Justinian - Epic Symphony

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&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&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...