In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Eleni Sikelianos’s Memory Rehearsal is a masterfully told memoir that utilizes a mesmerizing mix of poetry, prose, and photographs.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“Making her first trip to her ancestral homeland, Eleni slowly reveals an unconventional family history in an intriguing blend of poetry, prose, performance texts, fiction, and nonfiction accompanied by archival and family photographs.”
In her own words, here is Eleni Sikelianos’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir Memory Rehearsal:
In the last few years of working on Memory Rehearsal, which took my 25 years to write, a handful of albums pulled me through. Because the book is about ancestors, I needed music that had a certain ritual vibe to it. I was trying to make sense of my great grandparents’ endeavors to bring about world peace via a wild artistic endeavor, a history I had been cut off from. My great grandmother, Evelina Palmer (1874-1952), “was an American heiress obsessed with the ancient Greeks. A poem, a vase, a song — if it was busted or missing parts it inspired her.” My great grandfather, Angelos Sikelianos (1884-1951), “was a poet obsessed with Ancient Greece as well as the Greeks of his time. He was sure he could hear the thrum of his own blood in the cicadas screaming in the trees, and the sound revealed marriages between past and future, the muses and humans.” These two spent a good portion of their lives devoted to a dream of healing national and psychic wounds, reviving the festivals and plays at Delphi, in two three-day festivals that occurred at the ancient site in Delphi in 1927 and 1930. Eva spent her entire fortune on this endeavor, and ended up homeless yet still trying to carry out her dream at the end of her life. The book is about many things, but one of them is my discovery of this past I knew very little about, since my access to it had been severed in the intervening generations.
Sappho de Mytilene, Angélique Ionatos and Nena Venetsanou (sung in Modern Greek, in translations by poet Odysseas Elytis)
One of Eva’s first Ancient Greek obsessions was Sappho. Like many lesbians of her time, she found in Sappho a queer ancestral past that offered a lesbian present tense. Many of Sappho’s fragmented poems had recently been discovered in a trash heap in Oxyrhynchus (modern Al-Bahnasa) in Middle Egypt, and these scraps ignited their imaginations. Eva set about teaching herself, and then her lovers, Ancient Greek.
One song among the stunning renditions on this album, “Pali pali…” (“again, again”) is a version of Sappho’s Fragment 130, which comes to us not from papyri trash, but from the ancient grammarian Hephaestion’s second century C.E. Handbook on Meters, where he quotes it.
Πάλη πάλη ο έρωτας – again, again, love, begins this sung version, whereas Sappho’s original (as far as Hephaestion’s quote of it is original) goes:
Ἔρος δηὖτέ μ’ ὀ λυσιμέλης δόνει,
γλυκύπικρον ἀμάχανον ὄρπετον.
which Anne Carson offers as:
Eros the melter of limbs (now again) stirs me —
sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in
This is the poem in which the compound “bittersweet” (γλυκύπικρον) is invented, though it’s actually “sweetbitter,” as Anne Carson points out in Eros the Bittersweet. That order is important because love is sweet first then bitter, as when the beloved flees. Eva’s stormy love affair with Natalie Barney certainly followed that order of things. Still, the two of them, with an army of lovers, set about rewriting the sanitized Victorian version of Sappho, which had rendered her a lover of men.
Some translators have love crawling in the dust in this fragment rather than “stealing in,” because that last word, “orpeton,” is the word we get herpetology from — referring to snakes and other slithering things— your limbs have been so seized by love you can only crawl in the dirt. Others take it as the verb for a bee who steals through the air, like Eros, with his wings, his honey, and his sting.
Mu, Don Cherry
For when I needed energy, drive.
Gamelan Music, Lou Harrison (1917-2003)
What a rich rabbit hole.
For this book, I was listening to ghosts. My great grandfather, Angelos, a bit of an attention-hog in life, seemed to want to speak to me even from the dead, while my great grandmother, Eva, announced her presence only with a faint tinkling of bells. Beautifully rhythmic yet ethereal, Harrison’s “Preludes” were often able to call her forth. Gamelan was invented to summon the gods, so it makes sense that these pieces beckoned an ancestral ghost. An astonishing person — somewhat self-taught and therefore less subject to boundary-thinking, Harrison came out to his family before coming out was a thing (in 1934). He was Cage’s sometimes lover and collaborator, and a collaborator and friend of poet-translator Kenneth Rexroth. Like Eva, he was a queer, politically engaged American resistant to the American mainstream, bringing together various cultural influences (he was fluent in Esperanto, Mandarin, and ASL). A student of the great Javanese gamelan master Kanjeng Notoprojo, Harrison began to create his own instruments from tin cans and aluminum furniture tubing. The pieces on this album are beautiful, sometimes forceful meditations, melodic congregations that move the imagination along in cyclical clusters. Since the book follows temporal swirls rather than forcing an arrow of time, these sonic landscapes were fantastic mechanisms for writing. They are also, in the rare pieces that include language, piercingly political, and like Eva’s work, dedicated to art’s engagement with justice and peace. The super short “Ode on Bravo Twenty”[*] begins, “The untied snakes of America drive down with stinking speed-and-gleam to pierce sweet ancient things…”
Ambient 1: Music for Airports, Brian Eno
This album is like a Pavlovian signal — I put it on, I write.
Musique de la Grèce Antique, Gregorio Paniagua
Gregorio Paniagua’s passion for early music led him to found his own workshop in which he recreated ancient instruments and songs based on drawings in manuscripts, vase paintings, and musical notations from Oxyrhynchus papyri. This album, for which he constructed ancient Greek instruments, was made in conjunction with restorative work of the Acropolis in 1978. These songs, less troubled and troubling than the Acropolis restorations, include an ode to the Pythia, the mythic snake guarding the oracle at Delphi.
Silver Ladders, Mary Lattimore
Poet Carolina Ebeid (see her recent book, Hide) turned me onto this one. The harp. Listen to the moody “‘Til a Mermaid Drags you Under,” accompanied by guitarist Neil Halstead. Would love to collaborate with her one day.
“The Hymn of Kassiani,” by Kassiani (Sung by Nektaria Karantzi [and many others] in Medieval Greek)
In 2025, I was lucky enough to be in Athens on a Holy Tuesday, and went to the Church of St. Dimitrios Lombardiaris near the Hill of the Muses (just down from the Acropolis), designed by the amazing architect Pikionis, to hear the cantor sing Kassiani’s hymn. Kassiani (c. 810-c. 865) is the only known woman poet-composer whose work is used in the Byzantine liturgy. I sought the microtones with eyes closed against the candles lit all around. Eva first left for Greece because she heard a young Greek woman sing such a hymn in Paris. Following that song, her whole life changed permanently, forever. Besides her Delphic Festival endeavors, she invented an organ, a Panharmonium she called it, that would capture all the microtones in Eastern music, from Greece to India, in her ongoing search to preserve precolonial traditions and bringing cultures together. With her lover Kurshed Naoroji, she hoped to start a music school, but their plans were demolished with the outbreak of the Second World War. About hearing the song in Athens, I write, “The psalter’s throat clutched and freed the O’s as if they were eggs. Each vowel pulsing, so that a ‘tear’ took many seconds to fall. My guess is I could hear some but not all these tiny births.”
Night Sky in Sine Saloum,Yandé Codou Sène(sung in Serer, the predominant language in the Sine Saloum region)
I was working on some of the last stages of the book in the Tambacounda region of Senegal (many of the “Methods of Transmission” sections were written there), so I tapped into the great tradition of Senegalese music. Yandé Codou Sène’s Night Sky in Sine Saloum begins with an incredible polyphonic invocation — voices and drums. This is where we feel the loss of liner notes in our new listening methods, but I’ve gathered that Yandé Codou Sène (1932-2010) was once Leopold Senghor’s official griot. This is her first full-length album, released when she was 65. I can’t help but wonder if she was, like other griots of the Senegambia region, buried in a baobab tree, though I was told Senghor put a stop to this tradition.
Into the Light, etc., Marisa Anderson
Basically anything by incredible guitarist Marisa Anderson, who I first heard opening for Xylouris White in Providence. I once had the pleasure of performing with her in a garage in Portland.
The Sacrificial Code, Kali Malone
Nearly two hours of pipe organ compositions that are vaguely churchy but agnostic, minimalist and moody. In the title piece, there’s a lower register that feels like the soul at that place where the world’s thick, wide rubber bands cross, or the interior omphalos, or the oracle buried in the dirt, and then an upper register that is the mind stepping in mid-air, tentatively finding its way through the material. Sometimes the pieces are a little scary, in the best way, as if dark ethereal earth ghosts are floating through them. You can sort of hear the deep rumble of the earth-heart, and the pieces are long. They’re kind of dirty and clean at the same time, the way you want the sound track in your dreams.
[*] “Bravo 20 is the largest of the four air-to-ground impact target ranges associated with Fallon Naval Air Station, the Navy’s ‘top gun’ training base nearby in Fallon, Nevada,” The Center for Land Use Interpretation tells us.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Eleni Sikelianos’s playlist for her poetry collection Make Yourself Happy
Eleni Sikelianos’s playlist for her memoir You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek)
Born into a family of tree workers, bohemians, poets, ne’er-do-wells, visionaries, and smalltime sort-of hustlers, Eleni Sikelianos is a poet, writer, collaborator, and “master of mixing genres.” As a student of the poets of Naropa, she is a lineage-holder in the Outrider poetics family tree. Deeply engaged with ecopoetics, her work takes up urgent concerns of environmental precarity and ancestral work. She has published ten books of poetry (most recently, Your Kingdom, 2023) and two unclassifiable hybrid works, sometimes called nonfiction, sometimes memoirs, sometimes fiction: The Book of Jon and You Animal Machine. Among other honors, she has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Fulbright Artists fellowship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in nonfiction. She grew up in Goleta, California, and now lives in Providence, Rhode Island.