This is a vital correction to the modern obsession with cinematic aesthetics over historical substance. It proves that true musical power lies in the collective wisdom of tradition rather than the vanity of a single composer.
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How The Epic Byzantine Songs Are Made - And Why Real Traditional Music Is SuccessfulAdded:
Opening disclaimer. Uh, for many years now, people have asked me to make a video where I explain how many of the songs on this channel were made. And I thought I'd do one for the Epic Bazantine series because not only is it one of the most beloved and popular series on the channel, but also because as of making this video right now, I um am seriously considering not making any more of them and basically stopping uh the series. And I'm going to be explaining why in the last chapter of the video. But before you think, well, I'm going to skip to the last chapter then cuz I want to hear I want to know what's going on. That's not going to work. Uh you're going to have to watch the entire video if you want to understand the last chapter because once you understand the level of care, of work, of detail, and of absolute dedication to cultural accuracy and authenticity that goes into those songs.
Once you understand that, then the last chapter will make sense. Otherwise, it's not going to be very coherent. Anyway, let's start the video.
In my mission of collaborating with world musicians in order to present culturally accurate depictions of the world's various musical traditions, few of my projects have been as successful in terms of audience size and view count as the epic Bzantine series. What is the epic Bzantine series? It's a project where my Greek colleagues and I, we research and showcase the sounds of paradosaka, Greek living traditional music, the living tradition of modern day Greece, specifically from the angle of its continuity with the cultural and musical world that grew out of the medieval Greek world, usually called Baantium.
That's really the gist of what I do.
That's the dimension in which I operate.
I work with traditional musicians to bring their expertise so that we can have authentic renditions of their traditional music. I pick their brains.
I do video essays with them where we analyze stuff. I interview them. I interview music historians, experts, academics. I do field work. You'll find me hiking up mountains for seven hours in Greece to reach half abandoned isolated villages so I can pick the brains of local musicians there, ask them how things are done, document their tradition. and I hang out with local musicians, jam with them, learn how their songs are played and everything.
This is me at the Seculus Museum of Thesaroniki. This is me with my friend Pabazis, another music museum. The main reason I am doing this video is because due to the immense success of the series that attracts a very large audience, it ends up being also the most misunderstood project of all of those that I do. I think in mainstream pop cultural spaces divorced from traditional music, the only paradigm of music that is understood by people is the lone singular artist, author, composer, star paradigm. We live in a world where people only understand the paradigm of you have Beethoven and this music is Beethoven's music and it's his signature style and his compositional genius and how he feels about music. And when you take that paradigm and how it's the standard paradigm that we always default to in pop culture and when you take people who don't read the description and they just stop at the title and the channel name they see epic Bzantine music and then there's a name saying farery underneath it. An increasing number of people who discovered the epic Bzantine series think that they are discovering the innovative personal signature style of a great composer called Faria Farer that when they hear the epic Bzantine series they are experiencing the genius and talent of the composer Faria Farery.
when fary is just some [ __ ] guy from Canada who just works with Greek traditional musicians and the music you hear sounds great because of them. All I did was finance and produce and showcase it here as part of my ethnomusicological mission. But the actual music, they're the ones. It's their music. It's their culture. It's their style. If you like the Epic Bzantine series and you think the music sounds great, it has nothing to do with me. It has everything to do with a tradition that existed long before I was born. And it has everything to do with the bearers of that tradition. And all I did was get them to perform this music to showcase the beauty of their skills and the beautiful tradition that they are the inheritors of.
But interestingly enough, due to its massive success, the Epic Bizantine series will often attract a very large audience, larger than the usual core audience of this channel that cares about the methodological backbone of the Epic Bizantine series. That is its ethnomusicological aspect. The core audience of this channel, they're not just here to listen to music. They're here to comprehend a living heritage with medieval roots. On the other hand, very often you'll have people who come from further reaches of the internet like Tik Tok and they don't read descriptions. And so they model their understanding of the project solely based on the title and how they understand it. And this is how you get statements like these going around online.
>> I think the best thing about his music is that they aren't exactly authentic.
His style is more epic and cinematic music first and foremost to make it relatable for modern audiences.
Authenticity comes second.
>> So this is fascinating. I really want to break down these kind of comments because they reveal a lot about our modern psychology and how we understand or rather misunderstand traditional music. You see, these people are saying that the music in the epic Bzantine series sounds great because they're made in my style. Whereas that's already wrong. It's not my style. It's just the pre-existing styles of Greek paradosaka that existed long before I was born. I have nothing to do with this. I just showcase that style on my channel. But secondly, they believe the music sounds great because my style is about putting aside accuracy in favor of epic cinematic sounds. First and foremost, it's an incredibly ironic comment because it's actually completely the other way around. The music sounds great because we stick to tradition.
and we don't water it down with generic cinematic epic orchestral sounds.
See, what's happening is they're being confused and misled by how they understand the word epic in the title.
There's a mismatch between how I and musicologists and musical anthropologists use the term epic music versus how the internet at large in mainstream spaces uses the term epic music. Within the world of anthropology, epic music means traditional music of cultures that is tied to their epic narrative repertoire. What is that?
Think of the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Arththeran cycle, epic poetic traditions. Very often those are preserved through song, through music.
The Acitic songs, for example, they are a body of folk songs found in modern day Greece that have their roots in the Middle Ages. They are the very definition of epic music. I use the term epic music the way Samu uses it in this album. The music is epic, not because it's cinematic. It's just traditional music.
The people in the villages of the Pelpineese, you know, they had a violin, a clarinet, a drum. Like, of course, they couldn't create massive music that sounds like this.
Yet within the world of anthropology, we still absolutely refer to these songs as epic because they are characterized taxonomically within the epic repertoire.
>> Could you just talk to about about that dimension of Greek folk music? The one that's about storytelling.
>> Absolutely. And it's I think we find it much more so in folk music around the world, um, Greece included, is that they used a lot of these songs to continue a story. Uh, if I'm not mistaken, Homer's Odyssey was a poem. The whole thing is a poem. It's an epic poem. And that word epic is to describe a long story. And what better way to remember a story if especially if you don't have a written culture. you know, they had their songs to to remind them or to keep that cadence and it's easier to remember uh words of anything once you get into a a rhythm if once you get into a cadence. So, I think that's where a lot of that uh oral tradition came down.
>> So, that's what the epic Bzantine series is about and that's why there's a title epic within it. It signals that these songs are focusing specifically on the presentation of Greek traditional music from the storytelling aspect. The inspiration behind the Epic Bizantine series really comes from that album by Dumna Samu because she takes a bunch of Greek folk songs, but instead of arranging them on the basis of region, like oh nishotica island songs, she did something quite unusual. Instead, she categorized those songs on the basis of them being epic, meaning featuring epic storytelling. And one of my Greek friends, he really woke me up to that.
He told me that by doing this Samu forces the listener to engage with the music from its epic aspect. By packaging them with the epic epithe by packaging them through this angle, she forces you to engage with the songs primarily from that storytelling point of view instead of just listening to the melodies and dancing to them and everything. And so really what I do on this channel, especially with the Epic Buzzantine series, is a sort of spiritual successor, as humbly as it can be, to the work of Lumnasamu with this album.
This is something that is unfortunately increasingly lost in the mainstream spaces of the internet where the word epic music is solely defined as that kind of music.
This kind of music is a genre that has its roots in film score, Hollywood, composition, orchestral primarily, and accompanied by high production maximalism. Pretty much the complete opposite of authentic traditional music.
This kind of music is now a whole subculture on the internet. Pirates of the Caribbean, but epic version. So when people click on those songs and they just stop at the title and they don't read the description that explains that epic here is used in its anthropological sense, they latch on to the only definition of epic music that they understand. And so they assume, okay, so this is music that favors cinematic compositional maximalism at the expense of cultural accuracy and authenticity. a project that researches and showcases Greek traditional music sticking to its authentic sound and specifically narrows it down to Greek traditional music of the epic repertoire of Greek culture.
That project gets misunderstood as for your fairy takes presenting music and makes it sound more epic. Yeah, he doesn't care about accuracy. Let's make it cinematic.
>> This is basically the intellectual economy of the internet. You bring a level of anthropological nuance using terms with their original anthropological meaning. And very often the internet will just take that and bring it down to the intellectual level that defines the average internet.
That's what happens when you try to bring a level of research and anthropology to a platform that mostly deals in the intellectual level of Minecraft let's plays and YouTuber drama videos who have feuds and everything.
Now, what's interesting is most people upon hearing this, they would go, "That's not what cinematic music sounds like, though. If it were to sound cinematic, it would sound like this.
This doesn't fit the definition of cinematic.
This does.
Very few people would listen to this and go, "Ah, yes, orchestral cinematic Hollywood soundtrack film scores.
They would know that that would sound more like this.
And yet some people can be fooled if they already expect cinematic maximalism because of how they interpret the term epic. They can be fooled by the raw intensity and dynamism that is found in authentic traditional music.
What I found fascinating about this kind of common >> I think the best thing about his music is that they aren't exactly authentic >> implicit ideology built into it. The person says what's great about far's music is that he doesn't want to be authentic first and foremost. He's trying to be cinematic and epic. The clear implication of that is because if Farery was to stay authentic, the music would be boring and would be difficult to listen to. It's the fact that he does away with accuracy that makes it amazing. The irony is incredible to me.
They love the music so much. They find it so dynamic, so energetic, so raw and powerful that they cannot even contemplate the notion that in fact it is traditional and authentic.
>> And they say, "Wow, I love how you added like so many like loud sounding cinematic elements." And I'm like, "Oh no, it's like four village instruments like the entire thing." like we didn't add anything. And they can't believe it.
They're like, "How is that possible? How can a bunch of village instruments by gold herders produce this sound?
They have to believe that we just added like cinematic epic orchestration to it.
>> You really don't need to.
>> Thank you. You really don't need to.
>> It's like this entry. There's an article about me that says this about the song Belisario.
>> In tracks inspired by Byzantine music such as Beliserius, he incorporates modal structures and vocal techniques reminiscent of Eastern Roman chant traditions, blending them with epic orchestration.
>> What epic instrumentation? It's a suna backpipe.
>> Apart from the fact that the lyrics are Latin, it's a talei. It's a backpipe. It's pretty much a a Asian dance tune really at the end of the day.
>> Very much so.
Everything that I do is about proving that the real thing, real authentic music of the actual cultures as they are are more than enough on their own to be incredibly powerful and beautiful and breathtaking. Every single time I brought up the representation of ancient Rome musically speaking, you can't literally use ancient Roman instruments.
That would be weird. And yet, the moment I post songs using ancient Roman instruments on ancient Roman scales.
Bam. Millions of views. People love it.
And yet it is so ingrained within our psyches that the real thing is boring and we always have to change it and modify it and make it more epic and cinematic and put accuracy second. That when I showcase Greek traditional music and it sounds amazing, people have to resort to the explanation that it can't be because it's accurate. It has to be because they put accuracy aside and Faria Farery instead put cinematic intensity over it. And I find that fascinating because it's precisely the opposite. The Epic Byzantine series is so beloved because it's not generic cinematic sounds watering down Greek traditional music, but because it's just Greek traditional music performed by Greek traditional musicians.
But first, before we get into breaking down the songs themselves, a few word on the terminology used in the title. We've already established what epic means here. Epic does not mean cinematic Han Zimmer. It means the narrative repertoire, etc., etc. But what about Byzantine? A lot of people misunderstand Bzantine and default to thinking if it says Bzantine, then this must be or is trying to be the literal music that was heard in the Bzantine. Empire.
This misapprehension is something that you can see in full force with this rather comical comment written on Reddit about the subject.
>> I like him and his renditions, but I'll be the party pooper that points out his Byzantine music isn't really authentic.
One prominent example of what makes the orchestration of some pieces off is the use of non-bowed string instruments such as the saz/baglama for the main melodic piece. In traditional Byzantine music, the main melody is performed by vocals, bowed instruments, or more rarely wind instruments. Non-bowed string instruments are typically used to provide rhythm instead. Non-bowed string instruments providing the main melody is an eastern influence primarily Persianade via the Turks that developed primarily in post-byzantine music.
>> I'm not going to waste too much time analyzing whether or not those historical statements are true or not.
All I can say is this. As somebody who works on a daily basis with Greek music historians, who literally works with Greek music history museums, they're researchers, they're academics, I can tell you from a pretty good place that nobody in the field recognizes those statements. Nobody knows about that.
Those statements like >> non-bounded string instruments providing the main melody is an eastern influence primarily Persian via the Turks that developed primarily in post-byzantine music.
>> All of these statements are completely unrecognizable to the field of Byzantine historical musicology. There is virtually only a single true source uh when it comes to Byzantine instrumental musiccology which is sound of Baantium.
The people who worked on this book some of them I have talked to them they themselves don't recognize those statements. This book itself has no source anywhere that corroborates this statement. Not only that this book is chalk full of illustrations of musical ensembles from the period of the medieval Bzantine Empire where you have non-boat instruments playing the melody and literally no boat instruments around. So, even if the epic Bzantine series was supposed to be authentic to historical medieval Bzantine music, this entire comment is nonsensical and doesn't hold up because none of what's being said here even exists within the field of historical Bzantine musicology.
But not only that, even if they were right, even if they were correct about this, it's completely irrelevant. As established, the Epic Bizantine series is meant to be authentic to modern Greek Baradosaka, the inheritors of the medieval tradition. It's not supposed to be a reconstruction of the medieval tradition. So then why is it called Byzantine? Some people can say if you're calling it Byzantine, you're inviting people to assume that it must be music from the literal Eastern Roman Empire of the Middle Ages. Uh no. And anybody who believes that frankly is somewhat musicologically ignorant because in the field of musicology the term Bzantine is almost never used to refer to the actual music from the literal times of the medieval Eastern Roman Empire itself.
99% of the time, 99% of the time when people use the term Byzantine music, they use it to refer to Byzantine chant, the lurggical received tradition of the modern Orthodox Greek church, which is as anacronistic to the middle ages as the epic Byzantine series, which is basically paradosaka, is anacronistic to the secular instrumental traditions of the medieval Eastern Roman Empire. And yet that does not stop musicologists, music historians, and the literal Orthodox church itself to officially call that form of music Byzantine. Despite the fact that this form of music is modern, despite the fact that it is anacronistic on many levels compared to the medieval chanting tradition, despite the fact that it is defined by the post 18th century Chrysenthine reform, everybody refers to this modern anacronistic to the medieval tradition, everybody refers to it as Byzantine. By his logic, this Redditor would walk into a modern Greek Orthodox church and he would go, "I'm sorry to be the party pooper, but this music is not exactly authentic." You see, they are singing that did not exist in the Middle Ages.
>> They also developed a a seven syllable system of soulf. Say that 10 times fast.
um uh to parallel in in the West and anybody who who's grown up in Greece uh knows at least that much because it's recorded.
>> So that's postreform.
>> That's part of the reform. That's the part of the reform >> because that's possibly the most like famous like even I know about it, you know, and it's like that. So, it's interesting to know that it's relatively recent in the history. These are all male choirs. In the days of the Bzantine Empire, choirs were mixed. Men and women sang together.
Very sorry to be the party pooper. The music you hear of the patriarchet of Constantinople, it's not exactly authentic. to define the epic Bzantine series, modern Greek traditional music as inauthentic because they're associated with the term Byzantine within them and going, "Yeah, but that's not literally how Eastern Roman medieval music sounded." That's an incredibly ignorant and frankly stupid thing to say. What people like this guy are doing is that they are using the term Bzantine with a comically literal surface level meaning to them. Byzantine can only mean literally of the Bzantine Empire. In the field of historical musicology, however, that is not how the term Byzantine is used. The term Byzantine has a much broader and deeper meaning. More often than not, it is a term that is used to signal continuity between modern Greek and other cultures elements like Serbian, Bulgarian, Romanian and their roots in the civilizational fulcrum that was the Eastern Roman Empire in which those things originated. Why is the term Byzantine? absolutely an apt term for the music in this series despite the music in this series being technically anacronistic to the literal music of the Byzantine Empire on many levels because it is music that is fundamentally modal and monoponic. You see in modern day Greece there are two main musical languages. There's a western-based language rooted in western harmonic tonal systems. It was imported in the 1800s at a time when Greece wanted to become more westernike. That's how you get the works of Mikto is that whole school.
>> I think it's when we start getting into composers like the people that actually studied more uh western music.
>> They're more from a western base.
>> But then you have you have the more historical forms of music that were there for far longer going back to Bzantine and in many cases even ancient Greek roots and those are the modal monophonic tradition not based on tonal harmonic systems.
But on modal droo monoponic systems and that branch of Greek music the historical ones has itself two main branches. Byzantine chant the lurggical type and paradosaka the secular folk traditions. Yakav traditional music that so Baantine chant has been part of that phenomenon too that it's it's been a part of the kind of re reclamation of the Romeic heritage >> both of them share the same musical language a musical language that is fundamentally Bzantine in character hence why the paradosaka secular music here can be referred to as Byzantine in the same way that modern Byzantine liturggical chant is referred to Bzantine. And why is it called epic Bzantine? Because it is rooted in the epic dimension of Greek culture that has its roots in medieval Bantium.
So let's go over some of the songs within the project and break them down at the musicological level. See their musicological components and everything.
We're going to go for one of the very first epic Bzantine songs all the way back four years ago now, 2022. Dance of the accrete already at 1 million views.
Something I'm very proud of because this is nothing more than a straightup piece of Pontian dance music. An oftforgotten part of the Greek speakaking world. One who have actually suffered some discrimination as Asia minor Greeks at the hands of mainland Greeks during the 20th century and everything. And so for this piece of music, which is basically just a Pontion piece of music to have gained 1 million views over four years, is something that I'm just extremely happy about because that's exactly uh the mission of this channel to bring more awareness and attention towards cultures that deserve the love and the attention. So what's interesting about this project is that back then I did not have the views that I have now. I did not have the Google AdSense revenue that I have now where I could just, you know, just find great musicians and pay them.
And so back then I had to rely on other things. And so what I did was I would ask my friends in the Greek community here in Laval, especially Laval has a very strong uh Greek present. Back in 2022, I sent some of my friends who are routinely in Greek events and everything. I told them, if you meet traditional musicians, can you ask them to record short phrases on any instrument for me and if they give you the their blessing that I can incorporate them inside of my epic Bzantine songs for the project. And so one of my friends, he was at an event.
There was some Pontian guy there who was playing the Pontian fiddle. He's playing this. He records this bit for like 30 40 seconds and that's basically this song.
Dance of the accrete. I'm going to ask you a few questions like some of the songs that we made and everything.
Before we do that, however, what I want to do is there's a few songs that I did before I started working with you. I'm going to send you the song here on Zoom.
5second snippet. Just click on it and then tell us what instrument you're hearing. Where do you think this is from?
>> That's Pontion right away.
>> That obvious, right? What makes Pontion music sound so different? Uh it's an isolated culture. Isolated in their traditions is what I mean. Uh don't want to be misqued. Uh but they're very it's distinct and also the tuning. So they tuned in fourths their leaders.
Rhythmically they're their own thing as well. They use a lot of fives, a lot of sevens, a lot of nines.
>> We move to a song that's from even before that. The gates of Trajan. This one was from late 2021. That's one of the very very first epic Bzantine songs.
Now this one is really in the northern sphere of things. It's in the northern area. Uh it has those asymmetrical rhythms that you will find in Thraki in Macedonia. And once again, this song was created in collaboration with Greek musicians. I'm not the one who played the instruments. I only put it together.
But the core of the music was done by Greek musicians which once again I don't know who they are because other than sending my friends to record recordings for me in events and everything I would work with pre-existing sample libraries and so one of them which I was using very early on let me find it here for you in contact it has pre-recorded phrases and some of them came in instruments like the Madura or the diialos for example and so if I click here for example To be clear, these are not synthetic instruments. These are real recordings of real instruments. And by the way, this one I asked Nicolaus from the Seculus Museum when I was there in the summer. I asked him, "Did you guys do them?" He said, "No, some other guys here in the did it." Uh, but even back then, I knew and I asked Greek musician friends like, "Is this legit? Does this sound authentic to you?" And they said, "Yes, clearly these were recorded by Greek musicians. Go ahead and use them.
They are authentic." And so the gates of Traan, those reed instrument sounds that you are hearing in that recording, those were recorded by Greek musicians.
There's also this uh sample library that I bought, Anatolian May, for example.
Melodies of Anatolia recorded by a bunch of Greek musicians.
From very early on, my mission was showcase the living traditions, these modal monoponic traditions that arose out of this eastern Mediterranean bass and out of these Byzantine and adjacent traditions. And from the very beginning, my goal was showcase those traditions using the sounds provided by the bearers of those traditions. Because back then, I had less of a budget. I had to buy pre-existing loops that those musicians recorded and that's what became the bedrock of the early Byzantine songs. So as early as the very very very first songs, it was people from those cultures making those songs already. And I was just again, do you see what I mean when I when I say that I'm a curator of sounds? I'm somebody who researches and brings them to people. Balcon backpipe, that's a Bulgarian Gaida.
I think my point is made very clearly.
The very early Byzantine songs from the very beginning, all of them made out of the work of authentic traditional musicians from those cultures.
Starting from 2023, I was now making enough ad revenue and everything that I could now begin actually collaborating with musicians and ask for more customsp specific things like I want this specific traditional melody for you to record for me and everything. Now we have the Anderson death. Now this song is based on a poem by Kosis Palamas who was one of the great poets of the 19th century and early 20th centuries. He's the one who wrote the Olympic hymn and he writes about the death of theis who is one of the central figures of Byzantine folklore and mythology. And so he has this song where the is dueling with death on the marble threshing floors very epic imagery and everything.
the very definition of epic narrative poetry and traditions. Now I wanted this piece to specifically be a southern Aian piece and so I took this poem by Kos Palamas and I said okay I want a sorority that is primarily southern Aian. Well the first step was to create a melody. So I looked at creatin melodies.
I then composed or rather pieced together a quote unquote original melody. And I say quote unquote because it was built off of analysis of pre-existing melodies. Basically piecing together melodic patterns and motifs found across songs in the southern Aian.
I then give this quote unquote original melody to one of my collaborators and he says this when he first hears it >> makes me think of cretton saganos right up the alley of the instrument >> and this is often a reaction that I get every time I work with a new Greek traditional musician as the same thing the first melody that I send him he said this >> I received it and listen to it very pretty and familiar sounding >> they always say familiar familiar familiar because these aren't melodies that I'm just pulling out of my ass or my creative personal vision These are melodies that are synthesized very closely off of research, off of the pre-existing melodies that exist. So even if the melody is a melody that they never really heard before, they know that kind of melody. They've played that kind of melody all their lives. Another proof, for example, of of how these melodies are are familiar to the practitioners when you present it to them even though they never heard them before. I did this experiment in my upcoming video with Limit Dalas where we talked about uh the westernization of Greek music and everything and I wanted to talk about isocratima which is the drone accompaniment on the lauto uh traditional to much of Greek music and I gave this challenge to the I told him I'm going to sing you a song you've never heard this song before but I'm sure you will know when to drop theatima before the first verse was finished He already knew when to drop the Isocratima. And by the way, he may have had that instinct with a Persian melody.
Had I given him a Persian classical melody, he might have thought, okay, now is the time to drop. But actually, no, the melody is not actually finishing, it would have gone up and the Socratima would have felt completely out of place there. But here she already knew when to drop down because once again the melody was synthesized from pre-existing DNA that permeates the southern Aian region in this specific case. And then I worked with Dimitriopolis who's a Cretan musician uh to provide me with improvisations on the ascomura as they would call it in. And then the cherry on the cake of course to solidify that southern Aian aspect I went with a [ __ ] accent.
>> The [ __ ] accent. OMG, >> you even nailed the [ __ ] dialect. As a native [ __ ] you absolutely nailed the accent.
>> By the way, a message to all the [ __ ] out there. Keep being asked by creatins all the time. Okay.
Okay. So, please stop asking me. I do not have any ancestry from as far as I know. So this is a very clear example of working within ethnomusicological paradigm with constraints where you make sure that the music is situated within a very specific regional space which in this case is very southern Aian.
>> Tell us what you're hearing.
>> Aian islands.
>> Exactly.
>> By the way, open string loto. So you have that drone laud that's the old style of playing that giveaway >> even though it's an original song in that this literal song did not exist before we made it it serves the purpose of showcasing pre-existing ethnic music material of a certain region Okay, next we have the princes of Lazika. So, this one was a really fun project and I'm really proud of this one. This one brings us back to the Pontek area actually and this time because I could work with an actual musician, actually pay them and everything, I could have something much more uh specific. So, the Princess of Laza uh showcases the musical ecosystem of the Black Sea and of the Pontian Greeks. But interestingly, not only the Pontin Greeks, but also the Laz people.
>> The melody of the Princess of Laza is from a traditional Laz song, >> showcases the musical ecosystem of the Black Sea and of the Pontian Greeks. But interestingly, not only the Pontian Greeks, but also the LZ people.
Something that I've established in many videos of mine is that music has its own borders.
>> This is one of the best things that I ever heard come out of your mouth, my friend, is that we tend to think, "Oh, this is Greek. This is Turkish. This is Bulgarian."
All of those elements didn't mean anything at the time when we were coming up with these melodies. It was Thrian people. It was Pontian people. And you're talking about exchanges of of of cultures that there was no border there.
There was people. I mean there was the imaginary line in the my tomato plant is growing tomatoes on your side. What is >> and so what I did was very simple.
Contact the mitresalas give him this traditional melody from the last people and tell him go ahead and play it in the Pontian style. And the choices of instruments obviously also reflects that. For the percussions, we have the davul, the davul drums, the we have the uh black sement, and we have the tulum backpipe.
>> Is it built the same as the Madura or is it its own thing?
>> It's built identical. Identical. The only differences that you'll see is the way that they sculpted the body of it.
Uh it's got a little bit of a longer cone at the end. Otherwise, it's a turum. It's the exact same instrument.
Now, where it's different is the style, the the way that we play it, and that's going to match the style of the music that we're demanded. Meaning, I could take my kituna and I can play on it because it's the same configuration.
It's five holes on each side, but my finger patternings are going to change.
My accents are going to change because I'm playing that type of music.
>> And also, we have the panduri. Very uh untuned right now, but the panduri is a Georgian instrument that is now used by the laz in their traditional music. Once again, because of that connection that they have with the Georgian world being a Carfellian speaking people themselves, they often use uh the Panduri in order to provide the coral or drone accompaniments in the music. So I played that. And by the way, here people have to notice um whenever you hear instruments in the Epic Bizantine songs, whenever I'm playing the instruments, it's almost always I'm doing the drone.
da da dra I do it on the pandor I do on the la but that's basically the extent of my uh great contribution to these epic Bzantine songs musically speaking in terms of the instrumentation I do the basic thing that the most untalented [ __ ] can do which doesn't require any particular knowledge of technique then we have an masil It's not titularly part of the epic bazantine series, but it's very much part of the same idea of, you know, going through Greek history through the preserved folk chloric systems and everything. This is part of the janiser symphony which is a symphonic work which uses the music of the cultures involved in the history of the janiseries in order to basically paint the story of one janiser's life again through the music of the cultures involved and in my research I found this song that only exists as a text as a poem thrice be damned emperor meaning the sultan of the Ottomans first you took my brother then you took my father now you took my son is basically describing the heartbreak of you know native balconers in this case uh Greeks who had to be subjected to the deer system. Now the research said that this piece of music is from Epiros. Epio has a very unique style of music with pentatonic scales very slow often triple meter and everything. And so what I did was I contacted my colleague who has studied the music of Virus and I said here's a text that I found. This text dates back to Ottoman times.
However, the original melody is lost.
But we know that this text was sung in Epiros. So scour and analyze for me eperodic songs that naturally work with the lyrics of this text. And uh we'll set it to that melody. And that's how you get this melody. Again, it's it's historical research with ethnographic work.
>> The structure of it lends itself to different melodies that probably already existed. So let's say this village had this is how we're going to sing every freaking song because that's what we're familiar with. We don't know anything more than that. But we can take elements. We can take lyrics from here.
Oh, I heard an awesome lyric at that pani. I was out there selling milk, whatever. And I took it back to my village. And we're going to sing those words.
Calumir and the Saras which is a song from Karpathos. Now I I you know I was used to like most Asian music for many years. I'd never really listened to song from Karpathos. I listen to one and I go what the [ __ ] Like what the absolute [ __ ] is going on here? Pardon my language. As somebody who really studied a lot of medieval music that's been preserved. This is archaic. What is up with Karpathos? That makes it so interesting.
>> Isolated uh isolated culture. You're talking about a very secluded island. Uh even though I believe trade routes went through there historically, but as a people extremely secluded and they kept their tradition, they continue to keep their tradition. Uh particularly the song that we did was from Ombo, which is the northernmost village. Um there's examples there where I mean the people still wear traditional clothing during festivals. Uh and they they man they're hardcore and the music shows too they have not changed anything. This song is an example of the truly ethmusicological paradigm of the epic Bzantine series.
This is a pre-existing folk song which is very clearly of Bzantine origin at least in its themes whether the melody is Bzantine or not. Well, it's very clearly continuous with the modal monophonic DNA that would have existed in the medieval Eastern Roman Empire, but what it talks about is very clearly of Byzantine origin. Galamiris, a warrior who goes to fight the Sarissens.
I mean, Sarakin was like this is clearly originating in like 9th century and around that era of the Arab Byzantine wars. And this memory is preserved in folk songs that exist to this day. And so what do we do? We present this folk song as it is in its native style. And the Dallas he studies you know how the instruments are played in that island that style and everything and he brings that to life. It's a song from Carpathos and therefore we are showcasing what Carpathian music sounds like.
And now connected to this is the song that we're working on right now. As of making this video, I am working on a song by the Enakas. It's going to be called the legend of the Yakas. He is pretty much the main character, the main protagonist of Byzantine medieval literature. He's like the Hercules, basically half Arab, half Greek. And again, I found a bunch of text that is very clearly of Byzantine heritage, but they are not accompanied by melodies.
There are no folk songs that sing those texts. And so the idea is basically to generate a new folk song, if you will, a composition that basically behaves like a folk song using these traditional melodies. Once again, I turned to the midnos. I said, "Here's the texts." And for this one, I want the character of the music to be Cretton. Cree has a very strong tradition of narrative music of acritic songs, the inaccas acitic. And so I thought cree would be a good match.
Let's go for a creatin sound for this one. And I told him once again, look for cret and folk melodies that work with this text.
Is himself a cret and folk musician who studied with masters of the cret and folk tradition scene. He's literally from the island. He's as authentic as it gets. And he comes back to me with three different uh styles of melodies that he has. He narrows it down basically to three genres. So here he says in the silo of Voriza in the south of Ggerero village also in the same area also popular for the Madura and so on this is why I find it very interesting that when people don't read the description of the Epic Buzzantine series. And they go on Reddit saying stuff like, "Oh, Faraj, you know, he just makes cinematic music." The accuracy is not really the thing. I'm not just blindly whatever. Let's mix cool sounds a cool vibe. It's it's an actual ethnomusicological approach. And I find it really funny to have people say, "Oh, the accuracy comes second."
And it's just the methodology behind each of those songs is so precise uh in its accuracy of Greek traditional music that with most of the songs you can literally narrow down geographically the area of two to three villages of where that type of melody literally is from. In the case of this theakita song, you can literally narrow it down to this little area of a few dozen square kilometers in on the island of Kiti. And so it's very interesting to see the contrast between, you know, people who actually read the description and everything versus people who kind of, you know, uh, assume that it's just, oh, whatever, it's just like creativity and going crazy to make cool vibes. And again, that's kind of my point is that if you do narrow yourself down to accuracy, you do get an amazing sound that people are actually going to enjoy, which is unfortunately lost on so many of those people because of how little they instinctively trust the beauty that is found in traditional music. So, I'm going to play you a little bit of that song that we're working on right now.
And then of course we have the very very famous one uh Belisario. the one that went viral and everything. Uh, this one basically my viewers kept asking me for the first two years of the Epic Bizantine project, can you make a song by Bisarus and everything? And I thought, okay, sure. Whenever I direct the creation of songs like these, I like the decisions to be culturally informed, to make anthropological sense. I hate vibesbased uh methodology, at least for myself. I don't mind if other people do it. I don't mind listening to it, but I don't I hate working with vibes going, well, he's a general, so I'm going to have a powerful orchestras cuz he's a general. Like, that's not how I like to I like to work with an anthropological logic that makes sense. So, the melody had to have some sense of a meaningful anthropological continuity with the civilization that Belisario belonged to.
So, what I did was first I analyzed some old Roman chants. Old Roman chants are uh the ancestors of Gregorian chanting.
Uh basically a lot of musicologists believe that old Roman chants may be uh the common ancestor of both Byzantine and Gregorian chant and that was a modal monophonic form of music like modern Greek music is. So a lot of um Greek folk songs are morphologically compatible with old Roman chants. They follow the same broad fundamental logic.
I looked at some old Roman melodies and then I looked for Greek folk melodies that have functional similarity in terms of melodic morphology with old Roman chant. Why? Because old Roman chant was the sort of chants that Belisario himself may have heard during his lifetime and because the epic Bzantine series is about showcasing the anthropological continuity with that older civilization. Uh, I wanted to find folk melodies that have a morphological meaningful structural similarity with the kind of chance that Bisarus himself would have heard back in his day. And I settled on melodies like Apoxenotop and everything. And then I gave that melody to the Mitri Satanopulos who was one of my collaborators. And I told him, here's the melody that I came up with. I want you to play this on the tambuna. You do whatever the hell you want. You can change the notes around. You can modify it. You can ornament it however you want. I just gave you a basic melody that I constructed on the basis of uh documented research. You can modify it further and that became the now legendary melody of Bisario [ __ ] song. I can't stand it bisario.
It went 30 million views.
>> Congratulations.
>> Well, here's the thing. What I tell everybody is I didn't do anything. I just showed people sounds that already exist in another culture. 30 million views. People say congratulations to me and I'm like congratulations to the generations that collectively ended up crystallizing that sound. I think a lot of people they probably imagine that our collaborative process they tend to think more in terms of you know like you have a composer who writes a thing like classical composers and then they work with the musicians and they tell them no put the ornamentation here and everything and that it's very like the composer drives his vision. What does it look like when I tell you let's do that song? Basically, what does the the the process look like?
>> So, the process is actually one of the most rewarding things and I I give 100% credit to you for for doing things like this is that you take a piece of music, you send me a melody and uh you say they made it go for it.
That go for it gives me the freedom to play it the way that it's supposed to be played. meaning I have a piece that needs to be played on the ganakila and the ganakila has certain steps certain trills certain ornamentation that needs to be present otherwise it's going to sound the same as if I played it on [ __ ] lra and any other thing you could have gotten a violinist to play it the same way uh but the fact that you want it on a specific instrument and you that style is supposed to be present gives me the freedom to do what it what needs to happen to make it that the style that you sent me the the Carpathian song. The reason that I get scared with those songs is because I haven't been ingrained so much into that style. So that one was a challenge in itself because I had to take the way that I play and I had to learn the style of Karpath to pull that one off.
>> Otherwise, it would have been a bastardized version. I wouldn't have been proud to give it and I wouldn't want my name on it. But that's the case with any of the instruments that we collaborate on. You send me a barebones minimum. This song is from this region.
It's got to have these elements in it.
After that, it's whatever.
>> Here's the style. Here's the region. And then go for it. And I remember we had that discussion in October and you said, "Well, you know, if you don't like what I did, you know, you can ask me to change it because you're the one employing me." And my answer to that was, "Yeah, but who the [ __ ] am I to tell you to change that? You know better than I do." You know, if my goal was to do a composition in my personal style and go, I want to do like a fusion remix and reinvent the sound. Okay. But that's not what I'm trying to do. What I try to do with those songs is here's what Kaplas music sounds like because we're so ingrained to think Beethoven. And so it's Beethoven's music and his vision and his style. A lot of people who don't know Greek traditional music, they think they're encountering my work and my compositions and my vision. And this video is made to showcase people, it's it's exactly the reason the music sounds so well is that we all put our egos aside. We put ourselves in the in the service of those traditions and let them speak for themselves. And that's why you get 31 million views on a song like Belisario.
>> You definitely should take credit where credit is due. What you've done with your channel is incredible. taking my god traditional Canadian music and Japanese music and Greek music and and and giving this stuff. It's due presence. I mean, you have an awesome audience. A lot of your audience writes to me now, too. It's there's some incredible people out there. There's some [ __ ] too. Don't >> That's what we're doing. That's what really sort of motivates us to do what we do. I think a lot of people their image that I that they have of the epic bazantine series is once again in this author composer kind of paradigm they imagine fary as a genius composer in the way that Beethoven was where I'm just you know sitting down at night like this you know thinking oh I need to come up with a beautiful melody that expresses my feelings about bilisarius and then I write some no this is not good enough and not and it's not that romantic and passionate it's much more clinical and methodological. You analyze old Roman chants. You analyze AG melodies. You synthesize them together on a systemic basis of convergence of melodic patterns and elements and you give them to a creatine musician and tell him modify it in a way that would naturally fit Samuna playing and you get the melody of Bellisario. What is Belisarios? It's Agian music.
And so when people listen to Billisario and they go, "Wow, what an amazing song.
Farer is such a genius." Uh, no. It's it's they're missing the point.
Unfortunately, Faria Fer is not a genius. The reason Belisario sounds so amazing isn't because I am an artistic musical genius. It's because Agian music sounds wonderful. Because generations upon generations of Greek musicians came up with that sound over time. Not from the mind of one singular artist, but from a collective of generations building that sound over time. And all I did was present it to people and it blew up. Is Belisario an enjoyable song? Yes.
Not because I'm a genius, but because Greek traditional music is amazing.
All right. So, in the last chapter of this video, I'm going to be talking about why I am thinking as of making this video of uh stopping the Epic Bizantine series and not making any more of those songs. And I apologize for this very long-winded explanation at the end of the video, but I thought that the people who have always supported the project, who love the project, especially my Patreon members who are subscribed to my Patreon for this project, I believe that people deserve to know why I stopped the project if I ever end up choosing to stop it. Now, upon hearing this, a lot of people will say, "Why? Why would you want to stop it? It's one of your most popular series." And the popularity is actually part of its problem. When songs like Bellisarius get 30 million views, they tend to attract a much bigger audience that will engage at a surface level with the Epic Bizantine series, meaning that for example, they will not read the description. They come to two conclusions. First, they stop at the title epic and they go, "Oh, epic, therefore this is cinematic music." And then they also don't look at the description and so all all they see is a name that says Faria Farerra. And so they go, "Okay, so this is cinematic epic music made by the composer Faria Farery." And so basically the understanding these people have is these are the personal compositions in the image of the signature style of one composer called Faria Farerra. So it is lost on them that this is a collaborative effort that is not about Faria Farerra's signature style but that is about showcasing traditional Greek music as it is that simply happens to be posted on the Faria Farerra channel. The problem is a lot of those people that engage with the content at a surface level, they're still very keen to offer their opinions on it and to talk about it. And when those opinions are given the power to shape what is perceived as the objective truth about this series, that causes problems for me. And this is exactly what happens with the rise of AI search engines. You see, I want to say from 2024, Google and other search engines have implemented systems where you have AI summaries. AIS go looking for text written down about a certain subject and it will aggregate all that text and give you a summary and present it as objective truth. The problem is for whatever reason they do not scrape YouTube descriptions which is where the official explanations of the songs are found. So whatever I have to say about the work, the methodology, the descriptions, how it's Greek traditional music, how it's made in collaboration, none of that makes it to the AI summaries. Instead, the AI summaries solely focus on forums like Reddit. So, whatever Redditors have to say about the Epic Bizantine series, that becomes presented as the objective truth about the Bzantine series for everybody who from now on wants to learn more about it or to see who's this fary, what's this whole Epic Bizantine music thing. The information that they will be given will be given to them on the basis of whatever Redditors have said. And usually those Redditors tend to be the people who engage with the content at at the most surface level and none of them ever read the description. And so they offer an interpretation of the Epipantine series that's based on them not being informed at all about it whatsoever. This is how you get these kinds of comments.
>> I think the best thing about his music is that they aren't exactly authentic.
His style is more epic and cinematic music first and foremost to make it relatable for modern audiences.
Authenticity comes second. And he makes this very clear in video descriptions.
This guy talks as if he has read my descriptions >> and he makes this very clear in video descriptions.
>> But what he is saying is the epic Bzantine series is a project where Faria Fery takes medieval Byzantine secular music but makes it cinematic and epic to make it more relatable for modern audiences. That's not what the descriptions have ever said since the series began. This is the description as it was written from 2021 onwards. The epic Byzantine music series is a musical project where I explore various sounds from the ethnomusicological ecosystem of modern traditional music using sounds from modern folk traditions as a framing device for themes pertaining to the history of the Eastern Roman Empire.
>> The guy's going, "Well, the music isn't exactly authentic. Yes, it is exactly authentic, but to modern Greek traditional music." So, we're dealing with somebody who talks as if they read descriptions, but clearly the guy never read beyond like the first 10 words of the descriptions. He just read the part where I'm like, "This is not reconstructed historical music." And then he goes, "Okay, so therefore he's making cinematic epic sounds to make the medieval music more relatable for modern audiences." This person simply cannot understand a simple line that says, "This is modern Greek traditional music." The epic Bzantine series is me and Greek traditional musicians researching and showcasing the body of Greek traditional music that has Bzantine roots and epic storytelling functions. Got it. You're taking medieval Bizanti music and turning it cinematic and epic so that it's more relatable for modern audiences. How does that remotely sound like what I just said? Then we have the guy in the beginning who comes in saying, "I'm sorry to be the party pooper. These songs are not exactly authentic." And his entire argumentation rests on the argument, "This is not literally how music sounded like back in the days of the Bzantine Empire, which once again is an incredibly ignorant thing to say. If somebody reads the word Bzantine and assume that it must refer to something as it existed in the days of the Byzantine Empire, they are musicologically ignorant. Anybody who deals in the field of musicology knows that when we use the term Bzantine, more often than not, it is officially used to refer to modern forms of music anacronistic to the Middle Ages, but that have their roots in the medieval Bzantine Empire. But you think to yourself, surely he must know that these are modern Greek paradosaka. Anybody with a minimum of understanding of modern Greek traditional music would be able to recognize it immediately. And yet this person never says that. Nowhere in his description does this guy go to be clear, these are modern Greek traditional music because he doesn't even realize it's modern Greek traditional music. He thinks that what he is hearing is a foreigner's failed attempts at reconstructing medieval music because he specifically chalks it up to this. I just wish he collaborated more with people from the musical traditions he is trying to emulate each time in order to be more authentic.
>> At the time that this comment was posted in 2023, all of my epic Byzantine songs for 3 years had literally constituted recordings made by Greeks that all I did was mix and put on this channel.
>> And so one of my friends who was at an event, there was some Pontian guy there who was playing the pont fiddle. He's playing this. He records this bit for like 30 40 seconds and that's basically this song dance the very early Byzantine songs from the very beginning. All of them made out of the work of authentic traditional musicians from those cultures.
>> We are dealing with somebody who literally cannot recognize Greek traditional music played by Greek traditional musicians. That is how clueless this person is. The proof is in the pudding. Look at the reaction of somebody actually knowledgeable in Greek traditional music when you play one of the very early Byzantine songs to him.
Songs that were released before this guy wrote this comment.
>> Where do you think this is from?
>> That's Pantion right away.
>> Tell us what you're hearing.
>> Aian Islands.
>> The moment he hears them, he goes, "Oh, that's Pontian. Oh, that's Aian." this guy, he hears those and he goes, "That's clearly an Iranian failing to make medieval Greek music, which means he literally could not even recognize modern Greek traditional music played by Greek traditional musicians." And then he goes on to say this.
>> I just wish he collaborated more with people from the musical traditions he is trying to emulate each time in order to be more authentic.
>> Not realizing that the very songs he's talking about and calling not authentic are literally the product of entirely Greek traditional musicians playing Greek traditional instruments that I literally had nothing to do with and only brought onto my channel. These are the people that Google's AI blindly trusts and takes their words.
reminiscent of that one time a Redditor wrote an entire post about how your epic Byzantine tracks are wrong because the orchestration isn't something the actual Byzantine Empire would have used.
Meanwhile, every description you've written since 2020 says it's modern Greek folk music, not attempted historical reconstruction of medieval Bzantine music. The guy was technically right that the instruments weren't period accurate, but he framed it as foreigner gets Byzantine music wrong when the orchestrations were accurate for the modern traditions they tracks were about. The wildest part is how confidently the guy tried to correct you as if he were some authority talking down to a foreigner. Meanwhile, he was listening to modern Ponian and modern Cretan folk sounds and somehow he assumed those were failed attempts at reconstructing medieval Bzantine music.
And that's how he explained the anacronistic instruments. The fact that he couldn't even recognize modern Greek folk tradition, which is super obvious to anyone who knows the genre, is already a pretty good indicator of how little he actually knew about music. And it's scary how AI summaries and Google snippets just scrape random forum comments like this and present them as if they're reliable. You can build an entire channel on research/ ethnomous musicological collaboration. And it just takes a handful of clueless people making assumptions online to muddy the waters. Like this guy who couldn't tell he was hearing modern Greek folk at all, so he just jumped straight to failed historical reconstruction because he didn't know what he was listening to.
>> A lot of these comments are funny to me as a Byzantine chanter myself because I heard some of the epic Byzantine music pieces and thought, "Huh, that doesn't sound like Byzantine chant." And so I went and read the description and went, I see, it's not meant to be ecclesiastical chant from the current tradition of post 18th century reformed music. It's one secular and two not from the exact same time period. But apparently a bunch of other people immediately jumped to clearly this is totally fake and he's scamming us because this folk song about a local hero doesn't sound like a cherubic by Fkias. It must be because he's an Iranian and doesn't know anything which is certainly one of the takes of all time.
>> Let's make this abundantly clear.
Literally anyone with a minimum of knowledge of Greek traditional music upon clicking on those songs would have gone oh modern Greek traditional music from that region. Then the guy goes on to say oh his vocal style is wrong and the way he phrases his vocals that is not how you phrase it in traditional Byzantine music. See the guy thinks that I am trying to emulate Bzantine chant which is a very specific vocal style with very specific parameters. I would know. I have talked about it at length with literal salts and ensembles like Consantu, like John Michael Buer of Capella Romana, the guys who literally sang Bzantine chant for the king of England's coronation. I think I'm in good company. This guy thinks that I'm trying to attempt this vocal style. I'm not. There's only two songs I think where this vocal style is being attempted or three of them. And for every one of them, I got actual Greek caners of Bzantine churches from Laval here. Maybe they're not that good. They themselves say that they're amateurs, but again, this statement becomes very funny. Then >> I just wish he collaborated more with people from the musical traditions he is trying to emulate each time in order to be more authentic.
>> And so a lot of times this guy's reacting to literal Greek singing and saying this, meaning that once again, he literally can't even recognize Greeks doing their own music. But apart from that all of the epic Bzantine songs when I do the vocals I'm doing paradosaka vocals I'm doing traditional vocals which sound very different from Bzantine chant. Bzantine chant has a very specific systematic academic style of singing that everybody has to conform to. Greek traditional singing on the other hand, It's a very broad general melismatic style of singing. What do Greeks themselves in the comments of my videos have to say?
>> Coming from a Greek trad singer, you could literally be one of us and I wouldn't know if I didn't see the name.
Everyone has noted the spot on pronunciation before, but I'm also impressed by the way you nail the specific techniques and stylistic features of Greek singing. If your first version was already very good, this one is worthy of the most epic Glentia in my country. You truly deserve your place among Greek folk singers.
>> To be clear, I didn't just wake up one day doing this channel and deciding I can now sing Greek songs. Before I started this channel, I was a wedding photographer and a baptism photographer and everything for 10 years before I started this channel here in Laval. And most of the events were primarily Greek.
There were also a lot of Armenians, Arabs, other ethnicities. Primarily, however, I dealt with Greeks. And so for 10 years, I hung out with the musicians and the bands and everything. They taught me to sing in their style and everything. I think that's a thing that people miss. When this channel started, I had 10 years of experience hanging out with Greek musicians, picking their brains, asking them how this is sung, and having them coach me. So this guy is calling the music as a whole and the instrumentation not authentic because he takes Byzantine to mean historical music of the Byzantine Empire. And then he takes my singing, the vocal stylist as not authentic because he thinks that I'm trying to do Byzantine chant. And Google's search engines have no capacity for nuance. They just see someone say not authentic vocals not authentic instrumentation not authentic. That's all it keeps. It doesn't care about whether or not it's real. It doesn't care about whether or not it's accurate.
The AI engine does not have the capacity to look at my descriptions and my intentions. It can't even musically analyze the actual content of the music.
It's too dumb and primitive to do that.
All it does is blindly trust only one source, which is whatever a bunch of Redditors have said. And if they say the music is not authentic, that's all people are going to read about the project. Then that's all people are going to be told about the Epic Bizantine series. when googling about it. Or yet another comment, one of my favorite ones. This guy writes this, >> "I just wish Faria would use half flats more. He says he doesn't use them in order to make the songs more accessible, but not using them takes away from the mission to represent traditional Greek music through Byzantine themed songs."
>> And I respond to him, "Would you care to quote where I said that?" Because I know for a fact I never said that. Firstly, I do use half flats constantly, even reintroducing them in songs that don't have them. Anarchos uses Bzantine ination. So does Komir the Saras and Kosad Mikross. All of them use tone one intonation with a flattened second interval. And the Ronos ste reintroduces the half flat on the sixth interval missing in most modern versions.
Romanos's theme in Mansion saga is an even flatter form of tone one found in Simon Karasa's tuning systems. That's five examples already. Those are all written in the descriptions of those songs. By the way, >> modern renditions are adapted to the western equal temper tuning framework.
But with this version, I wanted to stick to Byzantine Chance's older microonal tuning in tone one with a microonal second interval slightly flatter than the western minor. I used an archaic microal second tetra chord derived from the now mostly extinct dromo of Greek music.
>> Here's some behind the scenes uh emails and messages of me contacting my colleagues when we're preparing the songs.
>> Hey bro, here are the files for the song. I wrote the song in D. That last part has a micro tone on the note B or the sixth degree of the mackam. It's slightly flatter than equal temperament B, about 25 cents flatter. Hey man, here's the song we talked about with the thrian lyra. As you'll hear, the melody is in tone one of the Byzantine modes.
It's basically a Dorian, but the second interval B is about 30 cents flatter than equal temperament B. And the sixth interval F# is also 30 cents flatter.
>> I work primarily with Dimitri Dalas in terms of the read instruments and the back pipes. And this is what he has to say about his back pipes.
>> I also noticed, tell me if my ear is wrong. I feel like um some of the notes weren't perfect like equal temperament.
It didn't feel like mine or mine.
>> No, no, no, no. See, that that's the the beauty of this stuff is that it's so raw. Now what you have is makers that are trying to match them with with the western scales. Right.
>> The equal temperament.
>> Exactly.
>> I specifically work with him because the man is traditional and he keeps two microonal reed instruments and backpipes. In 2025 December I was in Athens. I saw this beautiful instrument in the Samuelan workshop. And so I bought it from them in March of uh this year. But first I asked them this.
>> I wanted to know if before buying the instrument it would be possible to do a custom modification. Would it be possible to add frets to it to play makam microone? I only need two frets added so I can play Makam Bay. I am attaching you a picture of a tambboras with the microone frets I need highlighted in white.
>> I use microones so much in my Greek traditional music that I literally go out of my way to pay Greek instrument makers extra to custom modify the instruments so that they can add the microones back to them. In a world where most Greek instruments for 200 years have gotten rid of the microones in order to have western frets. I use microones so much that westernized Greeks who hate the fact that their music used to have microones in the past write comments like these.
>> But why are you confusing Greek music with these Arabic tonalities? These have nothing to do with Greek tradition. The quattrains are a foreign body in Greek music which never incorporated these tunings.
>> I use microones so much that Greeks who actually bother to read the description and be [ __ ] to understand what I'm doing with the Epic 18 series say this about my work on Patreon.
>> Amazingly beautiful. Have you or Ross Daly ever reached out to each other?
It's wonderful that two of the best representatives of Greek microonal music aren't even Greek. You even sound [ __ ] >> So, let's look at the recipe that's brewing here. Put all of that misinformation together. Couple it with the fact that this misinformation is treated by Google as the absolute authoritative statements on Fargy's work and it completely ignores whatever I have to say about my own work and my descriptions and everything. And what do you end up with? You end up with a collaborative project headed by multiple Greek traditional musicians that is simply being financed and produced and hosted on this channel by far. a project that absolutely sticks strictly to the usage of traditional instruments of traditional Greek folk idiom and music that is not cinematic by any stretch of the term that does not use cinematic high production orchestral whatever that is not cinematic first and foremost and accuracy second but tradition all the way throughout. And yet this series based on rigorous research on extreme dedication to tradition and authenticity headed by Greek traditional musicians is being presented by Google as a canonical objective fact as inauthentic inaccurate renditions of Greek music that are cinematic generic orchestral epic sounds first and foremost that sacrifice authenticity for mass consumption and palatability. That is the image that an increasing number of people now have of the Epic Bizantine series. A massive watering down of Greek traditional music into cinematic epic sounds for mass consumption and it has very real consequences for my career and unfortunately negative ones. I used to have a collaborator, a Greek traditional musician who started working with me from 2023 to late 2024. This Greek traditional musician asked their name to be purged out of all the descriptions and all mentions and said that they could not keep working on the series anymore because this growing reputation that AI plus these forums were creating for the series meant that they were now being associated publicly with a series that was being presented as a foreigner's attempt at watering down Greek traditional music in order to in order to present it in a palatable cinematic epic generic form for mass consumption.
sacrificing its authenticity and traditional integrity. Obviously, Greek traditional musician being associated with this is not exactly a good look for them. I had been hired by a project to procure them with Greek traditional music. Meaning that I was going to work with Greek traditional musicians to give them those sounds, meaning that I was going to work with my team of Greek traditional musicians and, you know, deploy them like Nick Fury does with the Avengers in order to give that Greek traditional soundsscape to that soundtrack. They wanted they didn't want a cinematic generic soundtrack. They wanted something authentic.
Unfortunately, some people maybe they wanted to double check on me and so they went on Google. They saw those statements and I got fired which means by proxy all of those Greek traditional musicians who could have made some money on this project also got fired. Why?
Because there are statements on Google now saying stuff like far music is not authentic. Why? because some idiot went around saying this music is not authentic because he could not put two and two together and understand this is not literally medieval reconstructions.
And then recently one last thing happened which really prompted me to make this video. I contacted a Greek traditional musician who plays a very rare instrument of a very rare geographical repertoire. Uh and I wanted to bring attention to that. Why? Because that's what the epic Bzantine series is.
I want to bring awareness to the rich real traditional cultures of the world.
The same reason why I did Princes of Lzika. Princes of Lazica uh represents and showcases the sounds of the last people primarily. There's 140,000 of them. That video now is like at 500,000.
It's it's almost five times the number of last people who are alive. And they were so happy. They were like, "Wow, the big internet audiences internationally are now hearing our traditional music."
And they were super thankful for that. I wanted to do that for the same regional repertoire. So I contact this Greek traditional musician. I'm like, "Hey, do you want to collaborate? This is the project." But he wanted to double check who I am. What does he do? And what does he get? An AI summary that tells them that this is cinematic epic music that he sacrifices authenticity, that he doesn't want to use microones. And the person explains to me why they don't want to work with me. And they specifically say in their reply, "I see that you work in the cinematic epic Han Zimmer kind of genre. Uh, you might be mistaken. I'm a traditional musician.
That's not the kind of music that I make. So, first off, you're getting the genre wrong. Secondly, I can see that you sacrifice Greek authenticity. You remove microones, you put authenticity second, and cinematic epic music comes first for you. The reality of the matter is that right now, the technological andformational infrastructure of the internet is specifically designed to harm my career in the most catastrophic way possible. And here, some people might say, but is that why you want to stop the series? Why can't you continue doing it? So many people still enjoy the songs and that's all fine and well, but there's a lot of financial expenses that go into this. For me, just the Arabic stanzas, two stanzas of Arabic in that the Inakita song, they cost me $560.
That's not the recording for the Arabic vocals, by the way. That's just writing the stanzas. And that whole Arabic section is going to be 20% of the song at most. I pay a lot of money on these songs because I have an extremely high level of quality for this channel. I employ rare musicians like Stephanos Graasopulolis who play rare instruments like the ancient Greek avo. It requires a lot of financial spendings which is not helped by the fact that there are scammers and copyright trolls who cause me financial harm. You see, every single time I upload a popular series like the Epic Bizantine series, there will be people uh scammers who will download the audio with some app and re-upload that audio on Spotify on another streaming platform, changing the name, changing the pitch or the sound or the speed of the of the song a little bit. And that way they can re-upload my songs under a different name. And very often millions of people discover my songs that I produced through those stolen versions.
And so when two million people click on their re-uploaded stolen version of Belisarios, that's 2 million clicks that could have gone to me and generated ad revenue for me. Instead, it goes to them. Meaning these people are not only siphoning money away from me, they're making money off of my work. The worst part is the internet's automated copyright systems are so [ __ ] stupid that sometimes this happens. They will re-upload one of my songs. The copyright systems of Spotify and YouTube will go, "Hey, in your YouTube video, you are using this song that is present in this upload on Spotify. You have stolen their song. We are deactivating the monetization from your video and giving it over to them because it belongs to them." And unfortunately, I have tried since December of 2024 for more than a year and a half now. I tried everything I could, contacting Google, contacting Spotify, Tounore, all of these, and all of them told me the same thing. [ __ ] you. Get yourself lawyers and get them in court. Otherwise, we're not helping you. I do not have the financial capabilities of organizing court cases and paying lawyers. And like, do you have any idea the exorbitant amounts of money required to do that? I simply cannot afford that realistically. So what's happening right now is that every single time I'm working on the Epic Bantine series, I am putting in weeks of research, weeks of work, and immense financial spendings to create songs of the highest possible quality, authenticity, respect for tradition, expertise by Greek traditional musicians just so that one out of five times they're going to steal those songs effectively and deactivate my monetization and I'm not going to make a penny from them. And yet, every time I tell myself, maybe I'm not going to make money off of it because some people are going to steal it. I tell myself, doesn't matter. It's worth it. You know why? Because of comments like these.
>> It took a Persian of all people to make me appreciate my native helenic music. I play rhythm guitar in a Greek punk band.
I never liked my native Greek music and I just discovered you and you made me reconsider.
>> For me that I am Greek, it is an honor and really noble what you are doing. You show to the world our true music and tell them this is real Greek music. It is beautiful and you don't have to feel ashamed for it.
>> You inspired me to make traditional music of my own country.
>> Faria has done more for the education on Greek musical traditions and ethnomusicology than most modern Greeks.
So thankful I am a Greek and he made me appreciate and vibe to my native Greek music.
>> My daughters who were never interested in Greek folk music signed up for traditional dance lessons because of your epic Byzantine tracks. They do an amazing job promoting interest in Greek culture and music.
>> Damn man, I don't know how you do it, but before I had zero interest in such songs from my country, considered them kind cringe. Then bam, you beautiful bastard come in and cover the song and suddenly am interested.
>> Throughout the years, I have had so many young Greek people tell me that they discovered their love of Greek traditional music, of their own tradition through the Epic Bizantine series. I have had a few kids from Cree over the last four years text me or message me in my emails and everything telling me that they're putting aside the piano and the classical guitar and instead they've picked up the Assumadura, a backpack, mind you, that was going to go extinct not even one generation ago. This is why I do the Epic Bantine series. This is why I do everything that I do for the promotion of traditional music. The problem is when an increasing number of people because of the unholy marriage of Reddit misinformation plus AI taking Reddit and making that the official source of truth. Because of that, an increasing number of people are now clicking on the epic Bzantine songs, not realizing that they're encountering Greek traditional music, but thinking that they're encountering the genius works of one composer, Faria Farer. So the whole mission of promoting traditional music goes out the window. If an increasing number of people are going to click on the Epic Bantine series thinking that these musics sound the way they do because they are cinematic and orchestral and they put accuracy and tradition aside, then traditional music is not being promoted. If an increasing number of people are going to click on those songs thinking they are not authentic because that's what they read because some idiot went and these are not literally medieval so they're not authentic and that's all that Google can keep is the not authentic part without any proper contextualization. If people are going to because of that click on those songs and think they're not authentic and they're nonsense then traditional music is not being promoted thanks to those songs. If people hear that sound and think, "Wow, Faria Farer's creativity than traditional music is not being promoted." Of course, I have not come to a definitive conclusion. I don't know.
Some of my more techsavvy friends have told me to create an official site where I explain the methodology of the work and everything. Um, and they told me that over the next six months, Google will realize that if this is your official site, this should be prioritized over whatever some random Redditors say. Uh, we're going to see.
Uh, I don't know where this leads, maybe the AI technologies are going to get better. But if things are going to continue working the way that they are now in terms of AI searches and how they use forums as their primary source of truth, then I'm going to have to stop working on the Epic Bizantine series and I won't make any more of those songs because the Epic Bizantine series is the most successful one. meaning it's the one that attracts the massive mainstream audiences. Mainstream audiences who tend not to really care about the deeper aspects of the work and who just want to engage with it at a surface superficial level. So, the Epic Bizantine series is the one project on this channel that attracts that kind of mainstream audiences the most. Mainstream audiences who don't read the descriptions and will therefore spread misinformation about the project on forums because they literally don't understand what the actual project is. That then gets picked up by Google AI search engines as the primary source of truth, which leads into me having an increasingly bigger reputation as a cinematic epic soundtrack film composer man who takes authentic music and makes them generic and cinematic sounding so that modern audiences can find them palatable when literally my entire career is built around saying, "Fuck you. We're not changing traditional music. We're keeping it authentic and not watering it down for mass consumption." I cannot continue keeping collaborators and finding collaborators and working with museums and with music historians and everything if in the future my public image is going to be cinematic composer man who waters down music in order to turn it into generic cinematic music for mass audience palatability. Basically, as of now, every time I work on one of the Epic Bizantine songs, I am directly financing out of my own pocket the complete and utter obliteration of my public image as a promoter of traditional music when I have been dedicated my life to the promotion of traditional music for the last 5 years, 6 years this summer. And that counts for the very first Epic Bzantine songs that were literally just recordings of Greek traditional music by Greek traditional musicians. So, we're going to see where the future leads, but for now, we're going to see. Anyway, this is Far Fery.
I've talked way too much and I have a pretty bad fever today. Goodbye.
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