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 19^th 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 14^th 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 19^th 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