Nychtose Xoris Feggari String Quartet - Digital Sheet Music

SKU: A0.857812

Nyctose Xoris Feggari ("Night Without Moon") belongs to a genre of Greek folk music called ‘Rebetika’, songs which express the strife and heartache endured by a people expelled from their homeland. Originating from Greek refugees living in Asia Minor - under Turkish domination - during the early 20th century, Rebetika music began to flourish in the urban ghettos of larger Greek cities (Athens, Piraeus) following the Greek diaspora in 1922. Over 1.5 million refugees brought with them Eastern Mediterranean-influenced music which, combined with the joy, sorrow, and difficulties of their new life in the urban underworld of Greece, evolved into the songs of Rebetika. The exchange and syncretization of musical ideas between European classical styles and Byzantine folk traditions created the distinctive musical style and emotional depth of Rebetika. In this arrangement of Nychtose Xoris Feggari - a first for string quartet instrumentation - the violins and viola/cello pair off, the upper strings taking a more rhythmic, coloristic role and the lower voices singing yearning, beautiful Greek tune. Imitating the traditional instruments of a Rebetika band - a guitar-like bouzouki, a politiki lyra (bowed instrument of Persian origin), clarinet, cymbalom, oud (European lute relative), and finger-cymbals, among others - our arrangements utilize a variety of stringed instrument ‘extended techniques’. Among these are various timbral applications of pizzicato and glissandi, as well as harmonics and ponticello. In an intriguing crossover to classical music, Rebetika songs feature the practice of taximia (singular: taximi). Similar to cadenzas found in Western classical-style concerti, taximia are improvisational solos featuring an instrumentalist's skill and virtuosity. Nychtose Xoris Feggari features a quasi-improvisational cadenza which reprises and expounds upon primary motivic material. (It snakes along a melodic line of exotic intervals until cascading in scalar upward/downward leaps; the following section of arpeggiated chords - which bring the taximi to a dramatic, powerful close - draws influence from classical composers as disparate as Bach and Arvo Pärt.) Featured in Apollo's album, 'EUROPEAN FOLKSCAPES,' available on Navona Records. www.navonarecords.com www.apollochamberplayers.org.