A live performance of one of my original compositions for replica ancient Greek tortoise shell lyre, "The Death of Socrates".
The lyre features an actual foraged land tortoise parapace, a soundboard of goat skin, arms of goat horn, with authentic strings of unpolished gut. I particularly like the subtley raspy, delicate, mandolin-like timbre the plectrum of carved foraged tortoise shell creates.
This piece features on my 2015 album, "The Ancient Greek Tortoise Shell Lyre" - available from all the usual digital music platforms, studio quality audio plus a PDF booklet of the detailed album notes are available from Bandcamp:
michaellevy.bandcamp.com/albu...
The track started off as an improvisation in the intensely mournful ancient Greek Hypodorian Mode. Sometimes also known as the 'Natural Minor Mode', this was misnamed the 'Aolian Mode' in the Middle Ages; it is formed of the equivalent intervals as A-A on the white notes of the piano.
My marvellously mythological lyre was handmade in modern Greece, by Luthieros:
www.luthieros.com/
According to ancient Greek mythology, the first lyre was fashioned from a tortoise shell, by the god Hermes, as recounted in the 4th Homeric Hymn to Hermes:
"For it was Hermes who first made the tortoise a singer. The creature fell in his way at the courtyard gate, where it was feeding on the rich grass before the dwelling, waddling along. When he saw it, the luck-bringing son of Zeus laughed and said:
'An omen of great luck for me so soon! I do not slight it. Hail, comrade of the feast, lovely in shape, sounding at the dance! With joy I meet you! Where got you that rich gaud for covering, that spangled shell -a tortoise living in the mountains? But I will take and carry you within: you shall help me and I will do you no disgrace, though first of all you must profit me. It is better to be at home: harm may come out of doors. Living, you shall be a spell against mischievous witchcraft; but if you die, then you shall make sweetest song.'
Thus speaking, he took up the tortoise in both hands and went back into the house carrying his charming toy. Then he cut off its limbs and scooped out the marrow of the mountain-tortoise with a scoop of grey iron. As a swift thought darts through the heart of a man when thronging cares haunt him, or as bright glances flash from the eye, so glorious Hermes planned both thought and deed at once. He cut stalks of reed to measure and fixed them, fastening their ends across the back and through the shell of the tortoise, and then stretched ox hide all over it by his skill. Also he put in the horns and fitted a cross-piece upon the two of them, and stretched seven strings of sheep-gut. But when he had made it he proved each string in turn with the key, as he held the lovely thing. At the touch of his hand it sounded marvelously..."
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