The last course I taught before retiring (2005) sought to update my work in Cross-Cultural Studies in Music by considering various facets of Ethnomusicology in the 21st century. (The CCSinM logfile tracks what I did in preparing and presenting, and draws heavily upon Web resources). One of the topical areas I developed was a module on Greek music, and even 4 years later it still holds up pretty well, but barely scratches the surface of my holdings in the several genres that might answer to the rubric 'Greek Music' ...so it's time to take on the greater challenge with a new summary.
I decided to begin with a database/catalog of CD and vinyl holdings, and use the resulting data as fodder for a broad range of pages which address various facets that I've found interesting. Here's what I stuck together in 2007, when I last worked with this material:
NB that the links don't work—the files are on my desktop drivesThis really doesn't work very well as a means of access to the vast wealth of music, and I need to spend more time on it to develop something a bit more friendly.
ordered by Title and ordered by Artist and sorted by Album
Among the subjects I want to explore are
Regional traditions (and there are lots of them, Greeks being anything but homogeneous. See Musical Geography)The urban musics of the 1920s and 1930s ("re[m]betika" is a handy cover term, but there are important subtypes)
Commercialization, mostly post-WW II, and substantially for tourist audiences; laika for Greek audiences
Recent fusion experiments, many of which draw on much older stuff
...and perhaps others, still to be defined, though Smyrna 1922 is an example of the sorts of productive digression I need to construct.
There are many topical extracts to be made, viz.
locative songs about women (Girl from Alexandria and suchlike)So what is it about this music? My own fascination with Greek music began more than 50 years ago with the sound, and since I don't have any competence in Greek, I must rely upon supplied translation of lyrics. The enormous task of transcribing from liner notes and books awaits me... but the content is really worth the effort. To see what I mean, consider this example, the lyrics of which reveal a multifaceted message in the song:
songs with dope references
taverna songs
social identities (Butcher's Boy, Shoemaker, etc.)
by principal instrument(s)
...etc. (Petropoulos has 21 headings)
I'm a Junkie/ Eimai prezakias (Rosa Eskenazi 1934)From dusk to dawn, my whole life is coke.
I can conquer the world when I snort that white powder.The whole world is mine when I have coke to snort;
But when the police see me, I disappear fast.When you get high, you become a king,Greece is mine; you can laugh at her plight.
a dictator, a god, and ruler of the world.
When you snort coke, you experience euphoria,
because everything in the world suddenly seems rosy.
She's missing one of her legs; man, they played dice for it.Man, if I were a dictator, the world could turn to ashes for all I care;
as long as I've got someone to light my hookah
and someone else to put it out.(What personal and societal disasters can possibly account for the sheer intensity of those two songs? Aman Yala's comment clarifies what's going on here: "I have always found the second verse especially poignant. It alludes to the loss of Western Anatolia and Eastern Thrace, which constituted the major territorial demands made by the Greek delegation at the Paris Peace Conference following the First World War. Both areas had been ceded to Greece under the terms of the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, which was later repudiated in favor of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne following the defeat of the Greek army in Asia Minor by Atatürk.")
Another way in: watch this 4:35 YouTube clip from Kostas Ferris' film Rembetiko. The words:
When a person comes into this world
sorrow is born with him
When a war beaks out anywhere, blood flows in streams
I swear by your eyes that were so sacred to me
that I shall turn the knife-wound you inflicted on me into laughter
And from the depths of hell burst your chains
and be blessed when you draw me to your sideI am burning, I am burning
Pour oil on my fire
I am drowning, I am drowning
Throw me in the depths of the sea
...and listen to the same song, sung here by Maria Kariofyllidou with Salto Orientale.
The Greek World has always been one of comings and goings, conquest by foreigners, and long-dustance commerce, and thus a person's life might involve spatial mobility and the effects of distant influences. Cosmo-politan is a thoroughly Greek concept, emphasizing heterogeneity and multiple social identities, and sometimes sheltering a person in secret ethnicities. In the Ottoman context, music was a quintessentially cosmopolitan profession. Thus,
Harvard has recently announced its Open Collections program, including Immigration to the US, 1789-1930. Three relevant items:
Fairchild, Henry Pratt. Greek immigration to the United States. New Haven : Yale University Press, 1911.Many personalities, and Markos Vamvakaris Archive is an interesting entrée to the murky world of the manges.Lacey, Thomas James. A study of social heredity as illustrated in the Greek people. New York : E.S. Gorham, 1916.
Xenides, J. P. The Greeks in America. New York : G.H. Doran Co., c1922.
Repertories and identities of a musician from Crete: Kostas Papadakis
Gail Holst-Warhaft Politics and popular music in modern Greece Journal of Political and Military Sociology, 2002, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Winter):297-323
The Work of the Greek Refugee Settlement Commission John Hope Simpson Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Vol. 8, No. 6 (Nov., 1929), pp. 583-604
Greek Hip Hop: Local and Translocal Authentication in the Restricted Field of Production Athena Elafros. 2013. Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media and the Arts. 41(1): 75-95.