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telios Petrakis is a top Cretan lyra player, who performed with his quartet at Womex Cardiff and is also a leading lyra maker who, with Ross, developed the sympathetic-stringed lyra that he, Ross, Kelly and many others use. Peter Biffin, Australian inventor and maker of the brilli ant and handsome range of cone-res- onator bowed instruments he calls tarhus, created with and for Ross a lyra tarhu; now Labyrinth’s resident instrument maker Mazdak Ferydooni is making gor- geously dusky-sounding lyra nak-tarhus with double-length metal sympathetic strings and five playing strings of untwist- ed bunches of fine fishing line.
Stelios tells me, “I began playing lyra at the age of seven. I met Ross at the age of eight or nine. At that time my father was the mayor of a small town called Sitia at the east of the island. And the great master Kostas Mountakis, who was Ross’s teacher, told the mayor that he would like to begin a lyra school there. So my father wanted to give a good example to the citizens by sending his children.” Ross soon took over from the ailing Mountakis as teacher.
A decade later Stelios, getting his law degree in Athens, was becoming very seri- ous about music, and met Ross again and continued lessons with him. “I tried the laouto, and he gave me a lot of material to listen to other kinds of music. I was interest- ed in the bag˘ lama, and the lute from Istan- bul, lafta. Then I joined the Labyrinth musi- cal group, and lessons became rehearsals and rehearsals became concerts. And con- certs became my life. So in this Labyrinth I had the opportunity to meet great masters that Ross was inviting to play with us. I was so lucky to have twenty years of this kind of
interested in developing each musician’s fantasy. Not only to be faithful to the old, but improve our skills for composition, for incorporating other cultures’ ideas. Because, as he believes, and he’s right, if a musical tradition is closed and without any dialogue, with the neighbours at least, then it’s going to be shrinking all the time, a closed thing which will be listened to, or useful, for fewer and fewer people. So his effort is to try to get folk traditions open, in an open dialogue. So this place is linking from the past to the future.”
Christos Barbas, a very fine ney player, who also plays piano and kaval in Magna - ni mus Trio, and whistle in Thessaloniki celtic band Tir Fada, tells me “I came here about twelve years ago for the first time, and I come every year; it was like a univer- sity for me.”
Kelly Thoma playing Cretan lyra
experience, to be sitting next to big masters and play the same concerts.”
“Without Ross Cretan music would be very much poorer. He also put it into more formal places like concert halls all over Europe and introduced it to larger audi- ences, and his compositions are so beautiful that local people have incorporated them into their repertoire. His students and his example influenced many people to try new things. Labyrinth is at the same time the source from which we take knowledge, a meeting point, a place for exchange of cultures, the reference for developing new ideas and in a nice environment. He’s really
Musical meetings, developing friend- ships, and the irrelevance to music of polit- ical lines on the map are a key aspect of Labyrinth. Violinist Giorgos Papaiouannou plays with Christos in the quartet Neda, whose members met at Labyrinth (I reviewed their CD in fR369). He tells me “If you get deep into your own tradition and study it, you become interested in neigh- bouring traditions, and that expands to musics of the wider world.”
As well as the seminars and master- classes, since 2010 Labyrinth has run, in a low-key way, a four-day festival in August at which play, voluntarily, musicians who have become part of the Labyrinth orbit as students or teachers. Kelly asks me “Don’t say too much about it – last year we had 23,000 people!” This in a village with a population under 1000!
www.labyrinthmusic.gr F
Photo: Andrew Cronshaw
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