Danse Macabre Andrew Katzenstein

Lament from Epirus: original 78s, including works of Delta passionate; the instruments keen like melody while the rest remain on fixed An Odyssey into Europe’s blues, Cajun, gospel, and Sacred Harp wolves or flutter and swoop like hum- tones. Iso-­polyphony has a hypnotic ef- Oldest Surviving Folk Music music. His unorthodox methods for mingbirds. The insistent strumming fect: the moving parts play off against by Christopher C. King. capturing sound from these old records and drumming, the pedal notes, the the static ones, which gives the music Norton, 304 pp., $29.95 yield brilliant results. The music critic droning of strings and accompanying a tension that always tends toward the Amanda Petrusich observed that in voices churn with a primeval energy. keynote but only rarely resolves. Sing- Kitsos Harisiadis: King’s home studio, Aspects of the music suggest bluegrass, ers in iso-­polyphony use no vibrato Lament in a Deep Style, 1929–1931 or free jazz, or the Velvet Underground, and channel sound through their nasal an album produced the turntable . . .was littered with or the Carnatic music of southern India. passages, creating a buzziness when by Christopher King oddly sized bits—matchsticks, But something sounds a bit off: the in- harmonies are close and a powerful, with Vassilis Georganos. tongue depressors, little plastic struments aren’t quite in tune and aren’t limpid tone when the voices collapse Third Man Records, $15.00 ice-­cream spoons—that he used to playing quite the same melody, or the into unison. weigh down the tone arm based on meter in a song intended for dancing is King emphasizes two types of While You Live, Shine assumptions he’d made or things a fast 7/8 or 9/8 that no one, it seems, Epirotic songs: the skaros and the mi- a documentary film he’d learned regarding certain could possibly keep up with. rologi. Both are played in free rhythm directed by Paul Duane studios or recording sessions. He After this initial impression, though, and feature improvised solos from accommodated for factors like am- aspects of the music become clear. klarino and violin. The skaros takes In 2009, the American re- its name from a word refer- cord collector and audio ring to the practice of graz- engineer Christopher King ing sheep at night, when they bought a stack of 78 rpm are thought to have better discs while on vacation in appetites. It is believed that Istanbul. A self-­described the skaros, variants of which obsessive for whom “the exist throughout the Bal- rare musk of shellac” is “the kans, began as tunes played second most arousing smell by shepherds on the flute to in the world,” he waited convey specific instructions impatiently to play his pur- to their flocks, and some still chases. Their contents were use music to communicate mysterious: the labels were with them. Listeners “who Nikos Economopoulos/Magnum Photos Nikos written in Greek, and King are attentive to the skaros are knew enough of the lan- drawn into a calm, trance-­ guage to realize that they like state,” King writes. “made no linguistic sense.” The word mirologi typi- He returned home ten days cally refers to vocal laments; later. “Decades of listen- there are versions of them ing to unvarnished prewar in Homer and on ancient music—Delta blues by Char- epitaphs. In some parts of lie Patton and fiddle records rural Greece, women sing by the Carter Brothers and mirologia beside the graves Son,” he writes in Lament of family members every day from Epirus, had not pre- for years, until the bones of pared him for what he heard the deceased are exhumed when he dropped the needle: and put in the village os- suary. Epirus is the only Insistent droning voices Musicians and dancers at a festival in Ganadio, a village in the region of Epirus in northwestern Greece, 2000 place where mirologia are and instruments merged, performed instrumentally, clashing against each other. One bient humidity, or a tilt in the floor- Many Epirotic dance songs have simple and musicians preserve the lugubrious vocal threaded its way between boards, or a distraction on the part melodies, which allow for embellish- mood of the sung versions found else- instruments while another voice of the original engineer.1 ment and improvisation. Lead parts where in Greece: mirrored the lead singer an octave are typically played by violin and kla- below. The music reached a cre- Over the past seven years, King rino (a type of clarinet), accompanied For the world is a tree, and we are scendo, crashed, and repeated . . . it has released six albums—nearly ten by laouto (a stringed instrument simi- its fruit, sounded like a massive coffee can hours—of songs from his collection lar to the oud) and defi (frame drum). And [Charon], who is the of angry bees had been shaken and of rural Greek and southern Albanian Klarino and violin players in particu- ­vintager, gathers its fruit. released in front of me. 78s. In Lament from Epirus, he re- lar display virtuosity with quick runs counts his odyssey, as he calls it, into of scales, trills, and large intervallic The music deeply affected King. He the region’s music, its history, and the jumps, especially of the minor sevenths The second-most-­ mountainous­ region felt as if he “had been taken apart and secrets he thinks it contains. King be- that give the style one of its most dis- in Europe, Epirus has harsh weather rearranged,” but the sensation was lieves that he has found in Epirotic tinctive characteristics. Even when and little arable land. As one Epirote “pleasurable—a necessary catharsis.” music the oldest folk tradition in Eu- doubling a melody with the violin, the told King, “Life has always been hard It was love at first listen. rope, one that began in pre-Homeric klarino lithely adds flourishes and fili- in the mountains, everything has always King learned that the records were cultures, hasn’t changed significantly grees around its partner. been uncertain.” Ancient Greeks be- made in the 1920s and 1930s by musi- in hundreds of years, and reveals the King writes that the vocabulary lieved the entrance to Hades was here: cians from Epirus, an area straddling origins and ultimate meaning of hu- and timbre of the music mimic the re- the Acheron River that Odysseus— northwestern Greece and southern manly organized sound. This engaging, gion’s cragged landscape and its fauna: and later Dante—crossed to reach the Albania. Eager for more, he contacted well-­researched, and peculiar book is “Phrases imitate sounds found in na- underworld flows, in reality, west from Elias and Vasilis Barounis, Athe- not only a work of music criticism or a ture: the singing of a nightingale, the Epirus’s mountains toward the Ionian nian brothers who owned an impres- philosophical rumination on the mean- babbling of a brook, the baying and Sea. Pilgrims hoping to summon the sive collection of Greek folk 78s and ing of music—it’s also a travelogue in barking of animals, and the surge of a ghosts of departed loved ones visited sparingly sold some to him for a few which the writer goes native. storm.” To achieve this mimetic effect, the Nekromanteion, a temple located hundred dollars apiece. After Vasilis violin and klarino players use scoops in a cave near the Acheron. For days, died in 2011, Elias sold their entire ar- and bends that elide distinctions be- and for a considerable fee, they un- chive of Epirotic recordings to King— The first thing one notices about tween pitches, almost ­imperceptible derwent purificatory rituals, including “something unprecedented among Epirotic music from the 1920s and grace notes in the upper registers, and the consumption of pork, oysters, and record collectors”—giving him the 1930s is that it’s raw. This isn’t just a re- heavy vibrato. a type of bean that induced hallucina- “staggering responsibility as a care- sult of the grainy quality of the record- In songs that include one or two tions. When the supplicant was ready, taker of this region’s ancient musical ing. The singing is full-­throated and singers, klarino and violin offer coun- he slaughtered a sheep and was led to legacy on the 78 rpm disc.” termelodies behind the vocalists, and a central chamber, which spirits could Elias couldn’t have chosen a more instrumental improvisations alternate enter from the beyond. Priests hidden loving or passionate custodian. Born 1Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, with sung verses. Songs with more in a second chamber impersonated the and raised in Virginia, King has remas- Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest than two singers use iso-­polyphony, in deceased, barked to suggest the pres- tered thousands of songs from their 78rpm Records (Scribner, 2014), p. 39. which some voices state or respond to a ence of Cerberus, and manipulated

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Katzenstein_41_43.indd 41 5/29/18 5:11 PM pulleys that sent up objects to dazzle taker—a job well suited to his morbid Lament in a Deep Style. Harisiadis’s state of having the blues with which the impressionable pilgrim. disposition—and until his vacation to tone is sweeter than many other klar- I had no prior experience.2 The difficulty of life in Epirus has Istanbul he had spent only a few weeks inists’, but most striking is his fleet, ef- been compounded by military failures outside Virginia, including a three-­day fortless virtuosity. Although music in and foreign invasions. Romans, Byz- stint in a philosophy Ph.D. program at Epirus is passed down from one gen- Throughout his life, King has been antines, Serbs, and Venetians all con- Franciscan University in Steubenville, eration to the next, technique is not, particularly fixated on music from trolled it at various times, and Ottoman Ohio. He depicts himself as a proud and every musician develops an idio- isolated communities that developed rule lasted from 1430 until 1913. While outcast and Luddite who’s most com- syncratic way of playing. Harisiadis, for unique idioms, techniques, and timbres. memories of the Ottomans are sour, fortable at home, surrounded by his example, would give lessons while sit- “If there’s any one continuous thread they granted Epirus a degree of inde- records. ting on one side of a gorge with his stu- through anything that I have,” he has pendence and access to foreign mar- Salty and self-­deprecating, he is a dent on the other side: unable see the said, “it’s deeply, deeply rural and kets; during this time, the region was lively and informative guide to Epi- master’s fingers move, the student had backwoodsy. It’s almost like it turns its enriched by trade, cultural exchange, rus. We watch him transform from a to figure out how to imitate the sounds back to the city.” He prizes music that and contributions from émigrés who “sheltered, misanthropic record collec- he heard. displays an “emotional intensity” and sent money back home. Lord Byron tor” into a modern Greek villager as Harisiadis, King discovers from reflects “an inextricable bond between celebrated Epirus’s striking landscapes he falls in love with the ways, rituals, those who knew him, had a reputation the soil and people”—“the intercon- in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and in- and cuisine of Epirus. He is especially for saintliness: he “had only one desire: nections between a place, its people, spired other Englishmen, including Ed- enamored of tsipouro, a grape brandy to heal people through his music.” He and its music.” Yet the very discs he ward Lear, to visit. One contemporary known as raki elsewhere in Greece, is said to have played for hours every loves from the 1920s and 1930s also led visitor called Ioannina, Epirus’s larg- which, he says, “tastes like the heavenly day to laborers at the marble mill in to the disintegration of the music they est city, “the Manchester and Paris” of fluids produced by two angels fucking.” Klimatia, his home village. The few captured—a kind of original sin that at northern Greece. once preserved and destroyed Though the population untainted folk traditions: has decreased precipitously since World War II, as resi- When mass commercial re- dents moved to cities within cording began, almost every Greece or to the US, Canada, ethnic and rural musical Australia, and Germany, expression commenced an Epirotes retain close ties to accelerated process of ho- their homeland. Many return mogenization, a sad urgency each year to see family and toward bland uniformity.... to participate in summer fes- Regional styles, repertoires, tivals called panegyria. The and, perhaps most crucially, number of residents in a vil- interactive and contextual lage during these festivals can functions went from being increase from a few dozen to a central component of a thousands. culture’s music to a quaint, When King heard that antiquated notion.... Ev- modern Epirus had a vibrant eryone wanted to sound like musical culture in which the those heard on the most re- same songs and styles as those Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,cent Yale University technologies: disc and on old recordings continued radio. to be played, he “disbelieved that this music could still exist Since, in King’s telling, au- in the world unchanged.” A print by Edward Lear showing Arta, a city in Epirus, and the surrounding region; thentic music disappeared All that remained of other from his book Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania, &c., 1851 as the phonograph and radio musical traditions he loved spread, he dismisses all music were slowly decaying 78s, not a living He learns how to distill it and argues, recordings we have of Harisiadis re- made after 1941 as “garbage.” His dis- culture. The music of the Mississippi unconvincingly, for its psychotropic veal a musician who combined intel- dain extends to practically every aspect Delta drifted to Chicago and Memphis, qualities. lectual rigor, technical adeptness, and of modern life. Lament from Epirus where it went electric; hillbilly music King takes us to important sites in emotional earnestness in ways that are contains jabs at, among other things, was eclipsed by country and western; Epirus and through its history, but he’s often, and surprisingly, reminiscent of smartphones, Oberlin graduates and Ukrainian fiddle music disappeared, in most lively when describing the sum- John Coltrane. Harisiadis’s improvi- Brooklynites, contemporary pop music, both Ukraine and America, within two mer festivals. Panegyria last all night, sations show an adventurousness that the American middle class, Western fu- generations of the first wave of emigra- with lots of food, liquor, music, and many other Epirotic musicians lacked: neral rites, hashtags, suburbanites who tion to the US. So when a friend invited dancing. The band sets up in the center he used nontraditional scales and su- drink single-­malt scotch, American King to Epirus, he enthusiastically of a village square, surrounded by the perimposed harmonies over the struc- urban culture, all of humanity, and the took the chance to visit the “land and villagers, who, arms linked, dance with tures of songs to create a more colorful, polka craze of the 1930s (an especially music that time forgot.” intricate footwork in concentric circles diverse sound. easy hit job). His aversion to a society he At the beginning of his voyage, King, around the musicians. King beautifully Zoumbas, a violinist, left Epirus in views as venal and mendacious is as in- like the supplicants who went to the evokes his first panegyria, in the town the 1910s for America, playing in Greek tense as his sensitivity to the aural quali- Nekromanteion, hoped to contact the of Vitsa: and Turkish clubs on the “Feta Circuit” ties of 78s. He told Amanda Petrusich, “It dead—in particular Kitsos Harisia- of émigré communities in New York, seems like I only enter into an abysmal dis and Alexis Zoumbas, two musi- We took in the whole works—the Philadelphia, and Gary, Indiana. He depression every year and a half or so, cians from Epirus who recorded about gears and the springs of the cel- recorded extensively in New York and and it’s usually because of having to go ninety years ago. He was determined ebration: the cascading clarinets Chicago in the 1920s but made almost to Whole Foods.” King seeks in 78s the to find out more about their lives from echoing from the village center like no recordings after 1929. His tone has authenticity he finds lacking in modern their descendants and other Epirotes snake charmers’ hypnotic flutes, a deep, woody resonance and mourn- culture, and for him authenticity almost who had known them. But he soon the disorienting smoke rising from ful yearning that, for King, exemplifies always means suffering: “I prepare for found that Epirus’s culture “embraces the souvlaki pits, the hundreds of the notion of xenitia, a longing for the death every day. I’m obsessed with it.” life and death equally,” and that the people orbiting the musicians, the dead and departed or a homesickness In Epirus, King found a culture au- present contained a vitality he was sure unhinged aura of everything. felt by emigrants. The expatriate vio- thentic enough for him. It has largely had vanished. linist would have been familiar with xe- resisted the temptations of consumer- That night he blacked out, waking the nitia: he returned to Greece only once, ism and survived the twentieth century next morning to find himself covered in struggled to make a living in America, relatively untouched by globalization. King began collecting records in the blood and his glasses in three pieces. and died penniless in Detroit in 1946. Its people and music express a strong mid-­1970s when, at age fifteen, he came Miraculously, he had “no hangover. I King writes, “The first time I played a awareness of death, a joyous celebra- across a box of pristine gospel 78 rpm was just at a loss as to where my skin recording of . . .‘Lament from Epirus,’” tion of life, and a deep connection to discs in an abandoned sharecropper’s had gone.” His wounds become a badge a mirologi by Zoumbas from which his their land. While You Live, Shine, a cabin on his grandfather’s property, an of honor, and he later refers to himself book takes its title, forthcoming documentary that fol- event he recounts with almost religious as “a Vitsanian by adoption.” lows King from Virginia (“hell”) to awe. In his book he offers few other Meanwhile, he hunts for facts about a dark vastness opened. . . . I felt the village of Vitsa and has marvelous details about his personal life, perhaps Kitsos Harisiadis and Alexis Zoum- as if I was witnessing an agonizing footage of its panegyria, shows him at because so much of it has involved the bas. Harisiadis, a klarino player, lived crucifixion but was unsure of the peace, happily turning meat on a spit music he’s remastered—work for which in Epirus his entire life and made only victim. Was it myself, humanity, he’s won a Grammy and been nomi- twenty-­four recordings, all between Zoumbas?. . . [The music] opened 2Alexis Zoumbas: A Lament for Epi- nated for five others. After college 1929 and 1931. Fourteen of these tracks up in me longing, remembrance, rus, 1926–­1928, a collection produced he was briefly a janitor and an under- are included on King’s latest release, and regret. It was some elevated by King, was released in 2014.

42 The New York Review

Katzenstein_41_43.indd 42 5/29/18 5:11 PM and joking with locals in a hesitant their distance from Greeks, living in mixture of Greek and English. He tells separate enclaves and speaking a differ- the film’s director that he plans to move ent language among themselves. to Greece “as soon as I fucking can”— The transmission of Epirotic music before it’s too late, presumably.3 from Greeks to Roma may have caused a major interruption in the continu- ity of its traditions, but King doesn’t JUST OUT The first time King listened to Epirotic explore the implications this might music, he suspected that it contained have. How can we know that the ear- “something behind the sound—an un- liest Roma musicians in Epirus didn’t The Cambridge Companion known intentionality, a function.” In profoundly alter the styles and forms the book’s final chapters, he speculates of local songs? It’s clear that mirolo- that human musical expression began gia have ancient roots, but how can not as entertainment or ritual but as a we be sure of the connection between to Literature and Science tool, “intended to heal as if it contained present-day Epirotic music and what within itself potency, a spiritual utility.” existed before the Roma arrived? Edited by Steven Meyer, Washington University in St. Louis He believes that though most music lost Nor does King address what it would this ancient function, Epirus’s still pos- mean for a cultural heritage to be car- sesses it. Indeed, Epirotic musicians ried by an ethnic group that has been view themselves as healers, as Yian- excluded from that culture. Although nis Chaldoupis, a klarino player from Roma now have more economic oppor- THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO Parakalamos, told King: tunities than they had fifty years ago, prejudice against them remains. King When I play in a village I feel more writes compassionately about the Ro- like a psychiatrist or a doctor than ma’s plight, but he ultimately romanti- a musician. I look around to see cizes it, arguing that their cultural and what the people need, what they economic vulnerabilities have “driven need to hear for their souls. I look [Roma musicians] to perform in extraor- around to see what their pain is, dinary ways,” and that although most what hurts them. Every village is non-­Roma musicians “have mastered different and they have different the technique . . . there is thinness in the spiritual and emotional needs. emotional depth” of their playing.4 King doesn’t directly argue that authentic ex- In claiming that Epirotic music has pression can only come from members preserved its prehistoric function, King of subjugated groups, or that subjuga- stresses that it has “steadfastly resisted tion is necessary for the production of assimilation—it shunned outside in- great art, but at times these seem im- literature fluences and seemed to only reference plied by his aesthetic philosophy, which itself.” There are, however, reasons values suffering above all else. and science to think that Epirotic music is not as Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote of Epi- pure as he suggests. Demetris Dallas, rus’s villages in the early 1960s that Edited by Steven Meyer a Greek poet who has translated song “nothing substantial had changed since lyrics for King, has noted the influence the pilgrimage of Childe Harold and of music from Macedonia and Istanbul, little enough since the reign of Pyrrhus” as well as Italian opera, on songs that in the third century BCE. But others have been in the repertory for two hun- who visited soon after Fermor began to dred years. Even the Epirotic records notice alterations. The English travel King fell in love with, now almost one writer Arthur Foss, who went to Epi- hundred years old, reflected instrumen- rus in 1972, met a group of local women tation that had only existed since the playing cards and watching a portable mid-­nineteenth century, a few genera- TV near the ruins of Dodona, the an- tions after the clarinet was introduced cient oracle of Zeus, and he quotes lo- to the region by the Ottomans. Tell- cals saying, sometimes gleefully, that ingly, King never supports his claims things had changed irrevocably. In the about purity with concrete comparisons 1980s, the clarinetist Pericles Halkias, Available in Hardback, Paperback and as an eBook | 9781107439030 to music from the Balkans, Turkey, or who emigrated to America and belongs even neighboring areas within Greece to a dynasty that has produced some of such as Thessaly, whose folk music the finest Epirotic musicians, said, “I SAVE 20% WAS $32.99 NOW $26.39 bears many similarities to Epirus’s. don’t want to go back to Greece, be- This isn’t the only major change cause of the deterioration of the music. whose importance King downplays. “At I cannot hear the things that I like to ‘‘an invaluable resource for some point,” he writes, “the occupa- hear.” One can imagine an Epirote tion of making music in Epirus was en- saying something similar two hundred trusted to the Gypsies,” and to this day years ago about the newfangled clarinet. students and scholars working most musicians in Epirus are Roma. Younger Greeks continue to return Roma first settled in Greece six hun- to their ancestral villages for the pan- in any area of literature and dred years ago, coming in larger num- egyria, and some have given new life bers at the beginning of the nineteenth to Epirus’s traditions by adapting its century. In Epirus as in other parts of sounds to rock and electronic music. science studies’’ PAUL PEPPIS Europe, Roma have been marginal- The line between authentic and inau- ized—until the mid-­twentieth century, thentic can never be firmly drawn—King the only careers Roma men could pur- concedes that modern Epirotic music is sue were those of smithy, basket weaver, only “relatively pure” compared to that cobbler, and musician—and viewed of a hundred years ago, though there’s Visit www.cambridge.org/meyer2018 and with suspicion by the Greek villagers, little doubt that he would view any mu- who believed that Roma possessed su- sicians who deviate from tradition as enter ‘meyer2018’ at checkout for 20% off pernatural powers. They, in turn, kept apostates. The question is whether, as the young grow older, they will keep Discount valid until 27th September 2018 3The title of the documentary comes the music at panegyria­ as it was in their from the Seikilos epitaph, a tombstone youth or introduce innovations, as their for a woman named Euterpe who died predecessors did. If they do, King will about two thousand years ago. The surely be there to ­complain. epitaph contains musical notation for a mirologi that also appears on it: 4For more about the music played by While you live, shine Roma and the long history of the ro- Have no mourning at all manticization of gypsy musicians, see Life exists a short while Alan Ashton-­Smith, Gypsy Music: The And Time demands its fee. Balkans and Beyond (Reaktion, 2017).

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