We asked Constantine Caravassils and Jeffrey Duban to tell us a little more about the central themes of “From Sappho’s Lyre”, which are portrayed in a series of thematic illustrations.
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“Caravassilis, with his vivid imagination as a musical creator, immediately transports us into a highly seductive sound mode, that of an ancient Greece fantasized and transcended…”
PANM360
Album illustrations by Noemi Sallai, clarinetist – noemisallaiclarinet.com
Jeffrey Duban: The title of Constantine Caravassilis’ From Sappho’s Lyre is a variant on the title of my book, The Lesbian Lyre. Taken together, the two titles give us Sappho, the famed lyric poetess of the 7th and 6th centuries B.C., in the words of British poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), “simply nothing less—as she is certainly nothing more—than the greatest poet whoever was at all.”
Constantine Caravassilis: The creation of musical settings for 2,700-year-old poetry was unquestionably the most challenging task I have ever undertaken as a composer. In From Sappho’s Lyre, the title piece work, I have fused elements of ancient Greek drama and Western ballet and opera, creating a hybrid structure within which Sappho’s poetry is woven around Jeffrey Duban’s translations. These two linguistic worlds provided a template that I have over-scripted with a wide array of soundscapes, all contained within the text and surrounding themes.
Once the piece was composed and recorded, I found that our clarinetist, Noemi Sallai, had made a number of paintings based on her impressions of the music. The illustrations are exactly what I had in mind during the compositional process and perfectly complement both the literature and music.
JD: Sappho was born, lived, loved, and composed her poetry on the Greek island of Lesbos—the third largest of the over 700 Aegean Greek islands—with its fabled capital of Mytilene. Sappho composed and sung her poems to the lyre, hence “lyric poet/poetry.” “The Lesbian Lyre” designates the location of Sappho’s origin and music-making on Lesbos. “Sappho of Lesbos” or “Lesbian Sappho” were, for millennia, titles essentially associating Sappho with her island homeland.
CC: Duban’s translations and original poetry add color-filled auras and sparkling nuances throughout. In addition to the sonic portrayal of various images and emotions elicited by the text, I have enriched the work with elements signaling dance and movement, lighting, and other means of spectacle accompanying live performance of this work, and with pre-recorded sound effects projected from carefully placed loudspeakers throughout the performance space. This provides the “listener” with an integrated audio-visual experience.
JD: The depictions that follow show a flamboyantly stylized Sappho in movement—dance inextricably tied to lyrical poetry and song. This can be a strange notion to contemporary readers of poetry for whom poems are not concurrently composed and performed but appear as written texts to be read and possibly sung. Today, when written texts are put to music, they become “art songs.” But such from the outset was the status of all ancient poetry—even of heroic epics, believed, at a minimum, to have been chanted to lyre accompaniment. In sum, there was no distinction, as there is today, between poem, song, and movement.
CC: In From Sappho’s Lyre, I treat the ancient Greek poetry as the sacred and the Duban translations as the secular/profane. I use both to offer imposing musical structures reflecting earnest emotion and continuous forward momentum. Inspiration has come from many sources, including Jeffrey Duban’s The Lesbian Lyre, my Aegean upbringing, world music, and others.
JD: Sappho was a lover of both women and men, but predominantly of women, as her surviving poetry and ancient testimonia provide. While the “suspect” nature of Sappho’s loves elicited comment in antiquity, it would not be until the nineteenth century that “Lesbian Sappho” would come to mean “Sappho the Lesbian,” and “Lesbian,” at first in medical contexts, an indication of sexual proclivity rather than of geographic locale. For all that she was “lesbian,” Sappho was married and had a daughter, Cleis (whom she mentions in her poetry). She was further believed to have ended her life in a leap from the Leucadian cliff in despair of her unrequited love for the ferryman Phaon (here imaginatively depicted in all his standing beauty).
CC: The momentum of From Sappho’s Lyre proceeds from an appreciation of the semantic range of key words—i.e., the words’ several innuendos or meanings— and from creating aural paintings molded to the same shapes and colored to comparable shades. The main thematic material appears several times including the start and finish of the work, and at other key points. Here, Sappho’s sexual proclivity and ambiguous nature of her sexuality is expressed by assigning the same melody (albeit somewhat transformed) to different kinds of voice, including that of a tenor, a countertenor, a mezzo-soprano, and finally a cantor via my own voice in pre-recorded movements.
JD: Love is also beastly, Sappho elsewhere describing it as an erpeton (crawler, slitherer), “a dissolver of limbs, bittersweet, creeping in.” The notion is here imaginatively conveyed by a colorful lumbering beast with its extended, phallically snakelike tail.
CC: With the images reflecting the poetry’s thematic import, there is an additional unifying element: Jeffrey’s narrations in Sapphic/Aeolic Greek. As From Sappho’s Lyre uses the two Sapphic poems long believed alone to have survived in their entirety (others since discovered), I selected key sections of each work and composed music complementing the narrations as a whole. This serves several purposes. Dramatically, these are the moments where the spotlight falls on the original text. Musically, these moments are conceived as thresholds, offsetting consequent movements where the poetry is set to song.
JD: The intensity of Sappho’s love, inviting physical and psychological dissolution unto death—is conveyed by the image of the firebird, its wings emanations of flame, and is seen in the poem “He appears to me.” Such intensity is reminiscent of the love described in the biblical Song of Songs,” establishing the concord of love and death:
For love is dire as death,
its grip the grave’s, and grim;
its flames a conflagration,
God ablaze.
CC: It is that physical and psychological dissolution, as Jeffrey describes it, that helped me attain the intensity in the second half of From Sappho’s Lyre. The first over intense moment is reached by a highly expressive solo cello and its aftermath (movements VIII and IX; Invocation & Rupture). The intensity continues with the sounds of singing air (movement XII, Cosmic Canticle), the soprano aria (movement XIV, Zenith), and the sonic depiction of multiple realities, including erotic scenes by the sea and memories of war and peace, all within a movement called Dream Within (XV).
