Kyriakos Kalaitzides sheds light on hidden musical treasures of the Byzantine world
His En Chordais joins Constantinople to play newly discovered, centuries-old works from the eastern Mediterranean, at Early Music Vancouver
Kyriakos Kalaitzides (right) and En Chordais. Photo by Rocher de Palmer Cenon
Early Music Vancouver presents Treasures from Byzantine Manuscripts at the BlueShore Financial Centre for the Performing Arts on September 24
WITH HIS SHAVED head and determined gaze, Kyriakos Kalaitzides could easily be cast in a Hollywood action thriller—although, being “foreign”, he’d inevitably be given the villain’s role. In real life, however, he’s a hero, a kind of Raider of the Lost Archive bent on restoring the sonic treasures of the eastern Mediterranean to their rightful place in music history.
Poring over dusty monastery documents and exhuming long-forgotten books of hymns, he has embarked on a voyage of discovery that has already shed a surprising and benign light on an often strife-torn land.
To reduce his quest to its essentials, he has discovered written records of music once thought to have been purely an oral tradition—and a secular one, at that—preserved over centuries by monkish scribes. It’s the musicological equivalent of finding a hoard of regal gold in some ruined abbey.
“I’ve shared my time between music and research for many years,” Kalaitzides explains in a telephone interview from his home in Thessalonika, on the Aegean Sea. “By playing the musical traditions coming from this part of the earth—that means, nowadays, Turkey, Greece, the Arab world, Iran, et cetera—I realized that there are no written sources in use with the exception of Byzantine church music, which has used notation since the 10th century continuously, up to today. So around 1999 I was preparing an album of music by an eminent composer from Constantinople, Zakharia Khanendeh, who lived in the 18th century, and I found a composition of his in some manuscripts of Byzantine church music, using the same notation that was standard for writing church music."
Further research has revealed that hundreds of secular compositions—by Turks, Greeks, Arabs, Jews, Armenians, and Persians—have been tucked into files of liturgical music throughout the eastern Mediterranean, and more are being discovered every year. A sampling of Kalaitzides’s favourites make up the program that he, his band En Chordais, and the Montreal-based musicians of Constantinople will perform in Treasures from Byzantine Manuscripts, at the BlueShore Financial Centre for the Performing Arts this weekend. Go, and you’ll hear music that has never been performed in British Columbia. But you’ll also get to enjoy Kalaitzides’ virtuosity on the oud and his reunion with Constantinople founder Kiya Tabassian, who has been part of this musicological journey since the beginning.
Kyriakos Kalaitzides says he shares a kind of brotherhood with Constantinople founder Kiya Tabassian. Photo by Vanias X
“It’s something more than friendship,” Kalaitzides says of his relationship with Tabassian, a noted scholar and performer on the Persian setar. “We are like brothers. We don’t do exactly the same things in terms of music: Kiya is doing of course with Constantinople amazing work; I’m doing with En Chordais some other styles. But we share a serious common space, let’s say, and we have a very similar approach to music, both in terms of research and in terms of performance.
“Our relationship extends outside of the music, as well,” he adds. “I mean, even though we live so far apart, our families share a close relationship, and our talks and discussions extend to many different topics outside of music: art in general, family life, ecology, and so on.”
Exile, and its aesthetic implications, is another shared preoccupation. The repression of music in post-revolutionary Iran is part of what sent a teenage Tabassian to Canada, and while Kalaitzides lives near where he was born, almost exactly a century ago his ethnically Greek ancestors were uprooted from eastern Anatolia as part of an enormous exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey. Finding that Greek choristers had diligently preserved the musics of many supposedly clashing cultures has only strengthened his belief that music can bring people together in ways that political leaders simply can’t imagine.
“For centuries, the music of this area was a kind of common language for people of the region, despite ethnicity or religion or whatever,” he says. “I mean, I am a Greek, but when I’m listening to an Iranian musician singing or playing, I can immediately recognize this musical language. It doesn’t happen the same, for instance, with musicians from East Asia or South America, even if I respect them a lot. So this is a very important starting point, and this is what we try to do: let the music unify people and not divorce people.”
If Treasures from Byzantine Manuscripts illustrates how music was a unifying force during Ottoman times, Kalaitzides’ 2019 solo album Exile speaks to more contemporary conditions, specifically the ongoing displacement of millions of people through war, famine, and political or religious oppression. In it, Kalaitzides says, he relates “the history of my family, which is also the history of more than half the population of Greece.
“Even nowadays, for many reasons, we have economic refugees, we have climate refugees, we have war refugees,” he continues. “So I wanted to put another dimension on the table, and that is the spiritual feeling of exile. I’m not sure if my English will help me to express what I’m glad to tell you, but nowadays people in the so-called ‘western world’, we have much more opportunity than the people who are forced into exile. But we have a strange feeling that something is missing, and what is missing is ‘paradise’. That means, we almost all are looking for the ideal place.
“People coming from countries where war is happening, they consider this ideal place to be Europe. At the beginning of the 20th century, for many, it was Canada. And here, we try to find this ideal place during our holidays, our vacations. But what about the other 50 weeks of the year?”
Perhaps, Kalaitzides concludes, music can help fill this void. “For me, art in general—and I am a musician, so more specifically music—is a kind of bridge with this other world that is the ideal world, this paradise, this heaven. It’s an attempt to communicate with the ideal world, let’s say. That’s different for each one, of course; it depends on your own religion, your ideology, your philosophy, or whatever. But we’re all looking for something, and music can give some answers.”
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