Hi, everyone! This is our very first History and Mythology Interview, and it is with the one and only @faryafaraji (Farya Faraji), an Iranian-Canadian historian, composer, singer, player and musical reconstructionist. I've been a fan of his work for some years now, and it is a privilege that we could have this great talk.
Farya is an easy and pleasant conversationalist. We share the love of epic poetry, especially of Homer's Iliad, Ferdowsi's Persian Shahnameh, Old Germanic alliterative verse like "Beowulf" and the Elder Edda, The Old French Song of Roland, etc.
Farya shared a broad (and slow) plan of recording full hexameter recitations of Homer's and Virgil's epic poems. That's what I call a great project! We even discussed different approaches of reciting Latin hexameters.
We spoke at some length about the birth of music out of the quasi-historical spirit of epic poetry.
It was an eye-opener for me to hear from Farya that real (at least, urban) Byzantine liturgical music used the high-pitched voices of eunuchs, female voices and even some musical instruments, not unlike the music of Classical and Late Antiquity, and thus also not unlike the music of the Roman Catholic Church.
Farya was curious about Balkan epic and mythological folklore, especially about heroic cycles of songs about Marko Kraleviti/Krali Marko (r. 1371-1394) and King Vukashin (d. 1371) throughout Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Serbia. We had some thoughts about a hypothetical reconstruction of non-surviving 12th century Balkan Slavic heroic lays about the famous Tzar Samuel (r. ca. 977-1014).
But it was a long and nice conversation, so I leave you with my eloquent and generous guest.
Chapters:
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