Theodora: Empress of Rome - Epic Byzantine Music

You can buy this song and the rest of my music here: Music by Farya Faraji. Not much historical value to this composition--this one is more Hollywood in style. I try to avoid that Hollywood sound as much as I can but I don’t mind using it from time to time just for fun. That said, the instrumentation itself is entirely based around the instrumental palette of the Byzantine Empire: there’s a Byzantine lyre, a qanun and an oud, which were all used widely in the empire. However, they were used in the Middle-Ages after the 9th century, so keep in mind that this instrumental sound is mostly projecting instruments of the 1000’s to 1400’s Byzantium onto the earlier era of Theodora, which would have been somewhere between Ancient Greek music and Medieval Greek music. I tend to call the kind of sound in this piece the “Orientalist“ sound--it’s not really Oriental or Greek music, but it’s more akin to the sound Western composers invented in order to represent the “East.“ I’m not a fan of the overuse of that sound, and the fact that in current pop culture, it has far overshadowed the actual music of the “East“, but I do enjoy it on its own terms. While it’s not an authentic representation of actual “Eastern“ musical styles, it is, in an of itself, a style that by now has existed for about 200 years ever since the era of Orientalism in Western Europe in the 1800’s--Orientalism being a period in that time when Western artists became obsessed with the civilisations of the “East,“ (again, whatever the “East“ means here, the definition is as broad and vague as Western understanding of the civilisations to the east of Western Europe in the 1800’s). What resulted was a an art movement interested more in what the West wanted the East to be, rather than what the East actually was, and projecting those stereotypes into their art. It’s from that era that was born the arbitrary association of certain musical scales like the Phrygian mode and the Double Harmonic Major (the Byzantine Scale) with the Middle-East, an association that is still unfortunately very commonplace, as evidenced by the fact that I receive comments daily on my Byzantine, Ancient Greek and Roman pieces of music questioning why they sound “Arabic;“ their line of thought being a product of 1800’s Orientalism that is still commonplace nowadays. The painting itself, “Impératrice Théodora,“ is an example of French Orientalist visual art by Jean Joseph Benjamin Constant, although in this case, the attention to detail and clothing is very accurate to Eastern Roman culture of the time; something that cannot be said for many other paintings of the era representing Arabian cultures or the Ottomans. It’s actually this very painting that inspired me to make this piece--its Orientalist style made me go for a similarly Orientalist piece of music for fun. While Orientalism continues to deal cultural damage through stereotypes on countries like Greece and its Middle-Eastern neighbours, the objective beauty of its visual and musical styles on their own term is undeniable, and so I wanted to pay homage to it with this piece. Theodora herself needs little introduction. She was the Empress of Byzantium in the 6th century, one of history’s greatest badasses in my opinion, and one of my all time favourite historical figures.