The Melancholy of Illumination

Four years ago, when I went, unsuspecting, to my first Balkan Music Workshop with the East European Folklife Center in Mendocino, California, I was blindsided by the power of an art form that had previously eluded me. One pre-dawn morning, around 4am, I was sitting in the kafana (a communal cabin in the middle of the redwoods camp, decorated with string lights and Balkan tapestries) in an ouzo-laced, sleep-deprived fog. One of the Greek clarinet teachers started playing a μοιρολόγι (miroloi) from Epirus, an unmetered melody in a pentatonic scale I’d never heard, with pain-laden vocals and subtle accompaniment on accordion. I forgot to breathe. I realized I was crying when I touched my face and my cheeks were wet. I had never heard anything like that. I had never heard a clarinet sound like that.  I remember walking back to my tent through the woods with the first lights of dawn and redwood mist, thinking that I had heard music for the first time. (Never mind the twenty-five years of study, two conservatory degrees, and professional performing career.)

I didn’t have the words to ask about what I had just heard. I didn’t know then that a μοιρολόγι is an improvised solo lament that is often performed at the beginning of festivals to honor the dead before celebrating the living, with a history that might date to Homeric times. I didn’t know, of all the many regions of the Balkans that I would encounter musically over the next few years, that this (along with its neighbor, southern Albania) was the only region that employs the pentatonic scale, in a characteristic Dorian-style mode with minor seventh leaps forcing emotional heights. I didn’t know the history of many of the most famous lyrics, stories such as those of dead lovers pushing their corpse arms up through the ground to try to reunite with the living, Orpheus and Euridice-style. I hadn’t yet encountered the handful of famous performers of μοιρολόγι that I would come to know by name and sound over the next few years. 

I left without any way to access what I had heard, and although I spent much of the next year diving into Balkan music with a frenzied obsession that very few things in my life have paralleled, the μοιρολόγι didn’t presence again until I returned the following summer. I was similarly floored by these performances, although I knew they were coming this time, and I had developed an awareness that allowed me to label and appreciate more of the mechanics of what I was hearing: the scales, the ornamentation, the concepts of improvisation, the microtonal inflections. The surprise was replaced by a more informed appreciation, an ability to hear nuances in intonation and tone color that my Western ear had tried to correct for the previous year. This time, I asked questions, sought out resources, and prepared for intentional study. 

Over the following year, I listened to the Ipirotika genre nonstop, multiple hours every day, during daily commutes, late at night when I should have been sleeping. I became familiar with many of the great performers of the genre. I began studying Greek, matching lyrics to recordings and finding more online resources in the Greek alphabet. I compared seven versions of the same song to try to understand the difference between standard conventions and individual performer styles. I learned the dances, the weight of the rhythms as they apply to the lead clarinet’s role. I slowed ornaments down to 25% of speed to try to figure out how to execute them, and acquired new muscles, vocal shapes, and tongue placements to do so. I introduced the repertoire into my band, and forced myself onstage with it, probably well before I was ready. 

In the wake of that obsession (oriented toward capturing and recreating the beauty that had struck me so violently during that first summer in Mendocino), I’ve noticed that both my emotional and cognitive experiences of this music have changed. I no longer feel the unbearable and elusive sadness of the μοιρολόγι in a language I can’t comprehend. I have a foundation for understanding it now. And while that allows for a type of depth and appreciation for a beauty that was once powerful in its inaccessibility, I also regret the loss of the first encounter, while simultaneously honoring how this music is now becoming an authentic part of my musical voice. 

The memory of first overwhelm, wholly unexpected, when experiences to follow always include a more prepared and nuanced understanding, reflects a nonlinear experience bounded by linear time. It’s a special kind of melancholy, a recognition of a beauty that holds meaning through memory but can’t be recreated. It is also the beauty of recognition of all of the elements of quality, unconsciously accessed in the first blow of pure experience, that can only take on language and meaning after intense and long-term dedication to defining and mastering its individual parts. That dedication also involves a sacrifice, a sacrifice that carries a depth of understanding that is only possible when the initial shock gives way to anticipation and understanding. 

I noticed recently, when listening to Kleftes (one of the first songs that seized me in this genre), that my experience of it has transformed. The attraction is different, and to some degree, I’m mourning the loss of the earlier response. I now feel compelled to create the experience, to bring it forward into the world myself, with all of the excruciating trials of learning and failing that are required to take ownership of something once passively encountered. Artistic practice is an ever-evolving integration of loss and gain.