Early music in Greece
Ivan Moody
Greece has, of course, the earliest music in
Europe. Manifold are the surveys of Greek musical history which begin with a
discussion of the surviving fragments from Pagan Greece, transcribed by more
than one scholar from a tantalizing alphabetic notation. What came next? Greece
had no "renaissance" in the sense that western European countries
did, for there was no equivalent to the development of the plastic arts and
music which took place within the Roman Catholic Church, Byzantine Orthodox
theological traditions having a different perspective on matters musical, as
also with ecclesiastical iconography, which ran counter to western ideas of
artistic innovation. (It should be said, however, that the renaissance did not
pass Greece by entirely, as the Latin-texted polyphony of the Roman Catholic
Cretan Frangiskos Leontaritis, of whom more below, demonstrates) At first
sight, then, to the western observer there would seem to be a huge gap between
the remnants of Classical Greece and the burgeoning of art music which took
place in Greece during the 19th century, filled only by the
continuous thread of Byzantine chant.
Things are, inevitably, not so simple. To
take Byzantine chant first, it, like Gregorian, was and is susceptible to
various kinds of performance – including polyphonic and instrumental. There has
been quite an outpouring of performances and recordings of this music,
increasingly well-informed musicologically, in the last twenty years or so. The
psaltis Theodore Vassilikos established quite a name for himself and his
ensemble (particularly in France) in the early 1980s, recording a series of
discs for Ocora and for the Greek label Minos, few of which have appeared on
CD. More recently, Lycourgos Angelopoulos has achieved even greater success,
with the Greek Byzantine Choir in concert (also with notable success outside
Greece) and on record, working to standards of formidable musicological rigour
and achieving profoundly beautiful musical results. He has issued several tapes
which are available only inside Greece, but fortunately the CDs he has made for
Playasound (which include a staggering historical survey of the Akathistos
Hymn), Opus 111 (a magnificent recording of the Divine Liturgy of St John
Chrysostom) and Jade (including an entire disc of the 14th century
composer and saint Ioannis Koukouzelis) are widely available. Angelopoulos has
also taken his experience outside Greece and the Byzantine repertoire, being a
frequent collaborator with Marcel Pérès and the Ensemble Organum: his voice may
be heard, for example, on the three volumes of Old Roman chant which Pérès has
recorded for Harmonia Mundi, sung in both Greek and Latin.
Mention should also be made of a magnificent
series produced by the Vatopaidi Monastery on Mount Athos, with musicological
presentation by the psaltis Constantinos Angelidis. This superb choir is
recording a series of luxuriously presented discs (which include the scores in
Byzantine notation) entitled "The Vatopaidi Musical Bible", of which
three volumes have so far appeared, containing works by Vatopaidi composers,
and another of music for Holy Week, one for each day, produced in conjunction
with Crete University Press, and also under the supervision of Angelidis. Like
the recent Sony disc of music from the New Skete entitled simply "Mount
Athos", these recordings show the living chant tradition at its best, sung
by monks who approach the music as part of their spiritual and liturgical life
but who are at the same time concerned to sing it well in a technical sense.
While Byzantine chant and a certain amount of
other kinds of Greek music has appeared with some regularity in both concerts
and recordings outside Greece, one of the principal disseminators of Greek
early music in recorded form in recent years has been the company FM Records,
which was established in Athens ten years ago by Nicos and Dina Courtis. From
the beginning the aim was to promote young artists and to promulgate Greece’s
vast musical legacy from the pre-Christian period to the 19th
century - something which was and continues to be largely overlooked by other
record companies active in Greece - and connections with other musical
traditions, the blurring between the categories which is evident in so much of
FM’s work, being seen as a natural extension of this. The success of this
project has been notable, both inside and outside Greece.
"Melos Archaion" are two discs (of
a projected series of four) of imaginative recreations of Greek antiquity by
the versatile instrumentalist Petros Tabouris, who has recorded extensively for
FM Records, and an ensemble of musicians. Where necessary, accompaniments are
composed and missing sections reconstructed and the Greek pronunciation will
remind you of modern-day Athens rather than the Erasmian system: the music is
approached as a living entity, like folk music, rather than as a
self-consciously revived museum artefact (a problem frequently affects
performances of this repertoire). There are pieces written by Tabouris himself
"based on the prosody of the verse and suitable harmony", and also
excursions into other repertoires related in various ways, such as a short
excerpt of Byzantine chant, and, in their first recordings, two pieces by
Konstantinos Agathaphrona Nikopoulos (1786-1841), whose settings of ancient
Greek writings sound quite of their composer’s time. Tabouris comments:
"Greek music is basically split and differentiated into two periods: the
period of Greek Antiquity and the period of the Middle Ages and Christianity.
It is to be understood that continuity is more obvious in the second period as
far as Greek music is concerned. However, it is far from the western European
style of music. Greek music of the middle ages, and especially in its popular
form, has not basically changed until today. The instruments, dances and songs
follow almost the same formal development." His work on later repertoire
confirms this approach. "Thyrathen: Post-Byzantine secular
music" (again, the first volume in a projected series) is a collection of kratimata
and other melismatic compositions by Byzantine composers, and folk songs and
dances from the Greek Ottoman milieu (Tabouris draws the expected parallels
with the Arab musical system in his insert notes). As well as Tabouris’s two
volumes of "Melos Archaion", there are two other discs of ancient
Greek music currently on the market: "Musique de la Grèce Antique"
recorded in 1979 by the Atrium Musicae of Madrid under Gregorio Paniagua on
Harmonia Mundi, and "Musiques de l’Antiquité Grecque" by the Ensemble
Kérylos under Annie Bélis, recorded in 1996 on K617.
There are also two recordings available from
FM of the Athens Byzantine Orchestra, whose artistic director is Manolis
Karpathios, similarly performing liturgical chants (Koukouzelis, Petros
Bereketis, Petros the Peloponnisian and others) instrumentally, and with a clear
input from folk tradition. This approach is highly speculative in that all such
kratemata (that is, works using only nonsense syllables; what the
composer and musicologist Michael Adamis has characterized as the only
"abstract music" of the Byzantine Church) come from liturgical
sources, even when endowed with exotic titles such as "Persika"
(Persian) and there is an almost complete lack of evidence concerning secular
music in Byzantium. The work of the Athens Byzantine Orchestra and others is
therefore an imaginative recreation, largely based on the performance practice
of Ottoman classical music, which stands or falls on its own musical merits.
The extensive series of recordings of "Byzantine secular classical
music" made for Orata by Christodoulos Halaris has generated not a little
controversy within Greece among both musicologists and folk musicians precisely
because of these questions. His work makes an interesting comparison, being
altogether smoother and quite without the vibrant folk-influenced sound of the
Athens Byzantine Orchestra. Manolis Karpathios points out that the orchestra,
which uses Greek instruments such as the canonaki (psaltery), lyre, outi
(lute), clarinet and violin, has "added an international aspect to the
repertoire it plays, with works of eastern classical music by composers
originating mainly from the city of Constantinople (Romanians, Turks, Jews,
Armenians, etc) such as Dede Efendi, Nikolakis, Tatyos Efendi, Cernil Bey,
Vassilakis and Alecco Batzanos."
Petros Tabouris is also involved in
producing FM’s magnificent series devoted to Greek folk instruments, the
"Musical Encounters" series of international collaborations (which
includes "Andama", a stunning disc of the Flamenco cantaor
José González working with the guitarist Giorgos Papadopoulos and other Greek
musicians) and with the work of the Early Music Workshop, of Athens. This vocal
and instrumental group, founded in 1980, not only performs what western
listeners would recognize as "early music", but has also worked
extensively on traditional Greek folksongs. Their two discs of Laments on the
Fall of Constantinople offer selections of some magnificent songs, many of them
transcribed by the eminent musicologist Simon Karas (with whom Manolis
Karpathios also worked), and performed using appropriate period instruments and
a distinctive style of rendition for each district and era. It is important to
note that, however much Greece may appear from the oustide to be a country with
a still-thriving tradition of folk music, as the insert notes to these
recordings put it, "we observe a remarkable constancy which is preserved
until the beginning of this century, and
then a rapid evolution which we could also characterize as corruption. Factors
such as market value, national expediency, slipshod work, semi-ignorance, but
also the gradual passing of music-making into the hands of professional
musicians, virtuosos undoubtedly, but ignorant of tradition (Gypsies,
Levantines, etc) harmed our national music irretreivably." This aspect of
what we have come to think of as the "early music movement" provides
food for thought indeed. The Early Music Workshop continues the work of Karas
and other researchers in trying - in this respect - to turn back thc clock, but
their own experience as musicians, both of folk and art music, is what confers
a particular vitality and spontaneous musicality upon these recordings. A
different kind of popular music figures on their two-disc set of "Songs of
the Greek War of Independence, 1821", which includes songs and marches
related to that event (including music by the same Konstantinos Nikolopoulos
whose work appears on Tabouris’s ancient Greek collection) and even a special
Byzantine Litany in tempore belli.
The Early Music Workshop’s work is further
continued by the Hellenic Music Archives Ensemble (to be heard on the disc
"Romeika", which also features the voice and playing of Christos
Tsiamoulis, who may be heard, together with the instrumentalist Dimitris Psonis
and the Spanish percussionist Pedro Estevan, on the extraordinary disc
"Metamorphosis" released by Glossa in 1997, yet another example of
the fruitful creative relationship which Greek musicians are able to maintain
both historically and geographically with Hellenic music, containing as it does
folk music, Byzantine chant and newly composed works. The Hellenic Music
Archives Ensemble, as well as giving a large number of concerts and recordings
within Greece, also has as one of its principal aims the creation of an archive
of scores, books and sound documents, and is active in the recording of folk
music in isolated areas of Greece. Tabouris is currently researching material
for an extended series of recordings of traditional songs from all over the
world, beginning with "the neighbours of Greek Hellenism": the first
three titles will be "The Music of Gypsies of Constantinople",
"The Music of Hungary’s Gypsies" and "Music of Azerbaijan".
The work of the choir Polyphonia falls
outside the areas I have discussed above, in that their work is very largely
based on western repertoire from the middle ages to the baroque, though they
have also performed works by contemporary Greek composers. Polyphonia was
founded in 1994, and today comprises twelve singers and five instrumentalists.
Since its foundation the choir has maintained a very busy schedule of concerts
and radio broadcasts. According to conductor Nikos Kotrokois, recruiting the
right kind of singer in Greece can be difficult, since the majority prefer to
remain with either the Greek Radio Chorus or the Greek National Opera Chorus
for reasons of livelihood, or else to pursue solo careers. Such difficulties
are hardly reflected in the quality of the singing though, as one may hear on
the choir’s first disc of Leontaritis’s work (including the Missa Je prens
en grez, on an unknown model, and a series of motets). Leontaritis, a
Catholic born in Candia, Crete in around 1518, was rediscovered and brought to
public attention by Professor N. Panayotis, head of the Greek Institute of
Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies in Venice. He had influential friends in
the clerical hierarchy and was able to go to Venice, where he sang under
Willaert in the choir of St Mark’s, and subsequently to Munich, where he was
hired as a member of Duke Albrecht’s chapel choir. His subtle and imaginative
music sheds valuable light on the Italian inheritance in Crete during this
period, and these recordings are something of which Polyphonia may be justly
proud. As well as participation in various European and American festivals,
Polyphonia will continue their series of recordings of Leontaritis for FM and
also record a CD under the aegis of the Monastery of Koutloumousiou on Mount
Athos, with works by the choir’s director and N.Mantazaros.
Early music taken in the Greek sense, then,
ranges from the truly ancient to the truly contemporary: a unique phenomenon
which is increasingly lively and which could well have something to teach the
rest of Europe.
© 1999 Ivan Moody and Goldberg Ediciones
This article first appeared in Goldberg no. 9 (1999) and is reproduced here with permission. Please click on the following link to go to the Goldberg website: www.goldberg-magazine.com
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