Lefkosia, 1947, Mevlevi tekke (from the British Pathe archives)

The knife dance

Weapon dances in general, and knife dances in particular, exist in most cultures throughout the world. The role of the knife in the dance, and the function of the dance itself vary from culture to culture, and from dance to dance. A quick search on youtube, for instance, will bring up the following examples:





There are various Cypriot dances which utilize particular objects (I suppose they are no longer objects when utilized in the dance ritual - and one may wonder as to whether they are even to be called instruments). These include dances with sickles, sieves, and glasses.
Contrary to the previous three, the knife dance is not often danced for tourists. In fact, I could not find any recordings of either performances, or the music that accompanies it. This rendition by Halaris just doesn't seem right:



[I'm not sure about this, but] it's more likely that the music that accompanied the knife dance is the same as that which accompanies the sickle and sieve dances. A strikingly similar tune accompanies the Lesbian knife dance:



(The tunes of other knife dances, such as this one from Pontus, or these two from Konya and Thrace, vaguely remind me of some Cypriot melodies, but I think that's coincidental, or even my imagination.)

It is customary (as was in antiquity) for many knife dances in the region to be representations of violent struggle. Yet, I've heard, the Cypriot knife dance, which was performed at weddings and other festive occasions, was sometimes the occasion for real bloodshed, and apparently one knew (if one was 'sensible'), in particular villages, to leave before it started.

A noisy paradox (or waking up on the wrong side of one's bed)

There's a lot of paradox involved in the notion of the 25th of March as somehow being a 'national holiday' (in Cyprus, jiolis), to be celebrated with, among other things, parades. At least one of the paradoxes is a musical one, and has to do with the history of the kind of music that is employed in celebrating 'the overthrow of the Ottoman yoke', and/or the refusal to pay Ottoman taxes.

Music, and particular brands of noise, had been employed in military practice since antiquity. I've heard that the Byzantines, for example, are known to have attempted to strike fear into the hearts of their enemies by using the hydraulis, an organ that used water to create its sound.

Here's some more recent examples of water organs:






One of the most distinctive innovations associated with the Ottoman army was its use of marching bands, the so called mehterân (according to wikipedia, 'thought to be the oldest variety of military marching band in the world'). They look and sound kind of like this (in historical reenactment):



The music of these bands, closely interlinked with the janissaries, were to later influence the music of various notable European composers (Mozart, Beethoven, etc) in their alla turcas.

E.g. Mozart's Overture to 'The Abduction from the Seraglio' (from Concerto Köln and Sarband's 'Dream of the Orient'):



[Slavoj Zizek makes much of this dimension of turquerie (in 'The Disturbing Sounds of the Turkish March', 2007), talking about Turkey's appearing in the role of Europe's other in Beethoven's ninth symphony. I attended one of his lectures on this, at the end of which a gentleman (I regret that I do not know his name) pointed out that the march in Beethoven's ninth symphony, though often misunderstood to be a Turkish march, is in fact a French march.]

In other words, ironically, the 'European-style' marching music that is used to celebrate independence from the Ottoman empire really copies music that mimicked Ottoman marching music.

Sufism in Cyprus

Naqshbandi dervishes in Cyprus, with Sheikh Muhammad Nazim Adil al-Qubrusi al-Haqqani, performing a Somalian-style (if I'm not mistaken) Hadra: