Dance of the Tagmata - Epic Byzantine Music

Arrangement by Farya Faraji, featuring oud and sazi by Edu Giro. Artwork by J.F Oliveras. The Epic Byzantine Series is a musical project where the sounds of modern Greek traditional music are used as a framing device for themes pertaining to the Eastern Roman Empire and the body of folklore descending from Medieval Greece. These are not attempts as historical reconstruction or even remotely concerned with approximation of the historical sound of medieval Byzantine music; all these represent is the form and status of modern Greek traditional music as it is today None of the melodies here are mine, I only arranged traditional passages on the violin and added my own instrumentation to it.

The tagmata were various sections of the forces of the Eastern Roman Empire whose function and arrangement evolved over time.

Whilst all my other Byzantine music used variants of the Greek folk lyras so far as bowed instruments, I wanted to pay homage to the recently introduced violin from the last two centuries. After entering the musical continuum of the Eastern Mediterranean, the Western violin became a central instrument of these cultures under the Ottoman Empire and the neighbouring regions, and its versatility in terms of articulation as well as lack of frets meant it was a perfect fit for the modal musical systems of the region. The violin has now almost displaced the traditional lyra except in select regions like Crete. The violin heard here plays passage in different traditional modes of Greek music descending directly from Ancient Greek modality, and whose nomenclature is inherited from Ottoman Turkish nomenclature (itself partly based on the nomenclature of Arabic and Iranian maqam systems), these modes being: Ussak, Rast, Sabah, Nihavent and Hicaz.

I added a santouri, as well as a supporting oud and sazi played by Edu Giro, and accompanied the whole thing with a chord progression on the island lauto as is typically the case with modern Greek folk music, being largely based on simple power chord progressions.