Keynote Lecture & Performance: Constructing Byzantineness within Metal
Fulya Çelikel Soğancı, Independent Scholar
As a scholar hailing from Istanbul, formerly the capital of the Byzantine Empire for more than a thousand years, it is no surprise for me to discover that this city, with its 3000-year history, has inspired many metal artists and has already been presented to this vibrant community of scholars in the last Heavy Metal and Premodernity Conference. It is vastly enlightening and enjoyable to listen to how Constantinople is represented as a place and an ethos, from the viewpoint of Antje Bosselmann-Ruickbie: for the most part she does not present any deductions, only letting information speak for itself. The last section of her presentation focuses on “Dark Love Empress”, a song by Leave’s Eyes. The song, according to its semiotic content (Norsemen, they hail from the Black sea, Past Eastern grounds, forging destiny, We are rushing forward to Byzantine lands, We are laying our fortune into noble hands…) and its iconography, namely the Byzantine crown which is replicated from the Hagia Sophia Mosaic of Zoë Poryphrogenita, alludes to the named Byzantine Empress. Her voice is not heard through the song (“We” refers to the Norsemen), she is distant, dangerous and full of fear and despair.
Leave’s Eyes’ “Dark Love Empress” is a quintessential symphonic metal work: the expected piano and string sounds, orchestral gestures, video clip featuring the lead singer in a gothic style black gown alone in dark woods, discovering a secret. The music makes no attempt to either assume a Byzantine identity, nor, in my opinion, does it remotely suggest a “northern” or ”Viking” sound world. The lyrics contain signifiers such as “Byzantine Shores, Eastern, Holy Lands” which could be word-painted with sound devices that our perception, shaped in the wake of Exotic fin-de-siècle European Opera and Hollywood, would represent the geographic locations these words describe. This would have provided Leave’s Eyes with a musical/compositional opportunity to create a blended sonic atmosphere to represent the two civilizations the song mentions, however they seem content to stick with the defining qualities of the Symphonic Metal subgenre. This, of course, could only be confirmed as a fact through an interview made with the band members.
It could be argued that Symphonic Metal sometimes features “exotic” elements (ethnic instruments, non-western scales and modes, vocal samples) for purposes of world building. This influx of foreign material into Symphonic Metal does not affect the music in a structural sense, it does not directly assume the “identity” of the foreign material. According to my interview with the Dutch Symphonic Progressive Band Epica, they use the oriental/exotic material in the abovementioned habitual way of Western Art Music, because it is interesting for the average listener and creates a contrast (See the songs Seif al Din and Code of Life). Those bands who habitually do more than “borrowing” material from the East are “Eastern” bands: Myrath, Melechesh and Orphaned Land are two prominent examples, and they are consequently pushed into a niche of their own, either towards the “progressive” side, or the “oriental” side. Some bands, such as Nile, despite their selected semiotic context, only assume non-Western sounds as allegories, perhaps even ironies (See Ethno-Musicological Cannibalisms from their album “At the Gate of Sethu”).
This lecture-recital discusses a third approach to creating a metal song on premodernity: is it possible to “reconstruct” a sound world by using material that originally belongs to that society? I am presenting a deliberate anachronism that probably could only be imagined by a historical musicologist and metal song writer. I am writing an album for my band Listana on the very subject Leave’s Eyes bases their song “Dark Love Empress”. The story of the Byzantine Empress Zoë truly is extraordinary for many reasons and our 4-song concept album Porphyrogenita relates the events from the protagonists’ point of view, admittedly not in the sense of a metal opera, but a concept album. I am aiming for a narrative in the cinematic sense: using synth sounds (thus not orchestral samples) juxtaposed with symphonic choirs and genuine Byzantine music, combined with clean and brutal/scream vocals and 7-string guitars. The voice of an earlier female figure of the Byzantine Era, the ninth-century composer/poet/abbess Cassia has miraculously came down to us and her hymns have recently been carefully transcribed into modern notation and performed in a style conscious sense through a musicological project. These are for the most part monophonic hymns, at the verge of breaking into polyphony through the presence of a movable drone. This biphonic construction precedes its equivalent, the Notre Dame Organum, by almost one and a half century. Through careful analysis of this music, I am looking for ways to subsume the characteristic modes/cadences/and text setting approach to my band’s music. I feel entitled to doing this both as a denizen of Istanbul, the eternal city that connects me with these two women of the past, and as a woman who inhabits the recently men only domain of metal music composition: Cassia, Zoë and Fulya the humble bard, who wishes to tell their story from a thousand years ago, hopefully, for posterity.