Justinian - Epic Symphony

Music composed by Farya Faraji, and featuring instruments by Dimitris Athanasopoulos, Ilias Vlamakis, Ilias de Sutter Ndavidlis, Gökhan Saraç, Izet M, Carmel Abramovitch, and Latin translations by Demetrios Paraschos. A massive shoutout to Ilias Vlamakis for allowing me to use his lyra recordings. Please check out his amazing work at Cretan Lyra Lab: This symphony tells the story of Eastern Roman emperor Justinian I, using the musical language of modern Greek music and its Byzantine medieval antecedents, both secular and liturgical. The soundscape consists of a wide variety of instruments: the oud, kanun and lyras, which served as the central trinity of Eastern Roman court music in the 1000’s to the end of the empire, ancient instruments going all the way back to Antiquity and still played today like the tsambouna and mandouras, and folk instruments like the tambouras family of lutes and the kaval flute of northern Greece. The melodies are based on the compositional and performative practices of liturgical Byzantine and Old Roman Chant, regional folk music such as Cycladic, Cretan, Pontic, Thracian Greek music, etc, with the exception of passages dealing with other cultures than the Eastern Romans. The chapter “A New Cathedral“ is not my own composition and is a lyra rendition of the traditional Orthodox hymn Xristos Anesti. The chapter “Theodora’s Malady“ is not my own composition and is instead a 16th century Greek composition by a Greek Orthodox monk called Vatepodinos the Younger, played expertly here by Ilias Vlamakis of the Cretan Lyra Lab channel. The lyrics are written in and pronounced using Classical Latin for convenience: it is not representative of how Latin was spoken at the time. Note that I also ignored vowel length and stress accent frequently for this symphony. 00:00 Overture : I am Justinian 08:20 My Empress 13:42 The Reforms 19:20 The Shadows Over Me 25:32 Nika 35:26 The General 40:00 A New Cathedral 44:00 Renovatio Imperii: Part I 58:54 Renovatio Imperii: Part II 1:06:12 Belisarius’ Crown 1:12:24 The Weight of Dreams 1:16:00 The Two Eyes of the Earth 1:29:26 The Plague 1:34:12 The Empress Reigns 1:39:12 Theodora’s Malady 1:42:00 Farewell, My Queen 1:47:30 Time 1:52:12 A General’s Farewell 1:57:14 Legacy 2:00:50 Death