Music without Borders

I have now attended twelve sessions of Traditional Iranian singing (Avaz Sonnati), and although I find the vocal flourishes (tahrir) difficult, I enjoy the lessons a lot.
A couple of sessions ago we were talking about Byzantine (Greek Church) and Greek traditional music, which are much closer to Iranian than to European music. I then mentioned the rich musical tradition of my native island of Kassos, Dodecanese, a subject I love. Despite the fact that Kassos is a very small island with only about eight hundred permanent inhabitants in the winter, its musical tradition boasts of some seventy-two different melodies (skopoi, or tunes).

The avaz teacher was interested in listening to one of them, so I sang the Palios Khaniotikos tune to the class. She loved it immediately and asked me to Bluetooth an amateur recording of it I’ve got and also to sing it myself so that she can record it.

Even though every singer can sing any distich to this tune, these two distichs (mandinades) are often sung to this tune:

You don’t go as far as killing me
But why don’t you put me put of my misery?
I’d much rather you killed me
Instead of hurting me so.

I owe this mortal body to the earth
And one day I will have to return it
But what do I owe to you
And you torment me so?

Interestingly, the similarities between the mandinades sung to the Kassos music and classical Persian poetry, which provides the lyrics to Iranian traditional singing, are striking. Overwhelming Love, the feeling that the Beloved is everywhere but forever out of reach, and a sense of separation from the object of one’s love, be it a person, God or the homeland that one has left behind but to which one yearns to return. Themes, images, poetic feeling…how similar the two apparently disparate cultures are.

For more information in English on the music of Kassos, visit www.emborios.com, press the button for "Traditions" and then "mandinades" and "mousiki".