a) Performance
Annabouboula, “Immortal Water.” Record Label: Byzan-Tone, 2010.
“Annabouboula” is a Greek expression meaning a mixed-up noise, but for years, Annabouboula the group has been exploring a seductive alternate musical world where Greek, Middle Eastern and Balkan traditions are re-tooled and re-imagined with an anything-goes attitude befitting their Athens-meets-downtown New York origins. Starting out in the late 1980’s with the ground-breaking singles “Hamam” and “Don’t Worry Ma”, Annabouboula went on to thrill festival and TV audiences world-wide with their challenging approach to Greek roots-rock, setting precedents for the next two decades of ethnic fusion. Featuring the spellbinding Anna Paidoussi singing provocatively over the rhythms and soundscapes of guitarist George Barba Yiorgi and friends, their new release Immortal Water picks up where their classic critically-acclaimed World Beat albums like In The Baths of Constantinople left off, injecting surf-rock, big-beat electronica, and gypsy-pop flash into their unique blend of Greek folk, rebetika, and contemporary flavors. From the hard-rocking anthem of the Athens underworld Hello Sailor, to the haunting dub-reggae inflected What Do You Care, to the odd-meter electronic dance workout of The Drum Lesson, to the title song, a reworking of a 1920s folk tune for the 21st century, Annabouboula will take you on a trip to the outer limits of global pop.
Bilides, Sophia. “Greek Legacy.” E. Thomas Compact Discs, 1991.
Vocalist Sophia Bilides, accompanied by an array of fine Greek instrumentalists, celebrates the beauty of her musical heritage on Greek Legacy, a rich collection encompassing a variety of styles: cabaret songs from Asia Minor (Smyrneika), urban blues of Athenian tavernas (Rebetika), old songs of Constantinople (Politika), refugee laments (Amanethes), lilting island melodies (Nissiotika), and dance songs of central Greece (Tsamika).
Drómeno. “Flórina: Greek/Balkan Dance Music.” Drómeno, 2012.
DRÓMENO is a unique folk group based in Seattle presenting regional music from all over Greece and the Balkans. Led by Christos Govetas and Ruth Hunter, long-time players in the Balkan music scene, the group includes both of their kids (Eleni and Bobby Govetas), as well as Nikos Maroussis and Peter Lippman. Dromeno presents authentic music that pulls from deep roots from Greece and all across the Balkans. Between them, these versatile members create the brass sounds of Macedonia, sonorous clarinet and vocal interplay from Ipiros and Thessaly, strident zournas and daouli from Serres, and energetic Thracian dance tunes.
Govetas, Christos. “Passatempo: Rebetika with Christos Govetas.” Christos Govetas, 2007.
Husband and wife team Christos Govetas and Ruth Hunter join up with guitarist Dave Bartley (of KGB) to create a collection of old Rebetika tunes from the 30’s and 40’s. The superb recording quality and choice of tunes makes this cd a rare gem.
Kallimopoulou, Eleni. Paradosiaká: Music, Meaning, and Identity in Modern Greece.Burlington: Ashgate, 2009.
Makrygiannes, Giorgos. Γιώργος Μακρυγιάννης, “Γιώργος Μακρυγιάννης ή ‘Νισύριος:’ Ιστορικές Ηχογραφήσεις 1917-1919.” Μορφωτικός και Εξωραϊστικός Σύλλογος Νισύρου, 2011.
Pangéo. “Northern Borders.” Pangéo, 2002.
Various artists, “Το Κρητικό Τραγούδι στην Αμερική 1945-1953.” FM Records, 1999.
Ziyiá. “Regional Music of Greece.” Ziyiá, 2014.
Ziyiá. “Travels with Karagiózis.” agaRhyhm, 1995.
Ziyiá. “From the Mountains to the Islands.” AgaRhythm, 1993.
Ziyia has been playing together since 1990, sharing a love of Greek regional, traditional music, played on instruments appropriate to the regions. From the lilting island music of Naxos, to the spoon dances of Cappadocia, or the driving rhythm of the chestos from Thrace, all is played with attention to regional styling. This dedicated group shares a passion for the connection with dancers and is one of the premier bands for Greek music in the US. This highly regarded group has been playing at Greek weddings and baptisms, Greek festivals and music camps throughout the US for over 20 years.
b) Music Research
Ball, Eric L. “Gouging Tradition: Musings on Fingernail Fiddle Making.” The Journal of New York Folklore, vol. 43, no. 1-2, 2017, pp. 36-48.
Ball, Eric L. “Virtuous Versifying: A Composition About Rhymes.” The Journal of New York Folklore, vol. 45, no. 1-2, 2019, pp. 38–43.
Ball, Eric L. “Refrain: Notes on Crafting Music.” Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore, vol. 46, no.1-2, 2020, pp. 34–39.
Ball, Eric L. “From Mantinades to Night-Rhymes: Composing an Imaginary Musical Tradition.” Ergon: Greek/American Arts and Letters. November 2017.
In this essay, I provide a rationale for my ongoing work as a “composer” by framing it in relation to contemporary Cretan traditional music, music composition in the academy, and a political issue (egalitarian social change). I begin by discussing my transformative experience with Cretan music, a tradition that includes significant participatory music-making elements and intersects with the island’s extensively developed rhyming couplet (mantinada) tradition. I then consider academic composing in relation to noncomposed, improvised and/or participatory musics, and I look at both in relation to the issue of egalitarian social change. I overview my efforts to compose a kind of music that is meant to sound as if it were part of an imaginary musical tradition partly inspired by Cretan music and the mantinada. I end by articulating some questions, anxieties, and speculations that relate to these efforts.
Archival resource: Greece Collections in the Archive of Folk Culture, Compiled by Vivy Niotis. [collection of folk songs in Greek America, audios of liturgies] https://www.loc.gov/folklife/guides/Greece.html
Bucuvalas, Tina. Greek Music in America. University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
A long-overdue study that samples all the genres, sounds, and contributions of the Greek music diaspora. Contributions by Tina Bucuvalas, Anna Caraveli, Aydin Chaloupka, Sotirios (Sam) Chianis, Frank Desby, Stavros K. Frangos, Stathis Gauntlett, Joseph G. Graziosi, Gail Holst-Warhaft, Michael G. Kaloyanides, Panayotis League, Roderick Conway Morris, National Endowment for the Arts/National Heritage Fellows, Nick Pappas, Meletios Pouliopoulos, Anthony Shay, David Soffa, Dick Spottswood, Jim Stoynoff, and Anna Lomax Wood.
Despite a substantial artistic legacy, there has never been a book devoted to Greek music In America until now. Those seeking to learn about this vibrant and exciting music were forced to seek out individual essays, often published in obscure or ephemeral sources. This volume provides a singular platform for understanding the scope, practice, and development of Greek music in America through essays and profiles written by principal scholars in the field.
Greece developed a rich variety of traditional, popular, and art music that diasporic Greeks brought with them to America. In Greek American communities, music was and continues to be an essential component of most social activities. Music links the past to the present, the distant to the near, and bonds the community with an embrace of memories and narrative. From 1896 to 1942, more than a thousand Greek recordings in many genres were made in the United States, and thousands more have appeared since then. These encompass not only Greek traditional music from all regions, but also emerging urban genres, stylistic changes, and new songs of social commentary. Greek Music in America includes essays on all of these topics as well as history and genre, places and venues, the recording business, and profiles of individual musicians. This book is required reading for anyone who cares about Greek music in America, whether scholar, fan, or performer.
Caraveli, Anna. “The Symbolic Village: Community Born in Performance.” The Journal of American Folklore 98 (1985): 259-286.
Lambropoulos, Vassilis. 2020. “C. P. Cavafy Music Resource Guide: Song and Music Settings of Cavafy’s Poetry,” Version 2 (January 14, 2020), compiled by Peter Vorissis, Haris Missler, and Artemis Leontis. University of Michigan Modern Greek website, “Cavafy Forum.”
League, Panayotis. “Kalymnian Music and Dance in Tarpon Springs, Florida.” M.A. Thesis. Boston University, 2012.
Greek immigrants from the Dodecanese island of Kálymnos have dominated the social, political, and economic life of Tarpon Springs, Florida since their arrival in the first decades of the twentieth century. Remarkably unlike the typical urban immigrant experience, this dynamic has allowed the Kalymnian-American community of Tarpon Springs to negotiate its relationship with American society from a position of relative power, without the immediate need to compromise linguistic, social, or occupational identity for the sake of survival. The cultural and artistic traditions of Kálymnos—foremost among them music and dancing—have played a central role in the construction of Kalymnian-American identity in Tarpon Springs, and have enabled a creative negotiation on the community’s own terms of the states of “hyphenated being” that characterize immigrant communities. This thesis examines the ways in which Kalymnian Tarponites use embodied musical movement as a resonant bridge between competing cultural allegiances, a means of imaginative travel in search of emotional fulfillment, and a venue to perform notions of distinction and belonging. For Kalymnian residents of Tarpon Springs, the embodied music and dance traditions of Kálymnos function as mobile sites of tension and transcendence, are imbued with a new set of self-sufficient meanings, and serve as a passport to cross the blurry borders of transnational being.
League, Panayotis. “Genealogies of sense and sound: Home recordings and Greek American identity.” Journal of Greek Media and Culture 2:1 (2016): 29-47.
This article examines the diverse ways that four generations of an extended Greek American family of musicians have employed recording technologies to explore their migrant subjectivity. Focusing on an Ottoman-era collection of handwritten sheet music and home-made audio recordings on reel-to-reel tape from the 1950s to 1970s, it explores the ways that people’s interactions with these materials have enabled the preservation and transmission of family repertoire, style, and both musical and social memory. Drawing on the work on Robin Bernstein, Georgina Born and Nadia Seremetakis, it highlights the performative agency embedded in these scores and reels, and reveals that, beyond mere archives of musical activity, they are sonic and material sites of emotional valence, nodes for the mediating of personal and musical relations, and a means of engaging the body to craft both a sense of family and a recognizable family sound. These musical archives enter into dialogue with other aspects of the Anatolian Greek community’s material culture to reveal past musical practices, shape contemporary ones, produce ideas and memories about the musicians who made them, and interrogate the meaning of ‘home’ and ‘family’ in the immigrant context.
Lomax Wood, Anna. “Musical Practice and Memory on the Edge of Two Worlds: Kalymnian Tsamboúna and Song Repertoire in the Family of Nikitas Tsimouris.” In The Florida Folklife Reader. Ed. Tina Bucuvalas. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. 96-153.
Petrusich, Amanda. “Hunting for the Source of the World’s Most Beguiling Music,” The New York Times Magazine (Sept. 24, 2014).
Petrusich, Amanda. Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records, New York: Scribner, 2014.
Reviews
Stamatis, Yona. Review of Greek Music in America edited by Tina Bucuvalas. Ergon: Greek/American Arts and Letters. 10 February 2020. https://ergon.scienzine.com/article/books/greek-music-in-america.
Tragaki, Dafni. Review of Greek Music in America edited by Tina Bucavalas. Journal of Modern Greek Studies, vol. 38, no. 2, 2020, pp. 568–71.