Music and vocals by Farya Faraji. Please note that this isn’t reconstructed music from
the era, only modern Greek Epirote music with ancient theme.

Since my Eastern Roman themed tracks are mostly excuses to delve into the vast regional diversity of Greek music, I chose as a theme the Despotate of Epirus to delve into the music of Epirus, a region renowned for its unusual usage of pentatonic melodies. Pentatonic melodies are ones using only five notes, which is typical of many cultures such as that of the Native Americans or East Asian cultures, instead of seven notes, which is the dominant norm across Greek music. This specific region of the Balkans however is defined by pentatonicism, alongisde another common feature which is the Polyphonic Song of Epirus heard in the background here, a unique form of polyphony found in this region across Greeks, Albanians and Vlachs. I structured the melody to reflect the typical melodic patterns found in the region, and the rythm also follows the typically slow, heavy feel of Epirus’ dances. The pentatonic nature of Epirote music has often been attempted to be linked to remote antiquity, as Ancient Greek music used pentatonic structures often, but this equating of Epirote music rests chiefly on a now outdated Darwinian model of simple-to-complex history of music, that presupposed that pentatonic music is inherently more primitive, and that the earliest stages of Greek music started from that primitive stage to attain a more complex heptatonicism. This model is now soundly rejected by modern musicology, as we can now observe that music does not follow a Darwinian model of simple complexification, as the earliest Greek music had always been heptatonic, and there is no solid evidence to link Epirus’ polyphony to that of Greek antiquity—the two may be unrelated emergences of a similar phenomenon.

The Despotate of Epirus (this name is a modern historiographical convention like the term Byzantine) was a rump state of the Eastern Roman Empire formed after the latter’s fall to the hands of the Venetian crusaders. It was centred around the eponymous region, and its monarchs claimed the throne of the Eastern Roman Empire. It would exist from 1205 to 1337, and then again from 1356 to 1479.

Lyrics in Greek:
Kάνε να μη σβήσει τούτο το κερί,
Η Ρωμανία ζει!

English translation:
Do not extinguish this candle yet,
Rhomania* still lives!

*The term Rhomania here obviously doesn’t mean the modern country of Romania, it was a term meaning roughly the land of Rome, or of the Romans.

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