Giorgioud - 2-1-2016 at 02:54 PM
Hello everybody,
just wanted to alert I was on the telly last night, Channel 117 Nottinghamshire Sky TV, playing with Eric Andersen at Ravenshead in the ancestral
villa of Romantic English poet and debauchee extraordinaire Lord George Gordon Byron. There's a repeat Tuesday the 2nd at 4.30 AM. Yes, AM. Then on
Thursday I'm off to record an album in Utrecht, Holland (pre-production) and Koln, Germany, with Eric who has put music to 12 of Byron's poems, and
there will be lots of oud on it and inshallah, a solo spot on the record. Thanks for reading and take care x
Lysander - 2-1-2016 at 04:41 PM
How does the oud relate to Byron or is it an aesthetic interpretation?
Giorgioud - 2-2-2016 at 02:18 AM
Very good question, Lysander, I'm glad you asked. Byron had been, all his life, an aficionado of the Mediterranean in all its cultural manifestations,
but especially of Greece. People of his upbringing carried out the so-called Grand Tours in countries of their choices as part of their education. As
a classicist, Byron was in awe of Greece's past, but what distinguished him from other contemporaries philo-Greek was that he was in love with the
Greece he saw. He used phrases of demotic Greek in his poems. Demotic, not the Koine' Attical (Classical ancient Greek) he would have been forced to
use because he "had to". He died in Greece fighting for her independence from the Ottomans. Eric Andersen, in this project, wanted to use specifically
an instrument that reflected the connection Byron had with Greece, the music he would've heard and loved while he was there. It could've been a
laouta, or a lavta, or a bouzouki, or a baglama, he settled for the oud out of personal preferences. He knows and loves vast chunks of music from the
Mediterranean, does Eric....
keving - 2-5-2016 at 06:41 AM
thats really cool, I wonder if is there a record of what kind of greek Byron might have been exposed to? What was greek folk music like in the 1800s?