Taking music back to its roots EDINBURGH FESTIVAL: Time travel is again a feature of this year's programme, finds Michael Tumelty

WHEN the Edinburgh International Festival's director, Jonathan Mills, launched an early music strand in his first programme last year, he immediately faced a question: if it's a success, what next? It was a success, so what next?

His thinking was informed by two specific ideas. The broad theme he was developing for this year's festival embraced the concept of borders, meeting points and crossroads. That triggered further ideas: of music that might be locked within a chronological border, or frozen in time; of music that was at a crossroads in historical development; and of music of such intrinsic power that it exerted a seminal influence on other music that followed it.

Last year's early music exploration was linear. It followed a timeline; not a rigid line, but one that weaved a course through the seventeenth century, into the eighteenth, turning back on itself to explore some early origins. As a programming device, it would not do for the idea that was fermenting in Mills's mind for this year's programme.

What he's come up with, in the five-concert series entitled Song and Civilisation, to be staged in Greyfriars Kirk on successive evenings of the first full week of the festival, is not so much a set of concerts as an archaeological dig into some of the foundations of vocal, choral and instrumental music.

His proposal is straightforward. "What happens when you excavate deeply into the sources, the wellsprings of European music from ancient times?"

The five events will present curious audiences with a set of performances of the most unfamiliar music to which they will ever be exposed. The programme entitled Chant Wars is the exception, in that the CD recording of the programme, which explores a conflict of musical cultures in the ninth and tenth centuries, has achieved status and acclaim through universal praise and awards. Two specialist choirs, Dialogos and Sequentia, run by Katarina Livljanic and Benjamin Bagby (a husband and wife team) will combine to present a vivid account of the different chant cultures that collided in the different regions of the Carolingian Empire.

The other programmes contain music familiar only to aficionados. "But even then, " asserts Mills, "there won't be aficionados in all of these."

The series will open with the music of Buhurizade Mustafa Itri Efendi, also known as Itri, a composer and performer of Turkish classical music from Istanbul who died in 1711. He was a contemporary of Bach, though that doesn't necessarily mean anything. It is sometimes suggested that the socalled "Turkish music" that pops up in later western classical music (including Mozart's Il Seraglio) can be traced to Itri's style. Mills doesn't agree. "Itri is a much more refined composer than in the classical adaptation of so-called Turkish music. He's not that guy."

The selection of Itri's music that will be played draws from the spectrum of his surviving work:

classical music for the Ottoman court, compositions for hypnotic Whirling Dervishes ceremonies and for the mosques. Performers will be a sextet of instrumentalists and vocalists led by Kudsi Erguner, the master of the ney reed flute (also spelled nay) an incredibly expressive instrument that can be traced back three and a half millenniums before Christ. The music for the instrument, whose ornamented lyrical lines, tonal and microtonal, are breathed as much as blown, is beguiling.

From Turkey, the scene shifts to the Lebanon, with Psalms and Canticles from the Eastern Churches, performed by Sister Marie Keyrouz - nun, musicologist, teacher, peace activist and singer. There might be a bone of contention about this one, depending on what the Lebanese nun sings, and what her band, the Ensemble of Peace, plays.

There is no dispute about the authenticity of her chants, or the reverence with which she delivers them.

But Sister Marie is also a crossover artist, dipping into popular "sacred" classics, from Panis Angelicus to Schubert's Ave Maria which, frankly, neither this series nor the festival needs.

And I don't know what size of band she's bringing to Greyfriars, but when the big band is in full amplified flight, with waves of keyboard arpeggios and a heavy beat, it can sound a bit like Phil Spector meets the populist practice of Catholic musical ecumenism that was rampant three decades ago.

Following the Chant Wars, the series climaxes with a brace of concerts featuring the mighty Corsicans and Georgians of A Cumpagnia and the Anchiskhati Choir.

The music of the Corsicans has an elemental quality. It's meaty stuff that can be tender, but is not intended as balm. Sacred and secular, this is music driven by passion. It is music, as Mills has described it, "frozen in time", and revivified by A Cumpagnia. Musicologists don't know exactly what was happening in Corsica, says Mills. "There are conflicting stories about constant trade and visits from ships. There are stories about shipwrecks of pilgrims who got stuck there and built their choral traditions in that place and outside Time."

The Georgian tradition, as preserved and revivified by the Anchiskhati Choir, is equally distinctive. The drones and the sonorities might seem familiar from later Russian choral music, but the hairraising shifts that occur are unique. At one moment the harmony is full, rich and triadic. Abruptly, the richness will dissolve leaving bare, skeletal harmonies. Then, precipitously, the voices will plunge in a glissando to an unrelated harmonic plane. Harmonic progressions are set in train, then don't resolve, or are starkly juxtaposed with others. It is remarkable music, which occasionally can sound scarily modern.

Jonathan Mills is riveted by it. "It started somewhere in the monasteries of Georgia in the Caucus mountains, and is a fundamental influence on all of the chants that spread from the Middle East to Europe in the early stages of the Christian church.

"There is something raw and unsettling about this music, and I absolutely want the Georgian tradition here. It has been so influential, and you can trace so much back to those extraordinary monasteries."

Song and Civilisation: MondayFriday, August 11-15, Greyfriars Kirk, 5.45pm. Tickets GBP17.