Uploaded February 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Lyra by @Dimitrios_Dallas, arrangement by Farya Faraji based on melodic motifs by Yoannis Plousiadinos.
This is my first attempt at an approximation of what secular music of the Eastern Roman Empire would have sounded like. The latest stages of the empire's history are where I feel most comfortable doing speculative reconstrutions as that is where we have the most attestations and information, especially due to the more, better attested Ottoman Classical tradition we know incorporated earlier Hellenic/ Earlier Roman influences. Therefore, this aims to be a possible approximation of courtly, imperial music as heard in the 1400's before the end of the empire.
We have one extant piece of secular music by Yoannis Plousiadinos, a 15th century Greek musician who wrote a Christmas imperial acclamation meant for Constantine XI. I based this melody on the simple melodic development found in this acclamation, to my knowledge only having been performed by Capella Romana: youtube.com/watch?v=FmFjmUMbslE
I then added in historically attested melodic movements found both in liturgical music of the time, as well as attested secular music of the region, including chromatic passages.
The tuning uses religious Byzantine intonation, namely that of Tone 1, equating roughly to Ussak and Huseyni makams in Turkish music. The modes of Byzantine Chant are understood to have been overlapping with the modes used in secular music, and this intonation with a quarter flat second interval seems to me one of the most plausible choices for the diverse modes used then, and is preserved in today's Byzantine Chant.
The instrumentation consists of attested instruments of the time: a pipe organ, oud, pan flute, as well as a lyra. I worked with Dimitrios Dallas who used a Thracian lyra as a stand in for the Byzantine lyra. Whilst I did have access to an actual Byzantine lyra reconstruction, that model employed modern steel strings, as opposed to the gut strings used by the historical Byzanyine lyra. The Thracian one, meanwhile, uses gut strings and a similar build to the Byzantine lyra, hence our usage of it for better acoustic accuracy. I also used a kanonaki; whilst psalteries of all sorts were employed and attested in Greece at the time, I could not find any direct confirmation that the kanun itself was, although it seems unlikely it didn't have some presence there due to its ubiquitous distribution in neighbouring regions. Furthermore, the renowned Christodoulos Halaris used it in his reconstructions, so I put trust in him in using the kanonaki here.
The percussions are tambourines, as well as kettle drums attested at the time. My main source for the instrumentation was the document "The Sound of Byzantium," a collaboration between the Koç University and the Centre for Late Byzantine Studies.
Lyra by @Dimitrios_Dallas, arrangement by Farya Faraji based on melodic motifs by Yoannis Plousiadinos.
This is my first attempt at an approximation of what secular music of the Eastern Roman Empire would have sounded like. The latest stages of the empire's history are where I feel most comfortable doing speculative reconstrutions as that is where we have the most attestations and information, especially due to the more, better attested Ottoman Classical tradition we know incorporated earlier Hellenic/ Earlier Roman influences. Therefore, this aims to be a possible approximation of courtly, imperial music as heard in the 1400's before the end of the empire.
We have one extant piece of secular music by Yoannis Plousiadinos, a 15th century Greek musician who wrote a Christmas imperial acclamation meant for Constantine XI. I based this melody on the simple melodic development found in this acclamation, to my knowledge only having been performed by Capella Romana: youtube.com/watch?v=FmFjmUMbslE
I then added in historically attested melodic movements found both in liturgical music of the time, as well as attested secular music of the region, including chromatic passages.
The tuning uses religious Byzantine intonation, namely that of Tone 1, equating roughly to Ussak and Huseyni makams in Turkish music. The modes of Byzantine Chant are understood to have been overlapping with the modes used in secular music, and this intonation with a quarter flat second interval seems to me one of the most plausible choices for the diverse modes used then, and is preserved in today's Byzantine Chant.
The instrumentation consists of attested instruments of the time: a pipe organ, oud, pan flute, as well as a lyra. I worked with Dimitrios Dallas who used a Thracian lyra as a stand in for the Byzantine lyra. Whilst I did have access to an actual Byzantine lyra reconstruction, that model employed modern steel strings, as opposed to the gut strings used by the historical Byzanyine lyra. The Thracian one, meanwhile, uses gut strings and a similar build to the Byzantine lyra, hence our usage of it for better acoustic accuracy. I also used a kanonaki; whilst psalteries of all sorts were employed and attested in Greece at the time, I could not find any direct confirmation that the kanun itself was, although it seems unlikely it didn't have some presence there due to its ubiquitous distribution in neighbouring regions. Furthermore, the renowned Christodoulos Halaris used it in his reconstructions, so I put trust in him in using the kanonaki here.
The percussions are tambourines, as well as kettle drums attested at the time. My main source for the instrumentation was the document "The Sound of Byzantium," a collaboration between the Koç University and the Centre for Late Byzantine Studies.
