Ali Pasha und die Musik des Epiros

The Albanian Vezir Ali Pasha Tepeleni was a famous Pasha and warlord between 1798-1821 of the Ottoman Empire, whose cultural activities influenced the traditional Greek and Albanian music of mainland Greeece till today. Many foreign travellers visited his court in Janina/Ioannina, capital of Epiros (Northern Greece), where a synthesis of South- European and Fanariot urban music mixed with Greek, Aromun (Vlach) and South- Albanian folk music was performed by Jewish and Roma musicians. This urban music has a genuin Greek -kommati--structure of fractal dimensions (similary with the -skopos- structure of the Greek Islands), which is verified by comparative analyses, recorded during a long term ethnomusicological fieldresearch since 1977 by Rudolf and Daniela Brandl and Bernhard Graf and archived in the -R.M. Brandl Collection- in the Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna and published in the -Orbis Musicarum- series in the Cuvillier Verlag on DVD. An important source is the Heritage Manuscript of the Epirotic master musician in the 5 th generation, Grigoris Kapsalis. It was recorded according to emic aesthetics and contained 60 Kleftic ballads, Ioanniotika and Alipashalitika from only one professional musicians family repertoire.