Simon Karas (Lepreo ,21 May 1903 – Athens, 26 January 1999)[1] was a Greek musicologist, who specialized in Byzantine music tradition.
The figure of Simon Karas is highly controversial, and it strongly divides Byzantine music scholars and performers into two camps: one supporting, and one opposing his philosophy and his works.
His opponents' chief argument is that some works and musical experiments of Simon Karas are highly non-traditional, at the edge of being heretical, at least from their point of view.
Simon Karas proposed to decrease this ambiguity by re-introducing some of the old (paleographic) qualitative sings, to differentiate between different possible embellishments.
He also tried to guess and reconstruct the relations and history of these modes and scales, as well as regularities of their internal interval structure.