"Crete is an island where many people from different countries, cultures and religions have lived and have left their traces. So isn’t music in Crete today a product of all these mixtures and cultural elements?" Dr. Hnaraki’s self-posed question is answered in the affirmative as the author takes the reader on a journey of discovery through the five steps--or five chapters--of the book, constructed in the spirit of the traditional Cretan pendozalis five-step dance.
Writing in an intensely personal style, bringing into her narrative gods and heroes from Greek mythology and literature as well as present-day musicians and performers, Dr. Hnaraki succeeds in evoking both the rich history and the vibrant present of Cretan music. She focuses on music and dance in an interdisciplinary way, combining her knowledge and expertise on mythology, history, cultural anthropology, ethnomusicology, and folklore together with her own extensive fieldwork:
Today, what we find in Greece generally and in Crete specifically is an amalgam of mythology shaped by places, but more so by people, in both time and space. Mythology is the world of myth and musicology the world of music… In the center of a circle, the labyrinth, lies the island of Crete and its music: It blossoms and dies, according to Heraclitus’s idea of acme and decline. Also, in the center of this circle, lies the main idea: We are what we think we are.
Dr. Hnaraki’s goal is to give the reader a comprehensive overview of a complex cultural phenomenon by using the interrelationships existing in a typical Cretan ensemble of instruments and voice, the Cretan repertoire, as well as native, local weddings and dances. The important, extemporaneously composed poetic distichs known as mandinades are thoroughly discussed by Dr. Hnaraki in this book as well.
Cretan Music consists of five chapters, each of which is preceded by an interlude, a description of a music and/or dance event that attunes the reader accordingly. The first chapter of the book, “Entering the Labyrinth,” offers a historical overview of Greek-Cretan cultural and musical history. It is an ethnomusicologist’s introduction to the Hellenic and Cretan musical world. The second chapter, “Into the Labrinth,” talks about Hellenic-Cretan ideals, local traditions, and Cretan identity as expressed in music, dances, and the Cretan-sung distichs.
The author proceeds to examine the role of song and dance as well as principal personalities on the Cretan music scene today, focusing on the work of three musicians who support the author’s argument that Cretan music has absorbed influences from both the East and the West. These three case studies are important, as they depict how we are all linked to larger communal processes, historical and social in nature. The fourth chapter, “Unraveling Ariadne’s Thread,” philosophizes on the importance of tradition and authenticity as well as on notions of identiy and the aesthetics of Cretan music through an imaginary conversation between Zorba the Greek and Erofili, the heroine of a sixteenth-century Cretan novel. “Amazing Mazes,” the last chapter, talks about Cretan music today as a component of world music and how it reaches out to a wider, non-Greek audience by means of local media, DVD production and distribution, and the Internet.
A fifteen-track CD that features music, songs, and dances discussed in the book accompanies Hnaraki’s prose. The last two tracks are the researcher’s field recordings of older women composing Cretan traditional poetry. In addition, aquarelle paintings and photographs illustrate the claret, square-shaped book. A glossary, an extensive list of citations and related bibliography, as well as a discrography on the topic of Cretan music are included at the end of the book for further investigation by interested students and scholars.
The book received the Young Academic Writer and Reseacher in the Areas of Cretan Culture and Dance Award from the Pancretan Association of America in June of 2007. It is an excellent and much-needed contribution to scholarship on Greek music, a fine starting point both for readers interested in becoming more familiar with Greek culture as well as for scholars of ethnomusiccology and folklore. Cretan Music is destined to serve as a model for future scholary works on the music of Crete and Greece in general, as there is no book that matches Cretan Music. One may read it as a treatise or enjoy it as a performance; it is both, and I recommend it unequivocally!
--------
[Review length: 725 words • Review posted on February 27, 2008]