Cretan lyra

The Cretan lyra (Greek: Κρητική λύρα) is a Greek pear-shaped, three-stringed bowed musical instrument, central to the traditional music of Crete and other islands in the Dodecanese and the Aegean Archipelago, in Greece. The Cretan lyra is considered to be the most popular surviving form of the medieval Byzantine lyra, an ancestor of most European bowed instruments.

String instrument

Cretan lyra/lira, Aegean lyra

321.321-71
(Necked bowl lute sounded by a bow)

10th century AD (est)

Playing style[edit]

The lyra is held vertically on the player's lap, in the same way as a small viol, rather than being placed under the chin of the player like a violin. For normal right-handed playing, the player's right hand holds the bow. The strings are stopped by pressing the fingernails of the player's left hand against the side of the string, rather than by pressing the string against the fingerboard. This gives it a different tone from the violin. Older lyras (lyrakis) have one string which is normally not fingered and is used as a drone, playing the same note while tunes are played on the other two strings

Construction[edit]

The Lyra has a body (kafka, or kafki) with a pear-shaped soundboard (kapaki), or one which is essentially oval in shape, with two small semi-circular soundholes. The body and neck are carved out of one piece of aged wood (minimum 10 years old). Traditionally the body's wood was sourced from trees growing in Crete such as walnut, mulberry and asfadamos, the local plane tree; today it is mostly imported.

The soundboard is also carved with a shallower arch and is usually made of straight-grained softwood: traditionally the aged wooden beams of buildings (katrani) and, ideally the 300-year-old wooden beams from Venetian ruins. In the past, the strings were made of animal gut and the bow (doxari) of horse-tail hair. In the past, the bow's arc usually had a series of spherical bells, gerakokoudouna (hawk bells), to provide rhythmic accompaniment to the melody when the bow was moving. Today, most lyras are played with violin bows.

A method for the vibration analysis and characterization of the Cretan lyre top plates was reported in 2006.^[1]

Common lyra

Lyraki

The old model of the Cretan lyra (also called lyraki ~ small lyra), is tuned 5-1-4. That is, the middle string is the lowest in pitch and the others are a 4th and a 5th above it. The performer plays the melody on the 1st and 3rd string, using the 2nd string as a drone (Magrini 1997), similarly to the Byzantine lyras from ca. 1190 AD, found in the excavations of Novgorod (Anthony Baines, 1992).

The contemporary lyra modelled after Stagakis' design is tuned in fifths to (G-d-a'), and like the violin, it uses no drone string. All strings may be fingered and used as melody strings.

In use[edit]

The Cretan lyra is still widely used in Crete (see Music of Crete), in some islands of the Dodecanese and the Aegean archipelago as well as in parts of northern Greece.

Artists[edit]

Noted Cretan Lyra performers include Andreas Rodinos, Thanassis Skordalos, Kostas Mountakis, Kareklas, Nikos Xilouris, Leonidas Klados, Ross Daly, Michalis Kallergis, Nikos Gonianakis, Kelly Thoma, Zacharias Spyridakis, Paris Perysinakis, Dimitris Vakakis, Stelios Petrakis, Vassilis Skoulas, Yiorgos Kaloudis and Psarantonis. Today in Rhodes, Yiannis Kladakis is known for reviving this type of lyra in the island. Georgia Dagaki is known for playing the instrument at the current shows of rock singer Eric Burdon. Yiorgos Kaloudis has interpreted Johan Sebastian Bach's suites for violoncello on the Cretan Lyra.