Nikos Xanthoulis in conversation with K. A. Lygnos

K. L. I imagine you don’t recall how we met. It was at a concert with Theodoros Antoniou in the Dimitris Mitropoulos Hall, where you participated as both a trumpeter and a composer. The program included you, Alexis Agrafiotis playing his own work on the piano…

N. X. … Apostolos Paraskevas (guitar), Christos Zerbinos (accordion), and Papadopoulos, whose first name I don’t remember.

K. L. The second time was at the ‘Olympia’ with the Lyric Opera, where you played in the Orchestra, and the program featured Argyris Kounadis’s ‘The Return’ and the well-known Cavalleria Rusticana. I remember you saying about ‘The Return,’ ‘this, kids, is a work of O.P.O.X.’ – meaning ‘whoever Charon takes’ – referring, of course, to Kounadis. (laughter)

N. X. A difficult work…

K. L. I’m saying all this to set the context. I don’t know if you want to add anything else, because I have a question.

N. X. No, tell me…

The Beginning

K. L. Alright. Trumpeter and composer. How did you get the idea to get involved with the lyre?

N. X. In 2004, Anna Synodinou asked me to write the music for the Eumenides, which would be staged at Epidaurus and the Odeon as a double production with two aspects. One in Ancient Greek and one in Modern Greek. The Ancient Greek version had a male Chorus and only men performed.

K. L. So it was a performance that largely referenced historical elements.

N. X. I’ve had a passion for ancient music since I was eighteen. Synodinou asked for the same music but adapted to the language form: with the dynamic prosody of Modern Greek, and the tonal prosody of Ancient Greek. Essentially, the music changed. I invited various musicians to play, because she had also asked for ancient instruments. But they didn’t play very well, just the basics.

About a year later, I presented the translation of three music theory texts in a Daidalos-Zacharopoulos edition, with my own translation and a lengthy preface, in the foyer of the Greek National Opera. The musicians who had played for Synodinou were supposed to perform that day, but at the last minute, the lyre player didn’t show up! I was notified five minutes before…

K. L. …typical Greek…

N. X. The important thing is that I picked up the instrument, and because I knew the pieces, basically chords I could think of, I accompanied the singer. From that night on, I said, no one will ever do this to me again. I will accompany myself and I will play the lyre.

So I picked up the instrument, and my first reaction was, ‘My goodness, what can I do with seven strings?’ ‘Okay, you create a scale, C-D-E, etc…’ That’s when Charalambos Spyridis, the Acoustics professor I was discussing with, told me: ‘And why don’t you play harmonics?’ The issue, however, is not just playing harmonics, which can be played. The issue is whether harmonics are an effect or part of the sound’s core structure.

K. L. I’ve listened to most of what you’ve posted, and the answer is that harmonics are part of the sound.

N. X. Exactly!

K. L. Another instrument that has harmonics and a similar sound is the well-known classical guitar. But there, the harmonics…

N. X. They are an effect.

K. L. Because underneath, the instrument has a different sound. Here, it’s different. I’m thinking of the last thing I heard…

N. X. The ‘Trigona-Kalanta’ (Christmas carols).

K. L. Exactly. Here we have melody accompanied by Alberti bass, and everything blends together. I see your hands moving up and down, and it’s obvious you’re playing with harmonics.

N. X. But don’t forget: What instrument did I play?

K. L. Trumpet.

N. X. …and how is the trumpet played? With harmonics! The trumpet has seven positions. Not notes, positions. They are seven different lengths.

K. L. So you’re telling me that behind the lyre and the trumpet lies the same technical idea and application, despite them being two such different instruments.

N. X. Exactly. But are the instruments really that different, or are the basic principles the same? What do instruments study? They study scales. You also try to increase the instrument’s range and play fast.

K. L. Speed is basically a matter of thought.

N. X. …to play arpeggios and chords, if you can manage it.

K. L. Some instruments make certain things easier than others. On the guitar, for example, it’s very easy to learn five or six chords to accompany songs. The difficulties begin later. On the other hand, if one takes an unusual position, they can move their hand up and down the fretboard to play that chord anywhere. The same thing on the piano is very difficult because you get entangled with the black and white keys.

N. X. And with the gaps in between if you’re a singer! The idea with the lyre, however, started from the discussion with Spyridis and also by listening to the guitarist Badi Assad from Brazil. When I heard her harmonics, I said that these were regular notes of the instrument. That’s when I said that – yes, it can be done. I also had another advantage in how I thought, as from the trumpet I knew that playing high harmonics would be a time-consuming process. I would have to study slowly, steadily, and know that for a long time it would be an uncertain process. In all instruments that play with harmonics, this exists because the high harmonics increasingly approach each other in terms of positions. Many times I found myself at a dead end, thinking it only went that far and no further. But I kept saying that the limits are not set by the instruments but by people’s minds. When I realized I could play a chromatic scale in three octaves, I was speechless. Then I saw how I could use my fingers on the left hand and simultaneously play with a plectrum on the right. Also, to play chords by combining harmonics and open strings. You understand what combinations exist this way.

In this way, if I have a C-D-E-F-G-A-B, a natural scale, I can play Prelude No. 1 for Cello, the first of Bach’s Suites. You’ve seen me play Bach on YouTube. I’m not saying it’s easy, but because in Baroque music we don’t venture into distant keys and modulations, the lyre can do it.

J. S. Bach, Cantata no.147:

To the question I imagine you’ll ask me (and many have), whether the ancients played this way, I will answer that I don’t know, but whoever knows should come and tell us. We don’t have DVDs and CDs from antiquity.

The Primacy of Sound

K. L. I will agree with you to say that beyond theories, in the end, what matters is the sonic result. But let’s not waste time on that. The essence is that we have minimal written evidence, Aristoxenus, some fragments of pieces, and no sound at all. So, about the most essential thing, we know nothing.

N. X. There are sixty-two musical fragments, of which ten or fifteen can be played. In theoretical texts, we have fifteen or sixteen. What does that mean? I mean, if you had a Theory of Harmony, would you know what Beethoven’s Fifth sounds like?

But here, the problem is not what we will do in relation to the past, but in relation to the future. The past is like that enormous mosaic in Pompeii with Alexander and Artaxerxes. A million tesserae, and we don’t have the mosaic, but twenty or thirty tesserae from one corner. Can you draw any conclusion?

You’ll ask me, ‘Then why are you doing all this?’ But I’m not doing a revival. What I thought was to take an instrument that was the ‘national’ instrument of the Greeks from the Seventh Century, and with which, from 582 or 586, the Delphic Games were held. Which means that every four years, the greatest musicians risked their reputation to play in Delphi.

K. L. It’s interesting, though… An impetus from Synodinou led you to a whole new situation.

The Epitaph of Seikilos:

N. X. The lyre has been continuously evolving for 1200 years. Also, in antiquity, everyone studied it, and it was part of education. Every free citizen was obliged to know it. It started as an instrument of the aristocracy and then spread to all free citizens, mainly in Athens but also throughout the Greek world. Workshops for its construction existed everywhere.

What is its characteristic? That it plays with open strings. Because even harmonics are open strings. Instruments with a neck ‘mute’ the sound. That’s why when a violinist or an orchestra plays open strings, the sound suddenly gets louder. What other instrument has the ability to play only open strings? The harp. All other string instruments ‘mute’ the sound in some way.

On the harp, we have many strings, but only those. On the lyre, along with harmonics, we have about three and a half octaves. Add to this the chromatic possibilities or the ability to change tuning very easily. I often do this while talking to people or reciting. Many times I do it as if it were music, as if I’m accompanying someone. I play it and create it on the spot.

Of course, you don’t have the enormous capabilities that the harp has with its pedals, yet you have quite a few chromatic possibilities. Without, of course, being able to play ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ (Rimsky-Korsakov). Although I don’t know if my students or my students’ students will play it in the future… Because the violin was played differently in the 16th century, and Kavakos plays it differently today. The next generation might surpass me.

K. L. As long as we don’t overdo it, as happened from the late ’60s to the late ’70s. Where things started to be written beyond the capabilities not only of the performers but also of the instruments.

N. X. But you can’t avoid that with composers. You’re a composer, you know.

K. L. Unfortunately or fortunately, I have decided that this is over. They told Schoenberg, ‘Master, your Violin Concerto needs a violinist with six fingers,’ and he replied, ‘I can wait.’ On the other hand, perhaps Schoenberg could say that because he knew music. We cannot say the same for many who supposedly went further….

N. X. If you look at Kadinsky’s or Picasso’s paintings before they moved to abstraction, they painted at the level of Michelangelo. Abstraction must be the result of a complex process. Abstraction without having composed first, does not exist.

K. L. In London, I largely encountered something like this. Good British composers like Britten or Tippet are not part of the ‘avant-garde.’ Maxwell Davies once was, but he also turned away. Only Harrison Birtwistle remained an exception. Musically, the English are fundamentally conservative, and rightly so. But you felt that they had internalized and poorly digested a trend they didn’t really like.

They also ended up with views like ‘we don’t need Harmony or Counterpoint.’ It’s interesting that similar views circulated in art schools at the same time. I had a friend who was studying at the Royal Academy then. ‘Drawing isn’t necessary,’ ‘charcoal sketches aren’t necessary,’ etc. It was a zeitgeist then: a climate of the era.

“Always Forward – Always Forward”

N. X. The same things happened in antiquity in the 5th Century. Suddenly, various musicians appeared, like Timotheus of Miletus, that redhead, as pseudo-Plutarch describes him in ‘On Music.’ (I should mention here that ‘On Music’ will be released in a few months in my translation with a long preface of my own.) A comedic playwright writes a play and presents Music appearing on stage with torn clothes, recounting what she has endured: ‘Phrynis did this to me, the other one ripped me apart.’ We obviously have sexual innuendos here… ‘But the worst was that redhead from Miletus!’

K. L. Just like in Aristophanes’ Frogs with Euripides and Aeschylus.

N. X. He explicitly says that they disgraced Music. It’s roughly in the same era as Aristophanes, and what it shows is that professional musicians push the boundaries as much as they can each time. They search. This searching is part of being a musician. You understand what I mean…

K. L. I’m thinking here of Angelos Gavriil, a friend who wrote a short History of Jazz. Somewhere near the end, he writes that Jazz followed a path similar to European Music, but in much less time. Western Music needed three or even four centuries to reach its ‘limit.’ Jazz, from the New Orleans era after the Civil War, reached free Jazz in less than 80 or 100 years. After free Jazz (just like after the avant-garde), there was nothing else to be done.

N. X. It’s something similar. This cannot easily happen with the lyre. Because the lyre is a diatonic instrument, it is obliged to create melody and tune with pure fifths and fourths. The seven strings limit the notes in such a way that when I play the open A on the lowest string and three octaves above, a high A as a harmonic from the sixth string, it sounds correct.

K. L. Have you measured it with an oscilloscope, or does it just give us that impression?

N. X. What did you just say? That Music is a social phenomenon and not a science. Let me remind you what Ennio Morricone says: “La musica e non scienza ma esperienza.” Not science but experience. I have to play, and you have to like it.

K. L. I’m thinking here of what John Le Carre once said. That one of his best critics was his taxi driver. When he came to take him to the airport, he always gave him his opinion on what he had written. In a sense, this is the average reader.

N. X. Personally, I have two people, or rather, I had two. The first was my little daughter, Daphne, who had an intellectual disability but tremendous musical instinct. All my children’s operas and related works, she heard first. If she liked them, she’d say, ‘Play it again.’ If she didn’t like them, she’d say, ‘I’m going inside now.’ The other is my cleaner, who is one of my dearest people. She listens very carefully to what I play and tells me, ‘This is nice – this tires me.’ When she tells me it tires her, it will tire all of us, and we must accept it.

We just always have to be careful.

K. L. That, of course, is an issue. Because there are many colleagues who say, ‘I’m not interested in that.’

N. X. But everyone is judged. My job with the ancient lyre is to play a piece and make someone today feel moved. To make them say today, ‘It’s beautiful.’

K. L. And not just, ‘how interesting it is…’

N. X. If I hear ‘interesting,’ I leave!

K. L. Let’s talk about theater and cinema for a moment. They say that comedy is the most difficult genre because you either laugh or you don’t. It doesn’t have, like other genres, interesting characters, or plot, or anything else. This is also why we often see a style of comedy lose its sparkle and deflate. It happens often, especially on television, when a series continues longer due to its success.

Teaching and Repertoire

N. X. With the lyre, however, it doesn’t seem to end… I have established the International Lyre Society, which has nearly a hundred students from all over the world. It’s like an educational organization, and I’ve divided it into four parts.

K. L. Is it online?

N. X. Online. We also have the Lifelong Learning Center at Democritus University of Thrace. That’s also online, but once a month, all Athenians and anyone else who can, gather. I gather them at my house, and we have lessons there. At the end of the year, for ten days, we go to Delphi where we play, even within the archaeological site. The Delphic Hymn to Apollo, which we have learned. This year we will also go to Thrace, the land of Orpheus. The Municipality of Komotini will help us with this. Generally, there is a lot of interest from everywhere.

K. L. It’s a fact that this is something that sparks the imagination. The ideological radiance of Ancient Greece is always very strong. The issue is that we have the least from music compared to all the rest of the ancient heritage.

You’re also doing – if I may say so – a trick: You take the instrument and transport it to the modern era.

N. X. But I do everything. I play samba. I play traditional music. The encore I did at my second concert was rebetiko. ‘What were you, what were you, a rusks thief.’ Whatever I can create, I do.

K. L. This brings me to what Byron Fidetzis told you, who is also a man of action and has done more for Greek music on his own than an army of musicologists and professors. He told you: ‘Create a repertoire.’

N. X. Were you there?

K. L. No, you told me. I’ve followed you from the beginning, at a presentation you gave at Theocharakis. That phrase goes to the heart of the matter. An instrument exists with its repertoire… You expanded it greatly. You didn’t just take a few folk songs that, after all, we could argue might have an ancient origin with a bit of a stretch.

N. X. And not only that… There are contemporary composers, like the Three Essentials, a group of composers from all over the world. They are like ‘Pre-Raphaelites of Composition,’ meaning we return to Tonality but with all modern data. What you also advocate.

K. L. Exactly!

N. X. They wrote excellent pieces which I presented at the Athens and Thessaloniki Concert Halls. I also made them into an album released on Spotify, etc., titled ‘Seven plus One.’ The ‘one’ is me, but it also refers to the seven strings of the lyre.

There’s also Simos Papanas, whom I want to make Honorary President of the Lyre Society. He requested works written by very well-known composers like Fazil Say, whose work we performed with the Thessaloniki State Symphony Orchestra at the Musikverein, or Lowell Lieberman, who wrote a Rhapsody for Violin and Lyre, which we toured in Estonia. Now Christos Hatzis is also preparing a work. I think it’s starting to gain popularity.

Concerto for Ancient Greek Lyre and Orchestra:

But the lyre has something else too. With all instruments, for a long time, you struggle just to produce a decent sound. Exceptions are instruments with ‘ready’ notes like the piano, guitar, and some percussion. The lyre is easier at first, even than the guitar.

K. L. Which becomes very difficult later…

N. X. The lyre is the same. But at the beginning, you can start and, without much effort, play something that will relax and calm you. That’s why I offer the first level of the International Lyre Society for free. The levels are four: Free, Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced. The Free level consists of forty lessons that you can download by visiting the Society’s website: The videos and the method part.

K. L. You’ve also written a book that I’ve seen in print.

N. X. That is the method: The Complete Method Ancient Greek Lyre (Edition Orpheus), which is in English and Greek. My model was Jean Baptiste Arban’s Trumpet Method. When trumpet valves were invented in Germany around 1825-1830, it was something completely new, and trumpeters couldn’t play the instrument. Arban studied it and created a consistent method. To this day, all trumpeters consider this method their gospel.

Exploring the Possibilities

But I’m thinking of the following, which is also somewhat philosophical as a question: What happens with an instrument that we have never seen before, and we are trying to figure out what it can do? So I was thinking: One of the most important competitions in the Delphic and other Games was Lyre-singing or Cithara-singing.

The cithara was a larger instrument with a louder sound for bigger theaters. The lyre was – let’s say – for chamber music.

What is Lyre-singing? It’s singing and accompanying yourself. But how do you accompany yourself? With chords? Did they know chords? From the depictions, it seems they did, because some strings are muted, and with the other hand, a movement seems to be made where the plectrum passes over the strings. What we call strumming on the guitar. The other hand touches the strings at certain points. This is an image we see on many vases. If you consider that everyone played the lyre, the one depicting it knows how to do it very well.

Pseudo-Plutarch tells us that from the 7th Century, during the time of Archilochus of Paros, lyre-singers stopped playing the instrument ‘proschorda.’ That is, they did not sing and play the same melody. They played something different. But what was different? Counterpoint, and what kind? I cannot answer that. However, the concept of Harmony in the sense of consonance certainly exists.

All these are problems you have to face by playing and composing. It’s the magic and the challenge to create a whole new world. I don’t imagine I created a whole world…

K. L. How can you not imagine it? When you create an instrument and around you, you have six or ten composers and others who follow the path and learn the instrument, what do you have? You have certainly created a space. It may be very small compared to how many play the violin or piano, but it’s not nothing. You are certainly not alone.

N. X. No, I’m not alone anymore.

Epilogue

K. L. Before we conclude, I have one last technical question about the instrument. Is there a maker?

N. X. It all started with the instruments I bought from Nikolas Bras. Excellent instruments, but most people played by strumming the strings. Recently, I found a maker who is also my student, Giorgos Nikas, who builds amazing instruments. He has the lyre workshop Palmos, and the instruments he makes have a wonderful, big, and rich sound. Now I play with his instrument. He has orders and is doing very well.

K. L. Would you like to add anything?

N. X. I am happy that I answered many questions I had asked when I was eighteen or nineteen. Back then, when Markos Dragoumis and I were studying Music History, I understood nothing about Ancient Greek Music.

K. L. But it troubled you and piqued your curiosity. I imagine many others didn’t understand either, but they simply closed the chapter without questioning.

N. X. I never stopped studying, but I had a great advantage: I knew Ancient Greek quite well from school. I was in the Classics stream and we had a very good education. So I had continuous contact. I bought books, some very expensive; there was a book where the first volume cost 60,000 drachmas and the second 48,000!

K. L. Around that time, the classic Volkswagen ‘Beetle’ cost about 100,000, as much as the two volumes! But this shows the value of searching. Similarly, Antoniou bought a Counterpoint book in French and sat down to read it with a dictionary.

N. X. Whoever wants to search always finds. This happens today too. It’s why you hear some young composers and are left speechless.

Ancient Greece Revisited: