Miroloi and Skaros: Epirot Blues

I’ve just bought an interesting book called Moiroloi kai Skaros, by Kostas Loli (Ioannina, 2003). It’s a bilingual book (in Greek and Albanian), so I don’t imagine that many of you will be rushing out to order it, unless you play the folk-clarinet and want to learn to improvise in the Epirot and Southern Albanian style. It contains a wealth of musical examples and transcriptions of this very bluesy kind of music, the moiroloi (a slow, melancholic lament or dirge), and the skaros, the shepherds’ improvisation on flute or clarinet traditionally played as they gather (skarizoun) the flocks, to settle them down for the night.

I've also been listening to an old vinyl LP ("Songs of Epirus", 1975) which contains excellent examples of the Miroloi (with Vasilis Batzis on clarinet) and the Skaros, or Shepherd's Tune (with Michael Panousakos on clarinet). It's probably still available as a CD, recorded with a Ford Foundation grant by the Society for the Dissemination of National Music. I also have an old French EP record, with Vassilis Batzis performing a Miroloi (paraponiariko) and a Skaros, recorded in 1956 by Louis Berthe, of the Musee de l'Homme.

There are several CDs containing historical recordings, such as "Epirotika, 1926 to 1950", with a miroloi (recorded in New York) from 1926, and a skaros from 1929, and "The Greek Archives, Music of Epirus Vol. 1, 1925-1940" (FM Records) which contains a miroloi from 1926 (no details) and a skaros from 1926 (clarinet, Christos Harisiadis)

I once wrote an article on Epirot Music (The Anglo-Hellenic Review, Spring 2006; reprinted in Corfu Blues, Ars Interpres, 2006), calling this music “deeper than the deepest blues”. The article finished with these words: “So play me a moiroloi (lament) of exile and infinite sadness, of that deep lonely yearning for a distant home and much-missed loved ones. Let the sound of the clarinet rise and fall as the player improvises a taximi-theme like a shepherd playing to settle his flocks- and his own soul- as night falls on the mountains!”

This kind of music isn’t very popular in Corfu, it has to be said, where the most mournful and funereal music is played by the wind-bands when they process slowly through the town on Good Friday. It’s a completely different musical tradition. The slow, improvised, Epirot instrumental moiroloi isn't associated only with funerals, it's also played at panigyria.

Patrick Leigh Fermor has a poetic description of a skaros as played on a long bone flute by Yorgo, a Saraktsani (a semi-nomadic shepherd), in his book "Roumeli, Travels in Northern Greece"(1966), page 54:

"The music that began to hover through the hut was moving and breathless. It started with long and deep notes separated by pauses; then it shot aloft in patterns of great complexity. Repeated and accelerating trills led to sustained high notes which left the tune quivering in mid-air before plummeting an octave to those low and long-drawn initial semibreves. Notes of an icy clarity alternated with with notes of a stirring, reedy, and at moments almost rasping hoarseness. After a long breath, they sailed again into limpid and piercing airs of a most touching softness; the same minor phrase recurred again and again with diminishing volume, until the final high flourishes presaged the protracted bass notes once more, each of them preceded and followed by a lengthening hiatus of silence. One can think of no apter or more accurate reflection in sound of the mountains and woods and flocks and the nomads' life."

See also Tammer on the Saraktasani, in which he quotes Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Now I have the book by Kostas Loli, but no flute, no clarinet and no teacher. I’d better stick to the blues guitar. I could do with a few lessons on that instrument, too! Maybe I'll take up the didgeridoo.