Θέματα Μουσικής Παράδοσης

One of the biggest problems for someone who starts to deal with the Byzantine Music is the relatively complex theory and the almost complete lack of a reliable and free program to experiment, to listen, learn, write and of course to create Byzantine Music using it.

This is the gap that we tried to cover with this site which we kindly offer to our students, to those studying our music and to all lovers of our tradition. In the future, we hope to build a notable music base with compositions and composers covering all the Greek music culture mainly from the Byzantine period and beyond. However, it is not impossible to find partners-experts in Ancient Greek Music, as well.

It is well known what an important role music played in the soul of young people since the antiquity. The accompaniment of flutes was necessary both while the young were exercising and during the official competitions. Besides the sports competitions there had been kitharodeias competitions since 586 BC! Our ancestors knew how to combine mathematics with music, sports, the arts, education and everyday life in general.

The ancient Greek philosophers consider music necessary for three reasons:

a) Entertainment and rest

b) Formation of character

c) Intellectual and aesthetic culture.

At that time, the cultured man was also called  musician man(μουσικός ανήρ). Themistocles admitted that his education was incomplete because he had not learned music well, as we are informed by Plutarch.  

Our Byzantine music offered and offers a serious and constant link with our ecclesiastical tradition of many centuries, with our traditional Leventiki music as well as with the ancient Greek music. It is known to all those engaged with Byzantine music, the Byzantine system of octave (4 main and 4 plagal tones)  resting directly on the moral-emotional system of music that the ancient Greeks had developed. Genera (=plural of genus) in Byzantine music are divided into three groups (diatonic, chromatic, harmonic) as in ancient times. The forerunner of the ecclesiastical organ  that passed through the Byzantine Empire to the West was ydralis(ύδραλις), while pandourida (the Pandoura,πανδουρίδα) is the forerunner of the lute and bouglari. The Pandoura is still used even today in the teaching of scales, microtonals etc. of Byzantine Music. Today, nowhere can we listen to the exact sounds of ancient music except for the chants and hymns of the Byzantine Music and the songs of our traditional music. Example: The scale intervals we listen to today in ecclesiastical members of the diatonic genus are those set by Didymus from Alexandria. The syntonic comma (i.e. 81/80 =around 21.54 cents) is also known by his name. More about the diatonic genus as well as other useful information can be found in the Encyclopedia of microtonal music theory(*).

Fathers of the Church stressed the important role of music for the revival/restoration/reconstruction of human nature and opposed to its misuse for the distasteful and unworthy entertainment and naturally to its commercialization. Characteristic is the following passage from the Contra Julianum imperatorem 2 (Against Julian):

Ἀναλάβωμεν ὕμνους ἀντὶ τυμπάνων, ψαλμῳδίαν ἀντὶ τῶν αἰσχρῶν λυγισμάτων τε καὶ ᾀσμάτων, κρότον εὐχαριστήριον ἀντὶ κρότων θεατρικῶν, καὶ χειρῶν πρᾶξιν εὔηχον, σύννοιαν ἀντὶ γέλωτος, ἀντὶ μέθης ἔμφρονα λόγον, ἀντὶ θρύψεως σεμνοπρέπειαν. Εἰ καὶ ὀρχήσασθαι δεῖ σε, ὡς πανηγυριστὴν καὶ φιλέορτον, ὄρχησαι μὲν, ἀλλὰ μὴ τὴν Ἡρωδιάδος ὄρχησιν τῆς ἀσχήμονος, ἧς ἔργον Βαπτιστοῦ θάνατος· ἀλλὰ τὴν Δαβὶδ ἐπὶ τῇ καταπαύσει τῆς κιβωτοῦ, ἣν ἡγοῦμαι τῆς εὐκινήτου καὶ πολυστρόφου κατὰ Θεὸν πορείας εἶναι μυστήριον. Πρῶτον μὲν δὴ τοῦτο καὶ μέγιστον τῆς ἐμῆς παραινέσεως.

We started the construction of this site in August 2015. After a very fruitful collaboration with the Canadian Mr. Seymour Shlien, we managed to write and listen to (finally!) Byzantine music using abcnotation and abc2midi. Abcnotation is a smart philosophy to enable anyone to write music without instruments, microphones installations, or expensive synthesizers. Just by using our computer keyboard where instead of writing syllables or sentences, we write one by one the notes (for example, note Ni i.e. Do is simply represented simply by the letter C). After we write our melody and add the appropriate "cosmetic" commands we can print and of course listen to it! Printing ie. viewing in the stave is supported by a free program called abcm2ps. Of course in this case, the stave does not interest us very much because traditionally we write our music with the established symbols of Byzantine notation (and five years now, free or commercial software has been developed rudimentary covering this need). The challenge is how to listen to our music, its scales and its quality characters, or in other words how we would attribute/represent it correctly. At this point, the abc2midi free program came along converting notes into sounds written in C language- the exquisite creature of Mr. Shlien.