Greek Musicians Research Articles

Epistemic Transmission and Originality in Greek-Karamanlidika Publications Related to Makam Music in 19th-Century Istanbul

Ottoman Istanbul retained its position as the cultural center of the Greek community for centuries. During this period, Greeks interacted with multicultural societies in the city. Their musical culture and interests were also influenced by social interactions. As a result, they recorded some Ottoman musical pieces in various manuscripts from the 16th to the 20th centuries. In the 19th century Greek musicians, mainly cantors, started to publish a series of works on Ottoman repertoire and theory. First, Euterpi (1830) was published in Istanbul. Then a number of publications emerged prior to 1909, at which point O Rithmographos, the last theoretical work of the time, was published. At that time, both the reform of the Orthodox Church (1814) under the influence of modernism and the spread of the printing press facilitated the distribution of such books. In order to write makam music with an efficient technique, they drew upon some theoretical principles from European, Ottoman and church music alike. Since these theoretical adaptations were the result of both technical needs and cultural tendencies, the Greeks cultivated an epistemic originality in terms of makam theory and its history. Moreover, this was the reason that a symbiotic knowledge emerged, drawing upon the aforementioned sources. This study aims to demonstrate both the symbiosis and the originality by examining the musical knowledge embedded in Greek-Karamanlidika publications. The sources will be evaluated in terms of notation, terminology, theory (makam and usûl), repertoire and historical understanding of the makam tradition. The aim of the study is to carry out musicological research on those publications in light of the multicultural character of 19th-century Istanbul.

Auditory Processing in Musicians, a Cross-Sectional Study, as a Basis for Auditory Training Optimization.

Μusicians are reported to have enhanced auditory processing. This study aimed to assess auditory perception in Greek musicians with respect to their musical specialization and to compare their auditory processing with that of non-musicians. Auditory processing elements evaluated were speech recognition in babble, rhythmic advantage in speech recognition, short-term working memory, temporal resolution, and frequency discrimination threshold detection. All groups were of 12 participants. Three distinct experimental groups tested included western classical musicians, Byzantine chanters, and percussionists. The control group consisted of 12 non-musicians. The results revealed: (i) a rhythmic advantage for word recognition in noise for classical musicians (M = 12.42) compared to Byzantine musicians (M = 9.83), as well as for musicians compared to non-musicians (U = 120.50, p = 0.019), (ii) better frequency discrimination threshold of Byzantine musicians (M = 3.17, p = 0.002) compared to the other two musicians' group for the 2000 Hz region, (iii) statistically significant better working memory for musicians (U = 123.00, p = 0.025) compared to non-musicians. Musical training enhances elements of auditory processing and may be used as an additional rehabilitation approach during auditory training, focusing on specific types of music for specific auditory processing deficits.

Musical Fusion and Allusion in the Core and the Transitional Klezmer Repertoires

Uniquely within Europe—from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries—in Ottoman and then post-Ottoman Moldova, Jewish klezmer and Gypsy (lautar) musicians had worked within a single professional structure. As the Ottoman Empire gradually withdrew from the Danubian Principalities (Wallachia and Moldova) during the mid-nineteenth century, a new "national" dance music was created by Gypsy, Jewish, Austrian, Greek, and other musicians in the Moldavian cities. Local klezmorim created a Judaized version of this repertoire. By the last third of the century this new repertoire also took hold among Jewish communities in Ukraine and Galicia. Part of the popularity of this repertoire lay in its partial continuity with an earlier Greco-Turkish element within klezmer music. This entire group of dance genres were barely acknowledged and never analyzed by the initial Russian and Soviet researchers, such as Engel, Kiselgoff, Beregovski, and Magid. Hence in 1994 I had coined the term "transitional" klezmer repertoire to describe it. The "transitional" and some of the "core" klezmer repertoires were transported massively with the contemporaneous Jewish immigration to America. The newer transitional repertoire dominated the klezmer music known by mid-century and thereafter. While the leading immigrant klezmorim—such as Dave Tarras (1897–1989)—were well aware of these distinctions of repertoire, they were quickly forgotten by the native-born generations of musicians. At the same time, the retention of earlier Greco-Turkish elements allowed for new interactions with immigrant Greek musicians. Thus, any attempt to analyze the entire klezmer repertoire must first deal with the relationship between the "core" and the "transitional" repertoires.

PODCAST | Music Work and Solidarity Politics in the Age of Covid-19: Some Thoughts from Greece

Professional musicians in Athens are a community notoriously lacking in solidarity and collective campaigning. Even during the so-called ‘Greek Crisis’, that exacerbated circumstances of precarity among performing artists, musicians seemed reluctant to resort to collective struggle and unionisation. However, the wake of the pandemic that resulted in the closure of music venues and cancellation of all face-to-face musical activity overnight had an unprecedented effect on the collectivisation of Greek musicians. The Panhellenic Music Union is rising in visibility and agency and a new grassroots movement called ‘Support Art Workers’ has emerged as a point of solidarity for thousands of creative artists including musicians, actors, dancers, visual artists and technicians. In this audio statement, Ioannis Tsioulakis (author of Musicians in Crisis, Routledge 2020) reflects on these new developments and provides some thoughts on why Covid-19 might be a time that cultivates collective campaigns for musicians and other precarious creative workers.

The mysterious Misirlou

My article deals with an unusual story on the roots of a song that has left a significant imprint on the twentieth century popular music all over the world. It is the song Misirlou, created somewhere on the territory of the Ottoman Empire, probably in Asia Minor. The author of this song is unknown. It was created in the so-called rebetiko musical style, typical of the Greeks from Asia Minor, who developed that style after the World War I. The first recordings of this song were made in the 1930s by Greek musicians Tethos Demetriades and Mihalis Patrinos. In no time, there was a true proliferation of different versions of this song, in almost every possible musical genre: jazz, latino, taksym, klezmer, makam, Serbian folk, hip hop, trash metal, pop and rock?n?roll. A number of these versions are mentioned in the article. The fact that this song is considered by many nations ? Greeks, Turks, Arabs, Serbs, Jews, Americans ? as their own, demonstrates its aptitude for incredible metamorphoses. What attracted me to this song was the story on how it was appropriated into Serbian folk music by the remarkable composer and singer Dragoljub Dragan Tokovic. The song was called Lela Vranjanka [Lela, the girl from Vranje] and became a standard in the so-called ?Vranje folk music?, marvelously interpreted by the singer Stanisa Stosic. I also compare various textual versions of Misirlou, in different languages, in order to show its parallel development in verse.

Italian musicians in Greece during the nineteenth century

In Greece, the monophonic chant of the Orthodox church and its neumatic notation have been transmitted as a popular tradition up to the first decades of the 20th century. The transformation of Greek musical tradition to a Western type of urban culture and the introduction of harmony, staff notation and western instruments and performance practices in the country began in the 19th century. Italian musicians played a central role in that process. A large number of them lived and worked on the Ionian Islands. Those Italian musicians have left a considerable number of transcriptions and original compositions. Quite a different cultural background existed in Athens. Education was in most cases connected to the church - the institution that during the four centuries of Turkish occupation kept Greeks united and nationally conscious. The neumatic notation was used for all music sung by the people, music of both western and eastern origin. The assimilation of staff notation and harmony was accelerated in the last quarter of the 19th century. At the beginning of the 20th century in Athens a violent cultural clash was provoked by the reformers of music education all of them belonging to German culture. The clash ended with the displacement of the Italian and Greek musicians from the Ionian Islands working at the time in Athens, and the defamation of their fundamental work in music education.

Musical evenings in the early Empire: new evidence from a Greek papyrus with musical notation

With disarmingly open conceit, the Younger Pliny tells Pontius Allifanus that ‘my hendecasyllables are read, are copied, are even sung, and Greeks (who have learned Latin out of love for my poetry book) make my verses resound to cithara and lyre’ (Epist. 7.4.9). By Pliny's time, Greek musicians (and actors) were widely distributed and organized in a worldwide guild centred at Rome, so it will not surprise us that Greeks are the ones setting the verses to music. But what sort of music? When Pliny went out to hear his beloved poems sung to cithara and lyre, what did it sound like? Or, more generally, what did Pliny, or Martial, or, in an earlier generation, Horace see and hear when out for an evening's musical entertainment at the hands of a Greek troupe? Until fairly recently, we have known precious little. Literary sources give the odd anecdote, such as the reports of Nero's performances, but in general tell us little specific about the content or style of musical entertainment in the Roman era. And sources speaking more technically about music itself lend the impression that nothing significant happened after the ‘New Music’ was introduced in the fourth century BC.

Cultural Identity and Cultural Interaction: Greek Music in the United States, 1917–1941

The rebétiko music played by Greek immigrants in the United States and recorded by American companies reflects the traditional culture of the immigrants and may thus serve to illuminate the attitude of the immigrant artist toward his or her ethnic identity and the problems of becoming integrated into new cultural surroundings. Before we can judge the actual music and its cultural significance, we must have precise ideas about which materials may be used to determine the musical culture in the immigrant community. Were recordings in Athens made with the Greek-American public in mind? As a rule, Greek musicians stayed outside the mainstream of American popular music; only in rare cases did they change their traditional means of expression. There are few examples of influence from other popular ethnic music cultures in the United States. One of the main differences between the Greek and the Greek-American rebétika songs seems to be the attitude to drugs; there are so few drug songs in the recorded American output of rebétika that this must reflect a deliberate choice either by the musicians or by the record companies.

Massinissa

In ancient historiography, characterization of leading statesmen was often the central preoccupation. A Berber prince was an irresistibly exotic subject, and the composite portrait of Massinissa, king of Numidia between 201 and 148 B.C., well exemplifies this focus of historia. There is abundant detail of personal attributes—his handsome bearing, his extraordinary strength, his unrivalled powers of endurance. We read how at the age of eighty-eight, sans teeth but with other faculties unimpaired, he led his troops on horseback to decisive victory over the Carthaginians. His love-life attracted admiring attention; his affair with Sophoniba, invested with a historical significance quite fictitious, was depicted by historians and painters of both the ancient world and the Renaissance. The achievements of his virility were enthusiastically recounted; he sired a son at eighty-six, and forty-four (? fifty-four) children are said to have survived him. Nor did his interest in children end with procreation. He reared his grandchildren in his own residence, and Ptolemy Euergetes cherished his query to the Greeks who sought to purchase Numidian monkeys as household pets: παρ΄ ὑμῖν, ὦ οὗτοι, αἱ γυναῖκες οὐ τίκτουσι παίδια; There is detail of the luxury of his court-life: δεῖπνα ΄Ρωμαϊκῶς ἦν κατεσκεσκευασμένα, with Greek musicians, golden baskets, silver tableware.