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    Music Culture of Greek People

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    Gabi Cristea
    Music has played an important role in Greek culture throughout history. Ancient Greek music was integrated with poetry and dance. After Greece fell, music took on a more religious style under the Byzantine Empire. During 400 years of Ottoman rule, Greek music absorbed eastern influences. In the 19th century, Greek opera and compositions emerged. Folk, rebetiko blues, and island styles developed to express the struggles of oppression and exile. Modern artists have revived rebetiko by blending it with rock music.

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    Music Culture of Greek People

    Uploaded by

    Gabi Cristea
    37 views4 pages
    Music has played an important role in Greek culture throughout history. Ancient Greek music was integrated with poetry and dance. After Greece fell, music took on a more religious style under the Byzantine Empire. During 400 years of Ottoman rule, Greek music absorbed eastern influences. In the 19th century, Greek opera and compositions emerged. Folk, rebetiko blues, and island styles developed to express the struggles of oppression and exile. Modern artists have revived rebetiko by blending it with rock music.

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    Music has played an important role in Greek culture throughout history. Ancient Greek music was integrated with poetry and dance. After Greece fell, music took on a more religious style under the Byzantine Empire. During 400 years of Ottoman rule, Greek music absorbed eastern influences. In the 19th century, Greek opera and compositions emerged. Folk, rebetiko blues, and island styles developed to express the struggles of oppression and exile. Modern artists have revived rebetiko by blending it with rock music.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    37 views4 pages

    Music Culture of Greek People

    Uploaded by

    Gabi Cristea
    Music has played an important role in Greek culture throughout history. Ancient Greek music was integrated with poetry and dance. After Greece fell, music took on a more religious style under the Byzantine Empire. During 400 years of Ottoman rule, Greek music absorbed eastern influences. In the 19th century, Greek opera and compositions emerged. Folk, rebetiko blues, and island styles developed to express the struggles of oppression and exile. Modern artists have revived rebetiko by blending it with rock music.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    of 4

    MUSIC CULTURE OF GREEK

    PEOPLE

    CRISTEA GABRIEL – DANIEL

    ANUL II
    Music culture of Greek people

    Music in Greece is of unbelievable diversity due to the creative Greek assimilation of


    different influences of the Eastern and Western cultures of Asia and Europe. Music is an
    important aspect of daily Greek culture. It has a long history dating from the Antiquity,
    during which poetry, dancing, and music were inseparable and played an important part in the
    ancient Greek's everyday life. The Greek tragedy used music as one of its component
    elements.
    Then, with the fall of Ancient Greece and the evolution of the Byzantine Empire,
    Greece music got a more ecclesiastical approach. In the 400 years of Ottoman domination, it
    was influenced by the eastern sounds. It got reborn only in the 19th century with the opera
    compositions of Nikolaos Mantzaros (1795-1872) and Spyros Samaras (1861-1917).
    From that moment on, Greece produced many talented artists, including great
    composers to fabulous interprets. Music in Greece became an expression and a testimony of
    the slavery years, a weapon of opposition against the colonel authority and a way to express
    love, death, human fears, that accompanied the Greeks in their everyday life.
    Read also: After reading about the music, get also informed about the traditions in Greece.

     Music types

     Folk Songs (Dimotiko Tragoudi)


    Greek folk song sees its origins coming from the time of ancient Greek poetry and music. It
    can be divided into two musical movements: the akritic and the klephtic. The akritic style
    dates from the 9th century AD and it was created to express the life and struggles of the
    frontier guards of the Byzantine Empire, the "akrites".
    The klephtic style was born between the end of the Byzantine period and the beginning of the
    Greek Revolution that led to the Greek Independence in 1821. This style was created by the
    "kleftes", the heroes who left to live in the mountains, leading a revolutionary action against
    the Ottoman tyranny. The klephtic musical style is monophonic, with second voices repeating
    a given rhythmical formula, without any harmonic accompaniment. It is composed of love
    songs, wedding songs, songs of exile, songs of freedom, death, and sorrows. It expresses an
    important, bloody part of the history and the life of the Greeks.
    Musical instruments used in Greek folk songs are the lira and laouto (lute), the tambouras and
    gaida (bagpipe), the zournas (shawm), the daouli (drum), the dachares (tambourine), the ziyia
    (paired groups) and the violi (violin).
     Kantada
    Originated from Kefalonia island and created at the beginning of the 19th century, it is a style
    of romantic serenade music, sung with three male voices in chorus, accompanied by guitar or
    mandolin. This style had been influenced by Italian music and soon gained all the Ionian
    Islands and the rest of Greece. In Athens, the cantadha is a little different, accompanied by a
    compania composed of a violin, clarinet, and laouto.
     Nisiotika
    This kind of popular songs was born in the Greek islands. Every island has its own nissiotiko
    style and its own way of dancing it. Violin, lira, clarinet, and guitar accompany the high-
    pitched women voices or the low voice of a single man. Nissiotika are still easy to listen in
    every festival on any Greek island, during which a huge group of musicians plays live music
    during the whole night.
     Rebetiko
    This particular and famous style of music in Greece was born in the hashish dens and the
    tekedes, the Turkish style underground cafes of the district of Piraeus and the city of
    Thessaloniki. Rembetiko music was spread by the two million Greek refugees coming from
    Asia Minor in 1922, after the destruction of Smyrna by the Turks. Homesick and rejected by
    the Greek population, those Greeks who had never lived in Greece and who had lost
    everything, sang about their surroundings, poverty, pain, hunger, prison, police oppression,
    drug addiction, betrayal, and hashish. Rembetiko was the forbidden music of the outcast, the
    Greek urban blues.
    The rebetiko slowly in the 1950s came out of the underground world and started to be played
    in the nightclubs of Athens, where it became very popular, even if it was despised by the
    Greek people because they saw it as outcast music. The principal instruments of the
    rembetiko are the bouzouki, an eight-string oval-shape instrument, the baglama, which looks
    like a miniature bouzouki, and the guitar as well as, for accompaniment, the ziyia, and the
    ntefi, a leather small tambourine with little metallic plates circling it.
    Some of the greatest and most famous players and singers are Vassilis Tsitsanis, Markos
    Vamvakaris, Marika Ninou, and Sotiria Bellou. During the 1960s, the rembetiko became
    unpopular again. Young people preferred the new rock music coming from the West and the
    oldest one started listening again to the candhades of the 1920s. But these music styles are
    back in the trends and many taverns propose rebetika music bands during weekends.
    Read more: Rebetiko & Feasts in Greece
     Late 20th-century music
    In the 1980s, modern artists like Dionyssis Savopoulos, Georgios Ntalaras, Nikos
    Papazoglou, Stavros Xarhakos, and Pavlos Sidiropoulos rehabilitated the rembetiko music
    and mixed it with rock music, bringing to life a new, passionate and interesting kind of
    music. Their lyrics were about personal or political freedom (Savopoulos, Ntallaras, and
    Sidiropoulos), or about aspects of everyday life, pain and sorrow (Papazoglou), and drugged
    generation (Sidiropoulos).

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