Greek Folk Songs Research Articles

A CHARACTERIZATION OF CAVAFY’S 18: CASCADING ENJAMBMENT AND THE SYLLABIC FORM

The influence of Constantine Cavafy’s (1863–1933) poetry outside of Greece has mainly proceeded through translations. Only in the last two decades has some attention been given to formal structures, such as meter and rhyme, which play a significant role in at least a third of his poems. Cavafy shows particular ingenuity creating one form, which is found in eighteen examples. It consists of visible hemistiches and a fixed syllabics structure. Cavafy built on the traditional structure of the Dekapentasyllavo or Greek folk song but allowed a flexible number of syllables, six or seven for either hemistich, together with a clear caesura. In later years, Cavafy would compromise the integrity of the meaningful phrase in each hemistich but never violated his own rules of syllabics. Syllabics look, feel, and sound different when they are applied in translation. They are a hidden structure with historical antecedents. Cavafy’s 18 are not limited to a theme or subject, yet the lack of attention to the form of these poems obfuscates Cavafy’s engagement with Modern Greek folk songs and his attempts to modernize their form.

Review

Review

Regional classification of Chinese folk songs based on CRF model

Music regional classification, which is an important branch of music automatic classification, aims at classifying folk songs according to different regional style. Chinese folk songs have developed various regional musical styles in the process of its evolution. Regional classification of Chinese folk songs can promote the development of music recommendation systems which recommending proper style of music to users and improve the efficiency of the music retrieval system. However, the accuracy of existing music regional classification systems is not high enough, because most methods do not consider temporal characteristics of music for both features extraction and classification. In this paper, we proposed an approach based on conditional random field (CRF) which can fully take advantage of the temporal characteristics of musical audio features for music regional classification. Considering the continuity, high dimensionality and large size of the audio feature data, we employed two ways to calculate the label sequence of musical audio features in CRF, which are Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM). The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method based on CRF-RBM outperforms other existing music regional classifiers with the best accuracy of 84.71% on Chinese folk songs datasets. Besides, when the proposed methods were applied to the Greek folk songs dataset, the CRF-RBM model also performs the best.

Music in the Imaginary Worlds of the Greek Nation: Greek Art Music during the Nineteenth-Century's fin de siécle (1880s–1910s)

This essay analyzes ways in which music becomes attached to the growing demand for national culture by the Greek middle class since the last decades of the nineteenth century.In modern Greece of that period, the predominant notions of ‘historic continuity’ and ‘Hellenism’, or ‘Greekness’, interpret Greek history as an uninterrupted evolution from the classical past to Byzantium. In terms of music, continuity was believed to be found from ancient Greek music to Byzantine hymns and folk songs. This theory, supported by important scholars and composers both in Greece and abroad, placed tradition in a privileged position both in composition and reception of music; composers incorporated rhythms, scales and the character of Greek folk songs and Byzantine hymns in their works and the middle-class audience was eager to accept folkloristic styles and the embodiment of tradition in art music because they reflected the notion of ‘national’. Musically, the theory of ‘historic continuity’ was strengthened by the links between German romanticism and attitudes to ancient culture. Moreover, German models, or the organic romantic perception of music, influenced representatives of the so-called National School of Music; the consequence was a growing alienation from Italian music in terms of offering aesthetic standards to composition and reception.

Greek Folk Literature, Poetry, Folk Songs and the Library of Congress PA (Supplement) Schedule

ABSTRACT This paper aims to explore, analyze, and assess the Library of Congress PA (Supplement) Schedule as it pertains to Greek folk (laiki) literature, Modern Greek poetry and Greek folk (dimotika) songs in particular. The notions folk literature, poetry and folk songs are discussed and elaborated upon. Particular effort is made to analyze the case of Byzantine folk (dimodi) literature. Last, in order to make the use of LC classification schedules more effective and accurate, clarifications and suggestions are made for the classification of folk literature.

Exile and the poetics of loss in Greek tradition

In Exile and the Poetics of Loss in Greek Tradition, Nancy Sultan examines the theme of heroic exile and return in Greek poetic tradition from the Archaic epic of Homer to modern Greek folk poetry and song. Sultan studies issues of how husbands and wives survive separation and communicate the painful experience of loss. Focusing on the role women play as obstacles and facilitators during the hero's exile and return, Sultan argues that the hero's reputation, his glory, that which he earns through suffering in exile, is managed by women-especially his wife and mother. Without their emotional support, the hero's glory is compromised. This innovative and interdisciplinary book will be of interest to classicists, anthropologists, and scholars of literature and women's studies.

Formulas and their relatives: a semiotic approach to verse making in Homer and modern greek folksongs

In a book I published a few years ago, entitledTowards a Poetics of Modern Greek Folksong, I examined certain aspects of the poetics of modern folksongs in the light of the ‘oral composition theory’ of Homeric poetry, originally expounded by Milman Parry in the late twenties and early thirties and subsequently elaborated by Albert B. Lord. In this paper I propose to follow the opposite course, and inquire whether some of my findings regarding the verse-making techniques of the modern folksongs could be applied to the Homeric epics, and whether they could be made to cast some additional light on the making of ancient epic poetry. More specifically, in my study of formular and otherwise similar verses in the folksongs, I was able to distinguish five degrees of kinship, as it were, or of decreasing similarity, from identical formulas to sense units of similar type. Can a comparable scale of similarities be found in Homer, and, if it can, could it be used in modern discussions of ancient epic versification and composition, without further encumbering a terminology that is not always clear or generally agreed upon? The purpose of this exercise is not merely taxonomic; by using some basic concepts of structural linguistics as tools, I think we may perhaps come a little closer to understanding the verse-making process, which is a prerequisite for understanding Homer's manner of composition and, in the last analysis, his ‘creativity’ or even ‘originality’ vis à vis the tradition to which he belonged.

Homer Sings the Blues

In a recent edition of this journal, G. M. Sifakis looked at possible Homeric echoes in modern Greek folksong. This paper may be regarded as a coda to that article. Like a satyr play coming after the major dramas it is not entirely serious, but it is not entirely flippant either. My aim is to offer some comparisons between the Homeric tradition and that of the blues singers of the (originally, southern) United States.

Για μια ποιητική του ελληνικού δημοτικού τραγουδιού (review)

Reviews 305 Greek, and questionnaires (for which no information is given about the respondents and which in no way produce statistically significant results). Despite the author's elaborate justification, one could seriously object to the use of decontextualized constructions to study "language in its social context." For this reason, the book's strength lies not so much in any rigorous sociolinguistic approach as in the wealth of material it unearths and in its useful insights into a series of phenomena whose study in Greek is still in its infancy. In its descriptive analysis, Sifianou's Politeness PL·nomena in Engend and Greece covers the areas of pragmatics and everyday usage that are known to be most demanding and most useful to the foreign learner, the translator, and the linguist. In addition, it emphasizes the need for further research on social aspects of Greek on the basis of pragmatic principles and contextual information. The informed theoretical discussion and the range of evidence from Greek (especially in chapter 7) are an invaluable contribution not only to Modern Greek linguistics but also to research on politeness from a crosscultural perspective. This contribution is especially welcome as an attempt to improve cross-cultural understanding at a time when nationalistic sentiments are resurfacing so ominously. Dionysis Goutsos University of Birmingham G. M. Sifákis. Γ. M. Σηφάκης, Για μια ποιητική του ελληνικοϕ δημοτικοϕ τϕαγουδιοϕ. Iráklio: Panepistimiakés Ekdósis KrÃ-tis. 1988. Pp. 236. Gregory Sifákis makes substantial progress "towards a poetics of modern Greek folk song" by harnessing the potential of oral-compositional theory more fully than any previous effort, as well as by marshaling selected elements of semiotic and linguistic theory for his purpose. This progress is all the more commendable when viewed in the context of the slow response in Greece to the rampant growth of oral-composition theory over half a century—a slowness that is paradoxical because it was from work on ancient Greek epics in the late 1920s by Milman Parry that the study of the purportedly universal phenomenon of oral-formulaic composition spread to a host of other medieval and modern literatures and waxed to the point of claiming the status of a whole new discipline, and because Homer has remained the standard analogue for modern oral poetry ever since. It is not that the Homer/folk song nexus had escaped notice in Greece, but rather that folklorists were preoccupied with exploiting the Homeric qualities of modern texts for other purposes, as revealed, for example, in the sub-title of I. E. Tsouderos's slim volume Όμοια καιπαϕάλληλαφϕαστικάσυστήματασταομηϕικάÎ-πηκαιστονεοελληνικό δημοτικότϕαγοϕδι:τασωστάκϕιτήϕιατηςγνησιότηταςτωννεοελληνικών δημοτικών τϕαγουδιών (Athens, 1976). More sophisticated investigators of 306 Reviews this nexus mentioned by Sifákis (pp. 137, 203) also refrained from pursuing formula analysis, and one might speculate that perhaps the use of South Slavic epic by Parry and A. B. Lord as the modern point of comparison for Homer dampened enthusiasm for their method and findings among exponents of the traditionally nationalistic discipline of laografÃ-a in Greece, while the perception that Parry's emphasis on tradition detracted from The Poet's originality and artistry (which earned Parry the label of "the Darwin of Homeric studies" in the West) would not have endeared him to Greeks who might otherwise have been pleased to argue for continuity from ancient to modern poetic technique. On the other hand, throughout his book Sifákis takes up the challenge of refuting the facile assumption that tradition and creativity are mutually exclusive. Whatever the reasons, just ten years before the publication of Sifákis's book, Alki KyriakÃ-du-Néstoros could report that Milman Parry's oral-formulaic theory had made no impact to date on the θεωϕία της ελληνικής λαογϕαφίας, which formed the title of her book (Thessaloniki, 1978, p.174). It seems that the efforts of overseas scholars including Morgan, Trypanis, Jeffreys, Alexiou, A. B. Lord himself, and especially James Notopoulos, who had tried valiantly in the 1950s to replicate Parry's and Lord's "Yugoslav laboratory" in Greece, failed to arouse much local interest. But the momentum was not lost, and it was not much longer before Roderick Beaton's Folk Poetry of Modern Greece (Cambridge, 1980) substantially inaugurated, among other innovations, the Parry-Lord approach to Modern Greek folk song. Not that his...

Homemric Survivals in the Medíeval and Modern Greek Folksong Tradition?

The basis of comparison between the Homeric poetry and Modern Greek folksong is that in either case we have a body of poetic texts behind which stretches a long tradition of oral composition; they both have existed, roughly, in the same geographical area, including mainland Greece, Asia Minor, the islands of the Aegean and the Ionian Sea, Crete, and Cyprus; and they are cast in cognate language forms. But the two bodies of poetry are separated by a great time distance, though how great it is difficult to determine because whatever we can say about the origins of modern folksongs is hypothetical and uncertain.

The Metrical Structure of the Oral Decapentasyllable

What Milman Parry saw as his ‘historical method’ in Homeric criticism has paradoxically relieved students of the Greek folk song from the obligation to approach their subject of study from an exclusively genetic or ‘etymological’ — in a word, historical — viewpoint. Instead of having to search for — or rather to speculate about — the origins of Greek oral poetry in the mists of antiquity or to assess the extent to which a song can provide reliable historical evidence concerning past events, we are free to turn our attention, as scholars such as Roderick Beaton (1980) and Grigoris Sifakis (1988) have done, to a synchronic study of the folk-song tradition, concentrating as much on the rules that generate the songs as on the significance of actual samples collected in the field (or in the scholar’s study or the recording studio).

Tradition and the Collective Talent: Oral Epic, Textual Meaning, and Receptionalist Theory

with a nagging and seemingly insoluble dilemma that has taken many forms and resists being held captive in any single, all-encompassing formulation. I mention as examples the academic jousting over analytical terms such as the phraseological "formula" and the narrative "theme" and the long debates over what is or is not a "motif. " The basic question amounts to this: can we agree on a grammar of compositional units and further, does our chosen model remain viable as we cross the linguistic line from one tradition to another? For the purposes of this essay and in order to speak directly to the concerns of this special collection of papers, I shall leapfrog both a bibliographical rehearsal of particular issues and the inevitable polemics involved, and instead concentrate on proposing a solution to the "unit problem" which, while perhaps rather radical in itself, finds its seeds in the writings of Walter Ong, Eric Havelock, Werner Kelber, Franz Bauml, Charles Segal, Robert Kellogg, and others. In concert with the general shift of critical focus from the text as object to the work as the reader's experience of that object, I suggest that we define the "units" of oral traditional discourse not strictly and exclusively as textual data, but also and equally as the necessarily subjective apprehension of those data by a reader or participant (whatever the prior experience of the reader or participant may be). I propose that we take as a starting point the idea of the work and its parts as processes rather than as an artifice and its discrete components, and that we stipulate that the unit of discourse-whether phraseological or narrative-cannot be understood as an object but only as a response. In other words, to summon the canonical Parry-Lord "oral formula" as an example, we need to realize that the phraseological unit consists not only of whatever chirographic avatar the highly literate reader uses as a reading mnemonic, but also and crucially of the informed but finally subjective response one makes to those "little black dots on the white page" in the larger context of the unexpressed (and inexpressible) reality of an oral tradition.

Wilhelm Muller. The Poet of the Schubert Song Cycles: His Life and His Works

Considered a German Byron by his contemporaries, Johann Ludwig Wilhelm Muller (1794 1827) is usually remembered today as the German Romantic poet whose lyrics Franz Schubert set to music in Die schone Mullerin and Die Winterreise. A philhellene who wrote impassioned lyrics in support of the Greeks in their struggle for independence from the Turks, Muller also collected and edited Italian and modern Greek folk songs. Goethe very likely became acquainted with Marlowe's The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus through Muller's 1818 translation of that work.Muller was an influential critic and scholar of the Romantic Era, a creative public librarian and publisher's consultant (with the prestigious firm of F. A. Brockhaus in Leipzig), a respected teacher, and a popular author of travel books all this despite his sudden and somewhat mysterious death at 32. The son of a guild tailor in the duchy of Anhalt-Dessau and a precocious and sometimes rebellious student, he nonetheless received lifelong aid from the ducal family, including a scholarship to the new University of Berlin. Muller left the University before completing his studies and spent two years as a volunteer in the Prussian Army fighting Napoleon. During this time, he had an unhappy love affair in Brussels. At 26, Muller married into one of the leading Dessau families, and at 30 he was granted the title Hofrat.In this first comprehensive study of Muller, Dr. Baumann presents a lively and vivid profile of the poet, prose writer, translator, critic, editor, philhellene, and traveler whose life reflects the landscape of literary concern from the Romantic movement to Junges Deutschland. A complete bibliography of works by and about Muller is included. This work in the words of one reader should interest any person with a general concern for the complex interrelationship of cultural and socio-political forces and the contact of key persons in German-speaking culture with one another during the late 18th and early 19th centuries . . . as a veritable 'window' into the period of Goethe.

Τρία πρόσφατα "Καππαδοκικά" τραγούδια από τη Νέα Σινασό

In 1962 the Belgian musicologist Paul Collaer, in collaboration with the«M. Merlier Folk Music Archives», recorded among other items, about adozen songs from a female refugee from Cappadocia in Asia Minor, thenliving in the northern part of the island of Euboea (Néa Sinassós). Thepresent article examines only those of the above songs which areunknown. All three of them have certain characteristics in common: theirtexts are recent (late 19th - early 20th centuries) and more or less of animprovisatory nature; they deal with subjects concerning illness, deathand the grief of the refugee; and in spite of the interest of their themesand the importance they have for the study of the later stages of thedevelopment of Greek folk song, they display certain weaknesses in theirphrasing and versification. The relation of N° 1 with a certain type ofrébétika (songs of illness) is noteworthy. N° 2, belongs to the category ofthe so called «incidental» (peristatika) songs, while at the same time it isdistantly related to the rébétika of the underworld. Moreover N° 3 is theonly dirge (mirológi) from Cappadocia which has come down to us in itscomplete form, i.e. both with its text and tune. The article is completedby a detailed study of the unfolding patterns of the melodies, their modality,rhythm, architectonic structure and form.

The Song beyond the Song Aesthetics and Social Interaction in Greek Folksong

body of meaning that is accessible to the outsider.1 Either a plot, however nominal, or the clarity of the situation, such as death, becomes the means for thematic organization and the conveyance of meaning. Though layers of additional meaning are created, for example, in performance or through metaphors and allusions with traditional, regional associations, there is, nonetheless, a degree of apparent accessibility in the content of the song that allows even an audience unfamiliar with folk poetry to apply, to some degree, the western aesthetics of written poetry to the interpretation of it. There is, however, a considerable corpus of folksongs and range of performance styles in most local repertories that appear to lack any of these devices for making sense common to other more familiar types of poetry: beginnings, middles or endings, smooth transitions from theme to theme, even minimal plot, etc. It is performance, rather than song type, which renders this body of folk poetry incomprehensible by western aesthetics. Whereas written collections of folksongs (Aravandinos 1880; Fauriel 1824; Petropoulos 1959; Politis 1914; etc.) present us with apparently complete versions of songs, performance often yields songs which appear fragmentary. Performance and social context reveal a body of meaning connected with the usage of songs, particularly when these are components of a larger performance event. In the past few years, a significant number of performance studies in folkloristics has provided us with useful models and methodologies for understanding oral events (see, e.g., Ben-Amos and Goldstein 1975; Bauman 1977; Paredes and Bauman 1972). An important source of folk aesthetics can be extracted from folk criticism-the criticism of the tradition bearers themselves. On the other hand, Albert Lord in his book The Singer of Tales demonstrates the existence of a

Collection Archives Melpo Merlier - Authentika Mikrasiatica [Greek folk songs from Asia Minor]. One 12“ LP Record. ACBA 1401. Recordings Melpo Merlier, photographs and notes in Greek and English by Markos Dragoumis. Athens, 1980.

Collection Archives Melpo Merlier - Authentika Mikrasiatica [Greek folk songs from Asia Minor]. One 12“ LP Record. ACBA 1401. Recordings Melpo Merlier, photographs and notes in Greek and English by Markos Dragoumis. Athens, 1980.

Social Borderers: Themes of Conflict and Ambiguity in Greek Folk-song

The ‘Akritic cycle’ of Greek folk-songs consists of those texts in which scholars have found thematic resemblances to the epic poem of Digenes. The name Digenes itself has not been an essential criterion for the inclusion of a song in this category, although many of the songs do boast at least one seemingly Byzantine name; in a few cases, the name is that of Digenes, and other forms have been somewhat debatably claimed as corruptions of the latter. Like all learned taxonomies, the Akritic rubric involves a measure of distortion or oversimplification. True, the thematic resemblances exist, and are rarely likely to be the outcome of pure coincidence; but they can be matched against other, hardly less compelling similarities which violate the boundaries of the Akritic category.

Some Greek Folk Songs of an Aegean Island Naxos

Some Greek Folk Songs of an Aegean Island Naxos

The Lament of the Virgin in Byzantine Literature and Modern Greek Folk-Song

The lament of the Virgin at the Crucifixion of Christ is a theme which can be traced throughout Greek tradition, from at least the sixth century to the present day. It is also found in a wide variety of sources: in the hymns and liturgy of the Orthodox Church, in prose homilies, in learned and vernacular poetry, and in modern folk songs from most areas of the Greekspeaking world. We therefore have an opportunity to examine how different writers and poets responded to a single theme over a period of nearly fifteen centuries.

The Marble Threshing Floor: A Collection of Greek Folksongs

The Marble Threshing Floor: A Collection of Greek Folksongs