This book is a reader that, through essays by several scholars in the field, lays a foundation for understanding the scope, practice, and development of Greek music in America. While there are numerous works dealing with other ethnic musics, and despite a substantial history of Greek music in America, this is the first published work that addresses Greek music in North America; it includes several pioneering essays as well as recent and previously unpublished work from contemporary specialists. The volume is edited by Tina Bucuvalas, a Greek American herself who is a folklorist and a writer as well as curator of art and historical resources in Tarpon Springs, Florida. She dedicates the book to the late George Soffos, her inspiration for this volume, a remarkable musician with an encyclopedic knowledge of Greek music.
Greek immigrants brought with them to America their artistic legacy. In Greek American communities, Greek music was and continues to be an essential component of most social activities. Recorded or performed live, music was and continues to be an indispensable part of Greek identity, a means of connecting the past to the present, the distant to the near. It acoustically bonds community members and invents the homeland as it saturates its audiences with an intricate web of information and memories.
From the late 1800s to mid 1900s, more than a thousand recordings of Greek music, in several genres, were made in the United States. They encompass not only Greek traditional music from all regions of the old country, but also emerging urban genres and styles. The essays in this book discuss the history and the kinds of these recordings, and they describe the places and the venues associated with them, along with the recording businesses and the individual musicians behind them.
The book opens with a sociohistorical overview of Greek music in America that depicts the ways members of the diaspora brought with them a taste for all the permutations of music in Greece. This overview also depicts specific events that influenced the development of Greek music in America. These include the invention of the phonograph, the establishment of independent Greek record companies, the formation of the Greek Musicians’ Union of America, and the influences of Greek music on American pop and the technological transformations that change the way people experience music. Also treated are the topics of radio broadcasting, touring artists, LPs, numerous record labels, music venues such as nightclubs, celebrated musicians, new forms of instrumental music, song styles and dance, and music albums imported from Greece.
This overview is followed by four large sections of the book. Part 1, Musical Genre, Style, and Content, consists of seven chapters that cover topics ranging from changes in sacred music to the Asia Minor style in the United States, brought by Greek refugees as a music of nostalgia. Here we read essays on Greek café music; the rebetika, the blues of Greece, a popular urban Greek music genre originating in Aegean seaports among lower-economic social classes; and the amanedes, vocal improvisations adorned and extended by the word “aman” (woe is me!); as well as of other influences and verbal interjections in music performances.
Part 2, Places, consists of four chapters. Here authors investigate the musical culture of specific Greek American communities, such as the survival of Greek folk music in New York. They also speak of communities rooted in movement and born in performances such as singing. Lastly, they discuss musical mobilities and emotional journeys, featuring practice and memory on the edge of two worlds—for example, as on the Greek island of Kalymnos and the Kalymnian traditions in Tarpon Springs, Florida.
The title of Part 3 is Delivering the Music, Recording Companies and Performance Venues; its four chapters examine the many ways that Greek music has been made available to the public. Discussed in this section are such topics as the making of records of Greek music in the early days, Greek music piano rolls in the United States, encountering Greek American soundscapes, and Greek nightlife in America.
The last section of the book, Part 4, includes twenty-one profiles, biographical sketches of noteworthy individuals or entities shaping the course of Greek music in America or contributing to its allure and perpetuation through the display of exceptional skills. They are chronologically organized and are not intended to be a comprehensive listing but rather a selection based on the research interests of the book’s authors. Subjects range from artists who lived in the early twentieth century to those who still perform, from instrument makers to record-company founders to the club-scene for the younger generations..
An additional essay on publicly available Greek music collections in the United States completes the book. Various forms of traditional music, popular urban music, music by amateur performers, liturgical music, oral history interviews, as well as all manner of commercial recordings, are cited here. A list of contributors and an index conclude the volume.
Ideally, the sources mentioned in this book, such as the recordings and the biographical sketches, could find a place on an interactive webpage. There, they could find their place among a growing inventory of articles and theses written on these topics, and they could be enriched in the company of audio-visual materials.
Overall, Greek Music in America is a valuable collection, useful in general to scholars who study diasporic cultures. The cover of the book features the image of Mme. Koula, the first Greek immigrant musician to own, together with her husband Andreas, and perform on, her own record-company label, the Panhellenion Record Company of New York—this was the first Greek immigrant-owned record label in North America.
The logo of this company, one pole with two nation’s flags, the Greek facing west and the American facing east, precisely illustrates what makes this collection unique: its fluidity and its ability to encompass, and to support, the creation and the cultivation of multiple voices in one remarkable musical journey.
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[Review length: 984 words • Review posted on March 25, 2021]