Reviewed by: Greek Music in America ed. by Tina Bucuvalas Dafni Tragaki (bio) Tina Bucuvalas, editor, Greek Music in America. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. 2019. Pp. xii + 467. 105 illustrations. Paper $30.00. Greek Music in America is a collection of essays edited by Tina Bucuvalas, curator of art and historical resources with the City of Tarpon Springs, Florida, who has also served as a folklorist and director of the Florida Department of State. The book is meant to serve as a foundation for the study of Greek American music, which is described in the introductory chapter as an essential medium for the poetics of the Greek American diasporic community (3). This opening chapter, co-authored by Bucuvalas and Stavros K. Frangos, one of the most renowned experts in Greek American music culture, offers a broad overview of Greek music in America from 1880 to 2015. Thereafter, the book is structured in four sections organized according to historical periods and summarizing valuable information about musicians, record labels and recording activity, genres, instrument makers, performance venues, and contexts. As an overview of its subject, Greek Music in America offers a basic text for any future research on the topic by ethnomusicologists, historical musicologists, anthropologists, historians, and other scholars. [End Page 568] Part One, "Musical Genres, Style and Content," gathers essays, mostly published between 1981 and 2008, by pioneering authors in the field. The essays involve a wide range of topics: Greek Orthodox liturgical music (Frank Desby); the café aman musical tradition (Roderick Conway Morris); the amanes genre (Gail Holst-Warhaft); a comparison between rebetiko song and the blues that expands the geographical focus to Australia's Greek music scene (Stathis Gauntlett); the life and career of one of the most outstanding Greek musicians, George Katsaros, documenting the powerful networking of traditions by the international record industry (Frangos); the exploration of the place of spoken interjections in 78–rpm gramophone recordings of Greek songs (Michael G. Kaloyanides); and the intersection of Greek and Turkish song in America (Joseph G. Graziosi). Since several of the reprinted essays are apparently less accessible today, Part One largely serves the re-surfacing of carefully selected, highly influential archival, folklore, anthropological, literary, historical, and ethnomusicological published research on the topic, while inspiring their critical reconsideration and theoretical reframing. The next section, "Places," collects chapters originally published between 1985 and 2012 (according to the information given in the Notes), including Sotirios (Sam) Chianis' essay on Greek folk music in New York, Anna Caraveli's ethnography of glendi performances, and Anna Lomax Wood's public folklore research on diasporic Kalymnian spongers' musical traditions focusing on the family of Nikitas Tsimouris. A new chapter by Panayotis League on Kalymnian music and dance in Tarpon Springs provides a fresh ethnomusicological perspective and raises questions of performance, authenticity, gender, embodiment, identification, and belonging. The acclaimed historical recordings researcher Dick Spottswood opens Part Three, "Delivering the Music: Recording Companies and Performance Venues," with a chapter offering a highly informative documentation of Greek music recordings from 1896 to 1937. The chapter by Meletios Pouliopoulos, a dedicated music archivist, deals with the apparently understudied topic of Greek piano rolls in the United States and provides a useful starting point for those interested in studying Greek American music's technoculture in the 1920s and 1930s. Anthony Shay's chapter recounts a choreographer's encounter with Greek folk dancing, while the essay by Nick Pappas (originally published in 1981) is a lively account of New York's Greek nightclubs during the 1980s. The final section, "Profiles," offers biographical accounts of Greek-American popular musicians, instrument-makers, and individuals actively involved in the music scene; it thus forms a sort of encyclopedic corpus of entries authored by dedicated specialists. The closing Appendix by Frangos provides a detailed [End Page 569] and systematic outline of Greek music collections in the United States that is a much-needed compilation and description of the available archival sources. Greek Music in America substantially contributes to the organization of relevant scholarship and paves the way for further investigations while hoping to attract a wider readership. Though the quantity of recent research is rather disproportionate, the book is likely to stimulate interest...
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Apr 25, 2024
Leonardo D’Amico 
Open Access