “Machiavellian” – self-serving and without moral scruples. Monkeys and apes often attempt to deceive one another, while at the same time remaining constantly on guard against falling victim to deception themselves! Paradoxically, this very trait is theorized as blocking the evolution of a language-like communication among them! A verbal signal sounds like the cry “Wolves!” by a shepherd trying to fool the others in the well-known moralizing pedagogical story. Once proven false, nobody takes it for granted anymore or even cares. Therefore, socially reliable institutions are necessary, where every scoundrel, “monkey” or “shepherd”, is accountable. In a hunter-gatherer society, a basic mechanism inspiring trust is the collective ritual. (In our society, all the above adequately explain our crisis).

Baby talk and the embryo’s audio stimuli

No features on “Venus” of Willendorf (28.000-25.000 BCE), only reproductive: probably she was a Mother Goddess

Last but not least is what we call “baby talk” – not the talk of a baby still unable to speak, but the one used by adults (usually mothers) while addressing infants, touching and caressing them: a melodic and undulating language, combined with strong gestures, exaggerated facial expressions and rhythmical head and body movements. This is indeed a language because the baby understands the meaning of all these sounds and movements: that is, comprehends the mother’s intentions. In this sense, such a language is similar to music having two main functions: to strengthen the mother-child relationship, and help the infant to speak. In this way its chances of survival increase. Man’s ability to synchronize himself with an external pulse – which is probably unknown to other mammals, including primates – was derived from the primordial mother-infant interaction that in time transformed itself into a proto-music/language – à la Neanderthal!

“Baby talk” has a similar “lexicon” in all cultures. The way mothers and babies raise and lower their voices, change simultaneously expressions and move their hands, is equivalent everywhere, despite linguistic differences such as between musical and dynamic languages. The reasons may be genetic or environmental – in the sense that all embryos grow in a similar environment and can hear twenty weeks before birth, far longer than other animals, most of which cannot hear before birth. During these weeks, the human fetus can also perceive movement and orientation. In addition, it senses the emotional state of the mother via the internal sounds of her body (voice, heartbeat, footsteps, digestion, etc.) and in this way adjusts its postnatal demands (e.g. crying), improving the chances of its survival. The embryo’s capacity to learn and remember sound patterns seems to confirm the idea. In this case, the internal sounds of the human body, and their relationship with the emotional state, may be associated with the relationship between audio-rhythmic patterns in music and their strong emotional charge.

A maenad (bacchante) with a tympanum and a satyr with diaulos (double aulos)

“The human being is musical by man’s very nature”. (Iégor Reznikoff)

“MAN”, IÉGOR REZNIKOFF REMARKED,⁽⁵⁾ “is a speaking being. However, I am absolutely sure that he is also a musical, a singing being, like birds. We know that the various species of birds are also distinguished by the way they sing. The same happens with humans who are distinguished not only by their speech, but also by their singing.

• ⁽⁵⁾ Reznikoff’s remarks were recorded by Despoina Paisidou-Lazaridou in Delphi in 1986 for the radio program, Living and Learning (ERT3). It was the time I started “sailing” on the airwaves as a “chronicler”, presenter, and also music supervisor, during the first round of the program on the Chronicle of Music. Nevertheless, the making of a radio program was something that I learned watching the producer Katy Vlachou with her immense patience and also open mind: she let me present in a public mass medium what I was not allowed to do at the time in a… private one (the newspaper Thessaloniki).

The Education of Achilles by Chiron (fresco from Herculaneum,
a city more wealthy than neighbouring Pompeii)

“These features, I believe, are part of human nature. They are deeply connected with man’s organic nature – his ears and throat, that is, his vocal capacities. That’s how he is born and created since his conception. A child e.g. can hear even when it is in the womb of its mother as a fetus and remembers some elements of music and the voice of its mother or her song.⁽⁶⁾

• ⁽⁶⁾ “Voices and audio stimuli to which a fetus is exposed during pregnancy are not only perceived but also recorded in its memory”, a scientific team concluded in a study. “Thus, if as a fetus it listened to soft music of natural instruments, as an infant it immediately calms and quiets down under the same sounds, while another baby, who had no such experience when it was in the belly of its mother, keeps on screaming”…

Music activates the brain’s centres of communication

● Besides, except the “Singing Neanderthals”, there are also “Singing Embryos”! A research showed that fetuses react to sound stimuli and “sing”! Some researchers at Institut Marquès in Barcelona showed that a fetus can detect sounds and even react moving its mouth and tongue, proving that the ears of the embryo are fully developed by the 16th week of pregnancy. The leading researcher said that the fetuses responded to music moving their mouths as if they were trying to talk or to sing. Music activates the parts of the brain associated with communication, and when the embryos hear it, they react with movements similar to those of a cry, which is the first stage before speaking and singing.

“Music is deeply rooted in humans. Singing is a characteristic of the human species. It is not something recent in man’s social life. The mechanism of hearing and its relationship with speech is characterized by complexity and is located deep inside the brain. Thus it cannot be something recent. In short: the human being is a musical being by man’s very nature.”

Generally speaking, the different species are born as tabula rasa regarding those qualities to be acquired – i.e. that must be gained after birth, depending on the current conditions faced by each species for its survival. But they bear in their DNA all those inherited capacities and qualities that have emerged as acquired ones (upright position, articulation, etc.) and ensured the survival of the species during the millennia of its evolution. This is where all the wisdom of the past is stored – together, of course, with natural musical capacities.

Music Lesson (Herculaneum, early 1st century AD)

“Musical ear”: a characteristic of the majority or of a minority?

Despite all that, we know that talent, an innate musical inclination, or a “musical ear”, do not characterize all persons but rather a minority. How come that some of them can sing beautifully or at least correctly, while others, who equally love music, sing out of tune?

“There is innate musical disposition, musical talent, which is often hereditary: see the Bach family”, said professor Demetris Thémelis “But in general terms, everyone can learn music up to a point. Most people sing out of tune because they’ve had no proper musical education, except in some cases where they may have some physical problem e.g. hearing impairment. Or they may listen properly and have some feel for music, but face some problem in the larynx muscles. There are many cases of distinguished musicians, productive composers, who are ‘cacophonous’, i.e. they cannot sing well because of such problems.”

This may be so, but then how come that in the Third World and, moreover, in the countryside, anywhere far from metropolitan urban centres, i.e. wherever children are naturally brought up, almost everyone can sing and dance well? Here’s Ellen Dissanayake’s comment:

“It is not spoken language itself that overlays or stunts musical ability”, she said, “but the factors in modernized societies that have made music a specialty – individuality, competitiveness, compartmentalization, institutionalization – reinforced by the high degree of literate (not oral improvisatory) training required to read (and compose) musical scores as well as literary texts. In small-scale pre-modern societies (and in any large modern sub-Saharan African city, as well in children anywhere who are exposed customarily to frequent communal musical activity), everyone participates in music – regularly, spontaneously, and wholeheartedly – and benefits thereby from the many adaptive advantages” it offers.

Iégor Reznikoff

You can see, therefore, how crucial is the role of the mother, as well as that of the family, or social environment in general, for the development of a child’s innate musical inclination. This must be the explanation for the existence not only of musical families, but also of musical tribes among gypsies or blacks. Not everything is hereditary, in spite of the important role of heredity: the potential capacities must be cultivated; otherwise they remain dormant, inert, like some atrophic member.

“We can say that African Americans have this divine gift”, said Reznikoff, referring to the innate inclination, the special talent. “Africans have a long tradition in music and singing. Furthermore, they have kept some primitive ways of expression and emotion, and thus they are probably closer to antiquity. The ancient Greeks also loved singing and dancing very much, as the Arabs do now.”

“Since we are human beings, with the senses of audition and vision, it happens that we have constants in art. These constants in music have to do with the natural laws of resonance and consonance: when a chord vibrates, it follows the laws that govern the sound, producing sounds and harmonics that delight our ears; so, our bodies respond.

“It is striking that an instrument like the cithara is found in all cultures. The behaviour of a string and our bodies is the same everywhere. Something similar happens with the auloi. Note that these instruments have been used in several ways in all cultures. But with few exceptions, and apart from modern Western civilization, we see everywhere the same musical laws to apply. It is a global concept of consonance precisely because we are dealing with a natural law.

“This concept, nevertheless, was lost since the early 19th century when the piano was introduced into music changing the natural tuning of the instruments; for the piano is tuned differently, with the equal intervals of the tempered scale. This tuning is wrong if we consider it from the point of view of natural resonance. It is due to the enormous development of music – but a kind of cultivated, sentimental, conceptual music which has abandoned its natural foundation that is rooted in our body and soul.

“Something equivalent has happened in painting: we have ancient art, or iconography, and then we have the art of beauty, even if it depicts saints, or Theotokos: Raphael’s Madonna is really beautiful, her movements are beautiful, and art lies in this beauty, not in the power exerted deep inside your soul by an icon. We have lost these deep roots related to our biological bodies – because we must not forget we are material beings obeying to natural laws. Nowadays art is too conceptual as e.g. abstract art, or even electronic music with computers.

“In antiquity people had delicate, fine ears catching all nuances. The lyre was a ‘soft’ instrument, just like those old traditional ones. When one listened to music on those instruments, he used his spirit even more: let us remember the long texts of old songs. Now, of course, we have all these huge pieces of machinery with the many decibels! All instruments are amplified and modified for that purpose. The violin is already a ‘hard’ instrument like the piano.

“I, personally, believe in a natural approach of antiquity – without imitating or copying it. We must go back to the delicate acoustics of antiquity, because finally man remains the same body and soul. These natural laws – so rich that they have created all those cultures – are like oxygen for us. In the big cities, of course, we may live in air pollution but we are not made for this: it is better for us to breathe fresh air…

“Music’s purpose in antiquity was not just fun. It mainly had to do with the invisible world. This is also true for the Pythagoreans, and later for the Platonic school, or even previously for the Orphic tradition, which influenced the Christian Church. For the Orphic tradition, music actually serves as a link to the invisible: for the preparation of the journey of the soul after death to eternity”…

The “labyrinth” of Reznikoff’s thought, or the contraposition between “soft” and “hard” instruments, may confuse us. The key to grasp its essence lies in that apt example from the art of painting. Sweet melodies and gentle voices, e.g. in most lullabies, are the equivalent to Raphael’s Madonna. Quite the contrary was what Plato suggested about children that cannot go promptly to sleep: “mothers do not offer them peace, but movement instead, always rocking them in their arms, not silently but with some melody, and in this artless way they make the kids fall asleep”. If you experiment, they say, you will see that the… Platonic technique is highly effective!

Catharsis: the mental and moral purification through Dionysian ecstasy.

Orpheus, by Marc Chagall

A SIMILAR MISUNDERSTANDING seems to obsess psychotherapists who choose music with soft sounds, having waters trickling and birds singing as… garnish in the background. But what the ancients were after during their psychotherapeutic rituals was exactly the opposite with their deliberately intense and monotonously repetitive music.

Using suitable melodies and rhythms, they made the mentally disturbed person to flush to such a degree that a reaction would follow bringing him back to his previous normal condition. Such methods of “sorcery” survived even in the so-called “civilized” world until the 60s. Certainly, now that we have become so very “cultured”, musical sounds can hardly excite us…

“Fire cleanses, while water purifies”, said Plutarch. Catharsis was the mental and also moral purification through Dionysian ecstasy in ancient Hellas. This is the original meaning of the term; not the one used in periods of political corruption in modern Greece. According to Aristotle, it was what the audience in a tragedy was subjected to through feelings of pity and fear caused by the suffering and tragic end of the heroes.

“There was a close link between the swamps (as sources of infections and fever), the subsequent neuromental disorders and their cure with music in the therapeutic rituals of the Corybantes and the Bacchantes”,⁽⁷⁾ wrote Denise Jourdan-Hemmerdinger in the synopsis of her paper on Music in the Therapeutic Rituals of the Corybantes and the Bacchantes, at the Musicological Symposium at Delphi in 1988.⁽⁸⁾ “These data allow a better reading of ancient texts. We can reconstruct them not anymore in an entirely irrational context with widespread mysticism, but in a reality with tragic experiences in the time line.

Cybele and Attis, three Corybantes, Aeon, Helios, Selene, Phosphorus, Hesperus, Poseidon, Thetis and Gaea,
on the Parabiago plate (2nd-4th century AD).

• ⁽⁷⁾ Corybantes: Cybele–Rhea’s priests in Phrygia, connected with Dionysus-Bacchus, performing orgiastic dances accompanied by cymbals, rattles, auloi, tympana (tambourines) [> corybantism (catharsis)]. We have already seen Dionysus’ followers, the Bacchantes, Bacchae or Maenads (< mania), as Orpheus’ slayers (in Chronicle 12, footnote 3).

• ⁽⁸⁾ With this… Sibyllic synopsis, Jourdan-Hemmerdinger tried to give some idea to the audience about her paper. Unfortunately, she had a formidable opponent: relentless time. Within a very short time – granted to each speaker – she had to expand on her vast thesis that could be the subject of a separate symposium. The… machine gun tempo she chose to say “everything” in time eventually proved to be a boomerang for her extremely interesting topic.

“So the biological and pathological cause of hallucinations reappears as an archetype of the mythological and dreamlike world of fantasy. Although the monotheistic religions expelled the ancient gods, who played a therapeutic role, they did not eliminate malaria – a scourge as old as the world but always present. This Thraco-Phrygian and Orphico-Pythagorean music therapy survived more or less in some folk, religious, pagan traditions.

“What did these specific kinds of music consist of? What body and soul level did they act upon? How and why were they effective? The texts give us an idea. Can we get even further? Obviously, if we work on this rich and diverse file with a fortunate conjuncture of data of the geographical and ethnological hematology, and medical anthropology – sciences already containing a wealth of information – adding the results of ethnomusicological research, without forgetting ancient and medieval musicology, either Oriental or Occidental.”

Bacchic Dance of Maenads in a Wood,
by Gustave Doré

Ethnological, musicological and medical research was eventually carried out in Asia (India, Indochina, Siberia), Africa (Ethiopia, Senegal), America (Haiti, Native American Indians and Eskimos), and Europe. Such phenomena were observed in Magna Graecia, especially around Taranto, with the renowned tarantella dance that was a key element of the musical exorcism to counteract the poison of the tarantula spider.

Part of the same tradition is a – mostly – Thracian fire ritual, called anastenária (nestinarstvo in Bulgarian Thrace). The oldest written information about such barefoot dances on smoldering embers is found in Euripides’ The Bacchae. Later Strabo wrote about Artemis’ priestesses in Asia Minor and Italy performing such dances at will. In Byzantium the dancers were called “psychária” or “asthenária” (hence anastenária or nestinari), while around 1800 such rituals were prevalent not only in the Balkans but also throughout Anatolia.

Music and dance contribute to an emotional release
and thus have a therapeutic effect on the participants.

Anastenária’s most striking feature is probably the “incombustibility”, “immunity from fire” – the (seeming, at least) negation of a natural law. This element of the ritual stirs our imagination so much that almost everyone forgets to mention the key role of music and dance which, according to many experts, contribute to an emotional release and, in this way, have a therapeutic effect on the participants. In a sense, therefore, this ceremony is a psychotherapeutic ritual system.

Levi-Strauss believes that these systems provide the patient with a gateway to express inexpressible conditions. During this therapeutic process, the participant receives from outside a social myth that has no conflicts and, therefore, does not correspond to his previous personal condition. In such a context, reality is compelled to identify with this social myth. Without music and dance, however, methexis is not possible:

“Monotonous music”, the psychiatrist Constantinos Constantinides wrote in his Notes on Fire Walking of Anastenária and a Possible Explanation of Incombustibility, “is a prerequisite to a change of mental mood, creating an equivalent emotional state, and triggering the subcortical (motor and emotional) centres, so as everything is easily and automatically executed, eliminating the inhibitory effect of the cortex.

“Generally motivated also by music, dance is known as a largely automatic event and as such a new prerequisite to the creation of the whole mental ecstatic state – even more so if it is religious. That is why all primitive religions are ‘danced’, all happy events are ‘danced’. While dancing, there is a peculiar emotional state, there is more automation and unconscious function, and there is more or less self-absorption and a break of contact with the environment. One could say that dance is a certain step to ecstasy, opens the way to the phenomenon of ecstasy.”

“Dance is a certain step to ecstasy, opens the way to the
phenomenon of ecstasy.” (Constantinos Constantinides)

“Music particularly seems to coordinate a tendency to group unification”, commented another psychiatrist, Pantelés Kranidiotes, analyzing Anastenaria as a Psychosomatic Phenomenon. “Constantinos Romeos realized just that, commenting ‘music makes the human soul to feel such desolation that it desires to mingle with the other dancers seeking to let it go’. On the other hand, Polydoros Papachristodoulou underlines the impact of music on these people saying that music ‘exerts some particular influence on the nervous system of hysterical, naïve peasants’.

Davul

“But anyway, regardless of the quality of the receiver, everyone would perceive this fascinating power of music, if above all he experienced the crucially overwhelming davul in the ‘hangout’, where ‘all the spectators were agitated and rocked’ under its sounds.

“Emotional arousal is more secure when music is more familiar. This is obviously the purpose of conflating this religious ceremony with songs, which clearly translate the various deepest emotions of the people’s psyche and where above all is the dominion of heroic elements, which can only bring about an arousing, wild ecstasy.

“This combination seems much more effective to induce the required emotional orgy than the ecclesiastical chants and hymns, which are totally absent in this religious ceremony, as they produce a rather static ecstasy.

“The music of the fire dancers, familiar to them over the centuries, is a creation and property of their own emotional universe and that is why it can definitely stir it and indeed with an intensely arousing way.⁽⁹⁾ But here it seems that rhythm plays the main role in music and – as the musicologist Pantelés Kavakópoulos says – ‘what excites the fire dancers is the davul with its varying rhythms’.”

• ⁽⁹⁾ These psychiatrists, it’s obvious, look on the fire dancers “from on high”: they see “hysterical, naïve peasants” with “the people’s psyche”, immersed in “an arousing, wild ecstasy”, which is described as an “emotional orgy”, under the sounds of a music that is a “property of their own emotional universe”… They recognize, however, that the impact of this music and dance, in that particular environment, is equally catalytic “regardless of the quality of the receiver”, apparently having in mind that nowadays, among fire dancers, several “hysterical, naïve”… intellectuals and scientists are included!

First a fetus hears mother’s heartbeat. The pulse is recorded deep in
the brain; when excited, man’s inhibitions are neutralized, and he is
in ecstasy, acting not as an individual but as a member of a group.

Relief of a maenad holding a tympanum

RHYTHM, INEXTRICABLY connected to dance, is the first musical element man experiences. The initial sound a fetus hears is the mother’s rhythmic heartbeat, long before it enjoys her singing – if she has a sweet voice. But even if she doesn’t, this primary pulse is recorded deep in its mind, in the subcortical centres of the brain; when they are excited, man’s inhibitions are neutralized and, as a result, he is overwhelmed with ecstasy, acting as a member of a group and not as an individual.⁽¹⁰⁾ That’s why melody, the second element of music, is intentionally monotonous and persistently repetitious, while the lyrics, if it’s a song, are just as rudimentary: precisely to prevent the re-activation of the cortex and achieve the culmination of ecstasy.

• ⁽¹⁰⁾ Music has been my first occupation, since I was 15, playing in the band of my father, Iannes Loukovikas. I remember that, also due to my music education, I wondered, and was annoyed, as well, whenever an audience glorified some drummer, or anyone playing percussion, in his solo, although his performance was not as difficult as the other musicians’ who, nevertheless, never received such an ovation. The answer to this childish question of mine is given here…

Such phenomena could not go unnoticed by ancient Greek philosophers, who have testified how crucial the role of rhythm is for the preservation, modification or loss of ethos in music. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and many others investigated the ethos in rhythm, melody, genera and harmonies or modes, not only because music was the foundation of education, but also because – quite rightly – they considered music as a form of language, capable of expressing almost as much as speech and exerting a catalytic effect on people, especially the youth.

Ethos of music (rhythm, melody, genera,
modes): exuberant, restrained, or serene.

Cybele with a tympanum, bronze statuette (2nd century CE)

“No act among people is performed without music”, Aristides Quintilianus used to say, while Plutarch stressed that “the formation and preparation [of young people] to be good [citizens is achieved] through music”, for the Orphean art is really beneficial “on everyone and every well-instructed act”, concluding: “Foul music and wicked songs lead to prodigal morals and unmanly lives, and men to indulgence and flabbiness and effeminacy”…

The ethos of music was generally distinguished as exuberant (the one causing agitation or excitement); restrained (the opposite); or serene (that calms down). Comprehensive philosophical studies were apparently based on observations on ancient folk rituals, such as musical therapeutic ceremonies. The philosophers found that every rhythmic or melodic movement resulted to certain emotional reactions, positive or negative – depending on the intended purpose. Thus they concluded that the sounds with the beneficial effects should be praised and the others to be condemned.

It was natural that the concept of ethos was also exploited for the condemnation of musical innovations by the conservatives, as we have already seen (Chronicle 12. “Do not maltreat our music!”). But in no way does this fact mean that musical ethos is worthless. Why else should the idea be adopted by Persians and Arabs and so many others?

“OK, if it’s not worthless, it is certainly completely unknown today”, the dissidents counter-argue. “Why should we care about the ethos of music (and not only) in an exceptionally unethical era in every respect? Isn’t it… an anachronism?”

Dear reader, my dearest fellow voyager, don’t you think that having come thus far, it means there is a deeper reason in earnest?

●

.

After the Mediterranean periplus, in search of Orpheus,
we set sail to Tartessos, in the Cassiterides archipelago…

Let’s follow the… tin!

• >> Chronicle 15. SAILING TO RIO DE JANEIRO!
• << Chronicle 13. PROFESSIONALS OR AMATEURS?

Next Chronicle 15. SAILING TO RIO DE JANEIRO! (Crossing the Atlantic / So Distant, So Near) ● Periplus – Luso-Hellenic Wanderings ● An Atlantic Odyssey

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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

Chronicle 9. THE CELEBRATED TRÍCHORDON

Chronicle 9. THE CELEBRATED TRÍCHORDON

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 9. TΟ ΠΕΡΙΩΝΥΜΟΝ ΤΡΙΧΟΡΔΟΝ

Persian setar (seh-tar = tri-chord = 3-string): Indian sitar’s “relative”

● Flamenco and Rebetiko, Guitar and Bouzouki
● Modal and Tempered Music ● Ross Daly
● Tanburs ● Ashiks ● Foustalieris and Iován
Tsaoús ● Entertainment and Edutainment

Michales Loukovikas

FLAMENCO AND REBÉTIKO’s lead instruments have been the guitarra and bouzouki respectively: the sound of these two instruments has become an absolutely necessary condition – sine qua non, as they say – for the two genres in their interpretation. Yet, the guitar and bouzouki may be evaluated as rather unsuitable for such musical idioms.

Rebétiko and flamenco: modal music genres accompanied by tempered instruments.

In terms of melodic themes, rebétiko and flamenco come under the category of modal music: that is, each song is based not on a simple musical scale but rather on a mode (“harmony”, or “echos”), with its own character, mood, and ethos, and with a variety of intervals that greatly outnumber the tempered-equal intervals of Western European music. In the accompaniment, however, both genres are dominated by the Occidental concept of chords and melodic phrases played on tempered instruments: the bouzouki and guitar’s frets are positioned according to these equal intervals, allowing the performance of just the notes of the piano. This contradiction, undoubtedly, creates various problems, imposes restrictions – but at the same time imparts a raw beauty to music when it flourishes at the borderline of distinct cultural areas. Its interpreters act like rope-dancers while balancing themselves between two worlds.

Bouzouki

The development of the guitar in its final phase, from the Renaissance onwards (seen in Chronicle 7), ran parallel to the development of Occidental music, with polyphony, counterpoint, and all the rest. The relationship between instrument and music, therefore, has been harmonious. The bouzouki, on the contrary, as a newcomer, has suffered from split personality. Even if it cannot be played with the classical guitar techniques that have crept into flamenco, it has gradually moved willy-nilly on the westernizing way of rebétiko, while major and minor scales have been substituting the multitude of modes.

Radical changes in the orientation of a musical genre are clearly reflected on its instruments. Although Music never reveals her face, the transformations of an instrument are clearly visible to the naked eye. Thus, we’ve seen the bouzouki undergoing a mutation and turning from a three-string (tri-chordon) into a four-string and electric instrument, while at the same time its tuning has changed, adopting that of the guitar just to facilitate virtuosities. This four-double-string… “guitarized” bouzouki was introduced by the superstar Manoles Chiotes (who was originally a guitarist), although it was not his own invention. Note that these developments occurred while rebétiko was on its deathbed.

Bouzouki mutated before and after the rebétiko era:
it was at first “mandolinized”, and then “guitarized”,
turned into a four-string and electric instrument.

Lavta with movable frets

That was the second mutation of the instrument. The first one happened before rebétiko moved into the spotlight, when the bouzouki, as a “prodigal son”, broke away from the tanbur family where it was raised, becoming a… Franco-Levantine: it lost both its tanbur-like appearance, and its movable frets enabling tunings according to the intervals of the mode to perform. They were replaced by the far fewer fixed metallic frets that permit the performance of just the tempered intervals. This metamorphosis was accompanied by other structural changes also modeled on the mandolin. In short, the instrument was at first… “mandolinized”. It continued “speaking” Greek, one might say, but with a foreign “accent”… ⁽¹⁾

• ⁽¹⁾ Considering the fixed frets and their tempered intervals, the only way to approach the original sound of old rebétiko, i.e. the sound of modal music, is to use several tunings called düzenia,* depending on the mode. The only bouzouki player I’ve listened to using such tunings “live” (not in some special event or during a musicological program) has been another… guitarist, Demetris Mystakides. Thus while the rest of his program favoured vocal duets, the düzenia required ison (drone) – i.e. music had moved away from Occidental-style “harmony” towards Oriental echos and ethos.
  * Düzen: tuning, harmony (in Turkish).

Nevertheless, there is a type of bouzouki still in use that has remained true to its origins and is proud to be a brother of the tanbur. It is the Arabic bouzouki, the buzuq, or bozuq, played in the region of ancient Phoenicia: in Lebanon and the surrounding area. The country of the cedars is where the great modern virtuoso of the instrument has emerged: the gypsy-born Matar Muhammad,⁽²⁾ who might turn even “four-string” Chiotes… pale, even though he had allegedly earned Jimi Hendrix’s admiration for his playing!

• ⁽²⁾ Note that Matar’s repertoire featured the Greek spongers’ song Dirlada. The song was included in The Fool’s Garden album (1969) by Dionyses Sabbopoulos – who was taken to court in 1973 for its credits. Despite the rebétiko composer Iannes Papaiohannou’s testimony that he’d known the song for years as traditional, despite the fact that by 1970 it was already an international hit recorded by Dalida in French and Italian as Darla dirladada, the court ruled that next to the song title on The Fool’s Garden cover and disc, a phrase should be written (in parenthesis): “Adapted by Sabbopoulos; composed by P. Ghines or traditional”… You could take your pick! The song was also recorded in Serbian, Finnish, Hebrew, etc. Other interpreters in Hellenic included Domna Samiou, Nikos Xylouris, and Marinella.

Crusades and Lebensraum – Urban, Hitler and Zionists

It seems as a modern version of the age-old competition – but also emulation and exchange – between Phoenicians and Hellenes during the colonizing phase in the Mediterranean: the former on the southern coastline, the latter by the northern shores – without excluding reciprocal incursions. This very competition went on (and still goes on) with other protagonists: Punics and Romans, Arabs and Byzantines – until the Crusaders appeared on mare nostrum upsetting the status quo. You can see how old the idea on “spheres of influence” is, where the concept of Lebensraum (vital, living space) recently emerged as a fatal malignant tumour.

● Pope Urban II made probably the most influential speech of the Middle Ages on November 27, 1095, giving rise to the Crusades, by calling Christians to war against Muslims. The chronicler Robert the Monk put this into the mouth of the pope:

“… this land which you inhabit, shut in on all sides by the seas and surrounded by the mountain peaks, is too narrow for your large population… and it furnishes scarcely food enough for its cultivators… Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre; wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves… Dieu li volt [It is God’s will]!”

● How identical the papal words were to Adolf Hitler’s: “We are overpopulated and cannot feed ourselves from our own resources”, he shouted. Germany has “a tightly packed racial core”, and thus the Germans are entitled to “greater Lebensraum than in the case of other peoples.” As for Urban’s “wicked race”, the Nazis interpreted it as referring mainly to the Eastern European Slav population… There was, therefore, a long history of equivalent mentality between the “Holy See” and fascism; it wasn’t just a case of… love at first sight! (See also Chronicles 23–24).

● Adding to this historical irony, some of the Nazis’ victims, the Jews, under Zionist leadership, have embraced verbatim and wholeheartedly Urban’s call and Hitler’s Lebensraum theory and practice, encroaching on the lands of that old “wicked race”…

Tanbur, Pandura and Tríchordon

What is the origin of this instrument and of its various variants? It is apparently located in Assyria, as Pollux has already said about the pandura (see Chronicle 7, conclusion). How come that these various variants developed in Levante and Hellas, without influencing the rest of the Arabs, nor the Turks that found themselves in between in the meantime? We may just speculate on that; especially since the word “bouzouki”, according to Nicolas Andriotes’ Etymological Dictionary of Modern Greek, is believed to have been Turkish in origin (büzük).⁽³⁾ We can see in this case, too, one of etymology’s so many oddities: an instrument’s godfather not to care much about it.

• ⁽³⁾ In fact, when the Turks say büzük, they mean a kind of bağlama; and when they say bağlama, they mean a kind of saz… (Some Greeks ordered from Constantinople “some little baglamás”… You can imagine their astonishment when they finally saw what they had bought!) So, the Greek terms bouzouki and baglamás are loans from Turkish referring to different, although related, instruments of the tanbur family, extending as far as India with the drone instrument, tanpura. Note, in addition, that the term tambour also denotes some kinds of drums. In the percussion category we have more derivative terms such as tambourine, tambora, tabor…
  ● The term büzük-bouzouki probably originates from a large Persian lute, the tanbur e bozorg.

Ross Daly

Unfortunately, we do not know how exactly the tambourás was played in Greece in the 19th century. Its playing, however, should have been quite different from that of the bouzouki or (at least today’s) Anatolian saz, though there are people who try hard to convince us of the opposite, for they introduce themselves as “masters of the tambourás”, while the instrument they play is in fact the saz – an instrument of the tanbur family in the form it has acquired in Asia Minor. Ross Daly describes the efforts to resurrect the tambourás:

“In recent years there has been much talk in various music high schools, educational institutions, schools of music and so-called conservatories about an instrument that is mentioned in Greek history, called tambourás. The instrument has not survived to this day. There has been no ongoing tradition since ancient times that, as they say, the tambourás originates. We can find old Byzantine theoreticians’ descriptions, folkloric descriptions, or references in books, we know more or less how it was tuned, what its form was; but we have never listened to it live.”

● The tríchordon: a three-string instrument of the lute family, also known as pandura, pandurís or pánduros. It was probably the only instrument with a neck used by the Greeks. In the Hellenistic times the term pandura was used to refer to a whole family of similar instruments played with a plectrum. Sachs says: ”it had a long arm…, small body, frets, and three strings”. According to Pollux: ”tríchordon, which the Assyrians called pandura; for it was their own invention”. We are told by Pythagoras that ”the pandura was made by the Red Sea Troglodytae with white laurel that grows by the sea”. In his Manual, Nicomachus writes that the monochord was called phánduros. Hesychius uses the term pandurís for the instrument and pánduros for the performer; pandúrion[, he claims, is] a diminutive of the word pandura. But Photius says: ”pandúrion, i.e. a Lydian instrument played with the fingers without a plectrum”. In his Dictionary Zonaras notes: “pandúrion… a kind of cithara”. (Solon Michaelides, Encyclopedia of Ancient Greek Music).

Muse playing a tríchordon-pandurís

“There is an instrument played today in Turkey that is considered as closely related to the tambourás: it’s the saz. Some say it’s one and the same instrument. First of all, it is not – and anyone can see that by a simple comparison of the two instruments. Besides, the style, the music an instrument plays, its construction – everything – are all in one. You cannot separate one thing from the other.

“What we have now as a result is a whole army of young people who have learned how to play the saz in recent years not through some kind of training or tradition, but completely self-taught and off-hand. They present themselves as tambourás masters though it’s obvious they have not the slightest idea. The people here know nothing about the saz, tambur, ney, not even the oud, although the Greeks have participated in the development of Anatolian culture. There have been numerous excellent Greek oud players; the best example may have been Yorgo Bacanós [Badjanós], the leading oud player in Istanbul in the mid-20th century: every Turkish oud player now drinks water to him. But, unfortunately, this tradition did not take root in Greece, and there was no follow-up.

“After this tradition had died out for some decades, with the revival of rebétiko in the early 70s, and even more around the 80s, when the people became interested in the Smyrnaic style,⁽⁴⁾ every bouzouki player bought an oud, as well; and started tinkering with it as if playing a bouzouki. This is one thing; another thing is to be initiated in the living tradition of this instrument in Turkey or Arabia where the oud is played now.

• ⁽⁴⁾ Smyrnaic (from Smyrna) and Piraeotic (from Piraeus): the two main styles of rebétiko.

Oud

“I cannot consider all these bouzouki players that were suddenly interested in the oud as successors of the tradition carried over by Bacanós, Agapios Tomboules, Lambros [Leontarides], the lyra player, or Lambros [Sabbaides], the qanun player. All these musicians carried a living tradition but, unfortunately, while they were alive, no one was interested in it; that’s why they left no successors.

“One could say, of course, the tambourás survived in Crete through Stelios Foustalieris’ bulgarí. However, Foustalieris changed completely his instrument, while he was deeply influenced mainly through his contact with rebétiko. His playing may be helpful; but this is not enough to revive an entire tradition. Let’s utilize whatever we have at our disposal; but without all that nationalist hot air specifically about this instrument that has become a symbol: ‘the tabourás of Makryiannes’!⁽⁵⁾ Some persons use it like a gun!”

• ⁽⁵⁾ General Iannes Makryiannes was a leader of the Greek struggle for independence (1820s).

Crete’s exchange with Constantinople and Smyrna, and also the wider area of Anatolia and the Balkans, was continuous until the Asia Minor catastrophe of 1922. That’s how several tunes, and also the bulgarí, an instrument closely resembling the cura (tzurá), arrived there. But which cura? Here, too, the terms are confusing. The tzurás for the Greeks is the middle-sized instrument of the three that make up the bouzouki triad, while the smallest of the family is the Lilliputian baglamás, a typical prison instrument: due to its size it can be easily hidden. However, the smallest of the Anatolian tanburs is not the bağlama but the cura! Babel…

The pandura tradition in Asia Minor is autochthonous,
indigenous, at least since the Hittite and Assyrian times.

Different words, obviously, indicate differences not only in terms of dimensions, construction in general, but also in relation to the root of either the instruments or their users. Settling down in Anatolia, the Turks should have had instruments of the tanbur family, as we can presume based on the origin of these terms. But the peoples of Asia Minor had already been using similar instruments, such as the pandura, since time immemorial: at least since the time of the Hittites and the Assyrians. The tanburs, therefore, have been autochthonous there and their tradition has been Anatolian rather than Central Asian (Turkish).⁽⁶⁾

Âşık Veysel

• ⁽⁶⁾ I insist that the Ashik tradition has been Anatolian, not Turkish (Central Asian). During the international Musicological Symposium at Delphi in 1988 e.g., Reinhold Schlötterer analyzed the structure of Âşik Veysel’s song, Black Earth, pointing out that this melody corresponds to the ancient Hellenic musical system. Still, he hastened to add that we should not draw arbitrary conclusions claiming that the Anatolian music was actually dependent on ancient Greek culture. Besides, he concluded, Hellenic music had received antecedent idioms from Asia Minor. As we can see, Schlötterer compared ancient Greek and Anatolian cultures. He never intended to take into account in his analysis some Central Asian culture. Conclusion: Veysel’s source of inspiration, albeit in this song, was the ancient tradition of Greece and Asia Minor, not that of Central Asia. Therefore, the Ashik tradition is autochthonous, born and bred in Anatolia.

Ashiks, Alevis, Bektashis

We tend to forget this fact as we are under the false impression that the erudite Constantinopolitan tradition’s origin, on the one hand, has been Arabo-Persian (and Byzantine, of course, but we also forget) and, on the other hand, that the Anatolian folk music is “purely Turkish”… Would you expect anything else? It’s more than obvious that these advocates of “purity” – in sound and also race – are a global phenomenon. And if in this case the “purists” are Turks, OK (so to speak). But what if they are foreigners?

“At the court of the Ottoman sultans”, commented Alain Gheerbrant, who recorded and released songs of Âşık Veysel, “the official arts were so encumbered by flowery Arabo-Persian art poetry as to become less and less understandable to the common people. At the same time, the ashiks, often illiterate itinerant folk poets, maintained a tradition of poetry in song on Turkish soil. Since the 12th century, their poetry, worded in rigorous language and free of foreign influences, could be heard from the shores of the Mediterranean as far away as China.

“The Ottoman Empire disappeared; the popular tradition did not. Although there may no longer be any ashiks in Khorasan, they are still present in Anatolia. Âşık Veysel was not only the most brilliant of them all, he was also one of the greatest contemporary poets of the Turkish language. The tradition from which he drew his inspiration dates from the great semi-legendary figures of yesteryear, such as Yunus Emre (13th century) and Pir Sultan or Kaygusuz Abdal (16th century). His work shall remain, alongside that of his predecessors, in the collective memory of the rural peoples of Anatolia.

“His influence is also plain to see elsewhere, for the ‘Kemalist’ revolution has placed Turkey on the road to recovering its identity. A reconciliation was needed for that to take place: for the literate to abnegate their caste, set apart by jealousy, and recognize and hear the illiterate élites. Today’s Turkey has reached that understanding: one needs only to open a novel by Yaşar Kemal or view a few scenes from a Yilmaz Güney film to understand that Âşık Veysel, the aged, sightless bard, opened the eyes of all contemporary thinkers and artists, those who have carried the voice of their people beyond their nation’s borders eliminating the barrier of misunderstandings, preconceptions, and platitudes that impede all positive interaction between cultures.

Statue of Pir Sultan Abdal, who was
martyred and hanged for his beliefs

“Veysel, like all the ashiks, was of the Alevi–Bektashi faith, and therefore voluntarily alien to the rigid code of the Sunni Muslims. His philosophy, a fusion of the wisdom of the ancient Greeks of Asia Minor and the generous warmth of his Central Asian ancestors, was one of tolerance and freedom. He preached unity, understanding, and equality between all men and women, based on a religion that was turned inwards towards the earth, rather than outwards towards the sky”…

What a “flowery” garden… Had we not known Turkey, we would have thought it’s a heavenly land of the angels! Was the French researcher really serious, or did he tell one white lie after the other winking meaningfully at us? After all, why should he mention two prominent Kurds, such as Yaşar Kemal and Yilmaz Güney, who were jailed by the “‘Kemalist’ revolution”? And they were not the only ones. The most important persons of the arts and letters in Turkey have been treated collectively as subversive elements. Let alone how the Sunni state dealt with Alevis and Bektashis. What is, indeed, the use of such texts, except perhaps to serve public relations and personal gain?

● The Alevis, who live… persecuted in Turkey (indiscriminately and at all times: in the Ottoman, Kemalist or Islamist periods), should not be confused with the Alawites in Syria, who form a ruling minority. Alevis are grouped together with Shias (Shiites), though their religion, a syncretism of Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Shamanist beliefs, differs from both main branches of Islam. They usually gather for their ceremonies in houses rather than mosques, drinking wine, listening to music and dancing: an ashik plays bağlama singing their didactic “spirituals”, while both men and women dance whirling like Dervishes. Unlike Muslims, whose ceremonies are performed in Arabic, the Alevis use mainly Turkish, or Kurdish, if they are Kurds. At least half the Alevis think they are not Muslims. Sunnis accuse them of “heresy, heterodoxy, rebellion, betrayal, immorality”. Alevis, on the other hand, preaching love and respect for all, tolerance towards other religions and ethnic groups, equality between men and women, and respect for working people, consider Sunnis as “reactionary, bigoted, fanatic, anti-democratic”, opposing free and independent thinking. Alevis now see themselves as an offset to Sunni fundamentalism. Take into account that 1/4 to 1/3 of the inhabitants of Turkey are Alevis. Native Alevis in Greek Western Thrace are thought to number 3000 people.

Bektashi hymns

● Alevism is associated with Bektashism, as both groups honour Haji Bektash Veli (13th century). Bektashis had a strong presence not only in Asia Minor but also in the Balkans, especially in Albania, “North Macedonia” (Vardar Banovina, or ancient Paeonia), Bulgaria, and Greece, primarily in Epirus, Macedonia, Thrace and Crete. It seems only in Bosnia they failed to take root. Influenced by Sufi mysticism and also accused of pantheism, they share some ideas with Shias, and are not dogmatic. Sultan Mahmud II abolished various orders (Bektashi, Janissaries, etc.) in 1826. Mustafa Kemal banned Dervish Sufi orders and shut down their lodges a century later, in 1925. While Enver Hoxha acted accordingly, outlawing religious practice in Albania. Kemal and Hoxha acted on the basis of their ideas and interests. One would surely expect that the rest of the Balkan leaders, except, of course, those who are under Ankara’s aegis, would do the same taking advantage of the Sunni-Bektashi conflict, given that the great majority of the Balkan Muslims have been Bektashis. Yet, acting stupidly as bigots in power, they too turned against them, handing them over to the Turkish leaders. It’s what we describe as “politicians with foresight”!

Although most Balkan Muslims are Bektashis, the Balkan states did not take advantage of the Sunni-Bektashi conflict, and turned against them, as well…

A Hittite with a small pandura

LET’S GO BACK to the tríchordon-pandura and its long history in Asia Minor. There is ample evidence that instruments of the tanbur family have been played by Anatolians since age-old times. Christian Poché says:

“Asia Minor was from earliest antiquity the favoured land of the long-necked lute, as shown by the Hittite archaeological finds… Long before Arabic Spain, this geographical area served as a link between Orient and Occident, and as such transmitted through the ages these types of long-necked lutes that in classical Europe gave birth to the pandura, colascione, mandora…

“In Turkey, these lutes take on different names according to their dimensions, the populations who use them and the way they use them. The Turkmen term baglama or baglamaq, literally ‘tying’ (of strings around an instrument) is the one found most often, as opposed to the other widespread term, saz, a Persian word which designates the music, the act of playing it on any instrument, especially the long-necked lute. A third term, of probable Indo-Iranian origin, also serves in support of the musical vocabulary: tambura.⁽⁷⁾ Like the preceding ones, it designates a fretted instrument of six strings in pairs, whose terminology finds more favour among the Kurdish populations.”

• ⁽⁷⁾ Personally, I think that the term tambura probably originates from the Assyrian pandura or a similar Hittite word. If so, the term must be Mesopotamian-Anatolian and not Indo-Iranian.

A Greek islander with a tambourás (18th century)

Thus, with the exception of the Kurds, the term tanbur is avoided in Turkey in relation to this long-necked lute because a related but very different instrument, called tambur, is used in the erudite Arabo-Persian music of Constantinople. There are two variants of this instrument: plucked (the older version) or bowed (yayli tambur), depending on the way it is played – with a plectrum or a bow. In Greece, of course, the term baglama in relation to the same long-necked lute is also avoided for the same reason, so as not to be confused with the well-known homonymous small instrument, the bouzouki’s little brother.

The Bulgarí

Unfortunately, the etymology of the terms relating to the several variants of the tanbur does not explain what the origin of the word bulgarí may be. Excluding the possibility of a Bulgarian origin, there’s only one alternative: the word vulgar referring to the common people, the “lower” classes – anything “debased”. This possibility, together with the characterization of the Greek demotic as “vulgar”, shows how class, racist, or sexist language may sometimes become – well, not language itself but man, the one who uses it…

● Words are boats and their etymology is a map of their voyages together with the peoples using them. On second… searches for bulgarí’s genealogy, my first guess proves to be in a way correct: after all, there is a “Bulgar connection”! The instrument may not originate from Bulgaria but from Anatolia among the Turkomans or Oguzes around the Taurus; it may not be directly linked with similar Balkan lutes, such as the tambura, tamburica or bugarija; but its name derives from the Bulgars, the proto-Bulgarian tribes of the Volga Bulgaria region, with whom the Turkomans-Turkmens had contacts. These Bulgars, on the contrary, had no contacts with the (European, Slavic-speaking) Bulgarians for more than a millennium.

The bulgarí spread in the Mediterranean, especially to Crete and Egypt. Guillaume André Villoteau, a French musicologist, mentioned in 1807 a tanbour boulghari or guitare de Bulgarie among other instruments of the tanbur family he saw in Cairo: bağlama, sharki, and bozuq (replaced later on by the buzuq). The bulgarí was either brought to Crete by Anatolian refugees in the 1920s or, most probably, was already in use at least since the 19th century among both Christian and Muslim populations. Stelios Foustalieris e.g. bought his first bulgarí in 1924, having seen the instrument being played by older musicians. It is still in use mainly as a lead instrument and not for accompaniment, a role that was gradually taken over by the laouto.

The bulgarí has 16-22 movable frets, but some musicians, e.g. Foustalieris replaced them with fixed frets. It’s the main instrument of the tabachaniotika, a style close to rebétiko, supposedly developed by “Turco-Cretans”. The tabachaniótika are urban folk songs influenced by Anatolian, Syrian, or Andalusian–Maghrebian music. Ross Daly and Pericles Papapetrópoulos are now bulgarí’s most accomplished performers.

Iován Tsaoús and Foustalieris

At any rate, Foustalieris’ vulgar or Bulgar bulgarí, together with the instruments performed by Iannes Eidjirides (or Etseirides), the famous Iován Tsaoús, were the only kinds of tambourás that Grecian discography actually recorded. But what a pity! These instruments seem to have little in common with those played by the fighters of the Greek War of Independence: the bulgarí is a Cretan peculiarity, while Iován Tsaoús’ instruments are Anatolian – hence unsuitable for restoring the Hellenic tambourás and its sound.

Iován Tsaoús

Iován Tsaoús, i.e. Sergeant John, was born in Pontus and worked with famous musicians and singers, playing even in the sultan’s Court, as they say. On the contrary, when he fled to Greece after the catastrophe of ’22, “he never played on stage because he seemed to disagree with the way the musicians functioned: he remained an ‘edutainer’ of his friends.”⁽⁸⁾ This is what Panaiotes Kounades says at least; which means that he did not like the role of an entertainer, as he was used to a different situation in Asia Minor and Constantinople, where musicians functioned otherwise:

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

“Arabo-Perso-Turkish music,” the qanun player Nikos Stephanides commented, “in earlier times was performed by musicians playing saz, bouzouki and tambourines in folk songs; while serious music was performed by an ensemble called ince saz (fine instruments) consisting of the following: tambur (pandura), psalterium [psaltery] – qanun in Greek, Arabic and Turkish – violin, oud, ney (reed flute). The ensembles had singers called hanendes. They had beautiful voices and played tabors – tambourines – keeping the various rhythms of the melodies being performed.

“When the ensemble played and the hanende sang, everyone was silent in the venue. Even the waiters did not move from their positions. Only during the breaks, when the ensemble stopped playing, the public discussed or ordered the waiters whatever they wished for. If they wanted the ensemble to play a song, they put a card with the order and a corresponding tip inside an envelope, and the waiter carried it to the artists so as to perform the piece he wanted. Such was the order inside the venues, which in those old times were equipped neither with loudspeakers nor with amplifiers and, although the musicians played with a natural sound, the audience were able to listen even in the large venues, where they oftentimes numbered more than 500-1000 persons, because they were completely silent”…

Panaiotes Tountas

When you are accustomed likewise – playing high-standards music with such partners and in front of such audience – how is it possible to restrict yourself to the role of an entertainer? Iován Tsaoús, therefore, chose to open a… tailor’s shop, which he later turned into an ouzo tavern, playing for his pleasure and not for the entertainment of the patrons of an establishment. Fortunately, he met Panaiotes Tountas, the greatest composer of the Smyrnaic style, and also artistic director of phonographic companies; so he recorded a number of his own songs and some other compositions, mainly by Tountas. These few recordings (about twenty in all) took place in just two years (1935-36), because when the Metaxas dictatorship imposed censorship on lyrics and music (and music!), Iován Tsaoús abandoned the idea to continue, as some others did, as well, such as Vangelis Papázoglou, Giorgos Batis, and Anestos (Artemes) Deliás (see Chronicle 13).

But anyway, less is more: these moments in the studio – however few – reflect the virtuosity of the musician who became a kind of “master” of the Piraeotic rebétiko protagonists: Batis, Deliás, Markos Bambakares, Stratos Paioumtzēs – that is, the “Famous Quartet of Piraeus”. They learned from him the names and techniques of the musical “routes” (modes), the art of improvisation (taqsim), and also the several tunings, the düzenia. All the above, combined with his unusual personal style and “eccentric” instruments that the bouzouki players of rebétiko did not dare to touch, let alone play, created a myth around the name of Iován Tsaoús, or… “Sgt. Iován”.⁽⁹⁾

• ⁽⁹⁾ Sgt. Pepper, who “offered” the Beatles their masterpiece, was an imaginary person. But on the contrary, Sgt. Iován, in Greece, was real. Unfortunately, no one has ever had the idea to form a… Sgt. Iován’s Lonely Hearts Club Band!

Canción Malagueña, by George Apperley (1931)

In our “modern” world, unfortunately, the musicians have no way out from the stranglehold of the entertainment circuit (clubs, festivals, etc.). That is, there has been no parallel “edutainment” circuit on a professional basis. In Andalusia, on the contrary, at least until the 60s, there was such a circuit for flamenco artists. Up to the latest development of the genre into concert and theatrical flamenco,⁽¹⁰⁾ these artists were divided into two major categories: the commercial entertainers worked primarily in tablaos, while the authentic “edutainers” were employed in juergas, the feasts organized by flamenco aficionados.

• ⁽¹⁰⁾ Concert and theatrical flamenco: having as protagonists the guitarists and dancers respectively: yesteryear’s leading artists, according to flamenco’s traditional hierarchy, the singers, have been sidelined – together with cante jondo and duende that avoid concert halls or theatres…

There’s been no way out from the stranglehold of the entertainment
circuit for the musicians: there’s been no parallel edutainment circuit.

Stelios Foustalieris

The other tambourás master, Stelios Foustalieris or Foustalierakis, together with his partner, the excellent singer Iannis Bernidakis or Baxevanis, belonged to the large batch of musicians and singers, who appeared in Rethymnon during the interwar period. The instruments accompanying the lyra at that time were the bulgarí and mandolin, according to Lambros Liavas. They were later replaced by the laouto. But Foustalieris managed to turn bulgarí into a solo instrument and worked with two Anatolian musicians playing the oud and santur. They were among those who sought refuge in the island after the catastrophe of 1922. So they should have imparted to him musical elements from the original cradle of his instrument. Unfortunately, there are no recordings from this collaboration.

Later he came into direct contact with the sound of the Piraeotic rebétiko. It was in the period of 1933-37, when he lived in Piraeus and also met Batis, Markos, Stratos and many other musicians of rebétiko, as well as Tountas, with whom, of course, he collaborated in discography. But here, too, the output was meagre: just 24 discs.

We wonder if the two tambourás masters, Iován Tsaoús and Foustalieris, finally met; if there was some exchange of knowledge and expertise. Having so many acquaintances in common, one would expect that this meeting did happen. But there is no available information.

Iován Tsaoús died 49 years old, in 1942, during the German occupation of Hellas that “wiped out” the vast majority of the élite of Greek musicians and singers: the Anatolian refugees. Apparently they failed to go through one more calvary so soon. On the contrary, Foustalieris passed away 50 years later, in 1992, when he was 81. Being… “the last of the Mohicans” among the select few traditional masters of tambourás, we suppose he attracted the attention of the authorities. This would have happened in almost any country; but not in Balkan Greece…

While Foustalieris was still alive, in 1987, I had a discussion on the radio with Sakis Papademetriou and Ross Daly – who concluded as follows:

“Crete, compared perhaps with other parts of Greece, somehow maintains its tradition in a better shape, in the sense that it’s been renewed. But because there have been neither significant studies on music nor recordings, each passing decade brings terrible losses. In the few years that I’m there, I’ve met old musicians who in the meantime have died and with them many archives have been lost. There are very few now left.

Stelios Foustalieris, Giorges Gogas, Kostas Mountakis and Ross Daly.

“Foustalieris, the last bulgarí player, is still alive. He’s around 75, but no one has gone there with a tape recorder to tell him: ‘Play – and when you get tired, stop!’ However, no private individual can do such a thing because Foustalieris will be afraid he’ll be exploited. In such cases, an official state agency can easily surpass any problems and Foustalieris, as a man with an old mentality, will warmly respond. At least something like that, now that there is still time”…

● Time’s passed, Foustalieris has died, the rest of the masters follow, but there have been no recordings – an undertaking of minimal expense. “Hellas, the eternal”…

● On second dispassionate thought, I wonder whether – as a daydreamer – I ask “too much” from a country that has not given a damn about the essence of Makryiannes’ Memoirs. Why then should they care about the way he used to play his tambourás? Let alone about Foustalieris and his own bulgarí…

● So, our only hope is to see the fulfillment of a verse, albeit paraphrased, of a most beautiful old song, Staphidianós, played superbly by Foustalieris on his bulgarí, having beside him an amazing Baxevanis:

“The good old Foustalieris song will never fade away”…

• >> Chronicle 10. THE… “SUN LANGUAGE”
• << Chronicle 8. A HYBRID’S HYBRIS…

Next Chronicle 10. THE… “SUN LANGUAGE” ● Linguistics à la Turca ● İsmail Beşikçi and the Kurds ● Egyptian, Graeco-Byzantine, Arabo-Persian, Turkish Music ● Assimilation Through Religion and Language ● Arabic Music Schools

Ross Daly playing tarhu