Μάθημα : Μουσικές Κλίμακες-Τρόποι & Εναρμόνιση της Παραδοσιακής-Δημοτικής Μουσικής

On Sept. 20, 1926, the Greek violinist Alexis Zoumbas recorded one of the most devastating bits of music I’ve ever encountered. The song, “Epirotiko Mirologi,” is a pentatonic lament — mirologi — that, for millenniums, has been sung beside fresh graves in Epirus, a historically contentious chunk of land on the Greek-Albanian border. The performance is a little over four minutes long, instrumental and largely improvised against the low anchoring drone of some unnamed accompanist dragging a bow across a double bass. Zoumbas was a technically proficient musician, even virtuosic, but his real gift was in effectively articulating disintegration. There is a palpable hysteria to his playing; each note trembles, as if he has recently suffered an emotional collapse of unknowable magnitude.