Love, the Food of Music
Article by Peter Sandle
One of the things anyone listening to the radio will notice here is the amount of Greek music you can hear. In Thessaloniki alone, there are countless stations belting out Hellenic melodies 24 hours a day, whereas in Austria and Hungary commercial broadcasts are dominated by US and UK artists.
So there’s a very strong indigenous music industry, which has a worldwide reputation. Its merits were even commended to me by the Serbian policeman I gave a lift to when driving from Greece to Hungary.
Months of exposure to its tuneful tones have led me to realise something about the content of its lyrics – they are nearly always about love – romantic love between a man and a woman. Yes, you will say to me, but that’s true of pop music in every country in the world. Well, I’m sure it’s the dominant theme everywhere, but when I compare what I hear here everyday with what I’ve heard over the years in English, I have no doubt there is a difference of emphasis. A large proportion of rock and quality pop numbers with English lyrics do not deal with romantic love, touch on it only indirectly, or dwell on it in some negative way – the track “Every day I love you less and less”, comes to mind! Whereas here most songs contain the phrase ?’?????, “I love you”, often with the intensifier ????, “so”, and are liberally peppered with such words or expressions as ?? ????? ???, “your eyes”, ????? ????, “first kiss”, ?? ????????, “I will wait”, and ?? ?????? ??? “my dream”. This kind of lexical content used to put me off songs as sugary, sentimental material suitable for young teenage girls. Here, though, such an attitude is not possible, as artists from pretty well every point on the scale are working the same theme. In the West (I speak ecclesiastically), it seems, what you sing about is a variable which the popular culture musician can alter to suit his creative purposes, but in the East, the content is on the whole a given, and variety must find expression through some channel other than unusual lyrical content.
I’ve just had a look at the Wikipedia summary of C S Lewis’s “The Four Loves”. Here’s the greater part of the section on Eros: “Eros (????) is love in the sense of ‘being in love’…. [Lewis] identifies eros as indifferent. This is good because it promotes appreciation of the beloved regardless of any pleasure that can be obtained from them. It can be bad, however, because this blind devotion has been at the root of many of history’s most abominable tragedies. In keeping with his warning that “love begins to be a demon the moment [it] begins to be a god”, he warns against the danger of elevating eros to the status of a god.”
Is true romantic love, ????, some neutral category entirely separate from the ????? that moved God to send his only begotten Son into the world to save sinners? This seems to me a rather pessimistic interpretation. Could it not be that this and all forms of human love are degrees of participation in the love of God. Such a view would make the Greek preoccupation with romantic love a good thing. Eros, in this view, is a worthy subject to sing and think about everyday. If all human loves are in a continuum with each other and with the Agape love of God, then the other, no less important, loves need not worry that in popular cultural they more often than not take a back seat and are represented by their more spectacular sister, Eros.
Eros is something beyond the rational. It can be explained to some extent by pointing to the features in the beloved that might excite the affection, but mere aesthetic and moral appreciation of someone is not being “in love” with them. It is much “bigger” than that, and to account for it greatness, we perhaps have to venture into the realm of the divine, and thus touch on a sphere where we find an interesting parallel with another aspect of Greek life – the Orthodox Church. This institution too is something super-rational. You would never have guessed it. You couldn’t have sat down with the Bible and even begun to imagine that this would be one of the outworking of Jesus’ mission. Human culture, divine revelation, and a special gift to retain tradition, though, combined to produce something that, while not perfect in the details its human fallibility is responsible for, provides a multidimensional place of supernatural, super-rational meeting between God and man. This has been entrusted to the Greeks, and those nations that either did not follow Rome in the Great Schism or chose to adopt Eastern rather than Western Christianity after that.
You will find a clue to the last point in the fact that in 1054 the schism was officially initiated by the Papal legation entering the church of Ayia Sofia in Constantinople during the divine liturgy, and putting their bull of excommunication on the altar. As our Lord said “by their fruits ye shall know them” – whatever reason they were breaking away for, it was not because they were concerned to preserve at all costs the sanctity of worship and the communion with the Creator it provides. Pure rationality is blind to so much, whether it be the outpourings of God himself in a long established ritual, or the mysterious roots of profound affection between two individuals.
About the Author
Brit based in Greece. http://www.savarian.com