FOLLOW UP VIDEO “The Middle-Eastern Roots of European Music”: th-cam.com/video/9VMZttMcZr8/w-d-xo.html Man with wet hair out of the shower talks at camera.png Most of our ideas of music come from Hollywood stereotypes, and surprisingly, Hollywood is not the most reliable source of information. What we think of as Middle-Eastern musical aesthetics were once also present in Europe, and the Vatican priests of Late Antiquity sang and wrote melodies in ways Arabs and Iranians still do today. What's more, many of the elements that we associate with the Middle-Eastern sound seemed to have traveled from West to East, instead of the opposite that we take for granted. Whilst we can never be certain of the origin, the first attestations of what we perceive as “Eastern” aesthetics are often found in the territory of today’s Europe, and were mostly credited to Ancient Greek sources by the musicians of the early Islamic Golden Age who adopted them, which is an interesting contradiction of our expectations. Please remember that I’m no musicologist, and that all the information I communicate here is merely the synthesis of research conducted by actual historians and musicologists, whose names you can find below. Sources: The Ancient Greek roots of Mediterranean Tonality and its Hemiolic Typology and their antithesis to Western tonality: www.academia.edu/50584752/The_Ancient_Greek_roots_of_Mediterranean_Tonality_and_its_Hemiolic_Typology_and_their_antithesis_to_Western_tonality, Aleksey Nikolsky The Rise of Music in the Ancient World : East and West, Curt Sachs Ancient Greek Music, Martin L. West Ancient Greek Music: A New Technical History, Steven Hagel Microtonality in Ancient Greek Music, Michael Hewitt The Sound of Medieval Song, Timothy J. Mc Gee
Great stuff, Farya! Is it possible that the music that everyone associates with the Middle East was indeed - as you say it was - found also in Europe, but perhaps was more entrenched in the more cosmopolitan Mediterranean areas of Southern Europe and the Balkans which traded a lot with each other, and the origins of what everyone refers to as the "Western scales" were probably more common in the more northern, colder parts of Europe? Could it be as the Germanic "barbarians" - the Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, Franks, etc sacked Rome and pretty much took over the Roman Empire, they brought such "Western-sounding" musical scales down with them from the North and virtually supplanted the original "Middle Eastern-sounding" scales in the more southern parts of Western Europe, but the original "Middle Eastern-sounding scales" pretty much survived in certain areas like the Balkans/Greece (Eastern Orthodoxy and their chants officially maintained that continuity), and of course, in the Southern Iberian Peninsula, Southern Italy, etc where Islamic cultural influence from the Moors in Iberia and the Ottomans in the Balkans made them feel comfortable with not needing to shift away from the "Middle Eastern-sounding scales" they were already used to? Just thinking aloud here. Could it be that the move towards what we consider "Western-sounding" scales was the result of the cultural assertiveness of the then dominant Germanic "barbarian" rulers who took over the reins of the old Roman Empire in the West during the Medieval Period? FYI, I use your music while I play Age of Empires the Definitive Edition. :)
@@OrionPD Thanks for the interesting comment Orion! There's definitely a bit of both of what you said in the historical data--interestingly enough the "Oriental sounding scales," are, as far as we know, Greek developments and regarded by contemporary Greeks as internal developments of their music, whilst the "Western sounding" ones are actually older and most probably inherited from Mesopotamia. We know they weren't brought by the northern Germanic tribes since their presence is attested centuries before the start of Greek culture in Mesopotamia, my last video talks about this if you're interested :th-cam.com/video/9VMZttMcZr8/w-d-xo.html That said you made a very good point that I really should have mentioned in the video: areas like Spain basically maintained traditions that were already there and were probably reinforced by Islamic culture that had adopted these same musical traits earlier on in history. The influence of Turks in the Balkans and Arabs in Iberia didn't necessarily bring these elements there, but rather solidified their presence even more, as you put it, well said!
Great video btw! Especially as I’ve been reading more about modern Greek history I cringe so much when I hear people claim that all the “oriental” features of Greek culture are somehow imposed by the Ottomans. Greeks are from the southern Balkans and Anatolia so of course their culture is “oriental” and it’s been like that since antiquity.
Sadly, I've pointed that put to many greeks themselves. But they seem to live in self-imposed denial and claim that any "oriental" features are "greek" and have nothing to do with the middle east. Like people feel so disgusted by being associated with middle east that even if their culture is highly tied to it they's politically rationalize how they're not.
Conclusion: when the Ancient Greeks used the oriental scales, they had sand and camels randomly teleport on their land. Why are they there no more? Once Hollywood defined those scales as Arabians, all of Balkan was so disappointed they sold all the camels to Arabia and threw all the sand in the sea. This is also why the Mediterranean sea is so filled with sand.
Nerd time : Greek world was not only in the Balkans. It was also in a pretty big part of Middle East. Greece was part of the Ottoman empire not really culturally in the West. Practically "middle eastern music" is the combination of Greek and Iranian music cause they were the major ethnicities in the M. East.
Thank you for battling stereotypes in such an eloquent and elaborate way, I enjoy watching your lectures as much as listening to your compositions. Keep posting!
Growing up, I associated the double harmonic major with the east. Then I started listening to classical Persian music, Armenian, and Turkish. I realized it was more about the musical texture of the instruments used than scale which made it sound Eastern.
Great point, a big difference between the Iranian santour and Greek and European versions of the instrument is the texture for example. In Greece and Eastern Europe, the hammers are typically coated with cotton or some material that makes the string resonate in a more “muted” manner, whereas in Iran the hammers are not always coated and the texture preferred is much more metallic and sharp
@@faryafaraji Just wanted to say I appreciate the work that your doing. From your renditions of folk music to your discussions. The comparison of Japanese music to Ancient Greek was amazing and I loved "Aspasia". By this you are breaking music stereotypes and myths propagated by movies and media. Keep up the good work 🤝
@@faryafaraji In India, santoor hammers are never cotton coated and they sound like harp. But playing style of indian santoor is very different from Persian or greek santur
@@SpartanLeonidas1821 It’s true that the tambour sounds alot like the bouzouki; both use a double course set of steel strings that are both high pitched, compared to the Saz in that video, that use a triple course with one bass string resonating at the same time as the other ones. Generally though, in terms of instruments’ build and design, Greek instruments share the most commonality with their neighbours due to more constant geographical exchange, so Turkey and the Balkans.
Dude you're work is awesome! Been fan for some months now. And as a Greek, if not for the rest of the brilliant work...at least for the Τζατζίκι I had to press like! Of course in the back of my mind the "typical Greek" says: - "I knew it and always said it...they took it from us! What? Everything!" 😁😄 Cheers!
Dude I was never into music theory , but I really like history. Your videos just make me want to research more and more , there is so much stuff you can understand about past civilizations by just their music . Thanks for the great video
The big change in sound for most of Europe likely came from more Northern European influence around the time of Charlemagne and the early Carolingians. A profound change in Christian chant in Western Europe happened around that time, and we know that different traditions from the Mediterranean existed in Frankish lands (though they arent well attested). It means that later Western European shifts away from these features probably came about due to increased Celtic/Germanic musical influence
I am mentally going through a pretty rough time in regards to loneliness, right now I am trying to become a historian and videos like this bring me joy. It is nice that you refute the interpretation of the melismatic singing being shaped under Ottoman and Asbassid/Ummayad rule, because that is the first thing that came to my mind when you were describing the areas.
Thanks alot Luuk, I’m happy this video can help! And yeee, I made these same assumptions too originally. The dangerous thing with these assumptions is that they’re perfectly logical and reasonable to make, which is why I think they’re so common
Hey. Im wondering if you could share how you're trying to become a historian? I've always wanted to become one as well and still do, it's my dream- so I'm very curious how you're getting on yourself :)
@@kathrinat9824 My advice is to get into university (which I am currently doing) and to read globally through history from a certain area as an anchorpoint so you get the foundations, for me this is a Western perspective. There are two books that I recommend for this purpose A history of the modern world-Palmer and the follow up book. It helped me grasp some of the core idea's and the continuation of said ideas, keep in mind that it is only a perspective of one historian (be open te ask certain question and criticize certain arguments that he is making, also try to understand why and how he makes these arguments to support his view); but the books are a decent foundation. Further reading depends on what you like. I guess if you want to know more about the medieval ages (me) Chris Wickham his book called medieval Europe is decent. After you got the core of an area or timeperiod you want to zoom in to (for me it is the Byzantine empire, I again read a global book; because I read Chris Wickham his book and Palmer I could contextualize everything that I read better into a historical frame and recognize certain major events in the global Byzantine secondary literature. This allowed me to skim quicker through the texts.) start searching for the historiography of the topic, start zooming in on other aspects of the topic (for me this is agricultural laws in the Byzantine empire in a specific time period). Ask yourself some questions and start looking into the literature if it gives you some answers, look at the methodology and the dataset that is used in the secondary literature. If that does not give you an answer on said question start making an hypothesis and try to look at primary sources and what research there was done with those. You order all the data that you can get and weigh everything you have. For this I recommend to also look into methodology applied to history, learn what other historians did to get to an answer that satisfies. If you want to take it to the next step describe certain problems you have with this answer, what I mean with this is describing the quality of your data and certain things that are uncertain because there is no data on it. Another thing you could do is look how other cultures view a certain event or how for instance (example from what I read) Greeks look at the legend of Constantine Palaiologos Dragases and him rising out of the ruins to reclaim the empire (so look at how other people/cultures in different timeperiods view historical events and try to understand their view and how that shaped their actions). If you keep doing stuff like this for years and years I think you will become a pretty decent historian. Sorry if this is sloppilly written, I have not slept well.
So you record yourself after brainstorming showerthoughts, quite the pro gamer move. Aside from the jokes, well done on presenting the information and overviewing cultural and differences in music groups. I found you to be quite informative, as usual.
I am really new to this underrated channel, and I can say I learned much more here about music than I learned than school which taught us nothing but doremi faso latido. Thank you Chad iranian.
Often overlooked in our classic definitions of culture, the musical space in which a culture sits is, arguably, a quintessential quality of that culture. As an example, regional identities here in Romania -who all share the same language- define themselves on the distinctions of their musical tradition, which was much harder to displace or wash away. Language ebbs and flows much more quickly with the politics of the geographic space, whereas musical qualities stand the test of time, deeply rooted into the unconscious of the geographical space. Another great video, Farya. I'll be watching you for a long time
That is really interesting; how regional identity can be defined on musical style. A funny example of this deeply rooted persistence of music is Manele in Romania. It’s been sort of appropriated by the Romani community as far as I understand, but the funny thing is that Manele is basically the natural evolution of Wallachian music-fundamentally, the musical language of Manele is the exact same as Anton Pann’s. Muzică populară is basically the modern, mainstreamified evolution of Transylvanian music (mostly), and Manele is the modern evolution of Wallachian music. Even as commercial forms of mainstream music, they’re just the continuation of two major regional music styles of Romania that persist
As someone from Romania(who isn't a musicologist)I have never thought about manele as being "modern" Wallachian music until recently but it makes so much sense. In the past few years I spent some time in the southern part of Romania and saw what kind of music people from there usually listen (it sounded, to me, more "balkanic", a bit greek-ish?). Here, in Transylvania, we mostly listen to muzică populară , but manele are not excluded. Some muzică populară from Transylvania has some Hungarian influences(as far as I know. I might be wrong tho), which I haven't noticed in manele. Anyway, I really enjoy watching these informative videos!!
@@paulastefania5019 Thanks alot Paula! And indeed, I first noticed this wide variety of Romanian music when I saw the confusion of my Transylvanian friends who encountered traditional music from the south which felt unfamiliar to them, which as you put very well, is indeed more Balkan/Greek-ish. As Nessie put it, the music is itself a testament to the cultural reality of Romania; one with many diverse cultural styles
People who studied the Islamic Golden age during the time of Umayyad and Abbasid dynasty knows that the melodic thingy came from Byzantium and ancient greek because there were a lot of musical manuscripts that was transcripted to Arabic during that times. That is why the Salafis till today HATE the melodic style of chanting the Quran and azan and that is why if you go to Mecca today they try to avoid any melodic chanting like that. Most muslim who first heard how Saudi Arabian imams and scholars chant their adzan and dzikir, they said its not melodic enough like they used to in their home countries. All these melodic stuff did not exist during the time of early Islam especially during the time of the Prophet and the 3 khalifas, it started after Muslim took over Damascus and got influenced by the byzantines. Many conservative Muslim when they visited Damascus for the first time during that time after Muawiyah took over Syria, they were shocked that the Khalif adopted many Byzantines cultural aspect in his palace including their musics and hated it, because they know the Prophet hated music, the only music that the Prophets ever allowed was from a drum.
This is really interesting, thanks for sharing! I just went and listened to Salafi call to prayers and I was taken aback; I’ve never heard it performed this way, without the melismas. Do you have any texts or books you could share about this subject? I’d love to research more about it
Every Mid East cutlure, from Egypt to Turkey to Persia and more in between, has had a significant portion of their culture derived from ancient greece. Alexander, the Diadochi period, and even after the Greeks were no longer a factor on the world stage- all this time featured direct Greek assimilation. The architecture was Greek long before the Turks took the Hagia Sophia. The armor and weapons used by ancient middle easterners which we now associate with as a middle eastern vibe were all Greek first. I am not of course saying that Islam took precedence over culture to the point of eliminating the Greek history completely, but it has definitely rebranded it. And this all lends itself to another conversation entirely- the similarity between ancient middle east cultures and mediterranean/euro cultures. But given the lack of study people will commit to anymore, I doubt anyone could appreciate that as it should be. Shoot, look at the aulos flute.
8:56 *Angry Anakin Skywalker noises* In all seriousness though, great video as always, love these new short documentary-style vids in addition to the music ones, your style reminds me a lot of historytubers like Metatron or The Cynical Historian.
Very thoughtfully done video essay on musicology and interactions between the east and west by the guy with the wettest hair in the game. A pleasure to watch this as much as it is to listen to your music. :)
My favorite composers: Farya Faraji,Peter Pringle, Hans Zimmer, Mick Gordon, Hiroyuki Sawano, Kohta Yamamoto, Jeremy Soul, Jesper Kyd, John Williams, Goward Shore, Ludwig Gorannson, Sarah Schachner, Mooze, Olexei Omelchuk, Einar Selvik.
Phenomenal video and insight. Let's not forget that Alexander the great conquered most of the "known world" from Greece to India. Peoples in the west seem to think that Europe magically ends at Italy and North to Finland. The balkans fought of the ottomans for centuries and modern day turkish lands were historically Greek and Armenian (to the east). Ancient greek settlements are all over the coastal areas of the Mediterranean as well as the middle east. Modern day Greek music still shows its influences. With regards to the bagpipes, there is an ancient Greek instrument called tsampouna. Hollywood has definitely influenced our view on the origin of music. As a Persian I commend you for not having a negative view towards Greek peoples considering historical exchanges between eachother. I think that there is Europe as a whole and then there is the "balkans", which is a subcategory within the European identity. Much like the way Iran gets thrown into the Middle Eastern Arab category, even though persians speak farsi and are Shia Muslims as opposed to Arabic speaking suni muslims. Great video, really enjoyed it. Thanks for sharing 👍
I know people in west, who refuse to believe that there is greek architecture in Afghanistan. Westerners don't realise how Hollywood made everything confusing. The name of the Greek explorer who ended up in Scotland was Pytheas of Massalia, if I remember correctly.
This is some pretty fantastic scholarship. When I was in undergrad for percussion performance, I did a project about Janissary bands and how they heavily influenced the modern percussion section that we typically associate with western classical music. Fascinating stuff.
I love your videos. Living in the Middle East myself I love the content and your unique way of presenting it. I'd love to hear you talk about Sephardic Music, lots of misconceptions there to be put in order.
Just found this channel, the way you can analyze and in a way criticize misconceptions/assumptions that cross all kinds of cultural boundaries(from Celt, to Roman, to Arabic, and to Iranian etc. ) so respectfully and educationally is fascinating. To me you show the connections we all have through music is much stronger than separations we all have. Thank you!
Great video, very informative. Even though I suck at anything musical, I did notice for some time that classical greek/byzantine music sounds quite familiar with the idea of middle-eastern music. Now it makes sense. Considering similiar thing happened for architecture (ie. domes), it makes quite the sense.
As a dayjob linguist but mainly musician I laughed pretty hard at 'Indo-European music' because there are really a group of naive people out there believing that ethno-linguistic-musico-artistic-whatever cultural lines are exactly the same and never mingles. (And oh the sweet sweet nationalists how can we not love them?? The modal province stretches from present-day Morocco to China; melisma exists in various East Asian musical traditions (e.g. 南管/南音 Lamkuan and Pansori); so much ornamentation exists in Indian music... All of that just show how you can't cherry pick 1-2 features and call it a day. People like putting things in boxes but like we need a lot more nuance than that. Although 'world music' - whatever that is - is a niche in the current musical landscape, I very much appreciate people like you who can approach it through both sociocultural and musical lenses. Great work!
You said it well! A metaphor a friend of mine once used sums it up well-categories do exist, but they’re overlapping circles, not separate boxes. In the same vein, not all categorisations perfectly overlap-music could not care less about the Europe/Middle-East category for example. Greeks still have the same overall modal music as Iranians, but people are still continually shocked, because they expect Greece’s placement in Europe to mean that its music must be 100% European. The expectation ends up being that, 10km on the Turkish side of the border, music ought to sound Eastern, but the instant you cross into the Greek border 10km on the other side, music should suddenly turn into a Bach polyphonic chorale in C Major
@@faryafaraji Sadly language kinda works that way (distinct boxes) more and more because of our common enemy nationalism and standardisation - folk music is far less likely to be regulated and standardised, but that also means they're far more likely to die due to negligence. It's a sad situation on both ends coz we musicologists (ahem do I even qualify) / linguists / anthropologists can contribute very little to the *salvation* of a whole culture. [Also yes things just magically stop at the Greek-Turkish border :) No such things as Macedonia and Thrace (wink)] Again these talking videos are exactly what I wanna do so thank you very much! I'll definitely lurk in the comment section once a new one comes out, cheers
Alright, I like damn near everything you said. N e a r l y.. Just.. a quick question. Bro why do you gotta go the "lol, nATIonAlIsTs right?" road? What's Nationalism got to do with.. any of this? Sorry but these days that whole "lol stupid nationalists" thing really irks me. Because in my day to day, on the, thankfully, uncommon occasion that crap like this comes up, every time "Nationalism" is brought up its usually followed closely by muff loads of word shiving. Not to get all political, but just because I raise the star spangled banner over my head with unapologetic appreciation for my country does not mean I'm ignorant or bigoted on ethnicity + music. Hell, coming from the dusty Mexican borderlands I, an ignorant nationalist, could tell you a thing or two about the blending of ethnicities in music myself.
@@septimus7524 1) Not your bro 2) You do you no one invites you to be triggered and comment, I don't know you so I don't care if something irks you 3) I stand by my hatred of nation states and nationalism, you can call it crap, that's ok because same to you.
@@quain5063 ..And people wonder why their nations are so shite.. A nation is only as good or as bad as its people. With that said, loathing on a national level doesn't fix any issues you have with a nation.. So sure, keep pretending to hate nationality while directly benefiting from the nation you live in. People like you always talk big smack like you could do it better, yet you stay. Right there. In the same NATION you claim to hate so much.
As always a fascinating topic, also the fluent presentation without any cuts. Would you consider making a video about the origin and evolution of Jewish music, or Jewish Ashkenazi music?
You look like if Jason Momoa got into shredding guitar instead of steroids. Anyways this was one of the most interesting videos I have seen recently. Greco Roman origins make sense given 1000 years give or take of control over the Mediterranean basin and near East.
Ah, awesome video Farya, and I was just wondering the other day of what your thoughts were on Greek / Turkish music, and who influenced whom. I have some thoughts based on what you said, and I think it's in agreement but I still feel like going on mini, disorganized rants. Why will Westerners be confused by ancient Greek and Roman music being "oriental" in their minds? The answer is that Western Europe has essentially culturally appropriated Greco-Roman antiquity to be the bedrock of "their" civilization, and so they can only picture it in a manner which is relatable for them. This appropriation goes up until the end of the Western Roman Empire, at which point the Eastern Roman Empire becomes "Byzantine," "Greek," or "oriental" because their own western culture (Germano-Latin) had actually started to develop at this point. The irony is that, in Greece's case at least, this cultural appropriation was sold back to us starting in the 19th century, with the ancient Greeks being "Western" and with our history under the medieval Roman Empire and subsequent Ottoman Empire being "Eastern," thus giving us the impression that we had orientalized and that we had to go back to being Western. It's why classical antiquity has a place of privilege in modern Greece, while the subsequent medieval and Ottoman periods are denigrated, and why many Greeks will still say that many of the negative traits of modern Greeks are a leftover of Ottoman periods. I think it's entirely fair to believe that the Hellenized and Romanized Eastern Mediterranean provided a ready source for Arabs and then Turks, though my only hesitation here would be treating the incoming Arabs and Turks as a carte blanche without their own culture, who just absorbed all of the awesome Greek stuff because it's obviously awesome Greek stuff. I think the question then becomes one of exchange: "Greek" music could have formed the basis of Arab and Turkish music, but I think by the same logic, the Ottomans did influence the Balkans by bringing in their variations on the "Greek" music which had originally influenced them. Here I'm also thinking in Greek of some Greeks words which were absorbed into Turkish, and then which became common in Greece through the Ottomans as the modified Turkish word (if I could remember the term used for these words I'd post an example but I forgot, so feel free to ignore). I actually think this discussion is very similar to the discussion on Ottoman culinary influences in the Balkans and Greece specifically. There are of course foods that did originate in the Ottoman Empire, but there are other foods whose recipe was recorded in Ottoman times but which could have pre-existed and were simply not recorded, or the records don't exist. Anyway I think I wanted to rant about more...but, I forgot. Great video, can't wait for more!
Very well put Petros, I couldn’t have communicated it better myself! There’s a common feeling in the West that Greek music used to be fully Western and was fully orientalised, and that is wrong, but so would be the idea that Turks and Arabs completely absorded Greek culture carte blanche as you said. Turkish and Greek music are especially intertwined. Starting from the 16th century, it’s impossible to even talk about Greek influence on Turkish music or Turkish influence on Greek music; it’s more like this continuous, mutual exchange where you can’t even define where the Greek and Turkish parts begins anymore. My metaphor is that the Greeks codified the basic recipe for the “Oriental music dish,” and Arabs and Turks learned that codification, but then they latter developped it and at this point, this dish is just as much characterised by their influence; it’s like this big soup of continuous mutual exchange and collective development. When it comes to the Turks, I am more confident in the slightly “carte blanche” aspect of their initial music, since they arrived relatively quickly from very remote lands where this type of music doesn’t exist, so they would have basically suddenly absorbed all this musical algorithm in the span of a few generations, but not only from the Greeks; Arabs and Iranians would have been major players, especially given the impact of Iranian, specifically Persian culture on the early Turks. Their initial music upon arrival in the Middle-East would have probably been far more central/east asiatic, whatever that would have sounded like back then. For the pre-Islamic Arabs, we know that they fully developped and learned the theory of ancient Greek music, but I’m inclined to think that this overall musical algorithm had likely already made its way into the peninsula due to relative geographical proximity, and they had already been part of that big pan-Mediterranean-Greek-Iranian-Mesopotamian soup then. They might very well already have sang like this and played similar melodies before encountering the theoretical texts, but that encounter probably solidifed their music and compounded its nature.
@@faryafaraji What would be your opinion on Yemeni music? It's very "arabic" and oriental but also has it's own unique feature. Another thing is the differentiating line between "middle eastern/"arabi" music and african music that can be recognized as you go southward down from egypt, in Sudan ypu can already notice very "horn of africa" ethipiopia style of music and sounds. I find the quest to recognize the geographical boundries of these musical provinces fascinating.
Just recently found your channel, and wow, really loving the original music and the informative videos on music and musical history! It would be very nice to see if you could branch off to Southeast Asian music if possible, but if not it's understandable. Besides that, great work! I truly feel like you are bringing people around the world together with one of the few things all people understand: beautiful music. And I think all of us listeners can appreciate your great work ❤️
What a great video. I don't know much music theory, but about everything made sense, especially with samples of music/scales. Thank you, Farya. Please keep making more content!
Great presentation! You make complicated matters easy to understand to people with no music studies background. Old Roman chants reminded me of rizitika songs of Crete!
I bookmarked this video when it came out, thinking it would be interesting but maybe a little intense, you know? Have watched halfway now, just wanna thank you for being so candid and real in your format. Way too many videos like this would be sensationalising and throwing all kinds of accusations left and right, making sensetive issues out of this. But your presentation is very down to earth and I feel like I'm approached by somebody who is honest, well-meaning and knowledgeable. Your perspective appears to be one of understanding, not condescension. It's a unique trait in the online presenter world, really. I hope my comment made sense, and good luck with your future content. I'll check out your other stuff. EDIT: and your editing is slick! Showcasing the lydian chromatic mode with perfect volume underneath you, fading in softly like that, that gave me goosebumps! And boy does it "sound middle eastern!" :D
Thank you. All I’m doing in this video is condense and communicate the current factual documentation on the matter: that many of the musical cultural traits we associate with the Middle-East have their earliest origin in the Greco-Roman basin, and that many of the musical traits we associate with the West such as diatonic modes are originally Mesopotamian influence, no more, no less.
What people don't understand is that in those days the world was just one,no borders so music was made according to climate and life struggle. You are so right
@@faryafaraji haha no oversight my guy, the work you are doing is incredible! i bet if oyu had to include every piece of information you could make whole movies
Fascinating as always. I love the video essays. I’ve gone through these same thought processes before but very much lacking any decent musical education. For example I’ve heard about how we simply can’t reliably know what Byzantine music would’ve sounded like. There was an episode of the Byzantium and friends podcast on the topic but again, I’m too uneducated to really grasp the merit of all arguments. From a historical pov though my impression is that despite all the great points in this video, we will never have enough data to know conclusively what originated where and from whom. I think an important element to the conversation is the development of “civilization” and the resulting biases. The Greeks entered this civilizational area of exchange connected to west Asia as far as the Mycenaean era. The Roman’s were connected through the empire. This “civilization” spread always coincided with the spread of written history and thus the potential cultural shifts resulting from it are indissociable from our available evidence. Thanks for yet another interesting topic to think about Fariya!
Very good point yeah! I definitely simplified the title, and a longer, more accurate title would have been “as far as we can trace these things, they come from Europe.” But the first point at which we can find evidence for something doesn’t mean it’s where it originated, as you said. As far as we can trace them, the “oriental modes” are first in Ancient Greece, though they might have come from somewhere else before and are simply not attested; the only fallacy there being that they must have come from the East because it fits our modern idea of Eastern music. The best we can do as history lovers is trace back the earliest attestations, but I don’t believe we can ever grasp “origins,” if there is even such a concept, because it implies monogenesis. Some musical elements emerge in multiple places independently too.
@@faryafaraji so true! its definitely an attention grabbing title and this is TH-cam after all. Of course It’s always basically “as far as we can tell”. That’s why I think it’s important to think about the civilizational areas. We can never truly know when it emerged first and if it happened more than once as you said. But as it was mentioned in the video, what definitely does correlate is that the European areas which eventually fell under Islamic rule were also already connected to this cultural area since Roman times and very possibly did inherit some sort of pan Mediterranean music which simply co evolved within the Islamic world as the rest of Europe went in another direction. Nothing develops in total isolation. It’s actually quite jarring to see how far of a divergence there is between Italian and Greek music despite the close proximity. It also was really interesting to learn the terms to describe what we associate with “Eastern” sounds such as melismatic, although my ears would probably still have a high failure rate at recognizing the double harmonic in the traditional Greek songs I grew up with! That was definitely a surprising fact.
@@isimerias The Double Harmonic Major most often appears in liturgical Byzantine singing, but there’s quite a few folk songs like Galani Galaziani and Misirlou. I think Rebetiko has the highest use of Double Harmonic along with Cretan music; I don’t hear it as much in Thracian music for example. I keep talking about “Greek music” as if it’s one homogeneous thing but it’s one of the most diverse musical cultures itself :p
@@faryafaraji good point! I should’ve pointed out that Misirlou would be the obvious exception to that given it’s huge influence even in the west. But I wouldn’t have picked up on Galani Galaziani, and though I can’t name any others, I intuitively know that it isn’t the only song I’ve heard that kind of melody in. I would find this it a really surprising example, but I almost want to say that the Thourio revolutionary song sounds like it might be fairly close to double harmonic to my ears? I’m probably wrong though. What’s sure is that definitely the peculiarity is how “Greek music” can go from quite Italianate sounding all the way to sand desert camel pyramid sand 😂 Sadly I do think that my own regional Peloponnesian heritage is on the more lacklustre end of the bunch 😅
@@isimerias Hahaha yeah I’m going to make a video about this discrepancy in Greek music soon. From what I had read, the Italian sounding one is the music of the Ionian Islands that used to be Italian colonies, so the music is pretty much literally Italian. The sand camel music is the more “native” Greek music if you will, but the interesting thing is that, after independence from the Ottomans, the new Greek government tried to make the Ionian music the standart across the nation in order to distinguish themselves from the Turks; it’s why this otherwise “anomaly” music in Greek history has gained so much weight, otherwise it would have remained a regional oddity. And about that! The Peleponnese is my favourite part of Greece but I know very few songs from there, it’s weird! Cretan and Thracian for example have incredible repertoires but I’d have a hard time thinking of one from the Peleponese
Really nice Video! As a geographer a really enjoy deconstructing representations and "idées reçus". Although I have no musicological background but al simple knowledge of ethic music (and particularly greek) , I am wondering if melismatic and polyphonic music coexisted in mediterenean in a way that could suggest a certain urban / rural separation and the fact of western polyphonic turn during the medieval age is due to the rapid decline of urbanisation in the west.
I do know that Polyphony in Western Europe starts emerging around (I think) 800 or 900 with the emergence of Organum, which is the first harmonisation of chanting. In other words everyone, rural or urban, sang melismatically in the Mediterranean up to a certain point in the Middle-Ages and then it seems that polyphony and harmony start emerging out of Northern Europe and it spreads across the continent, slowly making melismatic chant die out. Polyphony probably didn’t exist during the height of Old Roman Chant, in Late Antiquity, and it seems to be more of a North European cultural effect originally, although there might have been some basic forms of harmony back then
Hello, i've been hearing your musics for some time and i really enjoy your work, so i have a suggestion: can you do a video on some precolombian music? Incas, Aztecs, Mayas, etc all had a somewhat rich musical tradition, but i and others have been having a hard time trying to find anything that isn't a game theme.
I’ll have to do alot of research first in order to be confident that I’ll get the sound right, and not caricaturise it, but it’s definitely something that I’ve looked into doing for sure!
Perhaps, the reason why the double harmonic major and phrygian mode is thought of as being oriental, is due to the fact that the Armenians and Greeks under the ottoman empires, did alot of the trading with Europeans and were known to be adept merchants and christain brothers, and since they came from the ottoman empire, it probably became stereotyped as being oriental.
That’s a very plausible idea yeah, I can see how this initial contact with the Ottomans would have then brought the stereotype over to the operas and court music
Some time ago, I found a (historically informed) rendering of a piece (methinks it was the Messe de Nôtre Dame) of Guillaume de Macheaut here on TH-cam. It is late middle ages France. In parts of the chant you find a scale that today would be characterized as hamonic minor (also one of the Middle Eastern stereotype scale), and the rendering used a lot of melismatic singing. So, yeah, it evoked a lot of "Middle East" feel to me, but I am curious to discover that this actually might be a late example in a long line of a historical tradition with roots in greco-roman music composed in the 1300s in France.
Wow great analysis .in other videos ,can you make us discover the evolution of iranian music in the twentieth century or the andalusian and maghrebian music or even talk about some oriental composers like Mohamed Abed Alwaheb
Honestly, none of this was surprizing to me, partly because "Ancient" and "Middle East" have always been connected concepts in my mind, and I do think of Greece as related to the "Middle East", especially in pre-Islamic, and partly because I learned about the history of Western Music in college, though I never thought of Roman Chant as sounding "Middle Eastern" before.
Definitely, a core component of this question is the cultural placement of Greece. It’s been defined in recent Western European memory as entirely Western, but it’s more of an inbetween culture with elements of both Western and Eastern cultural spheres due to geography
In the same "mode" most are stunned to see the reincarnation of Hellenic monuments and statues in full blown color. The ancients would probably be pulling their hair in mourning (because they did and some still do) if they could see the monuments and statues of death we have been to conditioned to admire today. Bagpipes in Crete are called askomantoura, from the root word askos as in ASKOS of AEOLUS from the Odyssey. And, don't forget stuffed grape leaves (in continuation of the conversation in posts here about food and the Tzatziki comment. Cute). Come to Greece, we'll prepare everything and you can enjoy it with us and you won't have to buy a thing. Seriously.
Fantastic Video As an italian I discover Greek music In Crete Then jam on bouzuki in Amorgos Amazing scales amazing music Free to dive into the sound Love your video In case you need a bass player To explore the seas of middle east Be happy to cooperate
Nice video. Just my opinion but I prefer the inside more than the outside background. The whole aesthetic suit it better for these types of videos keep the good job
Thanks for the great videos and fascinating content (delivered with a good dose of humour)! I have only recently become aware of the the roots of our modern day major scale perhaps stretches back to Mesopotamia, 1800 bc, and maybe earlier, and not to Pythagoras, as so many believe? Is it true that they were aware of the circle of 5ths, shared this knowledge with the Chinese, and that the days of the week (according to Sara De Rose's paper) could well have its ordering on that basis? I am writing a short paper on the history of diatonicism - I was curious to know what the Greek uses of the tetrachord had to do with scales, if they had indeed been handed down heptatonic scales from the Mesopotamians, was it a case of phrasing, analysis, or lyre tuning system? Any guide as to how diatonicism made its way into west, into the catholic church, and finally into the major minor tonal system of the common practice period would be most gratefully received! - Thanks!
I really recommend watching the follow up video on Mesopotamian diatonicism in the pinned comment, it’ll answer many of your questions :) But to answer some of your questions here; absolutely, diatonicism, including our modern major scales, are known to go back go Mesopotamia, far before Pythagoras, that much is beyond dispute at this point. The sharing of circle of fifths with the Chinese thoigh, I’ve never heard of, and it certainly isn’t a proven reality; probably only conjecture. When it comes to your question on scales, I’d say to be careful about wording everything from a modern lens; the question of scale vs mode vs tetrachord is mostly different cultural ways to describe the same phenomenon. What matters is that the Greeks most probably adopted diatonic modality from their eastern neighbours, and as to how that made its way into the Catholic church, it’s simple: the early Christian Church rose out of the culture of the Classical Mediterranean, and those diatonic modes were simply part of the musical culture of that region by that point :)
@@faryafaraji Brilliant - thanks so much! Will have a look at the video, and thanks for the helpful comments, definitely some useful pointers there - I also like you quote from the video above "Dorian (Phrygian) was their C major" - will certainly be using that - Thanks again!
It seems that Greece and Iran are the two main regions that spread the music all over the region...and also to the world. Also, the "tzatziki" has its origins in Iran. It means "herbs" as I know. The "meze" is another Iranian word that traveled to the Greece and the Balkans through Anatolia.
Yeah that’s definitely the main consensus as far as the sources I read at least. It also makes sense because, fundamentally, the spread of this music was tied to the spread of music theory, and advanced cultures with a large degree of cultural influence can systematise theory and propagate it through soft cultural power. The Eastern Roman and Sasanian Empires very much fit the mold-and most early Arabic music is said to be Iranian + Greek synthethis And wow I didn’t know about tzatziki haha!
@@faryafaraji Yes, according to the Sevan Nishanyan, the "tzatziki" has its roots in Iran and entered Anatolia from the Kurds. As I remember, they refer differently to the tzatziki in Iran but Kurds say "cacıx", "x" with a harsh "kh" :) .
You explained this quite well! Until relatively recently, I had solely associated these scales and modes with the orientals, but have shifted more towards the Mediterranean Basin and Southern Europeans. Now, when I hear these musics I think of an Old World sound primarily, the Eastern Romans, and Arabic or Iranian cultures all at the same time instead of just Persians and Arabs.
Yeah it’s interesting how our knowledge changes our association/perception. For me these scales used to sound Iranian but ever since realising that they’re actually not that not commonly used in Iran, I associate them more strongly with Spain or the Balkans
Would you disagree, I know its not rly relevant maybe for your topic at hand (which was very interesting btw, i just dont know enough to comment on it), if I said that Romans and Greeks didnt see themselves as Europeans? Maybe that view of Greece as the Wests beginning maybe also influenced the way we think of specific modes of music coming from specific areas? (well that and also obviously western stereotypes of eastern music). Just my opinion, but I dont think the West understand Ancient Greece, Rome or the Mediterreanean cultures (alongside arabic and iranian cultures). I am not saying we are wrong about the historical events or something like that, but I am saying we do not comprehend how the multicultural (and musical) exchanges happened. Sorry if I am way out of my debt here. I found your songs and this video very interesting. Keep it up
That’s probably the most relevant thing actually, your comment is extremely correct in my opinion! Indeed, I believe that this all stems from this 19th century narrative of Greece as the epitome of White European Western Excellence. Greece was objectified in this Western narrative as a completely Western culture, one that had no links to the East, one that is exclusively Western. So every time “Eastern” traits are found in Greek culture, the only coping mechanism is to attribute them to Oriental corruption of the pure Western Greek culture. Greeks and Romans didn’t see themselves as “European” in any sense other than a technical, geographical one, because there really wasn’t such a concept of European identity in the way we understand it today. They saw themselves as Greeks and Romans, period. There are still people today who present this narrative of Leonidas vs Xerxes as “the White Westerners” vs the “Brown Easterners.” But this is projecting modern categorisations on the past. The idea that Leonidas was a Western man, more similar to the Celts in Ireland, than the neighbouring, relatively far more similar Persian Empire is absurd; they didn’t have ideas of East vs West back then. The truth of the matter is that Greece has always been very similar to its eastern neighbours because of its geographical location, but 19th century Western thought was in denial of this, because their narrative needed Greece to be a 100% Western culture
@@faryafaraji like i am of germanic heritage and the celts and germanic people were also both hailed and looked down upon by West because they didnt fit for the "glorious civilization" narrative people in the 1800s used for nation building. (Rome was instead substituting them). Germanic people were used because the West imagined them as more physically strong and warriorlike. They tended to forget that Vikings actullaly traded with people in the east, whether they were caliphates or not didnt matter to Vikings. In the West i think we have a tendency to project our modern imperialism onto the precolonial times. Edit: by modern imperialism i mean from colonial times to today.
Really enjoying your videos 👍The two scales you mention are very prominent in North Indian raga music. Ragas Bhairav and Bhairavi.The double harmonic major is the first one learnt in South Indian music ,Ragam Mayamalavagowla ... I wonder what musical effect the far east had on the Mediterranean antiquity or vice versa ..
Haha ouais chu pas capable de prononcer les mots français sans mon accent, mais l’inverse ne s’applique pas, quand j’emploie des mots anglais au millieu d’une phrase française, je les prononce avec l’accent québécois le plus obscène :p
I agree that history has been painted so black and white by historians. My assessment when it comes to culture from music, food, religion, to clothes, it becomes a ping pong effect, and it's nearly impossible to pin point culture stylistics to one culture. In the case of music Pythagoras, who is credited with Pythagorean tuning, was heavily influenced and studied under the Egyptians and Babylonians. With that said, it's easy to believe musical influences from the east to west have been going long before ancient Greek culture.
That’s super interesting! I mean we so often frame the Crusaders vs Muslims as enmemies that we overlook how much influence there must have been through the constant contact
@@faryafaraji I know right. There was a a lot of influence on European architecture during the Renaissance from the Islamic powers. I myself just thought it was a revival of Greek and Roman styles.
@@nipoone6109 Ooooh yeah I remember something about the late Gothic architecture of the early Florentine Renaissance, some of the churches had oriental touches or something like that
YES! This is super important when it comes to the historical and comparative musicology of Biblical Hebrew recitation. When performing a cladistic analysis of recitation styles, one finds that the deepest-branching traditions (and features of traditions) have LESS melisma, not MORE. ...This is important too when it comes to clarifying the rhythmic metre of the text (which goes unnoticed by most Hebrew scholars, partly due to the melismatic style with which most traditions recite it- AS FOR the general ILLITERACY that philologists have towards Prosodic Orthography). Check out the Samaritan version of HaAzinu by Sophi & the Baladis: the rhythm is a near-exact match for my reconstructed rhythm for this oldest song in the Tiberian Masoretic (Jewish!) text as derived strictly via syllable-length calculations from the vocalization and accent-punctuation.
Farya I believe personally as informed by platonism and my own experience travelling feeling something different in other land that despite a certain musical discovery or innovation originating in a particular culture or not, it is still filtered and imprinted by that people's collective soul.
Thanks! It was definitely a gradual process that occured naturally, the way I worded it wasn’t great when I said Europe “decided” to diverge. Different musical tastes developped over time and after a few centuries a distinct musical “province” had effectively emerged
The fado [from Arabic حدو (ḥadû)], music was born in the old Moorish Quarter of Lisbon and only came out of the closet when centuries of Catholic inquisition against the Muslims and Jews was abolished in the 1820s. Fado is more about longing for, about the expression of a permanent loss than about music itself. Some people say fado was initially sung by Crypto-Muslims (people that practised hidden Islam) from Lisbon to express their terrible loss, traditional fado dark outfit has Moorish roots and the Portuguese guitar is said to be a daughter of the Arabian oud. Apart from fado, we also have cante Alentejano, a traditional male group chant usually vocal only, the cante Alentejano is also quite similar to chants from Moroccan mosques. The Arabs introduced loads of things into the Iberian Peninsula, but most of them were not Arabic creations, many things were brought by Arabs into the Iberian Peninsula from China, India, Persia, Middle East, etc, etc. We also have have a few Greek words that were introduced by the Arabs. For example the Spanish word "albóndiga" ("almôndega" in Portuguese) comes from Andalusian Arabic "albúnduqa", which comes from classic Arabic "bunduqah", which in turn comes from Greek "[κάρυον] ποντικόν [káryon] pontikón". The entire Mediterranean is a melting pot and everything goes in circles, where things exactly come from will never be easy to tell.
FOLLOW UP VIDEO “The Middle-Eastern Roots of European Music”: th-cam.com/video/9VMZttMcZr8/w-d-xo.html
Man with wet hair out of the shower talks at camera.png Most of our ideas of music come from Hollywood stereotypes, and surprisingly, Hollywood is not the most reliable source of information. What we think of as Middle-Eastern musical aesthetics were once also present in Europe, and the Vatican priests of Late Antiquity sang and wrote melodies in ways Arabs and Iranians still do today. What's more, many of the elements that we associate with the Middle-Eastern sound seemed to have traveled from West to East, instead of the opposite that we take for granted. Whilst we can never be certain of the origin, the first attestations of what we perceive as “Eastern” aesthetics are often found in the territory of today’s Europe, and were mostly credited to Ancient Greek sources by the musicians of the early Islamic Golden Age who adopted them, which is an interesting contradiction of our expectations. Please remember that I’m no musicologist, and that all the information I communicate here is merely the synthesis of research conducted by actual historians and musicologists, whose names you can find below.
Sources:
The Ancient Greek roots of Mediterranean Tonality and its Hemiolic Typology and their antithesis to Western tonality: www.academia.edu/50584752/The_Ancient_Greek_roots_of_Mediterranean_Tonality_and_its_Hemiolic_Typology_and_their_antithesis_to_Western_tonality, Aleksey Nikolsky
The Rise of Music in the Ancient World : East and West, Curt Sachs
Ancient Greek Music, Martin L. West
Ancient Greek Music: A New Technical History, Steven Hagel
Microtonality in Ancient Greek Music, Michael Hewitt
The Sound of Medieval Song, Timothy J. Mc Gee
Great stuff, Farya!
Is it possible that the music that everyone associates with the Middle East was indeed - as you say it was - found also in Europe, but perhaps was more entrenched in the more cosmopolitan Mediterranean areas of Southern Europe and the Balkans which traded a lot with each other, and the origins of what everyone refers to as the "Western scales" were probably more common in the more northern, colder parts of Europe?
Could it be as the Germanic "barbarians" - the Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, Franks, etc sacked Rome and pretty much took over the Roman Empire, they brought such "Western-sounding" musical scales down with them from the North and virtually supplanted the original "Middle Eastern-sounding" scales in the more southern parts of Western Europe, but the original "Middle Eastern-sounding scales" pretty much survived in certain areas like the Balkans/Greece (Eastern Orthodoxy and their chants officially maintained that continuity), and of course, in the Southern Iberian Peninsula, Southern Italy, etc where Islamic cultural influence from the Moors in Iberia and the Ottomans in the Balkans made them feel comfortable with not needing to shift away from the "Middle Eastern-sounding scales" they were already used to? Just thinking aloud here.
Could it be that the move towards what we consider "Western-sounding" scales was the result of the cultural assertiveness of the then dominant Germanic "barbarian" rulers who took over the reins of the old Roman Empire in the West during the Medieval Period?
FYI, I use your music while I play Age of Empires the Definitive Edition. :)
@@OrionPD Thanks for the interesting comment Orion! There's definitely a bit of both of what you said in the historical data--interestingly enough the "Oriental sounding scales," are, as far as we know, Greek developments and regarded by contemporary Greeks as internal developments of their music, whilst the "Western sounding" ones are actually older and most probably inherited from Mesopotamia. We know they weren't brought by the northern Germanic tribes since their presence is attested centuries before the start of Greek culture in Mesopotamia, my last video talks about this if you're interested :th-cam.com/video/9VMZttMcZr8/w-d-xo.html
That said you made a very good point that I really should have mentioned in the video: areas like Spain basically maintained traditions that were already there and were probably reinforced by Islamic culture that had adopted these same musical traits earlier on in history. The influence of Turks in the Balkans and Arabs in Iberia didn't necessarily bring these elements there, but rather solidified their presence even more, as you put it, well said!
@@OrionPD Islam was in all of Iberian peninsula ! Not only South of Iberian Peninsula.
@@faryafaraji yes for exemple : adufe (al Duf Arabic tambor) in Portugal
Great video btw! Especially as I’ve been reading more about modern Greek history I cringe so much when I hear people claim that all the “oriental” features of Greek culture are somehow imposed by the Ottomans. Greeks are from the southern Balkans and Anatolia so of course their culture is “oriental” and it’s been like that since antiquity.
Sadly, I've pointed that put to many greeks themselves. But they seem to live in self-imposed denial and claim that any "oriental" features are "greek" and have nothing to do with the middle east. Like people feel so disgusted by being associated with middle east that even if their culture is highly tied to it they's politically rationalize how they're not.
Conclusion: when the Ancient Greeks used the oriental scales, they had sand and camels randomly teleport on their land.
Why are they there no more?
Once Hollywood defined those scales as Arabians, all of Balkan was so disappointed they sold all the camels to Arabia and threw all the sand in the sea. This is also why the Mediterranean sea is so filled with sand.
It explains Atlantis. Balkans threw the sand and camels in the Mediterranean, and the water went up and swallowed Atlantis whole. Damn you Hollywood.
Finally, we have found the answer!
@@faryafaraji as a Balkanian, I threw that sand 😔
Nerd time : Greek world was not only in the Balkans. It was also in a pretty big part of Middle East. Greece was part of the Ottoman empire not really culturally in the West. Practically "middle eastern music" is the combination of Greek and Iranian music cause they were the major ethnicities in the M. East.
Also until the 70s there were camels in Eastern Greek ( the muslim part of Greece ) from Ottoman traders.
I love these vids because it allows people like me who have no clue about music theory to get an insight on how music works and the history behind it
Thanks alot for the kind words! I absolutely want everyone to be able to follow so I’m happy to hear this :)
That's the point for me too! Grazie Farya😊
"Man with wet hair out of the shower talks at camera" I'm laughing so hard!!! Already know I'll love it!
Haha thanks Anne, always glad to read your comments!
looks like haircut from ancient Greek amphora
Thank you for battling stereotypes in such an eloquent and elaborate way, I enjoy watching your lectures as much as listening to your compositions. Keep posting!
Thanks alot!
I love how you formulate concepts in spoken language.. very complex sentence structures yet spoken so fluently..
Growing up, I associated the double harmonic major with the east. Then I started listening to classical Persian music, Armenian, and Turkish. I realized it was more about the musical texture of the instruments used than scale which made it sound Eastern.
Great point, a big difference between the Iranian santour and Greek and European versions of the instrument is the texture for example. In Greece and Eastern Europe, the hammers are typically coated with cotton or some material that makes the string resonate in a more “muted” manner, whereas in Iran the hammers are not always coated and the texture preferred is much more metallic and sharp
@@faryafaraji Just wanted to say I appreciate the work that your doing. From your renditions of folk music to your discussions.
The comparison of Japanese music to Ancient Greek was amazing and I loved "Aspasia".
By this you are breaking music stereotypes and myths propagated by movies and media.
Keep up the good work 🤝
@@faryafaraji In India, santoor hammers are never cotton coated and they sound like harp. But playing style of indian santoor is very different from Persian or greek santur
Thanks a lot!
@@SpartanLeonidas1821 It’s true that the tambour sounds alot like the bouzouki; both use a double course set of steel strings that are both high pitched, compared to the Saz in that video, that use a triple course with one bass string resonating at the same time as the other ones. Generally though, in terms of instruments’ build and design, Greek instruments share the most commonality with their neighbours due to more constant geographical exchange, so Turkey and the Balkans.
A cultured guy like you deserves even more attention and admiration
Dude you're work is awesome!
Been fan for some months now.
And as a Greek, if not for the rest of the brilliant work...at least for the Τζατζίκι I had to press like!
Of course in the back of my mind the "typical Greek" says:
- "I knew it and always said it...they took it from us!
What?
Everything!" 😁😄
Cheers!
Dude I was never into music theory , but I really like history. Your videos just make me want to research more and more , there is so much stuff you can understand about past civilizations by just their music . Thanks for the great video
True
The big change in sound for most of Europe likely came from more Northern European influence around the time of Charlemagne and the early Carolingians. A profound change in Christian chant in Western Europe happened around that time, and we know that different traditions from the Mediterranean existed in Frankish lands (though they arent well attested). It means that later Western European shifts away from these features probably came about due to increased Celtic/Germanic musical influence
I am mentally going through a pretty rough time in regards to loneliness, right now I am trying to become a historian and videos like this bring me joy. It is nice that you refute the interpretation of the melismatic singing being shaped under Ottoman and Asbassid/Ummayad rule, because that is the first thing that came to my mind when you were describing the areas.
Thanks alot Luuk, I’m happy this video can help! And yeee, I made these same assumptions too originally. The dangerous thing with these assumptions is that they’re perfectly logical and reasonable to make, which is why I think they’re so common
Hey. Im wondering if you could share how you're trying to become a historian? I've always wanted to become one as well and still do, it's my dream- so I'm very curious how you're getting on yourself :)
@@kathrinat9824 My advice is to get into university (which I am currently doing) and to read globally through history from a certain area as an anchorpoint so you get the foundations, for me this is a Western perspective. There are two books that I recommend for this purpose A history of the modern world-Palmer and the follow up book. It helped me grasp some of the core idea's and the continuation of said ideas, keep in mind that it is only a perspective of one historian (be open te ask certain question and criticize certain arguments that he is making, also try to understand why and how he makes these arguments to support his view); but the books are a decent foundation. Further reading depends on what you like. I guess if you want to know more about the medieval ages (me) Chris Wickham his book called medieval Europe is decent. After you got the core of an area or timeperiod you want to zoom in to (for me it is the Byzantine empire, I again read a global book; because I read Chris Wickham his book and Palmer I could contextualize everything that I read better into a historical frame and recognize certain major events in the global Byzantine secondary literature. This allowed me to skim quicker through the texts.) start searching for the historiography of the topic, start zooming in on other aspects of the topic (for me this is agricultural laws in the Byzantine empire in a specific time period). Ask yourself some questions and start looking into the literature if it gives you some answers, look at the methodology and the dataset that is used in the secondary literature. If that does not give you an answer on said question start making an hypothesis and try to look at primary sources and what research there was done with those. You order all the data that you can get and weigh everything you have. For this I recommend to also look into methodology applied to history, learn what other historians did to get to an answer that satisfies. If you want to take it to the next step describe certain problems you have with this answer, what I mean with this is describing the quality of your data and certain things that are uncertain because there is no data on it. Another thing you could do is look how other cultures view a certain event or how for instance (example from what I read) Greeks look at the legend of Constantine Palaiologos Dragases and him rising out of the ruins to reclaim the empire (so look at how other people/cultures in different timeperiods view historical events and try to understand their view and how that shaped their actions). If you keep doing stuff like this for years and years I think you will become a pretty decent historian. Sorry if this is sloppilly written, I have not slept well.
So you record yourself after brainstorming showerthoughts, quite the pro gamer move.
Aside from the jokes, well done on presenting the information and overviewing cultural and differences in music groups. I found you to be quite informative, as usual.
I am really new to this underrated channel, and I can say I learned much more here about music than I learned than school which taught us nothing but doremi faso latido. Thank you Chad iranian.
Often overlooked in our classic definitions of culture, the musical space in which a culture sits is, arguably, a quintessential quality of that culture. As an example, regional identities here in Romania -who all share the same language- define themselves on the distinctions of their musical tradition, which was much harder to displace or wash away.
Language ebbs and flows much more quickly with the politics of the geographic space, whereas musical qualities stand the test of time, deeply rooted into the unconscious of the geographical space.
Another great video, Farya. I'll be watching you for a long time
That is really interesting; how regional identity can be defined on musical style. A funny example of this deeply rooted persistence of music is Manele in Romania. It’s been sort of appropriated by the Romani community as far as I understand, but the funny thing is that Manele is basically the natural evolution of Wallachian music-fundamentally, the musical language of Manele is the exact same as Anton Pann’s. Muzică populară is basically the modern, mainstreamified evolution of Transylvanian music (mostly), and Manele is the modern evolution of Wallachian music. Even as commercial forms of mainstream music, they’re just the continuation of two major regional music styles of Romania that persist
As someone from Romania(who isn't a musicologist)I have never thought about manele as being "modern" Wallachian music until recently but it makes so much sense.
In the past few years I spent some time in the southern part of Romania and saw what kind of music people from there usually listen (it sounded, to me, more "balkanic", a bit greek-ish?). Here, in Transylvania, we mostly listen to muzică populară , but manele are not excluded. Some muzică populară from Transylvania has some Hungarian influences(as far as I know. I might be wrong tho), which I haven't noticed in manele.
Anyway, I really enjoy watching these informative videos!!
@@paulastefania5019 Thanks alot Paula! And indeed, I first noticed this wide variety of Romanian music when I saw the confusion of my Transylvanian friends who encountered traditional music from the south which felt unfamiliar to them, which as you put very well, is indeed more Balkan/Greek-ish. As Nessie put it, the music is itself a testament to the cultural reality of Romania; one with many diverse cultural styles
Really cool! It's the same here in Albania.
People who studied the Islamic Golden age during the time of Umayyad and Abbasid dynasty knows that the melodic thingy came from Byzantium and ancient greek because there were a lot of musical manuscripts that was transcripted to Arabic during that times. That is why the Salafis till today HATE the melodic style of chanting the Quran and azan and that is why if you go to Mecca today they try to avoid any melodic chanting like that. Most muslim who first heard how Saudi Arabian imams and scholars chant their adzan and dzikir, they said its not melodic enough like they used to in their home countries. All these melodic stuff did not exist during the time of early Islam especially during the time of the Prophet and the 3 khalifas, it started after Muslim took over Damascus and got influenced by the byzantines. Many conservative Muslim when they visited Damascus for the first time during that time after Muawiyah took over Syria, they were shocked that the Khalif adopted many Byzantines cultural aspect in his palace including their musics and hated it, because they know the Prophet hated music, the only music that the Prophets ever allowed was from a drum.
This is really interesting, thanks for sharing! I just went and listened to Salafi call to prayers and I was taken aback; I’ve never heard it performed this way, without the melismas. Do you have any texts or books you could share about this subject? I’d love to research more about it
Every Mid East cutlure, from Egypt to Turkey to Persia and more in between, has had a significant portion of their culture derived from ancient greece. Alexander, the Diadochi period, and even after the Greeks were no longer a factor on the world stage- all this time featured direct Greek assimilation. The architecture was Greek long before the Turks took the Hagia Sophia. The armor and weapons used by ancient middle easterners which we now associate with as a middle eastern vibe were all Greek first. I am not of course saying that Islam took precedence over culture to the point of eliminating the Greek history completely, but it has definitely rebranded it. And this all lends itself to another conversation entirely- the similarity between ancient middle east cultures and mediterranean/euro cultures. But given the lack of study people will commit to anymore, I doubt anyone could appreciate that as it should be. Shoot, look at the aulos flute.
8:56 *Angry Anakin Skywalker noises*
In all seriousness though, great video as always, love these new short documentary-style vids in addition to the music ones, your style reminds me a lot of historytubers like Metatron or The Cynical Historian.
The Double Harmonic Major is coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere 😫
He hates sand
I have a deep fascination with ancient/old folk music, your music really is breath taking! Much love and support from Sweden!
Very thoughtfully done video essay on musicology and interactions between the east and west by the guy with the wettest hair in the game. A pleasure to watch this as much as it is to listen to your music. :)
This is lowkey a Pantene commercial
From the first time I heard you sing,I knew there was something really good about you.
and I was correct .
Much Love from Greece!!
My favorite composers: Farya Faraji,Peter Pringle, Hans Zimmer, Mick Gordon, Hiroyuki Sawano, Kohta Yamamoto, Jeremy Soul, Jesper Kyd, John Williams, Goward Shore, Ludwig Gorannson, Sarah Schachner, Mooze, Olexei Omelchuk, Einar Selvik.
I also like Christodoulos Halaris for Byzantine music.
Man I absolutey do not deserve to be put next to those people haha, I appreciate it though :p
How can you forget batzorig vannchig the Mongolian throat singer
I’m a big fan of Einar Selvik’s music.
@@branarthen2268 A Wardruna?
Phenomenal video and insight. Let's not forget that Alexander the great conquered most of the "known world" from Greece to India. Peoples in the west seem to think that Europe magically ends at Italy and North to Finland. The balkans fought of the ottomans for centuries and modern day turkish lands were historically Greek and Armenian (to the east). Ancient greek settlements are all over the coastal areas of the Mediterranean as well as the middle east. Modern day Greek music still shows its influences. With regards to the bagpipes, there is an ancient Greek instrument called tsampouna.
Hollywood has definitely influenced our view on the origin of music. As a Persian I commend you for not having a negative view towards Greek peoples considering historical exchanges between eachother.
I think that there is Europe as a whole and then there is the "balkans", which is a subcategory within the European identity. Much like the way Iran gets thrown into the Middle Eastern Arab category, even though persians speak farsi and are Shia Muslims as opposed to Arabic speaking suni muslims.
Great video, really enjoyed it. Thanks for sharing 👍
I know people in west, who refuse to believe that there is greek architecture in Afghanistan. Westerners don't realise how Hollywood made everything confusing.
The name of the Greek explorer who ended up in Scotland was Pytheas of Massalia, if I remember correctly.
This is some pretty fantastic scholarship. When I was in undergrad for percussion performance, I did a project about Janissary bands and how they heavily influenced the modern percussion section that we typically associate with western classical music. Fascinating stuff.
I read somewhere that the first military marches emerged from the Janissary corps, makes sense!
Nice view on this topic and some valid points. Greetings from Serbia.
I love your videos. Living in the Middle East myself I love the content and your unique way of presenting it. I'd love to hear you talk about Sephardic Music, lots of misconceptions there to be put in order.
Thanks Daniel! Sephardic music is definitely a fascinating subject, I should look into it!
Just found this channel, the way you can analyze and in a way criticize misconceptions/assumptions that cross all kinds of cultural boundaries(from Celt, to Roman, to Arabic, and to Iranian etc. ) so respectfully and educationally is fascinating. To me you show the connections we all have through music is much stronger than separations we all have. Thank you!
Great video, very informative. Even though I suck at anything musical, I did notice for some time that classical greek/byzantine music sounds quite familiar with the idea of middle-eastern music. Now it makes sense. Considering similiar thing happened for architecture (ie. domes), it makes quite the sense.
This channel is making me wish I remembered how modes worked.
As a dayjob linguist but mainly musician I laughed pretty hard at 'Indo-European music' because there are really a group of naive people out there believing that ethno-linguistic-musico-artistic-whatever cultural lines are exactly the same and never mingles. (And oh the sweet sweet nationalists how can we not love them??
The modal province stretches from present-day Morocco to China; melisma exists in various East Asian musical traditions (e.g. 南管/南音 Lamkuan and Pansori); so much ornamentation exists in Indian music... All of that just show how you can't cherry pick 1-2 features and call it a day. People like putting things in boxes but like we need a lot more nuance than that. Although 'world music' - whatever that is - is a niche in the current musical landscape, I very much appreciate people like you who can approach it through both sociocultural and musical lenses. Great work!
You said it well! A metaphor a friend of mine once used sums it up well-categories do exist, but they’re overlapping circles, not separate boxes. In the same vein, not all categorisations perfectly overlap-music could not care less about the Europe/Middle-East category for example. Greeks still have the same overall modal music as Iranians, but people are still continually shocked, because they expect Greece’s placement in Europe to mean that its music must be 100% European. The expectation ends up being that, 10km on the Turkish side of the border, music ought to sound Eastern, but the instant you cross into the Greek border 10km on the other side, music should suddenly turn into a Bach polyphonic chorale in C Major
@@faryafaraji Sadly language kinda works that way (distinct boxes) more and more because of our common enemy nationalism and standardisation - folk music is far less likely to be regulated and standardised, but that also means they're far more likely to die due to negligence. It's a sad situation on both ends coz we musicologists (ahem do I even qualify) / linguists / anthropologists can contribute very little to the *salvation* of a whole culture. [Also yes things just magically stop at the Greek-Turkish border :) No such things as Macedonia and Thrace (wink)] Again these talking videos are exactly what I wanna do so thank you very much! I'll definitely lurk in the comment section once a new one comes out, cheers
Alright, I like damn near everything you said. N e a r l y..
Just.. a quick question.
Bro why do you gotta go the "lol, nATIonAlIsTs right?" road? What's Nationalism got to do with.. any of this?
Sorry but these days that whole "lol stupid nationalists" thing really irks me. Because in my day to day, on the, thankfully, uncommon occasion that crap like this comes up, every time "Nationalism" is brought up its usually followed closely by muff loads of word shiving.
Not to get all political, but just because I raise the star spangled banner over my head with unapologetic appreciation for my country does not mean I'm ignorant or bigoted on ethnicity + music.
Hell, coming from the dusty Mexican borderlands I, an ignorant nationalist, could tell you a thing or two about the blending of ethnicities in music myself.
@@septimus7524 1) Not your bro 2) You do you no one invites you to be triggered and comment, I don't know you so I don't care if something irks you 3) I stand by my hatred of nation states and nationalism, you can call it crap, that's ok because same to you.
@@quain5063 ..And people wonder why their nations are so shite.. A nation is only as good or as bad as its people. With that said, loathing on a national level doesn't fix any issues you have with a nation..
So sure, keep pretending to hate nationality while directly benefiting from the nation you live in. People like you always talk big smack like you could do it better, yet you stay. Right there. In the same NATION you claim to hate so much.
Another great video, thank you! (This from a Finnish writer, musician and lover of history of music and musical theory. )
As always a fascinating topic, also the fluent presentation without any cuts. Would you consider making a video about the origin and evolution of Jewish music, or Jewish Ashkenazi music?
A super interesting subject indeed! I haven’t done any research on it yet but it’s definitely an interesting prospect
I really like these videos! Very interesting subjects/topics. Keep up the epic quality my man!
Thanks alot!
You look like if Jason Momoa got into shredding guitar instead of steroids. Anyways this was one of the most interesting videos I have seen recently. Greco Roman origins make sense given 1000 years give or take of control over the Mediterranean basin and near East.
You are awesome in the way you present things , greetings from Romania ! True about Romania !
Ah, awesome video Farya, and I was just wondering the other day of what your thoughts were on Greek / Turkish music, and who influenced whom.
I have some thoughts based on what you said, and I think it's in agreement but I still feel like going on mini, disorganized rants.
Why will Westerners be confused by ancient Greek and Roman music being "oriental" in their minds? The answer is that Western Europe has essentially culturally appropriated Greco-Roman antiquity to be the bedrock of "their" civilization, and so they can only picture it in a manner which is relatable for them. This appropriation goes up until the end of the Western Roman Empire, at which point the Eastern Roman Empire becomes "Byzantine," "Greek," or "oriental" because their own western culture (Germano-Latin) had actually started to develop at this point. The irony is that, in Greece's case at least, this cultural appropriation was sold back to us starting in the 19th century, with the ancient Greeks being "Western" and with our history under the medieval Roman Empire and subsequent Ottoman Empire being "Eastern," thus giving us the impression that we had orientalized and that we had to go back to being Western. It's why classical antiquity has a place of privilege in modern Greece, while the subsequent medieval and Ottoman periods are denigrated, and why many Greeks will still say that many of the negative traits of modern Greeks are a leftover of Ottoman periods.
I think it's entirely fair to believe that the Hellenized and Romanized Eastern Mediterranean provided a ready source for Arabs and then Turks, though my only hesitation here would be treating the incoming Arabs and Turks as a carte blanche without their own culture, who just absorbed all of the awesome Greek stuff because it's obviously awesome Greek stuff. I think the question then becomes one of exchange: "Greek" music could have formed the basis of Arab and Turkish music, but I think by the same logic, the Ottomans did influence the Balkans by bringing in their variations on the "Greek" music which had originally influenced them. Here I'm also thinking in Greek of some Greeks words which were absorbed into Turkish, and then which became common in Greece through the Ottomans as the modified Turkish word (if I could remember the term used for these words I'd post an example but I forgot, so feel free to ignore).
I actually think this discussion is very similar to the discussion on Ottoman culinary influences in the Balkans and Greece specifically. There are of course foods that did originate in the Ottoman Empire, but there are other foods whose recipe was recorded in Ottoman times but which could have pre-existed and were simply not recorded, or the records don't exist.
Anyway I think I wanted to rant about more...but, I forgot. Great video, can't wait for more!
Very well put Petros, I couldn’t have communicated it better myself! There’s a common feeling in the West that Greek music used to be fully Western and was fully orientalised, and that is wrong, but so would be the idea that Turks and Arabs completely absorded Greek culture carte blanche as you said. Turkish and Greek music are especially intertwined. Starting from the 16th century, it’s impossible to even talk about Greek influence on Turkish music or Turkish influence on Greek music; it’s more like this continuous, mutual exchange where you can’t even define where the Greek and Turkish parts begins anymore. My metaphor is that the Greeks codified the basic recipe for the “Oriental music dish,” and Arabs and Turks learned that codification, but then they latter developped it and at this point, this dish is just as much characterised by their influence; it’s like this big soup of continuous mutual exchange and collective development.
When it comes to the Turks, I am more confident in the slightly “carte blanche” aspect of their initial music, since they arrived relatively quickly from very remote lands where this type of music doesn’t exist, so they would have basically suddenly absorbed all this musical algorithm in the span of a few generations, but not only from the Greeks; Arabs and Iranians would have been major players, especially given the impact of Iranian, specifically Persian culture on the early Turks. Their initial music upon arrival in the Middle-East would have probably been far more central/east asiatic, whatever that would have sounded like back then.
For the pre-Islamic Arabs, we know that they fully developped and learned the theory of ancient Greek music, but I’m inclined to think that this overall musical algorithm had likely already made its way into the peninsula due to relative geographical proximity, and they had already been part of that big pan-Mediterranean-Greek-Iranian-Mesopotamian soup then. They might very well already have sang like this and played similar melodies before encountering the theoretical texts, but that encounter probably solidifed their music and compounded its nature.
@@faryafaraji
What would be your opinion on Yemeni music? It's very "arabic" and oriental but also has it's own unique feature.
Another thing is the differentiating line between "middle eastern/"arabi" music and african music that can be recognized as you go southward down from egypt, in Sudan ypu can already notice very "horn of africa" ethipiopia style of music and sounds.
I find the quest to recognize the geographical boundries of these musical provinces fascinating.
Just recently found your channel, and wow, really loving the original music and the informative videos on music and musical history! It would be very nice to see if you could branch off to Southeast Asian music if possible, but if not it's understandable.
Besides that, great work! I truly feel like you are bringing people around the world together with one of the few things all people understand: beautiful music. And I think all of us listeners can appreciate your great work ❤️
You, sir, deliver top-drawer quality content. I watch and learn and I am entertained while I do it. Thank you!
What a great video. I don't know much music theory, but about everything made sense, especially with samples of music/scales. Thank you, Farya. Please keep making more content!
Thanks alot! I really want my videos to be completely accessible to people who don’t know much about music theory
Great presentation! You make complicated matters easy to understand to people with no music studies background. Old Roman chants reminded me of rizitika songs of Crete!
'sand camel, boom boom isis, magic flying carpet'
this is why i watch you, great content, no filter
Sand, Cobra, Pharaoh, Sand, Cobra, Sand….
This needs to be remixed as a song
I bookmarked this video when it came out, thinking it would be interesting but maybe a little intense, you know? Have watched halfway now, just wanna thank you for being so candid and real in your format. Way too many videos like this would be sensationalising and throwing all kinds of accusations left and right, making sensetive issues out of this. But your presentation is very down to earth and I feel like I'm approached by somebody who is honest, well-meaning and knowledgeable. Your perspective appears to be one of understanding, not condescension. It's a unique trait in the online presenter world, really. I hope my comment made sense, and good luck with your future content. I'll check out your other stuff.
EDIT: and your editing is slick! Showcasing the lydian chromatic mode with perfect volume underneath you, fading in softly like that, that gave me goosebumps! And boy does it "sound middle eastern!" :D
Thank you. All I’m doing in this video is condense and communicate the current factual documentation on the matter: that many of the musical cultural traits we associate with the Middle-East have their earliest origin in the Greco-Roman basin, and that many of the musical traits we associate with the West such as diatonic modes are originally Mesopotamian influence, no more, no less.
What people don't understand is that in those days the world was just one,no borders so music was made according to climate and life struggle. You are so right
In southern Italy we also sing like our Spanish and Romanian brothers
True, that was quite an oversight on my part not to mention South Italy
@@faryafaraji haha no oversight my guy, the work you are doing is incredible! i bet if oyu had to include every piece of information you could make whole movies
In Corsica too.
That say even some northern italian music use thoses scales and tribal groove percussion .
Stuff that would travel to Brazil as well.
So glad I happened upon your channel.
Fascinating as always. I love the video essays. I’ve gone through these same thought processes before but very much lacking any decent musical education. For example I’ve heard about how we simply can’t reliably know what Byzantine music would’ve sounded like. There was an episode of the Byzantium and friends podcast on the topic but again, I’m too uneducated to really grasp the merit of all arguments.
From a historical pov though my impression is that despite all the great points in this video, we will never have enough data to know conclusively what originated where and from whom. I think an important element to the conversation is the development of “civilization” and the resulting biases.
The Greeks entered this civilizational area of exchange connected to west Asia as far as the Mycenaean era. The Roman’s were connected through the empire. This “civilization” spread always coincided with the spread of written history and thus the potential cultural shifts resulting from it are indissociable from our available evidence.
Thanks for yet another interesting topic to think about Fariya!
Very good point yeah! I definitely simplified the title, and a longer, more accurate title would have been “as far as we can trace these things, they come from Europe.” But the first point at which we can find evidence for something doesn’t mean it’s where it originated, as you said. As far as we can trace them, the “oriental modes” are first in Ancient Greece, though they might have come from somewhere else before and are simply not attested; the only fallacy there being that they must have come from the East because it fits our modern idea of Eastern music. The best we can do as history lovers is trace back the earliest attestations, but I don’t believe we can ever grasp “origins,” if there is even such a concept, because it implies monogenesis. Some musical elements emerge in multiple places independently too.
@@faryafaraji so true! its definitely an attention grabbing title and this is TH-cam after all.
Of course It’s always basically “as far as we can tell”. That’s why I think it’s important to think about the civilizational areas. We can never truly know when it emerged first and if it happened more than once as you said. But as it was mentioned in the video, what definitely does correlate is that the European areas which eventually fell under Islamic rule were also already connected to this cultural area since Roman times and very possibly did inherit some sort of pan Mediterranean music which simply co evolved within the Islamic world as the rest of Europe went in another direction. Nothing develops in total isolation. It’s actually quite jarring to see how far of a divergence there is between Italian and Greek music despite the close proximity.
It also was really interesting to learn the terms to describe what we associate with “Eastern” sounds such as melismatic, although my ears would probably still have a high failure rate at recognizing the double harmonic in the traditional Greek songs I grew up with! That was definitely a surprising fact.
@@isimerias The Double Harmonic Major most often appears in liturgical Byzantine singing, but there’s quite a few folk songs like Galani Galaziani and Misirlou. I think Rebetiko has the highest use of Double Harmonic along with Cretan music; I don’t hear it as much in Thracian music for example. I keep talking about “Greek music” as if it’s one homogeneous thing but it’s one of the most diverse musical cultures itself :p
@@faryafaraji good point! I should’ve pointed out that Misirlou would be the obvious exception to that given it’s huge influence even in the west. But I wouldn’t have picked up on Galani Galaziani, and though I can’t name any others, I intuitively know that it isn’t the only song I’ve heard that kind of melody in. I would find this it a really surprising example, but I almost want to say that the Thourio revolutionary song sounds like it might be fairly close to double harmonic to my ears? I’m probably wrong though.
What’s sure is that definitely the peculiarity is how “Greek music” can go from quite Italianate sounding all the way to sand desert camel pyramid sand 😂
Sadly I do think that my own regional Peloponnesian heritage is on the more lacklustre end of the bunch 😅
@@isimerias Hahaha yeah I’m going to make a video about this discrepancy in Greek music soon. From what I had read, the Italian sounding one is the music of the Ionian Islands that used to be Italian colonies, so the music is pretty much literally Italian. The sand camel music is the more “native” Greek music if you will, but the interesting thing is that, after independence from the Ottomans, the new Greek government tried to make the Ionian music the standart across the nation in order to distinguish themselves from the Turks; it’s why this otherwise “anomaly” music in Greek history has gained so much weight, otherwise it would have remained a regional oddity.
And about that! The Peleponnese is my favourite part of Greece but I know very few songs from there, it’s weird! Cretan and Thracian for example have incredible repertoires but I’d have a hard time thinking of one from the Peleponese
Really nice Video! As a geographer a really enjoy deconstructing representations and "idées reçus". Although I have no musicological background but al simple knowledge of ethic music (and particularly greek) , I am wondering if melismatic and polyphonic music coexisted in mediterenean in a way that could suggest a certain urban / rural separation and the fact of western polyphonic turn during the medieval age is due to the rapid decline of urbanisation in the west.
I do know that Polyphony in Western Europe starts emerging around (I think) 800 or 900 with the emergence of Organum, which is the first harmonisation of chanting. In other words everyone, rural or urban, sang melismatically in the Mediterranean up to a certain point in the Middle-Ages and then it seems that polyphony and harmony start emerging out of Northern Europe and it spreads across the continent, slowly making melismatic chant die out. Polyphony probably didn’t exist during the height of Old Roman Chant, in Late Antiquity, and it seems to be more of a North European cultural effect originally, although there might have been some basic forms of harmony back then
Loved listening to this!
Hope you do more of these :)
Hello, i've been hearing your musics for some time and i really enjoy your work, so i have a suggestion: can you do a video on some precolombian music? Incas, Aztecs, Mayas, etc all had a somewhat rich musical tradition, but i and others have been having a hard time trying to find anything that isn't a game theme.
I’ll have to do alot of research first in order to be confident that I’ll get the sound right, and not caricaturise it, but it’s definitely something that I’ve looked into doing for sure!
Amazing vídeo, i learned something new today thanks man greetings from Bolivia
Perhaps, the reason why the double harmonic major and phrygian mode is thought of as being oriental, is due to the fact that the Armenians and Greeks under the ottoman empires, did alot of the trading with Europeans and were known to be adept merchants and christain brothers, and since they came from the ottoman empire, it probably became stereotyped as being oriental.
That’s a very plausible idea yeah, I can see how this initial contact with the Ottomans would have then brought the stereotype over to the operas and court music
The huge musical impact on the world of the Greeks, Thracians and Phrygians ...
Some time ago, I found a (historically informed) rendering of a piece (methinks it was the Messe de Nôtre Dame) of Guillaume de Macheaut here on TH-cam. It is late middle ages France. In parts of the chant you find a scale that today would be characterized as hamonic minor (also one of the Middle Eastern stereotype scale), and the rendering used a lot of melismatic singing. So, yeah, it evoked a lot of "Middle East" feel to me, but I am curious to discover that this actually might be a late example in a long line of a historical tradition with roots in greco-roman music composed in the 1300s in France.
Aquaman educates TH-cam People about Middle-Eastern Music
The DCEU is getting really weird
You've got no place being this underrated
Love these video/lectures. Absolute quality.
Great content as always, keep it going 👌
Tahmineh proposal Iranian song and mignonne de chardavoine is your best ever I listen it everyday I was just listening your notification pop up
Такі формати відео шановного Фаріїї, настільки круті, що йому можна викладати в якомусь вищому музикальному закладі.
Merci beaucoup pour ces éclairages extrêmement intéressants! J'attends bien entendu mon tiers de tzatziki!
Hahaha merci à toi, je l’enverrais par la poste bientôt :p
Wow great analysis .in other videos ,can you make us discover the evolution of iranian music in the twentieth century or the andalusian and maghrebian music or even talk about some oriental composers like Mohamed Abed Alwaheb
Great video bro listen to Sicilian music next time we sing like that too
Honestly, none of this was surprizing to me, partly because "Ancient" and "Middle East" have always been connected concepts in my mind, and I do think of Greece as related to the "Middle East", especially in pre-Islamic, and partly because I learned about the history of Western Music in college, though I never thought of Roman Chant as sounding "Middle Eastern" before.
Definitely, a core component of this question is the cultural placement of Greece. It’s been defined in recent Western European memory as entirely Western, but it’s more of an inbetween culture with elements of both Western and Eastern cultural spheres due to geography
In the same "mode" most are stunned to see the reincarnation of Hellenic monuments and statues in full blown color. The ancients would probably be pulling their hair in mourning (because they did and some still do) if they could see the monuments and statues of death we have been to conditioned to admire today. Bagpipes in Crete are called askomantoura, from the root word askos as in ASKOS of AEOLUS from the Odyssey. And, don't forget stuffed grape leaves (in continuation of the conversation in posts here about food and the Tzatziki comment. Cute). Come to Greece, we'll prepare everything and you can enjoy it with us and you won't have to buy a thing. Seriously.
When the gyro kicks in
23:59 That Impersonation was Gold XD
this & the sands/camels/sands part!
Fantastic
Video
As an italian
I discover Greek music
In Crete
Then jam on bouzuki in Amorgos
Amazing scales amazing music
Free to dive into the sound
Love your video
In case you need a bass player
To explore the seas of middle east
Be happy to cooperate
Nice video.
Just my opinion but I prefer the inside more than the outside background. The whole aesthetic suit it better for these types of videos
keep the good job
A new educational video! Thank you
Great work
I like your ideas! It's uniting.
Thanks! But don’t give me credit for the ideas, I’m only communicating the research actual professionals have done haha, the credit goes to them
@@faryafaraji Anyway, without your interference and digestion of information I'd never knew it. Your're always welcome in Istanbul.
Thank you for such an interesting topic, I am now curious to discover more. You are a gem.
Very informative and interesting video!
Now that's something, thank you!
-georgejorgen
You look pure Persian ❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤😍❤😍😍😍😍😍❤❤❤❤❤❤🇮🇷👑🦁🌞
Keep the great content and the fabulous beard
Thanks for the great videos and fascinating content (delivered with a good dose of humour)! I have only recently become aware of the the roots of our modern day major scale perhaps stretches back to Mesopotamia, 1800 bc, and maybe earlier, and not to Pythagoras, as so many believe? Is it true that they were aware of the circle of 5ths, shared this knowledge with the Chinese, and that the days of the week (according to Sara De Rose's paper) could well have its ordering on that basis? I am writing a short paper on the history of diatonicism - I was curious to know what the Greek uses of the tetrachord had to do with scales, if they had indeed been handed down heptatonic scales from the Mesopotamians, was it a case of phrasing, analysis, or lyre tuning system? Any guide as to how diatonicism made its way into west, into the catholic church, and finally into the major minor tonal system of the common practice period would be most gratefully received! - Thanks!
I really recommend watching the follow up video on Mesopotamian diatonicism in the pinned comment, it’ll answer many of your questions :)
But to answer some of your questions here; absolutely, diatonicism, including our modern major scales, are known to go back go Mesopotamia, far before Pythagoras, that much is beyond dispute at this point. The sharing of circle of fifths with the Chinese thoigh, I’ve never heard of, and it certainly isn’t a proven reality; probably only conjecture.
When it comes to your question on scales, I’d say to be careful about wording everything from a modern lens; the question of scale vs mode vs tetrachord is mostly different cultural ways to describe the same phenomenon. What matters is that the Greeks most probably adopted diatonic modality from their eastern neighbours, and as to how that made its way into the Catholic church, it’s simple: the early Christian Church rose out of the culture of the Classical Mediterranean, and those diatonic modes were simply part of the musical culture of that region by that point :)
@@faryafaraji Brilliant - thanks so much! Will have a look at the video, and thanks for the helpful comments, definitely some useful pointers there - I also like you quote from the video above "Dorian (Phrygian) was their C major" - will certainly be using that - Thanks again!
It seems that Greece and Iran are the two main regions that spread the music all over the region...and also to the world. Also, the "tzatziki" has its origins in Iran. It means "herbs" as I know. The "meze" is another Iranian word that traveled to the Greece and the Balkans through Anatolia.
Yeah that’s definitely the main consensus as far as the sources I read at least. It also makes sense because, fundamentally, the spread of this music was tied to the spread of music theory, and advanced cultures with a large degree of cultural influence can systematise theory and propagate it through soft cultural power. The Eastern Roman and Sasanian Empires very much fit the mold-and most early Arabic music is said to be Iranian + Greek synthethis
And wow I didn’t know about tzatziki haha!
@@faryafaraji Yes, according to the Sevan Nishanyan, the "tzatziki" has its roots in Iran and entered Anatolia from the Kurds. As I remember, they refer differently to the tzatziki in Iran but Kurds say "cacıx", "x" with a harsh "kh" :) .
@@SpartanLeonidas1821 Simfono mazi sas ❤🇬🇷
You explained this quite well! Until relatively recently, I had solely associated these scales and modes with the orientals, but have shifted more towards the Mediterranean Basin and Southern Europeans. Now, when I hear these musics I think of an Old World sound primarily, the Eastern Romans, and Arabic or Iranian cultures all at the same time instead of just Persians and Arabs.
Yeah it’s interesting how our knowledge changes our association/perception. For me these scales used to sound Iranian but ever since realising that they’re actually not that not commonly used in Iran, I associate them more strongly with Spain or the Balkans
@@faryafaraji I look forward to more music!
I am a Greek amateur musician who plays greek/oriental music (called rebetiko) and I thank you very much for this video
People are far too quick to dismiss other cultures influence on each other.
man, the shitstorm you would create by posting this on tiktok would be incredible to witness
TikTok is the Library of Alexandria of the modern era, a beacon of knowledge and science
@@faryafaraji I still wait with hope for the day when someone will entirely burn it, as happened to its ancient counterpart
@@faryafaraji I agree but I also laughed in real time so thanks for that. 😁
Man, this is interesting
Would you disagree, I know its not rly relevant maybe for your topic at hand (which was very interesting btw, i just dont know enough to comment on it), if I said that Romans and Greeks didnt see themselves as Europeans? Maybe that view of Greece as the Wests beginning maybe also influenced the way we think of specific modes of music coming from specific areas? (well that and also obviously western stereotypes of eastern music). Just my opinion, but I dont think the West understand Ancient Greece, Rome or the Mediterreanean cultures (alongside arabic and iranian cultures). I am not saying we are wrong about the historical events or something like that, but I am saying we do not comprehend how the multicultural (and musical) exchanges happened. Sorry if I am way out of my debt here. I found your songs and this video very interesting. Keep it up
That’s probably the most relevant thing actually, your comment is extremely correct in my opinion!
Indeed, I believe that this all stems from this 19th century narrative of Greece as the epitome of White European Western Excellence. Greece was objectified in this Western narrative as a completely Western culture, one that had no links to the East, one that is exclusively Western. So every time “Eastern” traits are found in Greek culture, the only coping mechanism is to attribute them to Oriental corruption of the pure Western Greek culture.
Greeks and Romans didn’t see themselves as “European” in any sense other than a technical, geographical one, because there really wasn’t such a concept of European identity in the way we understand it today. They saw themselves as Greeks and Romans, period. There are still people today who present this narrative of Leonidas vs Xerxes as “the White Westerners” vs the “Brown Easterners.” But this is projecting modern categorisations on the past. The idea that Leonidas was a Western man, more similar to the Celts in Ireland, than the neighbouring, relatively far more similar Persian Empire is absurd; they didn’t have ideas of East vs West back then. The truth of the matter is that Greece has always been very similar to its eastern neighbours because of its geographical location, but 19th century Western thought was in denial of this, because their narrative needed Greece to be a 100% Western culture
@@faryafaraji like i am of germanic heritage and the celts and germanic people were also both hailed and looked down upon by West because they didnt fit for the "glorious civilization" narrative people in the 1800s used for nation building. (Rome was instead substituting them). Germanic people were used because the West imagined them as more physically strong and warriorlike. They tended to forget that Vikings actullaly traded with people in the east, whether they were caliphates or not didnt matter to Vikings. In the West i think we have a tendency to project our modern imperialism onto the precolonial times. Edit: by modern imperialism i mean from colonial times to today.
@@mustplay7212 Yeah it all comes down to the problem with specific narratives with nationalistic intent
@@faryafaraji cheers mate. I will Try to read more about and listen to eastern music. You are also very talented. Keep it up
İ discover your channel new,your songs are perfect!!!
Excellent work.
Really enjoying your videos 👍The two scales you mention are very prominent in North Indian raga music. Ragas Bhairav and Bhairavi.The double harmonic major is the first one learnt in South Indian music ,Ragam Mayamalavagowla ... I wonder what musical effect the far east had on the Mediterranean antiquity or vice versa ..
J'ai souris très fort quand tu as placé ton Par excellence au milieu de ton anglais. Le bond entre accents étaient impressionnant xD
Haha ouais chu pas capable de prononcer les mots français sans mon accent, mais l’inverse ne s’applique pas, quand j’emploie des mots anglais au millieu d’une phrase française, je les prononce avec l’accent québécois le plus obscène :p
Just discovered your channel aquaman. Currently binge listening to your vids at work. You got yourself a sub from me
I agree that history has been painted so black and white by historians. My assessment when it comes to culture from music, food, religion, to clothes, it becomes a ping pong effect, and it's nearly impossible to pin point culture stylistics to one culture. In the case of music Pythagoras, who is credited with Pythagorean tuning, was heavily influenced and studied under the Egyptians and Babylonians. With that said, it's easy to believe musical influences from the east to west have been going long before ancient Greek culture.
I recall watching a video saying the Crusaders had a large hand in influencing music and art in the Middle East.
That’s super interesting! I mean we so often frame the Crusaders vs Muslims
as enmemies that we overlook how much influence there must have been through the constant contact
@@faryafaraji I know right. There was a a lot of influence on European architecture during the Renaissance from the Islamic powers. I myself just thought it was a revival of Greek and Roman styles.
@@nipoone6109 Ooooh yeah I remember something about the late Gothic architecture of the early Florentine Renaissance, some of the churches had oriental touches or something like that
YES! This is super important when it comes to the historical and comparative musicology of Biblical Hebrew recitation. When performing a cladistic analysis of recitation styles, one finds that the deepest-branching traditions (and features of traditions) have LESS melisma, not MORE.
...This is important too when it comes to clarifying the rhythmic metre of the text (which goes unnoticed by most Hebrew scholars, partly due to the melismatic style with which most traditions recite it- AS FOR the general ILLITERACY that philologists have towards Prosodic Orthography).
Check out the Samaritan version of HaAzinu by Sophi & the Baladis: the rhythm is a near-exact match for my reconstructed rhythm for this oldest song in the Tiberian Masoretic (Jewish!) text as derived strictly via syllable-length calculations from the vocalization and accent-punctuation.
Farya I believe personally as informed by platonism and my own experience travelling feeling something different in other land that despite a certain musical discovery or innovation originating in a particular culture or not, it is still filtered and imprinted by that people's collective soul.
Great job !
Great video as usual .
Was European divergence you mentioned at the end deliberate attempt by European artists or did it happen over time ?
Thanks! It was definitely a gradual process that occured naturally, the way I worded it wasn’t great when I said Europe “decided” to diverge. Different musical tastes developped over time and after a few centuries a distinct musical “province” had effectively emerged
@@faryafaraji Thanks for the answer
Very interesting vid
Excellent video, moreover your french accent is very good. Keep it up !
The fado [from Arabic حدو (ḥadû)], music was born in the old Moorish Quarter of Lisbon and only came out of the closet when centuries of Catholic inquisition against the Muslims and Jews was abolished in the 1820s. Fado is more about longing for, about the expression of a permanent loss than about music itself. Some people say fado was initially sung by Crypto-Muslims (people that practised hidden Islam) from Lisbon to express their terrible loss, traditional fado dark outfit has Moorish roots and the Portuguese guitar is said to be a daughter of the Arabian oud.
Apart from fado, we also have cante Alentejano, a traditional male group chant usually vocal only, the cante Alentejano is also quite similar to chants from Moroccan mosques.
The Arabs introduced loads of things into the Iberian Peninsula, but most of them were not Arabic creations, many things were brought by Arabs into the Iberian Peninsula from China, India, Persia, Middle East, etc, etc. We also have have a few Greek words that were introduced by the Arabs. For example the Spanish word "albóndiga" ("almôndega" in Portuguese) comes from Andalusian Arabic "albúnduqa", which comes from classic Arabic "bunduqah", which in turn comes from Greek "[κάρυον] ποντικόν [káryon] pontikón".
The entire Mediterranean is a melting pot and everything goes in circles, where things exactly come from will never be easy to tell.
I have added the Arabic حدو (ḥadû) origin of the word fado.
Thank you for the info 🙂