Modern Greek Folk Music and Dance in the New York Public Library

Abstract

In January of 1970 the Music Division of The New York Public Library had the opportunity to acquire part of the personal library of the late Minos Dounias, music critic in Athens for a quarter of a century. He had long been interested in the folk music of his country (he authored the article on Greek folk music for Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart), and a number of volumes in his collection filled important gaps in the Library's holdings. Subsequently, Mrs. Evro Layton, under the aegis of the Modern Greek Studies Association, entered into an agreement to supply to the Library all current imprints from Greece which fall within the scope of NYPL's collecting policies, including, of course, folklore. (A number of other large research libraries have also subscribed to this plan.) Then, in 1973, the Library surveyed its collections in order to contribute to the forthcoming Handbook of Research Resources on East Central and Southeastern Europe, sponsored by the Joint Committee on Eastern Europe of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council. These three circumstances following closely upon one another provided the impetus for a thorough examination of the Greek folk music and dance collections at NYPL, and this bibliography is the result. As early as 1907 it was recognized that the folk song collections of the Reference Department (now known as the Research Libraries) of The New York Public Library were particularly strong. (See List of works in The New York Public Library relating to folk songs, folk music, ballads, etc. in the Bulletin of The New York Public Library, Vol. XI, No. 5, May 1907, p. 187-226.) And then with the publication of Donald C. Swanson's important Modern Greek Studies in the West (New York, The New York Public Library, 1960), which was largely based upon the Library's own collections, it became generally recognized that serious American scholars of modern Greek language and culture could not ignore NYPL's resources. It is difficult to make comparisons