Eastern Art Music: Secular Songs and Melodies of the Early Ottoman Empire from Post-Byzantine Musical Manuscripts

Post-Byzantine musical manuscripts constitute a very important written source for the secular music of the Middle East. This source material covers a time span from the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth centuries (the Byzantine Renaissance) up to the year 1830, when the first collection of secular music was printed.

The amount of extant material is impressive, with the main bulk consisting of official musical compositions for the Ottoman Court, including Phanariot songs, Greek traditional songs and Persian art music. The material provides insight not just into Byzantine music and culture, but also into the continued influence of post-Byzantine music on the social context and cultural environment of the Ottoman elite Phanariots and their songs, as well as its general influence on Eastern art music in the post-Byzantine world.

This lecture on post-Byzantine musical traditions will include musical examples in recorded form, and will be followed by a 15-minute live performance by Kyriakos Kalaitzidis (on the oud) and Nikos Andrikos (ensemble member of En Chordais, on vocals).

This event is co-organized by Early Music Vancouver at Green College, an ongoing series dedicated to presenting music in ways that are attentive to and inspired by styles, conventions and conditions that existed when the music was first conceived, and Ways of Seeing Byzantine Art and Material Culture, a 2022-23 series co-hosted by Green College and SFN Centre for Hellenic Studies (SFU) that explores cutting-edge and innovative research by scholars of Byzantine art, archaeology and material culture. 

Born in Thessaloniki in a family originating from Pontos and Cappadocia, Kyriakos Kalaitzidis is a composer and musician. He is considered to be one of the most significant musical researchers in the field of modal secular music of the post-Byzantine era.

In 1993, he co-founded the En Chordais ensemble, renowned for extensive research on the musical legacy of the East Mediterranean and a producer of CDs, books and concerts. In 2002, he became Artistic Director of the three-year Medi-Muses project, dedicated to researching and celebrating the Mediterranean’s shared classical musical heritage and supported through the European Union program, Euromed Heritage II.

He was nominated for the UNESCO-Sharjah Prize in 2006, and he received the Prix France des Musiques du Monde from Radio France for En Chordais in 2008. Kyriakos Kalaitzides has a PhD in Byzantine Musicology from Athens University.