Lament from Epirus: An Odyssey into Europe's Oldest Surviving Folk Music

by Christopher C. King

Overview

A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2018

In the tradition of Patrick Leigh Fermor and Geoff Dyer, a Grammy-winning producer discovers a powerful and ancient folk music tradition.

In a gramophone shop in Istanbul, renowned record collector Christopher C. King uncovered some of the strangest—and most hypnotic—sounds he had ever heard. The 78s were immensely moving, seeming to tap into a primal well of emotion inaccessible through contemporary music. The songs, King learned, were from Epirus, an area straddling southern Albania and northwestern Greece and boasting a folk tradition extending back to the pre-Homeric era. To hear this music is to hear the past.

Lament from Epirus is an unforgettable journey into a musical obsession, which traces a unique genre back to the roots of song itself. As King hunts for two long-lost virtuosos—one of whom may have committed a murder—he also tells the story of the Roma people who pioneered Epirotic folk music and their descendants who continue the tradition today.

King discovers clues to his most profound questions about the function of music in the history of humanity: What is the relationship between music and language? Why do we organize sound as music? Is music superfluous, a mere form of entertainment, or could it be a tool for survival? King’s journey becomes an investigation into song and dance’s role as a means of spiritual healing—and what that may reveal about music’s evolutionary origins.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393249002
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/29/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	14 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Christopher C. King, a Grammy-winning producer, musicologist, and prominent 78 RPM record-collector, has written for The Paris Review and the Oxford American. Profiles of him have appeared in the New York Times Magazine and Washington Post. He lives in Virginia.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations 11

Prologue: Curious Black Discs and Dead Ends 15

1 A Street of Gramophones 31

2 The Black Earth of Epirus 61

3 "You Know, Greeks Don't Even Like This Music" 91

4 That's Going to Leave a Mark 121

5 Zoumbas's Lament 153

6 Kitsos's Shepherd Song 187

7 Satyr Dance 221

8 Some Kind of a Tool 249

Epilogue: On Fossils, Memory 269

Acknowledgments 273

Notes 279

Bibliography 285

Discography 291

Illustration Credits 293

Index 295

Editorial Reviews

"Half travelogue, half meditation, all confession, King’s book is compelling, illuminating and funny."

The Wire - Francis Gooding

"Christopher King is a weird-old-music savant, a gifted collector, engineer, and student of early recordings. He is also a writer, one who has begun to unfold what he knows in essays of increasing excellence. I think of him mainly, though, as a navigator, whose observations I wait for the way sixteenth-century merchants may have waited on sailors’ reports from America."

John Jeremiah Sullivan

"A blithely informative, immensely entertaining, beautifully written discourse on a music tradition, born in an isolated mountain region long before Homer composed his epics, whose echoes can still be heard today all over the world."

Nicholas Gage

"Lament from Epirus is a master class in listening. Record collector and music scholar Christopher King goes to northwestern Greece, drinks ‘perception-altering’ tsipouru, dances in the street, and brings back as many stories as records…King captures the transcendence of both the music and the land."

Sasha Frere-Jones

"Anyone interested in the power of music—spiritually, culturally, historically, or politically—will find this odyssey to be transformative. By way of an anthropological detective story, Christopher King deftly reveals details and echoing connections I personally never even imagined. Fascinating."

Jim Jarmusch

"This engaging, well-researched, and peculiar book is not only a work of music criticism or a philosophical rumination on the meaning of music—it’s also a travelogue in which the writer goes native."

New York Review of Books

"Obsession makes for good books. … [King’s] rapture propels and frequently erupts into the prose of his report on his multifaceted quest … [he] remains ardent to the point of mania throughout, so infusing us with his passion that even passages on music theory and the crafting of ancient instruments enthrall. This is a trip never to be forgotten."

Booklist (starred review)

"Christopher King’s relationship to music is passionate and profound. As a scholar and obsessive collector of 78s he has few peers. Lament from Epirus will delight anyone who has ever put the needle down on an unknown record and waited to see what would come out of the speakers."

Hari Kunzru

"Enjoy the hypnotic clarity of the landscape—physical, human and musical—that [King] paints. ... [Epirus's] depth and freshness are undeniable, and I thank Mr. King for giving me a sip."

Wall Street Journal

"The culmination of King’s devotion to the music of this region and its connections to the lost traditions of American folk music… When you put down the book, having read King’s rapturous descriptions of the tunes he loves, your own collection will seem suddenly aglow with a curious new power."

Oxford American

"A must-read volume for those interested in music, even if your village is about as far from Epirus as can be… King explores music as a powerful form of communication, a tool for healing and even survival, as a shared experience for the community."

The National Herald

"Christopher King is a formidable scholar and a magnificent writer, but what he does best is listen. No one has taught me more about music."

Amanda Petrusich

"A strange, hallucinatory musical odyssey."

MOJO

"A rich, compelling, and fascinating insight into some of the strangest music on earth, Lament from Epirus takes us on a search to discover insights into the mysterious and unexplainable."

Terry Zwigoff

2018-02-20
Emotionally wrenching music from northwestern Greece evokes questions about the meaning of music itself.King, a Grammy-winning producer, describes himself as an "obsessed" collector of 78 rpm phonograph records, counting among his treasures American folk music and Delta blues recorded in the 1920s and '30s. In his exuberant literary debut, he recounts his discovery of music far different from any that he had heard before, music so intense and transformative that it set him on a quest to find its cultural roots and to decipher "a larger enigma: why we make music." In 2009, the author was vacationing in Istanbul when he noticed a dusty collection of records on a shop shelf. Buying a few, he carefully transported the fragile discs home and, with great anticipation, played them. The sound, he writes, was startling: "a dissonant instrumental played with an uncontrolled abandon"; a clarinet "sounded as if it were in the throes of death—bent, contorted, and skirting along the margins of control." The music came from Epirus, a remote region in northwestern Greece that had "steadfastly resisted assimilation" for thousands of years. After acquiring hundreds more records, King made several trips to the mountain villages of Epirus to investigate the "musical biosphere" from which the viscerally shattering sounds emerged. He locates one origin of the music in "laments and funeral dirges," which evolved from metrical poetry into instrumental pieces: "a calculated wailing through an instrument such as the clarinet or the violin" that represented "collective remembrance" rather than the commemoration of one individual. In Epirus' sheepherding villages, the shepherd's flute, he believes, was the foundation of all the music that ensued. Participating in festivals, learning traditional dances, drinking the "psychotropic grape distillate" tsipouro, interviewing musicians, collectors, and scholars, King concludes that the "preeminent purpose" of music in Epirus was "therapeutic and curative to the individual and the village." Music, he writes, "was a tool for survival."A fascinating journey led by a passionate guide.

Kirkus Reviews