Scholars of modern Greece and its expressive culture have long observed that the notion of “tradition” wields immense symbolic and political power. While Greece’s ancient past signifies the very birth of the West, it also lies along Europe’s border with the imagined East: in this way, “the rhetoric of traditionalism marks the site of Greek debates about occident and orient” (Herzfeld 1995:227). Musical tradition, moreover, has proved pivotal in questions of Greek cultural identity. For example, nineteenth-century nationalist folklorists used folk song to downplay Ottoman influences and assert continuity with ancient Greece (Herzfeld 1982). Additionally, following Greece’s right-wing dictatorship (1967–1974), leftist intellectuals fueled the revival of urban rebetiko music (rooted in the “Byzantine” regions of western Asia Minor) in their quest for a new vision for Greek popular song (Tragaki 2005).
In Paradosiaka: Music, Meaning and Identity in Modern Greece, Eleni Kallimopoulou addresses these questions through the lens of the urban paradosiaka (“traditional”) musical style. In contrast to performers of Greek folk music (dimotika), who remain linked to specific regions of rural Greece and a well-established circuit of village festivals, paradosiaka musicians emerged from the middle and upper classes of urban areas of Greece in the mid-1980s. At a time of extremely tense Greek-Turkish relations, these young musicians explored Turkish art music and instruments that had previously remained obscure in Greece. As paradosiaka developed, it offered a new site for reinterpreting Greek identity, a crucial endeavor in the wake not only of the dictatorship but also of Greece’s 1981 EU accession, an increasingly privatized economy, and large influxes of migrants since the 1990s.
The book’s four parts correspond to the four decades that either set the stage for paradosiaka or that witnessed its birth and development. Part I explores the historical undercurrents that led to both the rebetiko revival and the “artistic” (entehno) style of popular music in the late 1970s. Together, these genres served as new sources of identity for emerging paradosiaka musicians, for whom the folk music of mainland Greece sonically embodied the “regime of the Colonels.”
In Part II, the author discusses key players in the early paradosiaka movement of the 1980s: Ross Daly; the group Dynameis tou Aigaiou (Powers of the Aegean); and the Turkish art music group Bosphorus. Each of these actors presented a vision of Greek identity and musicianship rooted in the East, even as they differed in how they constructed the boundaries of that discursive and musical space.
In Part III, Kallimopoulou outlines how the aesthetics of the paradosiaka movement figured in the development of music schools in the Greek secondary education system after 1988, and how those schools became the training ground for a professionalized generation of paradosiaka musicians.
Finally, in Part IV, the author explores the shifting ground of paradosiaka in the 2000s through a portrait of Sofia Lambropoulou, a young musician who emerged within the music school system. Kallimopoulou then considers paradosiaka in relation to the global “world music” market as well as the music market within Greece, concluding that what began as a sonic search for Greek distinctiveness has developed into a diffuse sense of identity and musical style, whose future directions remain open.
Throughout the book, the author deftly combines detailed musical transcription and fine-grained analysis of the recorded examples contained in the CDs, with interviews and documentary sources. However, her ethnographic vignettes offer perhaps the most convincing evidence for her arguments, particularly as they draw upon her own experience of training and performing as a paradosiaka musician.
Kallimopoulou provides a fascinating discussion of musical politics during the right-wing dictatorship in Greece, which set the stage for both the leftist rejection of mainland Greek folk music because of its association with the Colonels, and consequently for the search for sources of Greek identity from across the Aegean. In this regard, one of the book’s great strengths is its treatment of the work of musicologist and folklorist Simon Karas. Through his teaching of Greek Orthodox ecclesiastical chant and his research into Greek folk music—following an ideological agenda that asserted the origins of Greek musical forms in the Byzantine modal system (see also Brandl 1991)—Karas trained many of the musicians who later developed the paradosiaka style.
More importantly, Kallimopoulou links the ideological foundations of Karas’ school to the rise of “neo-Orthodoxy,” a political and philosophical movement that understood Byzantium as the conduit between ancient and modern Greece and that sought a more authentic identity in the values of the Greek Orthodox Church, particularly in the monasticism of Mt. Athos. While neo-Orthodoxy appears to be an unlikely project for Greek leftists following the dictatorship, the sensual appeal of Byzantine modal music, coupled with the symbolic valences of Byzantium as the erstwhile capital of “our East” (kath’imas Anatoli), offered this generation an “indigenous” tradition on which to forge an alternative musical modernity.
However, I would qualify the author’s assertion that Turkish music remained “taboo” in Greece prior to the 1980s by noting that such a taboo remained confined to the urban, educated, middle and upper classes from which paradosiaka musicians emerged. Other groups within Greece, including segments of the working class and Asia Minor refugees and their descendants (Hirschon 1989), had long acknowledged the cultural, linguistic, and musical continuities that may have seemed novel to the paradosiaka musicians. Indeed, Kallimopoulou herself speaks of “older popular views” (115) that stressed cultural affinities with Turkey. Nevertheless, while Greeks have not always necessarily viewed Turkish culture with suspicion, they certainly have always viewed it with an ambivalence born of a deep-seated awareness of their own proximity to it. In approaching Kallimopoulou’s important study, then, we must recognize the “cultural intimacy” (Herzfeld 1997) that Greeks employ as they reject, embrace, and reappropriate Turkish elements within their music and expressive culture.
Given its rich linguistic and historical particularities, this book will appeal to graduate students and specialists in Balkan, Mediterranean, and/or Middle Eastern music who wish to explore how music articulates and instantiates social, political, and cultural identities in the region.
Works Cited
Brandl, Rudolph. “Cooperation in the Study of Greek Folk Music: The Triadic Relationship Between Foreign Field-Worker, Greek Folklorist and Musicians (Problems and Expectations).” In Music in the Dialogue of Cultures: Traditional Music and Cultural Policy, edited by Max Peter Baumann, 336–346. Wilhelmshaven: Florian Noetzel Verlag, 1991.
Herzfeld, Michael. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. New York: Routledge, 1997.
_____. “Hellenism and Occidentalism: The Permutations of Performance in Greek Bourgeois Identity.” In Occidentalism: Images of the West. Edited by James G. Carrier, 218–233. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.
_____. Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982.
Hirschon, Renee. Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1998 [1989].
Tragaki, Daphne. “‘Humanizing the Masses:’ Enlightened Intellectuals and the Music of the People.” In The Mediterranean in Music: Critical Perspectives, Common Concerns, Cultural Differences. Edited by David Cooper and Kevin Dawe, 49–75. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005.
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[Review length: 1161 words • Review posted on March 2, 2010]