A Musical Get Together With Crete and Cyprus

A musical meeting between two very important Mediterranean civilizations took place in our island last month.

Cyprus and Crete, through two music schools, attempted to initiate us on the musical crossroads of eastern Mediterranean. Those schools are the Junior High School of Palouriotissa and the Iraklion School of Music.

Music ensemble “ELIKON”

Music constitutes one of the surest roads supplying us with evidence of culture, melodies and rhythms from ancient times and the Middle Ages.

The musician, according to the dialogue between Socrates and Protagoras, would be the one who would connect the physical existence – material level to the divine-religious level.

It is understandable then, that the gathering of attributes of a philosopher, a scientist and an artist all in one person would constitute the perfect image of an intellectual man to the ancient Greeks.

Knowledgeable about all the qualities of music, Professor Mihalis Georgiou of the Palouriotissa School constructs musical organs in the same forms and with the same materials the ancient Greeks would use, and teaches his students to transpose their musical skills to these instruments. Also, he composes melodies, reviving sounds that caressed the ears of the ancient Greeks.

In 2006, he founded the Music Ensemble of Ancient Musical Instruments ELIKON (the name of the Muses’ mountain in ancient Greece). As he himself states, “this effort’s goal is the return of the Greek musical tradition to its roots and to initiate us in the sounds which our ancestors identified with universal harmony and commuting with God.”

The Iraklion School of Music started at the old American base in 2000 and has created a wonderful tradition in musical education in our island.

Students from the greater metropolitan area of Iraklion familiarize themselves with musical instruments, and music ensembles have been formed in traditional and contemporary music where students learn to collaborate with extraordinary results.

The meeting of these two schools was a goal inspired some months ago. Thusly, the ensemble’s five day visit was organized by the junior high school in Palouriotissa with the principal and teachers from the Iraklion School of Music acting as hosts.

The zenith of this musical meeting was the concert in April where ancient Greek pieces were played by the Cypriot students on instruments which were exact copies of the ancient prototypes.

Then, the Music School of Iraklion, in a wonderful selection of Byzantine and Middle Ages songs, presented, through the school’s traditional ensemble and quite expertly, the continuation of the ancient  Greek musical tradition from Crete and eastern Mediterranean. The experienced musician and instructor of the ensemble, Manolis Saloustros, had taught his students with his unique knowledge so that the audience experienced an authentic music stroll into the Cretan past, where the connecting link with the music tradition of antiquity can be found.

This event ended in an enthusiastic climax, confirming the unique and irreplaceable function of culture, which is the common language and a communication bridge between people of different eras, especially in music, where a plateau of co-existence can be created beyond time and space.    

Iraklion Music School Traditional Ensemble